Download TEXT: With all wisdom and insight [God] has made known to us the

SCIENTISTS IN CONGREGATIONS
SUNDAY DISCUSSION FOR JULY 15TH, 2012
TEXT: With all wisdom and insight [God] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to
his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather all things in
him, things in heaven and things on earth.
~Ephesians 1:8b-10.
DISCUSSION PROMPT: The discovery of the so-called “God particle” (the Higgs boson) has
been in the news this week. In the second reading for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost, the writer of the
Letter to the Ephesians makes reference to what is called in theology, the “end time” or the escaton.
The writer states his faith that this will occur not through global warming or nuclear holocaust, but
rather, by God's own good pleasure and plan. The writer speaks of this as a mystery and in speaking of
it occurring according to God's pleasure it is because God has plans for a “new heaven and a new
earth”, wherein God will gather together all the particles of what God has created and re-make it to be a
new creation that operates completely according to God's holy will and where there will be no more
“weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Have the class discuss how we view the end times and how we think
that might happen according to science.
CLASS DISCUSSION: Science recognizes a variety of catastrophic endings for “life as we
know it”. Some are ever possible, but unlikely at any particular time, such as a blast of gamma
radiation from the explosion of a nearby star, or the impact of an asteroid (as is thought to have finished
off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period). The possibility of a mutated disease organism
could cause a widespread pandemic. We have been aware for several generations now that the fullscale use of nuclear weapons would be suicidal to modern society, and so we have made efforts to
reduce the likelihood of nuclear warfare.
There are also threats in the distance which are harder to avoid. The fossil-fuel energy resources of the
Earth accumulated over vast geological time scales, yet are being depleted at a rate which we can
measure in human generations. As they become scarce, wrenching adjustments to human society will
be necessary. Astronomers have cataloged, over a relatively brief span of human experience, stars in
all stages of a theoretical “life span”. From time to time, we actually see one explode. Of course, we
cannot follow a single star through the millions to billions of years of its progression from gas to dust,
but scientific understanding of the chemical composition of stars and the reactions inside them allow us
to deduce with great confidence that the star we call “The Sun” will some day no longer support any
life on this planet. Though we do not observe the aging of the Sun in our lifetimes, it is obvious that it
is finite, and thus so is life on this planet.
Exactly how and when our local star will expire is difficult to predict, but theories of cosmology allow
us to contemplate the fate of the entire universe, with several possible results (none of them good): the
universe may disperse into a cold dark void; or it may fly apart for a time, but then collapse back on
itself and either cease to exist or pass through a new “Big Bang”. The fundamental laws of
thermodynamics indicate that the universe must some day progress to a bleak and boring uniformly
lukewarm “soup”of the ashes of stars.
Science proves, within the rules of scientific inquiry, that we are ultimately, desperately, in need of a
new creation, and a new earth!