Prelude: The Story to Now

Across the vast expanse of Earth, from steaming jungles to frozen tundra, from desert waste to luxuriant cropland, from smallest villages to teeming cities, the voice of humanity is rising in unison in a new song, the Song of Transcendence, to rise out of darkening despair to glorious celebration of our finest hour.

The song stirs in the hearts of human beings on Earth who have discovered that we live in a continuously evolving universe. Latecomers of limited intelligence, we have struggled over millennia to come to this conclusion, and our understanding of what it means is still limited and is evolving over time.

In one gigantic leap in human thought in the 16th and 17th centuries
of what the Gregorian calendar calls the second millennium
of the Common Era,
scientific thought was born in the Western world.
This displaced the ancient notion that the Earth
on which human beings live is the centre of a universe
of stars that can be seen with the naked eye during the night.

The ancients observed that these heavenly bodies move about in the night sky, and most significant of all, the great ball of fire called the sun moves around the Earth and gives light called day to different parts of the Earth as it moves.

In this worldview, the Earth was the solid stationary centre
around which everything else in the universe moved.

It had been placed there by God for the enjoyment of human beings, His greatest creation.

A geocentric view of the universe proposed by the philosopher Aristotle in the fourth century BCE held sway for almost two millennia and was influential in the two major religions of Islam and Christianity.

In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a radically different heliocentric system, that the Earth orbits the sun, rotating as it goes to give day and night.

Galileo Galilei invented the telescope for better observation of heavenly bodies and popularized Copernincanism, that the earth was part of a solar system of other planets also travelling around the sun in different orbits. The scientific revolution had begun and launched a centuries long upheaval in which science and religion engaged in bitter disputes about the nature of reality and whose authority should be paramount.

Coming down to the 20th century, the scientific view had won the day.

It was bolstered by the extraordinary contributions of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Isaac Newton and many others, giving birth to a materialistic science in which the universe was perceived to be working in perfect precision in a mechanical way. Through the science of astronomy and the advent of better telescopes, it was discovered that what had been perceived as the entire universe was only one galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy, in which our sun was one unremarkable star and the Earth was one of several planets in its solar system, and likely the only one that contained biological life.

Later it was discovered that the universe was expanding.

This suggested that it therefore had a beginning that was eventually calculated to be 13.8 billion years ago in an event called the Big Bang. The space age began and gave us the capability of putting satellites into orbit around the Earth, and later in the century the Hubble Telescope was placed into orbit and put into service to peer deep into the expanding universe. It revealed a universe of incomprehensible size measured in thousands of light years and comprised of up to 2 trillion galaxies each with billions of stars with the likelihood of solar systems and the potential for life on orbiting planets. The potential for life in the universe on countless planets was suddenly beyond human comprehension. The search for exoplanets began and by the early 21st century several thousand had been discovered, but with no positive identification of life yet on any of them.

Work began to build an even more powerful telescope to be located in space a million miles from Earth with the capability of capturing and interpreting the infrared light that has been travelling through space since the beginning 13.8 billion years ago. It took 20 years and 10,000 people to build the telescope and during that time a second goal was added: to search for exoplanets and analyze their composition and atmospheres for evidence of life.

The James Webb Telescope was launched in December 2021
and is now sending back astonishing images containing information
from the earliest galaxies dating back to 13.2 billion years ago.

Behind these extraordinary accomplishments of material science, there has been little thought of purpose—why the universe exists at all and what does it mean for human beings to be participants in such an unfolding story.

Are we accidental beings living in an accidental universe,
or is there some divine plan or intent guiding evolution?

Material science has no answers to these questions and has relegated them to philosophy and religion. From these quarters In the 21st century, a stream of thought is developing that suggests there is purpose behind the universe, and human beings on Earth have an important role to play in its development.

4