Tag Archives: Astronomy

A Secular Scientist’s Argument against the New Atheists

19 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Religion, Science

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David Berlinski and Christopher Hitchens

Moderator: Dr. Berlisnki, you’re not a Christian, and indeed, you’re not religious as I understand it. Why do you argue for a Judeo-Christian influence in society?

David Berlisnki: I presume you are not asking me in the hopes of a personal declaration. And I won’t say that this secular Jew has a remarkable degree of authority when it comes to these moral events: after all, I have lived my own life under the impress of having a good time, all the time. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to hear these words from someone such as myself, because at least you are hearing them from someone with no conceivable bias in their favor.

In its largest aspect, Western science is of course an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian tradition, especially to the extent, perhaps only to the extent, that it is committed to the principle that the manifest universe contains a latent structure that can be discovered by the intellect of man. I think this is true. I don’t think this is very far from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ declaration that, ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ […]

You know, Stephen Hawking just published a book, one explaining, again, how everything began — why it’s there, why we shouldn’t worry about God, et cetera. And to paraphrase the claim that he now makes: having given up on “A” through “L”, he now champions something called “M-theory” to explain how the universe popped into existence. I respect Hawking as a reputable physicist. But I can tell you this: What is lamentably lacking in every one of these discussions is that coruscating spirit of skepticism which a Christopher Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins would bring to religious claims, and then lapses absurdly when it comes to naturalistic and scientific claims about the cosmos.

Surely, we should have the sophistication to wonder at any asseveration of the form that the universe just blasted itself into existence following the laws of M-theory — a theory no one can understand, whose mathematical formulism hasn’t been completed, which has never once been tested in any laboratory on the face of the earth…

Finally, the fact that the earth, our home, is a small part of the physical universe does not mean it is not the center of the universe. That is a non sequitur. After all, no one would argue, least of all Mr. Hitchens, that the doctrine that home is where the heart lies is rendered false by distance. We should be very careful about making these claims. I agree that the universe is very big; there are lots of galaxies and amazing things. And there is certainly some biological continuity between humans and the animals that came before us. But as for the central religious claim that this particular place is blessed and important, that’s different. No doctrine about physical size rebuts it…

And as to why should a secular Jew open his mouth to questions pertaining to the Christian religion? It’s a big tent. I’m presuming I would be welcomed.

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An excerpt from Berlinski’s 2010 debate with Christopher Hitchens. Berlinski’s erudition reaches almost comical heights in this debate, which is, in my opinion, one of the more compelling Hitch ever did. I like the whole thing, but you can watch the pulled section below.

Continue onward:

Galileo Squares Faith and Reason

06 Monday Apr 2015

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Galileo

“I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth — whenever its true meaning is understood.  But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies…

It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible…

It follows as a necessary consequence that, since the Holy Ghost did not intend to teach us whether heaven moves or stands still, whether its shape is spherical or like a discus or extended in a plane, nor whether the earth is located at its center or off to one side, then so much the less was it intended to settle for us any other conclusion of the same kind. And the motion or rest of the earth and the sun is so closely linked with the things just named, that without a determination of the one, neither side can be taken in the other matters. Now if the Holy Spirit has purposely neglected to teach us propositions of this sort as irrelevant to the highest goal (that is, to our salvation), how can anyone affirm that it is obligatory to take sides on them, that one belief is required by faith, while the other side is erroneous? Can an opinion be heretical and yet have no concern with the salvation of souls? Can the Holy Ghost be asserted not to have intended teaching us something that does concern our salvation?

I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.'”

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Excerpted from Galileo Galilei’s letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, sent in 1615 and collected in Stillman Drake’s The Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo.

It’s astounding the burden this logic can lift from the shoulders of literalists.

More science and faith:

Galileo 2

Is It Possible to Step Outside the Universe?

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Science

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Bill Bryson

“Now the question that has occurred to all of us at some point is: what would happen if you traveled out to the edge of the universe and, as it were, put your head through the curtains? Where would your head be if it were no longer in the universe? What would you find beyond?

The answer, disappointingly, is that you can never get to the edge of the universe. That’’s not because it would take too long to get there— — though of course it would — but because even if you traveled outward and outward in a straight line, indefinitely and pugnaciously, you would never arrive at an outer boundary. Instead, you would come back to where you began (at which point, presumably, you would rather lose heart in the exercise and give up). The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’’s theory of relativity… [W]e are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be said to be expanding because, as the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg notes, “’solar systems and galaxies are not expanding, and space itself is not expanding.”’ Rather, the galaxies are rushing apart. It is all something of a challenge to intuition. Or as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “’The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.'”

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From Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

The image below is a three-dimensional map of the perceptible universe. It stretches 380 million light years, includes 43,000 galaxies, and covers 95 percent of our sky. It took a team of world-class scientists over a decade to compile, and it represents only a tiny fraction of the entire universe. The colors signify the respective red-light-shifts of each galaxy (the “third dimension” of an otherwise 2D image).

If you can understand it, well, you’re cleverer than me.

Read on:

  • Einstein, Newton, Carl Sagan, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson relate how science requires childlike wonder
  • Baruch Spinoza theorizes how the universe might have began ex nihilo
  • Gottfried Leibniz takes a different crack at the question

3D Map of the Universe

Isaac Newton

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Interview, Science

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Isaac Newton

If you could meet and talk with any scientist who had ever lived, who would it be, and why?

“Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton. No question about it: Isaac Newton. The smartest person ever — ever to walk the face of this earth. You read his writings, the man was connected to the universe in spooky ways. The most successful scientists in the history of the world are those who pose the right questions… Newton, his questions reached into the soul of the universe, and he pulled out insights and wisdom that transformed our understanding of our place in the cosmos.

Someone said to him, ‘Isaac, why is it that planets orbit in these shapes you call ellipses, rather than circles? Why that shape?’ Newton said, ‘You know, I’ll get back to you on that.’ He goes away for a few months, comes back, and says, ‘Here’s the answer. Here’s why gravity produces ellipses for orbits.’

His friend asks, ‘Well how’d you figure that out?’

He says, ‘Well I had to invent this new kind of mathematics to do it.’ He invented calculus. Most of us sweat through it — for multiple years in school — just to learn it. He invented it practically on a dare.

He discovered the laws of motion. The laws of gravity. The laws of optics. Then he turned twenty-six.”

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Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response to the question, “If you could meet and talk with any scientist who had ever lived, who would it be, and why?”

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said Let Newton be! and all was light.
– Alexander Pope’s intended epitaph for Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Pick up the James Gaelic’s much praised biography Isaac Newton, then watch the Time Magazine interview below: