More than Stars…

… are up there in the nighttime skies above you — it’s just that the stars are the easiest to see.

Aside from stars, our galaxy also contains vast regions of dust and gas known as nebulae. Most of these clouds are too dim to be seen by the naked eye, and are known to us only by the long-exposure photographs astronomers take of them. Even seeing these pictures, we may be tricked into thinking that these must be objects deep in space, mere tiny patches in the sky above. For many of them, though, that’s not the case. Take a look at this picture from The World at Night to see what I mean.

In the first image, you see a house with the familiar night sky behind it. Click the small black box in the upper left corner of the image (the right-hand box, not the one with the arrow) to see what that same sky would look like if the nebulae were bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. You’ll see that what looks like empty space interspersed only with stars is actually filled with massive clouds and filaments of dust and gasses. This impressive image is evidence that C. S. Lewis was on the right track when he recorded the ruminations of his protagonist Dr. Ransom in the first book of his space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet:

“[Ransom] had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years he had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it was barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more? No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wise when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory…”

Caritas in Veritate

Pope Benedict XVI’s first social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, has been released. For a roundup of some commentary, I recommend The Catholic Thing and the blog at First Things, First Thoughts.

One interesting dimension to the encyclical — the link between respect for life and all other social issues — is discussed in this article from Catholic News Agency :

In his new encyclical, the Holy Father insists that “openness to life is at the centre of true development,” and warns that “when a society moves towards the denial or suppression of life, it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man’s true good.”

“If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of a new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away.”

Explaining the incompatibility between a mentality that accepts legal abortion as a given and a true social commitment to the common good of society, the Pope also writes that “the acceptance of life strengthens moral fibre and makes people capable of mutual help. By cultivating openness to life, wealthy peoples can better understand the needs of poor ones, they can avoid employing huge economic and intellectual resources to satisfy the selfish desires of their own citizens, and instead, they can promote virtuous action within the perspective of production that is morally sound and marked by solidarity, respecting the fundamental right to life of every people and every individual.”

Fourth of July

“The essence of Americanism is not revolution, but the recognition of the sacredness of human personality, and the inherent inalienable rights which every man possesses independent of the State.”

- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

Ida’s Five Minutes…

… are up, it seems, according to scientists with newly analyzed primate fossils from Asia:

“It’s been just a month since the fossil primate made her debut on the History Channel where she was called a “missing link” between humans and primitive primates and a “revolutionary scientific find that will change everything.” But Ida may be robbed of her claim to that title by a new fossil primate from Asia, published today. “It shows that Ida is out of the running as a [human] ancestor,” says the fossil’s discoverer, paleontologist K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”

Even if Ida was what she was claimed to be, a direct ancestor of humans as a species, her place in that lineage was far earlier than the media hype implied. Now it seems as if she’s not even in the human line at all.

Read here from Science.

Regis Nicoll: “Seeking Salvation in Science”

In this piece from Salvo, Regis Nicoll discusses the attempt to make science a new religion:

“Welcome to scientism, a belief system founded on the conviction that everything from neutrinos to supernovae to conscious beings who marvel at such things are reducible to material processes explicable through science. It is a conviction based on neither observed fact nor experimental evidence, but rather on dogmatic faith in naturalistic science. In scientism, nature is God, science is revelation, and scientists are the new exegetes.”

Read the article here.

Lawrence Krauss on God and Science

In his Wall Street Journal opinion piece of June 26^th, “God and Science Don’t Mix”, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss claims that the traditional belief in an “active” God is entirely incompatible with modern science. He writes:

“J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a “god, angel, or devil” will interfere with one’s experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.”

In other words, for science to proceed, miracles cannot be considered. Science depends on a universe that operates according to its own rational, internal laws of causation. A universe which was constantly being manipulated by supernatural intervention would be incomprehensible to science.

As the lifetime work of Father Stanley Jaki has shown, modern science has developed in the West because of its recognition of the orderly, independent operation of the natural universe. What Krauss is unaware of, however, is that the modern scientific heritage developed not in spite of, but rather because of, the Catholic Church. The Church, like Krauss, recognizes that the universe possesses an autonomy of its own, and does not require God to intervene from moment to moment to physically direct its activities. So whence the conflict?

Krauss explains:

“When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.”

If Krauss’ account of their replies is correct, it’s disappointing that his Catholic interlocutors (who happened to be Ken Miller and Brother Guy Consolmagno) did not defend the Church’s teaching more robustly. But the error here I want to focus on is Krauss’ assertion that because Catholicism requires belief in some miracles, Catholicism therefore rejects the orderly universe of science. In a certain sense, he makes the mistake of assuming that because Catholics believe in miracles, they must believe that miracles are commonplace.

That’s not how the Catholic scientist sees the universe, however. A Catholic accepts, as Krauss does, a universe that is rational and orderly, but that does not exclude the extraordinary miracle. As G. K. Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy, “We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception.” Left to itself, the universe does operate according to its own laws, and it is those laws the Catholic scientist seeks to uncover; but God can intervene from time to time if He so wills.

What of the objection, then, made by Haldane and quoted by Krauss, that a scientist cannot proceed experimentally if he cannot be sure his results are not the result of miraculous intervention? Well, neither can he be entirely sure his results are not the result of the night janitor or a disgruntled graduate student fiddling with his experiments. Although the Catholic scientist accepts miracles, but he does not count on them in the course of his day’s work. Nor is the objection of tentativeness cogent here: science is always tentative and relies on repetition, peer-review, and further experimentation to continually refine its conclusions. Experiments always contain errors and imprecision, and continual study makes our knowledge more accurate. Such a method should dispel any fears about minor miracles fouling experimental results.

Ultimately, a belief in miracles and a belief in an orderly universe are not incompatible. The point of miracles is that they are rare suspensions of the universe’s ordinary way of working. Believing God can do such a thing does not negate a belief that the universe usually works by natural scientific laws.

Bones of St. Paul

At Sunday’s service to mark the end of the year of Saint Paul, Pope Benedict announced that carbon dating of bones from his traditional tomb do indeed date from the first-to-second century AD. Read here. Tradition holds that Saint Paul was martyred by beheading in Rome under Nero, in the mid-60’s AD. A shrine was built over his tomb, over which was eventually built the current basilica of Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls. The Apostle’s tomb was unearthed in 2006, and the contents of the sarcophagus just recently examined. ZENIT reports the details, as related by the Pope in his homily:

“A tiny hole was drilled into the sarcophagus — which over many centuries had never been opened — in order to insert a special probe, which revealed traces of costly purple colored linen fabric, laminated with pure gold and a blue fabric with linen filaments,” Benedict XVI explained.

“Grains of red incense and protein and chalk substances were also discovered,” he continued. “There were also tiny bone fragments, which were sent for carbon-14 testing by experts who were unaware of their origin. These were discovered to belong to a person who had lived between the first and second centuries.”

For those interested in the process, here’s briefly how radiocarbon and similar radioisotope dating methods work: carbon comes in two forms, or “isotopes“, carbon-12 and carbon-14, the numbers indicating the number of particles in the atoms’ nuclei. Carbon-12, the most common form on Earth, is a stable atom, but carbon-14 is unstable and turns into nitrogen through radioactive decay. Substances which undergo radioactive decay have what is called a half-life, that is, the amount of time it takes half of a sample of the substance to decay. If you start with ten grams of a substance with a half-life of ten years, in ten years you will have five grams of the substance remaining. Ten years later, you will have 2.5 grams, and in another ten years, 1.25 grams, and so on. (Good demonstration here.) In this case, carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5,700 years.

While an organism is living, it is continuously taking in both carbon-14 and carbon-12 from the food it eats, and the two isotopes maintain a steady ratio to one another. Once the organism dies, however, and is no longer taking in new carbon, the carbon-14 it contains will decay into nitrogen, while the carbon-12 remains constant. Hence, the ratio of the two substances change. Measuring the ratio in a sample and comparing it to the standard ratio allows scientists to calculate the age of the sample. Carbon dating is most effective for samples up to about 50,000 years old. Older samples usually are tested with different elements. For more information, go here.

Catholics in Science: Dr. Jerome Lejeune

Mary Meets Dolly posts this informative piece about Dr. Jerome Lejeune, Catholic physician and geneticist, notable for his discovery of the genetic cause of trisomy-21, or Down’s syndrome:

“Dr. Lejeune was a man of faith.  Indeed, he exuded faith… in life, in science, in God.  He saw no barriers, no compartments, no built-in contradictions amidst “levels” of reality, from the biological to the spiritual. “

Read the whole post here.

Early Human Flutes

“Art is the signature of man,” said G. K. Chesterton, and I regard finds like this as demonstrating that man has always been what he is:

“Researchers working at two Stone Age German sites have unearthed a nearly complete flute made from a vulture’s forearm as well as sections of three mammoth-ivory flutes.

These 35,000- to 40,000-year-old finds are the oldest known musical instruments in the world, says archaeologist and project director Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany.”

Read here.

ZENIT: Astronaut with Devotion to St. Therese Attends Papal Audience

ZENIT reports:

“The U.S. astronaut who carried relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux into space and put them in orbit around the earth attended Benedict XVI’s general audience today.

On a Discovery shuttle mission one year ago, Colonel Ronald Garan brought the relics given to him by a Carmelite community in New Caney, Texas.

The astronaut had called the women religious before his space flight to ask for prayers, and at that time he told them he could take some small item into space on behalf of the community.”

Read here.

Knox and the Scientist

I recently read an account of a certain scientist who was given the gift of a microscope as a young man and promptly began using it to investigate the world around him. A young Catholic, he managed to sneak home a consecrated Host for examination under his new instrument, and determined that it was indistinguishable from ordinary bread. His childhood faith died under this triumph of scientific observation over credulous superstition.

I was reminded of this story while reading David Rooney’s* biography of Ronald Knox,  The Wine of Certitude (available from Ignatius). Rooney recounts Knox’s assertion that his contemporary skeptics frequently argued not against the true doctrines of the faith, but of their half-remembered childhood impressions of them. Rooney provides the following quote taken from Knox’s work, Caliban in Grub Street:

“[T]he authors, and countless others whom they represent, have grown out of the religion of their childhood without ever exactly discovering what it was; and … they are suggesting substitutes for it not because the have decided that there is nothing in it, but because they have assumed that there is nothing in it.”

Rooney comments:

“The standard debating tactic employed by these critics is to summon forth a doctrine couched in terms as it might have been first imparted to them as children. Then they proclaim, truly enough, that such teachings could no longer satisfy mature, thinking people.”

Hence we see the arguments, so popular among atheists, that the Christian belief in a pettily jealous, gigantic “bearded thunderer” of a God is childish. The scientist in our story falls into the same category, having never learned, it seems, the Church’s teaching that the accidents of the bread and wine will remain unchanged. The Church, borrowing the Aristotelean distinction between substance and accidents, or properties, asserts that the miraculous changing of bread and wine by transubstantiation in the Eucharist, or communion, means that the substance of the bread and wine change into the body of Christ, but that the properties of those substances will remain just like normal bread and wine. The boy-scientist with his microscope observed exactly what the Church teaches he would.

How convenient, the skeptic will say. A change is alleged to occur which is entirely undetectable, and which cannot therefore be empirically refuted. Perhaps so, but to save logical face the critic must at the least admit that the conclusion of the scientist in question was fallacious. It cannot be evidence against a religious doctrine that something it says will not happen in fact does not happen. While it may be true that understanding the theology of the Eucharist is not an easy starting point for the logically-minded skeptic, the logic is still there.

Perhaps if the young scientist had not so cavalierly dismissed his misunderstood faith, and instead dedicated the same probity to the claims of religion he would not have so easily abandoned his faith on such a mistaken premise.

(*It is interesting to note, as an aside, that Rooney is a professor of engineering and a researcher in experimental aerodynamics. As a practitioner of applied natural science by profession, and the author of an competent, in-depth literary biography, Rooney evinces a truly “catholic” mind.)

The Monks and the Mastodon Teeth

From the “isn’t that interesting?” files comes this story: the making of gemstones by mediaeval French Cistercian monks. To decorate reliquaries, manuscripts, and other items, these monks developed a process for making a turquoise-colored gemstone called odontolite from, of all things, fossilized mastodon teeth. The monks originally thought they were creating actual turquoise, but modern chemical studies show that it is similarly-colored but different material. This paper describes modern studies into determining the actual cause of the color change in heated fossilized ivory.

Paul Davies on a “Self-Made Universe”

From physicist Paul Davies:

“[W]e’re talking about why the universe looks like it’s been fixed up for habitation. For most people, the first interpretation is, “Well, God did it.” What I’m saying is that that gets us nowhere at all. It just shoves the problem off to some other realm. But saying “God did it” is no worse than saying “the laws of physics did it.” They both basically appeal to something outside the universe.

The problem with saying God did it is that God himself or herself is unexplained, so you’re appealing to an unexplained designer. It doesn’t actually explain anything; it just shoves the problem off.”

It is these kinds of quotes that underscore the desperate need for a basic education in philosophy and theology for scientists who make pronouncements about arguments they do not understand.

Davies claims that assigning the cause of the traits of the universe to God and assigning the traits of the universe to itself is equivalent, but its not. His mistake is seen in his statement that “God is unexplained”. He seems to mean that God must be posited as an Uncaused Cause, and that assigning the status of Uncaused Cause to God or to the universe is equivalent. In either case, we have rather arbitrarily chosen a starting point and called it the beginning.

But a study of the classical philosophical arguments for God would have shown Davies, and the others who make this argument, that there is something more to be said for choosing God as the Cause than for choosing the universe: namely, that the argument to a Cause indicates the properties that cause must have — immutability and essential simplicity. These are traits the universe is clearly observed not to possess.

Davies is right to point out that, in either case, you have to have a given starting point. But the available starting points are not as equivalent as he thinks, and educating ourselves about the millenia of human thought on this question is a great way to overcome the arrogant assumption that we’re the first to think of these things.

Interview with Fr. Pacholczyk

ZENIT offers this interview with bioethicist Fr. Tad Pacholczyk:

“I have never met anyone who didn’t insist on moral absolutes of some kind. Even those of the most liberal-minded, relativist stripe will, when pushed, insist that certain actions are absolutely wrong, whether it is polluting and causing global warming, killing polar bears, or threatening the South American rainforests.

When it comes to killing young humans in the womb, these same liberal-minded individuals will paradoxically insist that everybody should be free to choose to do whatever they want, although such radical freedom of choice will be summarily denied by them to anyone who might wish to take the lives of pandas or dolphins.

In other words, they exercise a selective absolutism, where they are the ones to decide, often based on unexamined sentiment, those matters that are to be held as absolutely wrong. Their own myopic version of the truth, which is really only a partial and incomplete image of it, becomes a kind of central focus and obsession for them.”

Read here.

Vatican Observatory Moves

ZENIT reports on the Vatican Observatories recent move from Castel Gandolfo to Albano, Italy:

A renovated convent in Albano, Italy, is the new home of the Vatican Observatory — a change that will give the Jesuits who work there better living and working space, and better accommodate visitors to the Observatory.

The Vatican Observatory had been housed in the pontifical palace at Castel Gandolfo, the town south of Rome where the Pope spends the summer months. It moved there in 1939, more than three centuries after its first beginnings within Vatican City, because of growing light pollution in Rome.

The Observatory and its 15 scientists are moving to their newest home this month, though the new space won’t be inaugurated until October.

Read here.

For some of my previous musings on the Vatican Observatory and its symbolism for the Catholic approach to science, see my March article at InsideCatholic: “Reflections on a Year of Science”