The first thing to note about the "Big bang" is there was no explosion simply because that would imply fragments flying into space whereas the Big Bang was the event that created space. The distribution of mass/energy creates space as Einstein showed. The very idea of development from the undifferentiated energy of the Big bang to the complex sentient life-forms of our planet suggests a purpose, in the development of rational, moral and conscious beings from a primitive mass of insentient energy. In suggesting this purpose, it also suggests that the value inherent in the world-process itself is precisely the development of awareness, understanding and feeling within the physical order, so that its beauty, order and nature can become objects of awareness and so that the universe itself can develop to take control of its future being.
God is not the supreme, but strangely indifferent, clock-maker of eighteen-century theology or the autocratic monarch of some biblical religion. God will be seen as one who creates primal energy and then draws from it communities of persons who are capable of growth towards full consciousness, understanding, happiness and responsible creativity. God will be an empowering ideal, not a tyrant or a watch-maker; and the revelations of divine nature and purpose which occur in religious experience will be the present glimpses of our future goal and of a cosmic ideal which can empower our own efforts to achieve it.
Such a vision has emerged even within physics, as is exemplified by the so-called anthropic principle. This principle draws attention to the way in which sentient life seems an almost inevitable outcome of the physical processes of the universe. To many physicists, it actually looks as if the whole process has been set up to produce things very like human persons. In contemporary physics, the idea of purpose enters once again into our understanding of the universe, but in a much wider and more extensive way. The universe is a value-realizing emergent totality; within that totality human persons have their proper role to play in realizing such values. The urge to seek truth is not a meaningless by-product of a mechanistic process. It is an intuition of the inner tendency of the whole physical system of the cosmos to move towards the realization of conscious value, self-knowledge and self-direction. Seen in that light, religion becomes the quest for the meaning and purpose of the whole cosmic process, and for the role we can play within it. It will not contradict the sciences, but will accept them as revealing the physical structure of the intelligible ordering of the universe towards emergent value, within which human life has its own objective purpose and value.
