> In terms of integrating faith with science, there have been vast amounts
> written on origins, but very little on eschatology.
It's true that there hasn't been as much about eschatology as
about origins, but there's been some. Teilhard, Pannenberg, & Peters
are Christian theologians seriously involved in science-theology
dialogue who have dealt with eschatology. Tipler's _Physics of
Immortality_ is in major ways non-Christian, but he is familiar with the
work of real theologians & some of his ideas can be useful for Christian
theologian.
> The current Big Bang
> scenario has a physical origin at about 10^10 years ago, but also predicts
> a continuation into the future of over 10^100 years, depending somewhat on
> the curvature of spacetime.
"Somewhat" is an understatement: If the average cosmic density
is less than a critical value, expansion will continue forever. OTOH,
there might be enough dark matter to bring about a big crunch in a time
on the same order as that elapsed since the big bang. We still don't
have a good measure of the deceleration parameter. I.e., we only know
(roughly) the speed, & not the acceleration, of cosmic expansion.
>This implies that at present the universe is
> VERY YOUNG, less than one ten billionth of its eventual age. What does
> theology have to say about the rest of this time period?
Among other things, this puts the question of "the delay of the
parousia" in a different light. On a cosmic scale, 2000 years is no
delay at all!
>I don't know of
> many who even want to speculate about matching this up with Christian
> eschatology as described in the Revelation. Any takers?
IMO it will be more profitable to focus on the eschatological
implications of Ephesians & Colossians - Christ as the purpose of
creation, connections between the Incarnation & anthropic principles, &c
- instead of Revelation. (Which isn't to say Revelation has to be
ignored. Teilhard's "Omega" comes from there.)
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@imperium.net
http://www.imperium.net/~gmurphy