God in a Shrinking Universe

From AcademicBlogs

God in a Shrinking Universe is the personal Blog of Patrik Hagman, a PhD student from Pargas, Finland.

From the "About this blog" page: "I will use this blog to explore certain ideas that I as a working academic theologian feel I need to explore, and I think this might be an appropriate medium for this. Obviously a blog cannot replace proper scholarly work that is published in monographs and scientific journals, but this can maybe be a preparation for such work in the future. In a way these are thoughts that I at the moment do not have time to address in my work on my PhD, but there are thoughts that spill over from this work that might end up here. Ore vice versa.

What I want to discuss is the role of the – primarily Christian – religion in a world that is not progressing any more, but is heading towards a scenario with more injustice, suffering and meaninglessness rather than less. It is my belief that this is where our world is heading, and I feel this is something that most, if not all, modern theology does not address sufficiently. Faith in a pessimistic worldview, or God in a shrinking universe, as the title, stolen from a Muse tune, says.

My intuition is that religion is the key to survival in a scenario like this, in the sense that religion can provide the tools to live in a life that is not expanding. This is in part because faith deals in hope, but also because religion is about transforming ones values, something I feel is the key to a constructive way of living in a destructing world. Obviously, life can not be fulfilling if based on material goods, if these material goods are becoming harder to obtain."