ST&F Network Convener, the Rev. Barbara Smith-Moran, was invited to participate in the Public Lecture Series organized by the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion, a program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington, D.C. On 19 February, she offered a theological response to a keynote talk by eminent astronomer and cosmologist Michael Turner, of the National Science Foundation and the University of Chicago.

In his talk, entitled "Evidence and Cosmology: What we have learned from NASA's cosmic radiation probe," Dr. Turner presented results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) relating to the age of the universe (13.7 Byr, to within .2 Byr), its beginning (Hot Big Bang with nucleosynthesis), its infancy (quark soup with inflation), its future (expanding at an accelerating rate), its geometry (uncurved), and its constituency (4% ordinary matter, ~25% cold dark matter, ~70% dark energy). Not all these findings are known with equal "certitude," he said. The aspects of the current cosmological model that are most to be trusted are the Hot Big Bang with nucleosynthesis, and the expansion of matter and energy. Closely following these in certitude are the quark soup, and the amount of ordinary (atomic) matter. The aspect known with least certainty is the so-called "inflationary period."

The WMAP discoveries were collectively awarded the "#1 Breakthrough of the Year 2003" by AAAS's Science magazine (18 Dec. 2003). The panoramic picture of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) shows the subtlest irregularities or anisotropy which "grew up" to become the clumpy structures we are familiar with in the present era.

Then he showed a slide "that gets every cosmologist's heart racing," he said. It showed the so-called Power Spectrum of the irregularities, which is the result of a mathematical analysis of the data using the "fast-spherical harmonic transform." This analysis shows patterns and periodicities that characterize the irregularities. These are recognized as the acoustic waves (shock waves) that reflected off the surface of the early cosmos at the moment it became transparent to light, about 400,000 years after the Hot Big Bang.

In her response, Ms. Smith-Moran said that we could look at the WMAP picture and see in it the "Grandmother" or "Grand-Matrix" of us all. She speculated on where God was at that time, what God might have been doing, and even on who or what God might have been, some 13 billion years before human life arose. Using the concept of "coevolution" borrowed from biology, she proposed that perhaps humanity and humanity's God grew up together and influenced each other's evolution. She drew a comparison between God and the elusive "magnetic monopole" that many cosmologists and physicists pursue out of a deep belief in the nature of matter.

She borrowed the "fast-spherical harmonic transform" as an analogy for how people of faith analyze history and personal experience to find evidence of pattern, purpose, and the "marks" of God. "In the history of a community or of an individual, the patterns of God at work are often not obvious," she said, not until the "data" are analyzed using what she called the "fast-harmonic faith transform" (in religious language, "eyes to see"). After this operation, a "sacred story" emerges in which events have meaning and purpose, and in which God's involvement is plainly seen.

Audiotracks of these talks will soon be available on the AAAS/DoSER website.