Cosmology Rather Than Worldview

The theological point of perspective matters in our everyday.

This piece is part of The Choc-Board, a 30-day writing challenge from my friend Chocolate Knox. You can follow Chocolate Knox’s Diagnostic Doxology on Substack, as well as his profile on X.

The music of the spheres, the harmonices mundi, resounds through God's Creation. It is, according to the great man of letters and science Johannes Kepler, heard not only in the heavens, but in the connections God has made throughout his Cosmos (κόσμος: arrangement, proper order). Geometry, astronomy, music, all the world displays the pleasing proportions of God's will made material. For Kepler, the composition of the universe was such that every soul was born under its influence, longing for harmony and proper arrangement. The composition of the universe; the cosmos is a symphony.

Before Kepler developed his ideas of cosmos and motion, many ancients had theorized that celestial bodies emitted tones, which Aristotle dismissed as impossible noise. Even in dismissing these thinkers, however, Aristotle conceded that to observation these bodies appeared to have the same ratios as musical concordances.

The word "observation" is key. Plato described astronomy and music as twin studies of sense: astronomy was for the eyes, and music for the ears.

Among many other achievements, Johannes Kepler brought our hearing into the heavens. Astronomy was for the eyes and the ears, and music was just like it. Kepler would probably have said that he was merely describing what was already happening as man's understanding of God's cosmos grew. In Harmonices Mundi, Kepler wrote:

It is no longer remarkable that man, the imitator of his Creator, has finally discovered the art of polyphonic music that was unknown to the ancients. He wanted to perform the continuous duration of the time of the world in a fraction of an hour in terms of an artful symphony and thus taste the pleasure which the divine master craftsman takes in his works so far as possible in the very agreeable feeling of bliss, afforded him by this music in the imitation of God.

The more we discover how God has made the world, the better we are able to imitate him as creators. We should strive to imitate his motions, his proportions, his pleasure in pleasing our senses by the soul-deep connection of our selves to his Great Composition.

Man must understand that the world is arranged. That is not to say planned, although it is. That is not to say predestined, although it is. That is not to say rigged, although the outcome is indeed certain. It is to say that it is organized, set up in the way that its Creator wants it to be. The world is all arranged, like a battle order, or a banquet, or a table set before you in the presence of your enemies. It is a cosmos.

This is why it is better to have a cosmology than a worldview.

A worldview is a perspective, a point of view. We know because of revelation, as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas would all affirm in their own ways. We can know, which is no small blessing, and not at all to be taken for granted. It is amazing to think that we can know anything at all. Before The Matrix there was the Brain in the Vat, Descartes’ daemon, the deus deceptor, because of whom Descartes "shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things." 

“There is not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt may not properly be raised.”

To depend wholly on ourselves for knowledge is to make of doubt our bread, and of skepticism our watered wine.

We stand in the middle of the mess and have no way of knowing if what we see is real. This is the crisis that takes us from modernism to postmodernism, from the possibility of metaknowledge, through the crisis of crack-up, and into the insecurity of invented local knowledge and metanarratives.

Our worldview, our subjective perspective, is ultimately useless to us. We must depend on the only one who actually does look at the cosmos from outside of it, our Creator. We must depend on revelation.

There is such a thing as a Christian worldview, but we are not capable of having such a thing. Only God has a Christian worldview, and we depend upon his revelation. The only real Christian worldview comes from God.

While we cannot truly have a worldview of our own, we can have a cosmology. Cosmology is the study of the cosmos, the words about the world, the conversation about Creation. We have eyeballs and can look at the world. We can view the world (we can world-view) through the lens of study, and learn. We can map. We can take the knowledge revealed to us, even as filtered through our cracked minds, and trust that it is so, that God is kind. We can stand upon the surety of God’s reality and revelation and learn things for real.

We understand because we believe. We hold to a hermeneutic of trust. Because we trust we can be scient.

Scient is a real word, friend. It’s in dictionaries and everything.

To be scient is to be knowledgeable, to be skillful, and above all, to be aware. Grateful people should be aware, and aware people are grateful. We start to be grateful through knowledge. The more we know, truly know, the more we know in truth, the more grateful we are.

The more we know of the world, the more we see the arrangement of the cosmos, the more we see the music and hear the movement of the spheres, the better our own songs will be.

There are many associations that people have with the word cosmology. Some think of physics, of the mathematics of heavenly motion. Some think of astronomy, of the mapping of times and lights. Others think of mythology, of the world-tree Yggsdrasil or of great galactal turtles all the way down. Some think of philosophy and the ambitions of totalizing thinkers with their genies’ lamps, phenomenal cosmic power in an itty-bitty living space. Still others think of metaphysics and wonder about the constitution of the great cosmic egg.

Cosmology. Cosmos-Logos. In the beginning was the Logos. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word arranged.

A cosmology is a map, the map of science, which is simply the map of awareness. It is what the world is, and how the world is. Most of all, it is why the world is plus space and time. 

Where a worldview is prescriptive, a cosmology is descriptive. The first makes demands, the second informs. One is dialectic, the other is conversation.

A moment with this word, conversation. When you hear the word dialogue, you visualize two parties. Hopefully, when you hear conversation you visualize third parties, a group, some cocktails, a bit of a hubbub, with a background rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb that might coalesce into someone interjecting from outside. Conversation comes from conversor, meaning to abide with, to keep company. It is much more still than dialogue, just as cosmology is more still than worldview. Dialogue demands, conversation informs.

Three hundred years ago, conversation could refer to engagement with a certain idea, subject, or field of study. This is still seen in the use of the word conversant, as in he is conversant with the ideas of Aristotle. Conversation could also refer to sexual intercourse, to behavior, to social interactions. Marvelously, and perhaps counter our small thesis here, conversation is still the technical term for the interplay of blades in a fencing bout. Perhaps that makes sense for us, since blades are said to sing, to play, and to ring out. These are all verbs that resist binary expression.

Dialogues are wonderful. Two is better than one, and two always leads to three. Ecclesiastes tells us as much. Notice also that every time a man approaches a woman a third party appears: dance. And as you yourself may have experienced, it doesn’t take much for dance to take on flesh and become a baby.

Dialogue may lead to conversation; good dialogue will. Christian worldview leads to Christian cosmology; if it does not, it is only an idea, and has no flesh or life. We cannot live in a dialogue as we can in a conversation, nor can we navigate by a point of view. We must navigate with a map, with a knowledge of the world, a science (i.e. awareness) that is conversant with the cosmos. From two must come three, or it is not real at all.

A worldview will not help us discover new forms of music, but a cosmology will, as Kepler showed us. Observation of God’s creation gives us the knowledge to be sub-creators by showing us how God’s world works in all its multifaceted and complex glories. As we grow in understanding of how the world is arranged, we grow in our understanding of arrangement itself. This is crucial to sub-creation. 

In the words of J. R. R. Tolkien, “being made by a Creator one of our natural factors is wishing to create, but since we aren’t creators we have to sub-create…we have to rearrange the primary material in some particular form which pleases. It isn’t necessarily a moral pleasing, it’s partly aesthetic pleasing.”

There is no true making without true knowledge of the world, of the primary materials which we may use in building that world up and out. A cosmology, a commitment to the importance of knowing the world, helps us abide and build.

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