Talk With the Animals

At the Deeps of Time household, Lucy and John Lennon the Thirty-Pound Cat engage in heated debate…

“Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, clearly demonstrates a hierarchy of being which places your animal friends lower in the ontological ordering…”

Chesterton, Beards, and Poetry

I can’t let this round of blog posting pass without noting Tim J.’s establishment of “The League of Bearded Catholics“, to which I believe my “short boxed”  (according to Tim’s chart) qualifies me to belong. I must admit, the Napoleon III Imperial is definitely tempting… I provide evidence of this beard below.

Dedicated to facial hair (real or in spirit) and the spirit of TLBC (that is, Tolkien, Lewis, Belloc, and Chesterton) Tim’s new effort will surely be worthwhile.

And speaking of Saint Gilbert, if any of you readers are subscribers to Gilbert Magazine, look for my poem in the upcoming edition which, I am assured by the editor, will be printed soon. Soon, that is, in Chestertonian terms…

Space Weather

I just stumbled across this site yesterday and would like to recommend it to all readers: SpaceWeather.com

The site features detailed, real-time information about all aspects of “space weather”, or the ever changing environment of space surrounding the Earth. The popular picture of space is of a vast, empty, and unchanging void; on a human scale, such an impression is not unjustified. Modern exploration has revealed the complex steps man has to take to live in such a hostile environment, and the distances and time-scales on which the universe operates are incomprehensible to the human mind.

Nevertheless, the truth is nearer to the vision expressed by C. S. Lewis’ in his novel, Out of the Silent Planet:

“He 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…”

Space is, in fact, a very dynamic place, and is full of ever-changing waves and eddies of matter and energy. Our planet is surrounded daily by changing magnetic fields, charged ions from the sun traveling at tremendous velocities, meteoroids, and high-energy rays from deep space. Indeed, as Lewis was implying in his book, these two visions of the Heavens come from two different visions of man in the world. One the one hand we have Carl Sagan’s insignificant “pale blue dot” lost in the empty void; on the other we have this blog’s namesake as expressed by Tolkien and Lewis: the unique habitation man, tucked away in the vast and gloriously radiant Deeps of Time.

Keeping an eye on space weather is a good way to keep track of these changing cosmic conditions. It might not have quite as much practical impact on your daily life as the local rain forecast, but it might help keep your mind on higher things. Take a look!

DNA Mutation Rate is Variable

Standard rates of mutation are used to date changes in DNA. New studies indicate that previous estimates have been off, in this case by up to 600%. Far from being a boon to literalist creationists, however, this data indicates that in many cases species are far older than has been previously thought. ScienceNews reports:

“Overall, the whole mitochondrial genome was experiencing more changes per unit time than previous methods had predicted. But each part of the circular mitochondrial genome evolves at different rates, the team found. Protein-coding genes change more slowly than the hypervariable region, and genes that encode transfer RNAs and ribosomal RNAs change even more slowly than protein coding regions. These data indicate that scientists should calculate evolutionary rates on the basis of the entire mitochondrial genome, not just a small part, Denver says.

Using only the hypervariable region might also throw off estimates of human migrations as well as broader evolutionary time scales, he says.

And each species may have its own rate that can’t be generalized to other species, even if closely related. “When you’re extrapolating these rates to another group, there’s a very good chance it’s an underestimate,” Denver says.”

Read here.

Leonids Meteor Shower Tonight

The yearly Leonids meteor shower is expected to peak late tonight. Go to Sky and Telescope for more information on observing this year’s display:

“This year is expected to be better than average. The “traditional,” most reliable part of the shower should peak around 4 a.m. EST (1 a.m. PST) on the morning of Tuesday, November 17th. You might see 20 or 30 meteors per hour under ideal dark-sky conditions. (Remember, if you want to stay up late instead of getting up early, you’ll be staying up Monday night. It’s easy to get the date wrong for events that happen after midnight!)”

STS-129 Atlantis Launch

The space shuttle Atlantis launched today on its mission to the International Space Station. Watch the launch below:

The Age of the Universe II

The general consensus among scientists today is that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old, but as I throw that number out there, let’s be a little more precise about what exactly we mean when we say that science can measure the age of the universe.

Technically, this age is the time that has elapsed since the Big Bang. If the Big Bang represents the point of origin of the universe, then this age is the age of the universe. But is the Big Bang in fact the origin? From our current scientific perspective, the Big Bang is farthest back in time we can go with science. The current structure of the universe is traceable back to this “explosion” of space and matter. However, the Big Bang itself is a mystery. We can measure what happened immediately after, but the event itself is still a riddle. There are various cosmological models which postulate ways the Big Bang could have been the result of previous physical states. As of yet, though, there’s no way for science to know with certainty.

Theology is silent on the matter as well. As Catholics, we know from revelation that the universe was created, and has not existed eternally. However, we cannot use science to identify a specific event in natural history, like the Big Bang, as the Creation event. In fact, the Catholic priest-physicist who first postulated the earliest version of the Big Bang theory, Georges Lemaitre, cautioned Pope Pius XII after the pontiff made statements that, in Lemaitre’s view, too closely identified the Big Bang with Creation itself.

All that being said, making the supposition that this event represents the origin of the universe is not unreasonable. So far as have seen, it looks just what a Creation event would look like — a point where the laws of the universe simply begin, without a preceding natural cause. For all practical purposes the Big Bang was the point of origin for the universe, and it certainly looks like it was the actual beginning as well. While this cannot be definitively shown, all age estimates of the universe take the Big Bang as their starting points. This is the number we’ll be looking at next.

Johnston: Are Catholics Creationsts?

Over at The Catholic Thing, George Sims Johnston asks, “Are Catholics Creationists?“:

“Catholics should take their cue from the Magisterium: Welcome the genuine discoveries of modern science while casting a skeptical eye on evolutionary “science” that for philosophical reasons dispenses with a Creator and treats man as a thing. At the same time, Christians who insist on explaining the universe in terms of ancient Hebrew cosmology are going to have a difficult time engaging the modern world.”

Read here.

The Factual and the True

In Friday’s edition of The Catholic Thing, John O’Callaghan writes :

“A favorite tactic of people of faith and scientists alike to eliminate apparent conflicts between faith and science is an epistemological solution – science knows facts and truth, faith involves feeling and a kind of emotional response to the transcendent, where the transcendent is understood to be noumenal, beyond the realm of fact and truth. That solution is nonsense. It misunderstands both Catholic faith and natural science. Scientists often experience a kind of awe and wonder at the intelligibility of what they study, an intelligible reality that transcends them. And Catholics make claims of fact when they speak of God, claims that exclude their contradictory opposites as false. The divine transcends the natural; it does not transcend the factual and the true.”

Read here.

The Age of the World

Recently, Jimmy Akin ran a series of posts examining the Church position on the age of the world. Ultimately, it boiled down to this:

[B]oth positions are compatible with the Catholic faith. You can be a good Catholic and hold that the universe is thousands or millions or billions or trillions or quadrillions or other numbers of years old. The Church does not teach any particular age or age-range for the earth or the cosmos. You can follow the evidence where you think it leads.

As far as the Church is concerned, the question of the age of the world, and the universe, is a scientific question, to be determined by scientific inquiry. The Catholic Church does not teach that the age of the universe has been revealed by revelation or can be found by counting genealogies in the Bible.

What I would like to do now is examine the scientific evidence for the age of the universe and see what it indicates.

But before we do that, there’s one principle to examine first: that is, the idea that multiple lines of evidence pointing to the same conclusion are stronger evidence than a single line of evidence, and more importantly, that a possible, but unlikely, interpretation of one single line of evidence is difficult to maintain when multiple lines point to the opposite conclusion.

In other words, when many analyses, of many sets of data, all point to the same conclusion, unlikely controversions of a single line of that data are not entirely convincing. This seems to be the problem with many of the interpretations of the data pointing to the age of the universe — interpreters who desire a particular result come up with an explanation of a few sets of data that support that result, and don’t look at the “big picture.”

In the upcoming series of posts, we will look at the various lines of evidence which indicate the age of the world and of the universe, and see what the “big picture” these various lines indicate looks like.

Stay tuned…

Feser on Divine Simplicity

Philosophical arguments demonstrate that the Uncaused Cause, the origin of all that is, must be essentially simple. Christianity explicitly teaches that God has this attribute of ultimate simplicity. For our scientific purposes, the necessity of essential simplicity in the First Cause is certainly the clearest way to demonstrate the universe’s incapability of causing itself, but it’s still a profound doctrine which is worthy of sustained thought. Edward Feser provides some at his blog:

“This doctrine is absolutely central to the classical theistic tradition, and has been defended by thinkers as diverse as St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes, to name just a few. It is affirmed in such councils of the Roman Catholic Church as the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and Vatican I (1869-70) – which means that it is de fide, an absolutely binding, infallible, irreformable teaching of the Church, denial of which amounts to heresy. Divine simplicity is generally understood to follow from the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of God as pure actuality. For something composed of parts presupposes the combination of those parts and thus a reduction of potentiality to actuality; and a purely actual being has no potentiality to actualize.”

Neocutis is People

Compounds derived from aborted tissues are used in cosmetics. It sounds like a campy sci-fi B-movie, right? Sadly, it’s not. The cosmetic company, Neocutis, has acknowledged that proteins derived from aborted fetal tissue is a component of their rejuvenating products.

We used to think this stuff was only in dystopian stories of the future. I used to think this movie was just silly, sci-fi schlock. But now a civilization uses the remains of its murdered children to improve, of all things, under-eye wrinkles. I’m not one to get unduly alarmed with apocalyptic predictions, but when children are used as cosmetics, can justice be far behind?

“The worshipers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a matured and polished civiliation, abounding in refinements and luxuries.”

G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

And Speaking of Dawkins…

… Carl Olson takes on his latest screed over at InsightScoop.

 

Papal Address on Year of Astronomy

“It is my hope that the wonder and exaltation which are meant to be the fruits of this International Year of Astronomy will lead beyond the contemplation of the marvels of creation to the contemplation of the Creator, and of that Love which is the underlying motive of his creation — the Love which, in the words of Dante Alighieri, “moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradiso XXXIII, 145).”

Read the Pope’s whole address here.

It is interesting to note that those who are the most atheistic promoters of science (Sagan, Dawkins, etc.) usually invoke the sense of awe and wonder that most men feel when they look at the natural universe as a replacement for the religious impulse; indeed, they often talk as if the religious is the direct enemy of that wonder that, I have no doubt, they have experienced and which has motivated their love for science. However, not only is it not the case that religion destroys the sublimity of science, in fact the awe we feel at the universe can be maintained only in a religious context — it is atheism that ultimately eviscerates wonder and awe by maintaining that they are, in fact, nothing more than a particular set of chemical reactions in our heads. Their sense of awe is truncated, unrequited. It leaves off just at the point where it could begin to have meaning. It denies the only thing that could give it real existence, for they cannot seem to grasp the pathetic absurdity of maintaining that there is value in believing that value, meaning, nobility and wonder are just one arrangement of atoms reacting to another.

“For the first thing the casual critic will say is “What nonsense all this is; do you mean that a poet cannot be thankful for grass and wild flowers without connecting it with theology; let alone your theology?” To which I answer , “Yes; I mean he cannot do it without connecting it with theology, unless he can do it without connecting it with thought. If he can manage to be thankful when there is nobody to be thankful to, and no good intentions to be thankful for, then he is simply taking refuge in being thoughtless in order to avoid being thankless.”

G. K. Chesterton

Astronomers Spot Most Distant Object Yet Seen

National Geographic reports:

“The most distant object yet spied in the universe is the remnant of a star about 13 billion light-years from Earth that sheds new light on the earliest days of the universe. Two different teams of astronomers studied a brief but powerful flash of light, called a gamma-ray burst, from the star explosion.

Because of the time it takes for light to travel such distances, scientists think the exploded star must have been born about 600 million years after the big bang, when the universe was just 4 percent of its current age.”