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Having explored the natural world as a professional without “knowing” its Creator, I returned to this captivating subject with an entirely new perspective. This perspective was grounded not only in the love of knowledge but also in love for the One, whose ecstatic charity, I believe, creates and sustains all there is.
However, there was a catch. On the one hand, Western civilization had relied for centuries on the traditional reading of the biblical creation narratives (Gen. 1–2) as a blow-by-blow historical account of how creation had occurred. On the other, because of discoveries in cosmology, developmental biology, and other fields, the current scientific understanding of the natural world has diverged profoundly from those creation narratives. Yet millions of Christians still cling to the biblical account. Since this difference over the doctrine of creation is deep and is prosecuted with hostility wherever it surfaces, Christianity can no longer offer a coherent narrative of the cosmos. ....
By delving progressively into the details of this discovery, the book reaches its first climax with the momentous realization that with the emergence of the human brain, the very “stuff of the universe” awakens to self-consciousness. From this point onward, the book treats the fundamental openness of human consciousness as the key to the “inside story” of the universe and thus as the unique point of access for divine revelation—but paradoxically also, owing to humanity’s mimetic constitution, as the avenue for death-dealing corruption. Finally, the story moves toward its second climax by identifying the unique God consciousness of Jesus and the resurrection as the revelation of God’s love and, as such, as the depth dimension of cosmic “inwardness.”
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