ⓜ Logo madness: Diary of 19 September, 2020
Our newsletter went out earlier this month. If you didn’t get a chance to read it, clicking on this image (or the link in the text) should take you to it.
First a bit of the regular news…
Our newsletter went out on the first of the month that has lots of news, in fact.
The VATT is back in operation after the summer scheduled shut-down; a bunch of scientific papers have been accepted from our gang; and we’re planning on our Astronomy for Catholics in Ministry and Education Workshop (ACME… formerly known as FAW) to occur in January 2022, a year later than originally scheduled due to… you know the rest.
[Oh, and did I mention, the Calendars are available?]
We have also had a couple of new remembrances added to the Coyne Memorial. Go take a look!
Our Moon-thly Meet Ups are not affected by any virus, thank heavens. These are where our Sacred Space subscribers can chat with Vatican astronomers. As you know, we hold them every Full Moon (as visible from Tucson). Our next will be Tuesday, October 1, at 10am Tucson Time/1pm EDT. It’ll feature VATT astronomer and a very old and dear friend of mine, Dr. Larry Lebofsky. I first met Larry when we were both students (me an undergrad, he a grad student) at MIT nearly 50 years ago. We share many things in common, as it happens, including both of us having papers written in the 1970s that eventually led to a certain NASA probe being sent into the astroid belt to check out what we’d found. (Oddly enough, though the papers were on very different topics, it was the same space probe that checked out both of our ideas.) Tune in to find out more!
Speaking of Sacred Space subscribers… last month we had 213 users; this month the number has grown to 216. Thanks! Meanwhile, we now have 10,432 people who get notified of new postings, net increase of about 40 new readers… fewer than usual, no idea why. Please tell more people about our site.
And if you can, please join the Sacred Space gang starting at a rate of $10 a month (which is getting close to what a burger and fries costs nowadays… remember when you could go out and buy a burger and fries?) or starting at a rate of $100 per year.
And tell your friends about the site! Maybe you could make a deal with your annoying brother-in-law who’s supporting That Other Candidate and both of you send your money here, rather than helping them pay for a fraction of a second of one more annoying ad.
I started this out by mentioning the newsletter. The lead article is about a grant we got from the Templeton Foundation to modernize our web presence, and we’ve done a lot of work on this already though little of it is visible yet. One thing you may have noticed is the new logo that appears on our Twitter and Facebook feeds. This does not replace our famous “three domes” but it’s an abbreviated version designed for tiny places on the internet where fewer pixels are available. (Someone complained that the little logo without the domes didn’t have a cross… good grief, it has five crosses!)
To see how it fits into the other designs so far, read on…
[In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!]
ⓜ Creation Stories: Science, Religion, and Science Fiction…Part 1
In the fall of 2011, I was invited to give The Vivian J. Lamb Lecture on Science and Religion at Villanova University. The text of my hour-long talk ran to more than 6,000 words, and as far as I know it was never published anywhere. I’ll be publishing it here in three parts, over the next three weeks.
This past summer [2011] I did a bit of traveling…
First, there was the “Living Theology” workshop at the Jesuit parish in Liverpool. I gave a bunch of talks, heard a bunch of talks. Got lost one day driving through Liverpool, and found myself crossing Penny Lane.
Following that, I went to Greenwich for the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society. I heard a bunch of scientific presentations about meteorites, those bits of rock from the asteroid belt that occasionally fall to earth. It’s really cool to be able to hold and touch a piece of outer space. Of course, when you present a scientific paper, you have to be able to say more than, “it’s really cool!” But never mind...
This was the official logo by Brad Foster of the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention held in Reno, Nevada. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/69th_World_Science_Fiction_Convention
And then, right after the Meteoritical Society, I flew off to Reno, Nevada, for the annual World Science Fiction Convention. That’s where they hand out the Hugo Awards for the best science fiction stories of the past year. I didn’t win. I hadn’t written any stories to be nominated. Maybe next year...
Anyway, I heard plenty of talks about the life and business of writing science fiction. I appeared on a few panels where they asked me about the latest in astronomy (so I got to talk about meteorites).
I got interviewed by a British guy, Paul Cornell, who writes for DC comics and Doctor Who. He wanted to know about my life in science and religion. Turns out, his wife is an Anglican curate, so it was mostly a case of us comparing notes, about living in worlds that a lot of people think don’t have much overlap.
I think they do have an overlap. That’s what this talk is all about.
The last stop of my trip was back in Tucson. I had dinner there with a grad student in meteoritics from the University of Arizona who was about to defend her PhD thesis. (She’d borrowed some meteorite samples from me, which is how we got to know each other.) She was all worried about how she should present her work at her final defense.
I guess I was still thinking of science fiction, and the meteorite conference papers, and Beatles songs like Penny Lane, so what popped out of my mouth was, “tell it like a story.”
A scientific paper that works, one that is remembered, one that advances the field, is one that tells a story.
A story starts with a setting –- where are we? who are the protagonists? A place and people we care about… the poor orphan with the funny scar living under the stairs at Number 4, Privet Drive; the peaceful countryside with lovable hobbits. A story lures you in with a problem, a conflict, a mystery; it makes you want to know what happens next, what happens when the wizard visits the orphan, when the wizard visits the hobbits, and drags them all away from home.
A story has a central point, a climactic moment, when the main character makes a crucial decision, when someone uncovers the key piece of information and everything you thought you knew is changed.
And the decision, the information, the main moment has consequences. It matters. We know how it matters, within the realm of the story, because we’ve been given the set up in the first place, back when the story began. So we know about the evil wizard who killed the hero’s parents, we know about the evil ring that can control all the other rings of magic but corrupts one’s soul in the process.
But it also matters, outside of the universe of the story, inside our own personal universe, it matters in a different way; it matters enough that we want to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next. We have to see how the decision plays out.
And then we come to the end, the resolution. For a story to satisfy, you need to have a moment at the end to step back, catch your breath, and just take in the scenery… look over the landscape now, where Middle Earth will never be the same; where a new generation boards the train to Hogwarts.
Now, if you’re going to write a scientific paper, you need the same parts. You describe the problem. You describe why it’s a problem – and why you needed that clever or difficult or special thing you did, to make it all work. You describe your brilliant contribution. You describe what came of it. And then you sit back, see how it changes all our ideas about the origin and evolution of the universe, and why you’ll be asking for another grant next year to keep up the good work.
So where does religion fit into all this? In a couple of ways.
[In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!]
Fear, Isolation, and Calendars
And then I wrote… it's September and so the 2021 Calendars are available! Here are two more reflections from calendars of years past...
And since these are meant to support our Calendar guild (click here to get a calendar!) I am not putting them behind the usual firewall...
2021 Calendar
The COVID-19 pandemic that hit the world in 2020 brought many changes to all of our lives, including the tragic deaths of people we knew and loved. Meanwhile, even for those of us who were not directly affected by the disease, the uncertainty that it brought to our lives was a constant worry. Fear arises from uncertainty.
Science tries to put constraints on that fear by at least letting us know what is likely, or not likely, to occur. This was the motivation behind the desire of every civilization to outline the shape of the coming year with calendars. Astronomy was developed and supported by our ancient cultures precisely to give us the reassurance that spring would follow winter, and to remind us to be prepared when winter would come again.
As our knowledge of the sky grew and we learned even how to predict the motions of the planets, wandering among those stars, it was tempting (if ultimately fruitless) to hope that we could use that ability to somehow give us a comforting foreknowledge of things to come here on Earth. Still, even if astrology was ultimately found wanting, the repeatable sequence of the stars through the seasons which astronomy taught us could be a source of reassurance in an uncertain universe.
Donati's Comet of 1859; drawing by William Turner. Comets are frightening because they are unpredictable…
But along with letting us know about the usual seasons of the year, a calendar can also remind us of the days when something unusual did happen: the birth or death of a notable person, the remembrance days of triumph or tragedy. And each day on a calendar can also have space for us to note, as they come, events which may have an unusual significance only to us; and to remind us of them when they have passed.
The fact is, for all that calendars can give us a repeatable framework for our lives, nonetheless every day is filled with unpredictable moments. Even wonderful events — a wedding, a graduation, a new birth — can be unsettling. That is why, beyond the limits of astronomy or medicine to cure our worries, we can be reassured by the words of the risen Christ to his apostles: “Do not be afraid.”
2020 Calendar
One striking parallel I find between the worlds of science and faith is the eternal tension between isolation and community. When I am at the telescope looking at a beautiful nebula, or when I am in front of my computer analyzing my data, I am alone. My concentration is entirely on the object before me; I dread the interruption of a visitor to my office or the beep of an incoming email.
And yet I cannot do this work without the community of people who taught me where to point my telescope, indeed who made the telescope for me to point. And I do this work so that I can share it with my colleagues and friends. The joy of discovery is empty if it is not linked to the joy of telling someone else about what I have discovered.
Likewise, every encounter with God is intensely personal and private. And yet I would not know how to find God, much less how to understand that encounter, without the support of my religion. Even people who think they are “finding Jesus on their own,” only know that there is a Jesus to be found because of the community of our forebears who gave us the scriptures.
As a young astronomer I worried that the isolation I experienced in my work meant that astronomy had no relevance to the “real world” of human problems and pain. But when I went to Africa with the US Peace Corps, I found that the Africans themselves were hungry to learn about this universe. It’s a hunger as real as the need for bread; we are human, we cannot live by bread alone.
We are all familiar with the sad irony that so-called “social media” can make us less social, more isolated. The beautiful irony is that an observer isolated and alone on a mountaintop studying the stars is in fact linked to every other human who has looked up at the sky in wonder.
Your support of the Vatican Observatory Foundation helps us build these links among all of us who go alone to the mountaintops, seeking bread for the soul.
Calendars, coincidence, and play
And then I wrote… it's September and so the 2021 Calendars are available! Here are two more reflections from calendars of years past… And since these are meant to support our Calendar guild (click here to get a calendar!) I am not putting them behind the usual firewall...
2019 Calendar
Yes, this is part of the Trifid Nebula as imaged by Hubble. But you know what you are thinking of when you see this!
There are many coincidences in astronomy. The Moon’s size and location allows it to exactly eclipse the disk of the Sun. The visual juxtaposition of the stars Alcor and Mizar in the Big Dipper’s handle drew the attention of early telescopes to discover that Mizar was actually a double star (whose separation is just right for those early telescopes). The shapes of nebulae remind us of horses’s heads or dumbbells. And of course it’s mere chance that the nebulae themselves happen to be not only scientifically interesting, but also remarkably beautiful.
There’s no cosmic significance to it, really. Just coincidence. And yet...
In December 1988 I spent a week at the Jesuit retreat house in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, discerning my vocation to enter the Jesuits. I’d done weekend retreats before, but never one-on-one with a spiritual director. I was entranced by the beautiful countryside around Wernersvelle. The following year, when I entered the novitiate there, I brought my small telescope with me to enjoy its dark skies. But that December evening I was yearning for some sort of sign... and all I saw were clouds. Then, the next morning, I awoke to a magical world under the season’s first snowfall.
“Did my prayer have anything to do with that snow?” I asked my spiritual director. I was half afraid he would offend my scientific skepticism and say “Yes”; half afraid he would say “No”, and dismiss the effect, all out of proportion, that the snowfall had had on me. Instead, he simply replied, “Divine coincidence.”
A miracle is not a violation of the laws of nature: we recognized miracles long before we had natural laws. Rather, a miracle is an occurrence in our lives that wakes us up to the presence of God. It may well be perfectly explicable by science, but happening at just the right moment to capture our attention: a divine coincidence. As Gerta Klein, the author and Holocaust survivor has put it, “Coincidences are God’s way of letting us know He is here.”
2018 Calendar
When I am asked about being an astronomer who is also a Jesuit, seeing the stars through the eyes of faith, I am reminded of a rainy Sunday afternoon many years ago... a child growing up on the shores of Lake Huron, in the Thumb of Michigan. Like many such afternoons when I could not go outside to play, my mother would sit with me on our covered porch, listening to the rain, and playing cards with me. But there was one moment I still remember, when suddenly I had a flash of maturity, as happens when children begin to grow up; and I realized that our game had nothing to do with winning or losing. Playing cards with me was simply my mother’s way of being with me, and telling me she loved me.
In the same way we are awkward children looking at the stars. No matter how sophisticated our equipment, or our theories, we still can glimpse only a shadow of the truth that lies behind this universe. More often than not we get things upside-down (the meaning of the word “awkward” in late Middle English). But sometimes seeing things upside down – as when I see, from Australia, the constellations I learned as a child in Michigan – lets us see these things anew, as for the first time. Truly, we cannot be afraid to get things backwards at times; we learn by making mistakes.
And all the time, we can recognize in our awkward steps that we are children, yes, but children of a God who not only created these immense and beautiful things in the sky, but who also loves us as a Father... and Who plays along with us as we do our astronomy, spending His being with us as a sign of his love.
With the glorious images of this calendar we invite you to join us at the Vatican Observatory Foundation, experiencing the Creator’s love. Come, play with us!
Reflections on a calendar
And then I wrote… in September our 2021 Calendars become available! What I suspect most people don’t notice is that on the back of every calendar is a little reflection that I write, based on a suggestion — often just a word — from Dr. Brendan Thomson, the volunteer who does all the legwork of putting these incredible calendars together. Over the next three weeks I though I would run the texts of these reflections from the calendars going back to 2016. If I can find earlier calendars I may add to this list!
And since these are meant to encourage people to join our guild and get a calendar, I am not putting them behind the usual firewall...
2017 Calendar
Why does the Vatican support an astronomical observatory? It’s a common question we get asked, and there are many simple answers.
The creation of the Earth as imaged in the stained glass of Cairns Cathedral. (Scanned from the St. Monica's Cathedral Creation Windows perpetual calendar.)
The Observatory is a way of showing the Church’s support for science. It’s a way of demonstrating that, with a national observatory recognized by other nations, the Vatican City State is indeed its own independent nation. It’s even a way to apologize for the Galileo affair! But all those answers miss the deeper question: why does anyone support astronomy? Why does anyone dedicate his or her life to studying the stars and planets?
There’s no obvious way to turn this knowledge into profit (though astrologers tried to do that in the past, and companies are being formed now that may try to mine resources in space in the future). Astronomy in and of itself provides no obvious route to power or glory. So why does anyone do it?
Each of us has our own reasons, but I suspect the common thread in all astronomers ultimately goes back to the sense of wonder and mystery when we look at the night sky... and even more, the sense of joy that we receive when we suddenly understand some small part of this immense creation. In fact, of all the motivations, joy is the one that comes most powerfully to me. When we display the images of this calendar, we do it to remind ourselves of the joy we feel at contemplating the universe.
C. S. Lewis once described encountering God as being “surprised by joy”… and I believe that this joy of seeing celestial wonders is a sign of the Creator’s presence. That’s why I do astronomy.
That’s why we are all so eager to share this universe with everyone, especially through the work of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. We thank you for helping us share this joy; and we invite you to share it yourselves, among your friends and family.
2016 Calendar
A few years ago, a couple of cosmologists who styled themselves as atheists attempted to show that there was “no need for God” to start the universe, at the moment popularly known as the Big Bang. They proposed that a quantum fluctuation in the zero-energy vacuum field of the “nothingness” that presumably existed before the Bang occurred could have given rise our our existence.
The cover of 2016 calendar featured an image of Mars by Damian Peach
Their argument, while certain having scientific merit, would have failed any Philosophy 101 class. After all, if one defines “God” as “that which started the Big Bang” and then you define quantum fluctuations as the cause of the Bang, then logically you haven’t disproved God; you’ve proved that God exists, as a quantum fluctuation – whatever they mean by that!
But more seriously, as the late Fr. Bill Stoeger explained in a chapter of our 2009 book, The Heavens Proclaim, the argument fails on a more fundamental level. “Creation out of nothing” is not the same as “creation in a vacuum” since even a vacuum is not “nothing”. As the cosmologists themselves concede, the primordial vacuum contains a zero-point energy; it also contains space, and time, and the laws of physics that allow it to fluctuate… or not.
Furthermore, God’s creation is not something that happened at one time in the distant past. Rather, since God is outside of time, God’s creation occurs continually at all times. From our point of view, every moment, every second, every nanosecond, God is creating. God maintains the existence of the Universe. The famous philosopher Wittgenstein pointed out that nothing can find meaning within itself; only a super-natural God, standing outside of nature, can cause nature to exist and give it meaning. God is not a being; God is Being.
But we Christians realize that God is more than the author of the Big Bang. God so loved this creation that He sent His only Son to become a part of it. In the Incarnation, as St. Athanasius wrote more than 1500 years ago, the universe became “cleansed and quickened”. Thus to study God’s creation, as we do at the Vatican Observatory, is an act of worship both to God who Created and to God who chose to become part of that creation.
Our science reveals a creation that is orderly, understandable, yet infinitely surprising. These features clearly echo the attributes of its Creator. But even more, as the images of these calendars reveal year by year, our science reveals a creation that is also remarkably beautiful.
Expired: ⓜ Full Moon Meetup on September 1
ⓜ Pluto and the priesthood of science
And then I wrote… In place of the weekly columns originally published in The Tablet I am running odd articles that I have written and published over the years. This one came from a blog I used to write, and it covers a topic of occasional interest even today. I first posted it in 2009.
I suspect I am letting myself in for it by posting this, but someone has to say it…
Before the IAU meeting this past month in Rio [this was written in 2009; it was the previous IAU General Assembly in 2006 that had redefined the status of Pluto], I received several emails from impassioned folks offering petitions to try to get Pluto “reinstated” as a planet. Needless to say, that was the farthest from anyone’s mind at the IAU. As these petitions reveal a deep misunderstanding of what science is in general, I thought I would pass on a few comments here.
Remember this little kid from the movie Jerry McGuire? He knew how many pounds the human brain weighed, and many other cheerful facts. Probably even knew how to spell Pluto. Is that the same thing as science? [p.s. The actor who played this little kid, Jonathan Lipnicki, turns 30 this year…]
[2020 comment, not in the original blog post… after trying to explain the Pluto decision over and over at great length, to no avail, I have discovered that the quickest way to end the argument is to ask, “Why do you insist that being a planet is somehow better than being any other kind of object? Aren’t you being guilty of rampant Planet-ism?”]
Instead, I want to examine some of the hidden incorrect assumptions that the petition-forwarders have about who the IAU is, what we do, and why we do it.
First misunderstanding: They seem to think that science is about “facts”. The petitions argue about the “fact” of Pluto’s status, i.e. where it sits in a list in a textbook. But the science of astronomy is not at all about lists or textbook facts. Those lists are what precocious 8 year old children love to memorize; that is no longer what is of interest to the rest of us. As astronomers, we want to understand what’s in the universe, and how it got to be the way it is today. In order to do this work, we must work in international communities and we must have a common language to describe the things we’re looking at. That’s why the IAU exists: to facilitate our work.
For example, a few years ago – just before the 2006 IAU reclassification – I was curious...
[In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!]
ⓜ Speaking of speaking online: Diary of 19 August, 2020
It seems odd to write an online diary about how much time I have been spending online, but I am sure that my experience is hardly any different from yours.
Going to talks online is no different, really, than hearing your favorite band in a live album. Right?
Except… for the past twenty-plus years my life had been constant travel, reaching the top rank of my airline’s frequent flier status regularly, as I would go not only to Rome and back several times a year but also around North America and Europe giving talks and attending conferences. But now I haven’t left home since George Coyne’s funeral last February. (Speaking of which, be sure to check out the George Coyne memorial page, as several new memories have been posted in the past month or so.)
It’s the longest I have been in one place since at least 2003, which is how far back I kept track of my calendar on my computer. I suspect it’s the longest I’ve been in one place since I joined the Vatican Observatory in 1993.
Instead, I have gotten accustomed to giving talks via Skype and Zoom and all the rest. This past weekend I participated in a science fiction convention hosted in Boston, but with panelists from all over the world. The panel I was on included a guy from Leeds, England. (This youngster had never heard of the famous Live at Leeds rock album. OK, so it’s more than 50 years old, but geez, it’s a classic!) Before that, I took part on-line in a birthday party for a friend; a memorial service for a colleague; and too many committee meetings.
And, like many of you, I have regular meet ups of old friends, including one gang I have known since high school and another dating from when I got active in science fiction fandom. As a result I actually have been in closer touch with some old friends than I have been in years.
One online event we’ve just started are our Moon-thly Meet Ups, held every Full Moon as seen from Tucson, where our Sacred Space subscribers can chat with Vatican astronomers. Our next will be Tuesday, September 1, at 10am Tucson Time/1pm EDT. It’ll feature long-time VATT astronomer Fr. Rich Boyle SJ.
Speaking of Sacred Space subscribers… last month we had 211 users; this month, even with a small deletion of users whose subscriptions have expired, the number has grown to 213. Thanks! Meanwhile, we now have 10,396 people who get notified of new postings, net increase of 85 new readers. Please tell more people about our site. And if you can, please subscribe at a rate of $10 a month (about the tip you haven’t given your barber lately) or $100 per year. And tell your friends about the site!
Along with all the online talks, however, a new new that I have begun doing is preparing pre-recorded presentations. After the break, I will provide links to two of them which I think might be of interest to our subscribers…
[In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!]
ⓜ Beyond the end of time
Georges Lemaitre and Albert Einstein Photo Credit: Catholic Education Resource Center
And then I wrote: As I have mentioned, in 2009 the Redemptorist Press invited me to write a series of reflections on issues of religion and science for the Sunday bulletins that are distributed in churches throughout the United Kingdom. The Feast of the Assumption is August 15, but in the UK it is celebrated on the following Sunday, 16 August. This is the final reflection that I wrote for that series.
One of the great successes of modern science is the Big Bang theory. This idea that the universe is expanding from a single point was originally invented to explain what stops the stars and galaxies from all collapsing together due to the warping of space-time proposed by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
But the thought that the universe began from a single point at a certain fixed time (currently estimated at 13.7 billion years ago) was strongly resisted by many astronomers at first. They felt more comfortable with a universe that was eternal and unchanging. That this theory was developed by an astrophysicist who also happened to be a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre, may also have led some other astronomers to suspect his motivation. Was he just trying to find a “scientific basis” for the idea of a Genesis point? Father Lemaitre himself denied this, and he personally urged Pope Pius XII not to promote his theory as such a proof.
But like all good scientific theories, the Big Bang predicted a number of traits about the structure of the universe that astronomers could look for…
[In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!]
ⓜ Science and miracles
And then I wrote: As I have mentioned, in 2009 the Redemptorist Press invited me to write a series of reflections on issues of religion and science for the Sunday bulletins that are distributed in churches throughout the United Kingdom.
As it happens, the days of the week in 2009 match those of 2020 (after this year's leap day) and the liturgical calendar also matches; thus, both in 2009 and 2020, the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time falls on 9 August. Here's what I wrote for that reflection:
By coincidence, a dust cloud in Orion has the shape of a horse’s head. But did coincidence make it beautiful? Credit: author and colleagues, Vatican Observatory.
As a religious scientist, I am often asked about miracles: does God suspend the laws of nature if we ask? This is related to a larger issue theologians have pondered for centuries: how does God act in the Universe? If the world obeys the laws of science (presumably, set in place by the Creator), and God obeys his own laws, then how can God change the inevitable? For that matter, if all we know can be reduced to chemical reactions in our brains, subject to the laws of cause and effect, how can there be any human freedom?
The ways theologians have answered these questions can be complex and subtle. But there are some basic starting points…
[In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!]
ⓜ Science and humility
And then I wrote: As I have mentioned, in 2009 the Redemptorist Press invited me to write a series of reflections on issues of religion and science for the Sunday bulletins that are distributed in churches throughout the United Kingdom.
As it happens, the days of the week in 2009 match those of 2020 (after this year's leap day) and the liturgical calendar also matches; thus, both in 2009 and 2020, the 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time falls on 2 August. Here's what I wrote for the that reflection:
The history of science has many examples of outmoded ideas, like “phrenology” – the notion that your personality could somehow be read in the shape of your head. It advances by knowing when to abandon these ideas.
Children are fascinated by nature. They are tireless collectors of rocks and bugs, and full of curiosity about the sky and stars. Sadly, by the time they become teenagers, much of that enthusiasm is lost. That also happens with religion, of course. Too many people stop learning anything new about their faith by the time they finish with confirmation classes. And so too often we go through life with a 12-year-old’s understanding of both our universe and our creed. We think science is just a big book of facts, and religion a big book of rules.
With every other aspect of life, as we grow older our world becomes a little more complicated, more nuanced, and frankly more interesting. But the “big book of facts” myth is hard to shake. You will find even scientists claiming to have “proved” some new fact, when in fact they’ve proved no such thing.
Science describes, it does not prove. And those descriptions are constantly open to improvement.
Say you walk into a room, flip the switch on the wall, and the light comes on. For you, that’s “proof” enough that the switch controls the light. But in point of fact…
[In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such!]