In the winter quarter, the Lumen Christi Institute was honored to welcome Rev. Dr. Adam Hincks, S.J., as scholar-in-residence. Fr. Hincks is a Jesuit priest from Canada, as well as an accomplished cosmologist. He is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, with appointments in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and at St. Michael’s College, the latter of which is the home at the University of Toronto to many studies within the broad tradition of the Catholic Church, including programs in Christianity and Culture and in Medieval Studies, a Faculty of Theology, and the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, where the Institute’s Senior Fellow Fr. Andrew Summerson is an assistant professor of Greek Patristics. The Sheptytsky Institute hosts one of the Institute’s graduate summer seminars, which in the summer of 2025 will be on the work of Dionysius the Areopagite. Fr. Hincks is also an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory.
During his residency at the University of Chicago, Fr. Hincks led a non-credit course titled “The Bible and the Big Bang” as well as a Magis Lecture exploring the connections between faith, belief, and knowledge.
“The Bible and the Big Bang” offered a rare intellectual space where cosmology met theology. Fr. Hincks began by exploring the foundations of physical cosmology — our scientific understanding of the universe’s origins and structure — before turning to biblical texts like Genesis, Isaiah, and John. A key focus was the Hebrew word bara’ (to create), used exclusively for divine acts in the Hebrew Bible: only God is said to create. All other forms of making or becoming are described differently by the biblical authors.
This important distinction underscores that the biblical concept of creation is theological, not scientific. It invites the question that Fr. Hincks posed to the students: what does it mean to “create”? How can we move between intellectual disciplines and understand what are, in fact, distinct concepts but whose differences can be muddled by our habit of using the same words to articulate them?
Rather than rush to reconcile science and faith, Fr. Hincks insisted on the importance of understanding each on its own terms first. Only then could students begin to see how biblical theology and the Big Bang theory might relate — not in contradiction, but as complements of one another. Discussions ranged from the physics of general relativity to the theological insight that creation is an ongoing covenantal act, culminating in a nuanced vision where the cosmos is not just matter and motion but also meaning and mystery. Throughout, Fr. Hincks stressed that the challenge to faith in God’s creation and even His existence leveled by superficial readers of the insights of modern science falls flat. By weaving cosmology with scripture, Fr. Hincks invited students to explore a universe that is both intelligible and sacred.