Cosmology Archives - Page 2 of 8 - Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War

Book 258 pages Level: high school and above This 2015 biography of Max Planck, the founder of quantum mechanics, was written by Brandon R. Brown. Planck was a scientist of faith—“I consider it a grace of Heaven that belief in the Eternal has been rooted deeply in me since childhood,” he once wrote—and Brown’s biography includes this aspect of Planck’s life, along with Planck’s science, the many difficulties he faced, and the work of his friend, Albert Einstein. Click here for a preview, courtesy of Google Books. From the publisher, Oxford University Press: Max Planck is credited with being the father of quantum theory, and his work was described by his close friend Albert Einstein as “the basis of all twentieth-century physics.” But Planck’s story is not well known, especially in the United States. A German physicist working during the first half of the twentieth century, his library, personal journals, notebooks, and letters were all destroyed with his home in World … Continue reading →

Pierre Duhem, Entropy, and Christian Faith

Article 18 pages Level: university In this 2008 article published in the journal Physics in Perspective, historian of science Helge Kragh discusses Pierre Duhem and the status of science and religion in the second half of the nineteenth century, when developments in the science of thermodynamics challenged the idea of an eternal, unchanging or cyclic universe. Kragh writes: The French physicist and polymath Pierre Duhem was strongly devoted to Catholicism but insisted that science and religion were wholly independent. In an article of 1905 he reflected at length on the relationship between physics and Christian faith, using as an example the cosmological significance of the laws of thermodynamics. He held that it was unjustified to draw cosmological consequences from thermodynamics or any other science, and even more unjustified to draw consequences of a religious nature. I place Duhem’s thoughts on “the physics of a believer” in their proper contexts by relating them to the late-nineteenth-century discussion concerning the meaning and … Continue reading →

Isaac Newton – God and the Universe in the ‘General Scholium’ of the Principia

Book chapter 5 pages Level: university Isaac Newton is arguably the most important scientist of all. His Principia Mathematica (written in Latin, and first published in 1687), in which he develops a physics of the solar system to compete with the “vortex theory” of René Descartes, is arguably his most important work, for it developed the physics still taught in classrooms and used in science and engineering today. Newton sees in this physics and in the solar system the action of God. Newton is often said to have written more about theology than about mathematics and physics, although his views on the nature of God were unorthodox and much of what he wrote regarding matters relating to religion was never published. From the ‘General Scholium’: This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers of other like systems, … Continue reading →

Robert Scherrer – Georges Lemaitre’s Contributions to Cosmology

Video 27 minutes Level: high school and above Cosmologist Robert Scherrer of Vanderbilt University discusses Albert Einstein, Vesto Slipher, Alexander Friedmann, Fr. Georges Lemaitre, and how the idea of the expansion of the universe came into being. The focus of the talk, given at the inaugural conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists, is the ideas and work of Fr. Lemaitre. Scherrer argues that Fr. Lemaitre was ahead of his time in a number of ways. Click here for an article from Our Sunday Visitor entitled “Catholic scientists discuss faith’s role in work”, on the first conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists—“Origins”—held April 21-23, 2017 in Chicago. Click here for the Society of Catholic Scientists “Origins” conference page.

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John D. Barrow – The Origin and Evolution of Universes

Video 1 hour Level: high school and above John D. Barrow (a cosmologist with Cambridge University in the U.K.) speaks at the inaugural conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists. Barrow’s talk includes an overview of cosmology since 1915, an outline of the characteristics of the universe, and the future of the universe, with occasional references to the Christian tradition. The video and audio quality is excellent, but the video does not include Barrow’s PowerPoint Presentation. Scroll down past the video for additional links. Click here for an article from Our Sunday Visitor entitled “Catholic scientists discuss faith’s role in work”, on the first conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists—“Origins”—held April 21-23, 2017 in Chicago. Click here for the Society of Catholic Scientists “Origins” conference page.

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God is dead; long live the eternal God

Article (blog post) 1200 words Level: all audiences A post on The Catholic Astronomer blog by Vatican Observatory astronomer Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., commenting on Stephen Hawking’s ideas regarding God: Hawking does us an important favor by eliminating [a certain] image of God. The “god” that Stephen Hawking doesn’t believe in is one I don’t believe in either. God is not a force to be invoked to swell a progress, start a scene or two, and fill the momentary gaps in our knowledge. God is the reason why existence itself exists. God is the reason why space and time and the laws of nature can be present for the forces to operate that Stephen Hawking is talking about. What’s more, I believe in such a God not because of the absence of any other explanation for the origin of the universe, but because of the person of Jesus Christ — in history, in scripture, and in my own personal … Continue reading →

Creation Reveals God’s Glory – St. John Paul II

Article 1000 words Level: all audiences Pope John Paul II in a March 1986 General Audience discusses creation and scriptural references to how creation proclaims the glory of God : A new dimension of God’s glory begins with the creation of the visible and invisible world. This glory is called “exterior” to distinguish it from the previous one. Sacred Scripture speaks of it in many passages and in different ways. Some examples will suffice. Psalm 19 proclaims: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork…. There is no speech, nor are there words whose sound is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps 19:1, 2, 4). The Book of Sirach states: “The sun looks down on everything with its light, and the work of the Lord is full of his glory” (42:16). The Book of Baruch has a very singular and evocative … Continue reading →

James Clerk Maxwell and the equations of light

Article 5000 words Level: university An article about physicist James Clerk Maxwell, by historian and philosopher of science Thomas Forsyth Torrance. Maxwell, a devout Christian, is one of the most important figures in the history of science. Students in physics courses everywhere study “Maxwell’s Equations” that mathematically describe electromagnetic waves. These waves include light, radio, x-rays, etc. They are how astronomers learn about the universe and they are the basis of all wireless communication technology, including smart phones. Torrance writes about Maxwell: [I]t is certainly clear that the kind of physical science which he advocated is much more congenial to Christian theology than that which developed when absolute notions of space and time were arbitrarily clamped down upon the empirical world and had the effect of reducing understanding of it to a hard and closed mechanistic system. For Clerk Maxwell himself rigorous scientific inquiry and simple devout Christian faith were life-long partners, each in its own way contributing to the strength … Continue reading →

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences – Eugene P. Wigner

Article 6400 words Level: university Physicist Eugene Wigner discusses the remarkable fact that the universe is understandable in terms of mathematics. Wigner received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 “for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles”. Wigner writes: There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. “How can you know that?” was his query. “And what is this symbol here?” “Oh,” said the statistician, … Continue reading →

The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure On Creation – Étienne Gilson

Article (book excerpt) 2800 words Level: university The twentieth-century French philosopher Étienne Gilson writes on St. Bonaventure and Aristotle: All order, in fact, starts from a beginning, passes through a middle point and reaches an end. If then there is no first term there is no order; now if the duration of the world and therefore the revolutions of the stars had no beginning, their series would have had no first term and they would possess no order, which amounts to saying that in reality they do not in fact form a series and they do not precede or follow one another. But this the order of the days and seasons plainly proves to be false…. In St. Bonaventure’s Christian universe there is, in reality, no place for Aristotelian accident; his thought shrinks from supposing a series of causes accidentally ordered, that is to say, without order, without law and with its terms following one another at random. Click here … Continue reading →

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Category Archives: Cosmology