Relationships between different religious concepts and characteristics of the universe

Recently, there have been rare attempts to link religious ideas more closely to reality or directly deduce our world’s basic characteristics from the basic sources of specific religions. In this context, mention may be made in particular activities linked to East Asian schools of thought. The American physicist Fritjov  Capra became known for his publication TAO Physics, 59). He tried to prove that such fundamental characteristics of the material world as relativity of space and time, a blur of contours of elementary particles of our world and others, result directly from Taoist religion. However, it must be said openly that the evidence for these allegations is not very convincing. Each of us will admit without serious objection the fact that in the deep meditation that underlies Taoist philosophy, the present merges with the past and seeps into the future, that bodies lose their contours and the world appears more than an unstructured medium than an environment with strictly determined shapes, etc.

Similarly, Chinese physicists Fang Li Zhi and Li Shu Xian in their book Creation of the Universe 60) cite quite a few lessons from ancient religious sources, which relate, for example, to questions of statics or dynamics of the universe, its finiteness or infinity, and so on. Indeed, it can be mentioned that it was or was connected to the earth in the beginning. It separated from it and permanently moved away from it, which, according to the mentioned authors, unmistakably documents the thesis of expanding the universe. The basic symbols of ancient Chinese philosophy, “Yin” and “Yang,” in turn, point to the polar nature of most phenomena observed in the real world.

More such attempts to explain nature through religious texts can be found, but, surprisingly, we rarely encounter such efforts in the field of Christian teaching. We do not now mean the information that Christian sources give us, for example, about the beginnings of the universe, but there is a lack of reflection on whether the Christian God has left his “seal” in his creation. If we start from the well-known truth that the author usually marks his work with his individuality, then the meaningful question is whether traces or reflections of the Christian God can also be found in the universe. The point of this question is based in particular on the fact that the Christian God (God in the Christian sense) is different from the Gods of other religions, and so – if what we have stated above is true – nature should in a sense bear witness to what Creator he created it.

In the Christian sense, God’s specificity is that he is the Triune, which means that he has one divine essence and contains three Divine persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church’s Catechism explicitly emphasizes: “God has certainly left traces of his trinity in his created work.” the correctness of the various religious concepts that concern the world around us and in us. It is not surprising, therefore, that in history, there have been attempts to discover the “Trinity” principle in nature, but they have not been successful. The great astronomer J. Kepler was convinced that the solar system’s arrangement somehow documented this principle, but in the end, he had to give up this idea. Today we know that this attempt could not be successful because Kepler was looking for traces of trinity at the wrong level. In theology, however, much attention has been paid to the idea of ​​the Triune God. However, it seems that a prominent Christian thinker of St. With his thesis “opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt” (the deeds of the Holy Trinity are indivisible to the outside), Augustine influenced thinking in the sense that the individual Divine Persons do not have their own autonomous role. Nevertheless, in the past, we find indications of the search for specific functions of individual Persons of the Divine Trinity in creation. For example, St. Bonaventure is explicitly based on the thesis that “the universe is a book reflecting, representing, and describing its Creator.” Simultaneously, three clear manifestations can be found in it: traces, image, and similarity. Every creature bears traces, the image is visible in the intellectual creature, and the resemblance only to those in a “conformal relationship” with God. St. Bonaventure sees the roles of the individual Persons of the Holy Trinity divided so that the First Divine Person gives creatures being, the second wisdom, and the third love. In this sense, the universe is the “self-reflection” of the Triune God, and this idea is emphasized in contemporary theology.