Paying Attention To The Sky

One of the great stories of materialism and the atheist conceit is how the religious cosmology, man and earth in the center of the universe was overturned by Galileo and other brave atheists in history. The bad guys wear robes and answer to “Bishop” or “Pope.” We now know, of course, or are led to believe, that we do not live at the center of a cozy little cosmos but in what Bertrand Russell called a “backwater” of a vast universe. Christian megalomania to the contrary, our atheist guides point out that the earth is a tiny planet, orbiting an insignificant star, near the edge of an ordinary galaxy that contains a hundred billion other stars, in a universe with more than a hundred billion other galaxies. “Deal with it.” says the guide, “Live courageously as I do,” “Dare to be free.”

The problem with this little drama of science debunking religion is that most of it is not true. For one thing, as I covered in the opening post of this science and religion series (Revelation Reveals Not Only God To Man But Man To Himself), the notion that the universe has a center entered Western thought not from the Bible, which knows no such idea, but from Ptolemy and Aristotle.  

The geocentric theory that the Church endorsed and propagated through its medieval scholasticism was no more supernatural than the heliocentric theory that it condemned. This was, rather, a clash between two perfectly naturalistic theories of astronomy. Galileo had to overcome the naturalism of Aristotle, not the supernaturalism of Christianity and while under the aegis of the Church natural philosophy became a staple of a medieval university education, nothing in it was derived from any biblical source.

Biblical religion has a great deal to say about the existence of a natural order (which is simply a corollary of its teaching on God and creation), but little to say about the detailed workings of that natural order. Augustine, whose Literal Commentary on Genesis declared that God’s Spirit has not spoken through men in order to teach the laws of biology or physics, since these have no relevance to the order of salvation.[ Augustine, see De Genesi ad litteram L 21, 41] Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus wrote: “They (biblical authors) did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science…”

There was, however, a question about the structure of the cosmos that historically really did, early on, divide Jews and Christians from materialists and pagans. That question was not about space and whether it had a center or not, it was about time and whether it had a beginning. The idea that the universe and time itself had a beginning entered Western thought from the Bible, from the opening words of Genesis. Virtually all the pagan philosophers of antiquity, including Aristotle, and, according to most scholars, Plato, held that time had no beginning. Modern materialists and atheists, for obvious reasons, have naturally followed that ancient pagan view.

Let’s follow Dr. Barr’s story line: “For a very long time, all the indications from science seemed to tell against the idea of a beginning. In Newtonian physics it was natural to assume that both time and space were boundless and infinite in extent. The simplest assumption was that time coordinates, like space coordinates, extended from minus infinity to plus infinity. The discovery of the law of conservation of energy gave further support to the idea of the eternity of the world, for it said that energy could be neither created nor destroyed. And chemists discovered that the quantity of matter, as measured by its mass, is also unchanged in physical processes. Thus almost every scientific indication at the beginning of the twentieth century was that space, time, matter, and energy had always existed and always would. One more nail in the coffin of religion, it would seem. But then came the first plot twist.

The first intimation that time could have had a beginning came from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity — that is, his theory of gravity. In the 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann and the Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître (who was also a Catholic priest) independently proposed mathematical models of the universe, based on Einstein’s theory, in which the universe is expanding from some initial explosion, which Lemaître called the “primeval atom,” and which is now called the “Big Bang.” Observational evidence for this cosmic expansion was announced a few years later, in 1929, by the American astronomers Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason.

The initial reaction of some scientists to the idea of a beginning was extremely negative. The eminent German physicist Walter Nernst declared, “To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of science.” As late as 1959, thirty years after the discovery of the expansion of the universe, a survey of leading American astronomers and physicists showed that most still believed that the universe had no beginning. Not all, but certainly some, of the resistance to the idea of a beginning can be attributed to materialist prejudice.”

Least anyone accuse me of constructing a new Christian conceit to replace the old atheist model: None of this is to say that the Big Bang proves the biblical doctrine of creation, or even that it proves conclusively that time had a beginning. It is possible that something existed before the Big Bang, even though in the simplest and currently standard model of cosmology nothing did. Nevertheless, it remains true that on the one question of cosmology where Jewish and Christian doctrine really did have something to say that conflicted with the expectations of materialists and atheists — the question of a beginning — the evidence as it now stands seems strongly to favor the religious conception.

And this is what this series wants to point out, the many religious concepts from which modern science flows and has adopted. Here are three readings from John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio that delineate the timeless truths the Church holds and their relationship to science and philosophy:

The Church Has THE Ultimate Truth About Human Life; Philosophy The Way To Come To Know Fundamental Truths About Human Life
“The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be. From the moment when, through the Paschal mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate truth about human life, the Church has made her pilgrim way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth and the life” [John 14:6] It is her duty to serve humanity in different ways, but one way in particular imposes a specific responsibility: the diakonia (service) of the truth. …On her part the Church cannot but set great value upon reason’s drive to attain ascertain goals which render people’s lives ever more worthy. She sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life. At the same time, the church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and of communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who don’t yet know it.”

An Implicit Philosophy
“Although times change and knowledge increases, it is possible to discern a core of philosophical insight within the history of thought as a whole. Consider, for example, the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality, as well as the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth and goodness. Consider as well certain fundamental moral norms which are shared by all. These are among the indications that, beyond different schools of thought, there exists a body of knowledge which may be judged a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity. It is as if we had come upon an implicit philosophy, as a result of which all feel they possess these principles, albeit in a general and unreflective way.”

Sundered From The Truth, A One-Sided Concern To Investigate Human Subjectivity
“The positive results achieved (by science) must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps toward a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened before that reason rather than voicing the human orientation toward truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.”