We Have to Draw the Line Somewhere Don't We?

In our course on the relationship of Christianity with the Natural Sciences we are going to be exposed to a wide spectrum of theist-agnostic-atheist thought. Even within the theist camp we will see a significant variation in thought.

There is a blog by Chet Raymo that I keep an eye on and he posted a thoughtful response that he titled Capax Dei on recent changes of thinking in the Catholic Church. LINK TO POST. He makes reference to the current Pope's position on Science and Faith which is interesting in it's own right.

While Raymo's blog makes for interesting reading, and is definitely a position that we will need to deal with in our course, it does beg the question of where we draw the line between conservative evangelical theism and liberal theism. I think that his revised Creed at the end makes the line clear for us. I will reproduce it here:

"We believe in God, the source and animator of heaven and earth, and all that is seen and unseen.

We honor the personhood of Jesus Christ, light of the world, who gave his name and inspiration to the Christian fellowship, and who taught us to love all women and men as we love ourselves. For us he made the ultimate sacrifice, that we might live more freely and graciously.

His spirit lives on, in the mystical body of the Church. Together, in his name, we celebrate the mystery of life, and await the time when his dream of universal peace is fulfilled.

With the water of Baptism we affirm our desire to wash away our sins and live the love he exampled in his life. In remembrance of him, we share together the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and invite all persons of good will, regardless of faith, to join our table.

We commit ourselves for as long as we shall live to the continuance of his message of charity and hope, to provident stewardship of the planet, and to the fulness of life in the terrestrial world to come.

Amen"

A Time to Pick Up Stones: The Heavens Pour Forth

It is time to re-activate this blog for the Christianity and Natural Sciences course for the coming semester. I will be posting mostly comments and internet links on this blog related to Faith and Science issues. These links and posts may be part of classroom discussions.

A writer for Discover Magazine has selected the 10 most amazing astronomy photographs of 2008. The one above spoke to me but they are all pretty astonishing. I especially like the image of a exploding star from the other side of the Universe (the light would have had to start more than 4 billion years before our star the Sun formed). But the one I have to post is the one above of a spiral galaxy among other spiral galaxy. If you got far enough away from our Milky Way Galaxy this is what home would look like. It is so beautiful and complete one would assume it is a cheap starfield background painting but not only is it real it was taken with a ground based telescope. Beautiful, simply beautiful.

It is a bit gimmicky but this little video of the Moon passing across the face of the Earth as seen from a satellite sent to look at comets is kinda neat also.

LINK TO TOP 10
LINK TO VIDEO

Galileo In the News

Galileo made the list of "50 must read" books for all educated people according to the Globe and Mail.

I like this statement that makes him sound like a early version of Carl Sagan ...

"Unlike other scientific tomes of its time, which were written in Latin and addressed a scholarly audience, the Dialogue spoke in Italian to an underserved public of intelligent, curious laymen who couldn't afford a university education. Galileo's direct appeal to this mass market fanned the church's anxieties over the message his Dialogue delivered."

LINK TO GLOBE AND MAIL ARTICLE

I'm Back and Reading Comics

Oddly enough a rather weak cartoon strip called "Mother Goose and Grimm" has taken an interest in the Faith and Science debate.

LINK TO CARTOON

Striking NASA Image

LINK TO NASA PAGE

Carl Sagan would have loved this image. If you were on Mars and trained a reasonably powerful telescope on Earth and the Moon this is what you would see. This is an image from a satellite that is currently orbiting Mars. There is just something precious about this image that makes me think of the famous Earthrise image from the the surface of the Moon.

A Quote and An Image

It has been a while and I doubt that I have an audience on this blog right now but I am slowly coming back into the ABU system after my sabbatical and I thought I was due for a posting.

I have been reading alot of Richard Feynman this past year and I like this quote:

"Scientists are explorers,

philosophers are tourists"

Richard Feynman

What gets me about both of these images is that neither explorers or tourists are "home", both set out with real intentions of returning to where they started. I would really like to talk to Feynman about this ... he was too thoughtful and intelligent for this to not be an intentional link but where did he think "home" would be for scientists? The past is not home for a positivist scientist that believes in progress. Does Feynman mean that we are all lost in space and our only purpose is to explore and never get home? Really? Man oh man.

I tripped across this image recently and it made me stop and really, really think.

Yes, it is just another pretty sunset ... but it is a sunset on Mars as captured by NASA's Mars Rover Spirit. There are a number of concentric spinning thought wheels on this image. The dominant one being how small the Sun seems and how a change of perspective changes everything. Then again, think of how blessed Earth is to be "just the right distance" from the Sun.

LINK to NASA image

This would still bother Einstein

Albert Einstein did not like it, it bothered him. The co-discoverer of the double helix Francis Crick was so astounded by the sheer chemical impossibility of it that he bought into panspermia to get around it. It can be argued that Dawkin's fundamental blind spot in the physical sciences is chemistry and biochemistry so he ignored it (or bought other peoples pat answers).

There is an unbreakable law in chemistry. It is one of the fundamental symmetry laws of Creation. It occurs at a microscopic level so deep that you have to go beyond understanding molecules to understanding the shape of molecules. It may not seem important but stick with me on this.

There are molecules in this Universe that have symmetry points in them. The ones that are easiest to see are molecules that have a carbon with four different things attached to them. Carbon atoms that have four attachments have a fixed tetrahedral geometry and if the smallest attachment is pointed directly up the other three rotate clockwise or counterclockwise about the carbon - smallest attachment axis. We call these options left or right handed and we know they are there because such molecules can rotate polarized light (how? we have no idea but we're working on it).

You body is mostly water but the parts that are not water are mostly proteins. You could think of proteins as long chains where each link in the chain is an amino acid (you know ... essential amino acids that show up in everything from food to shampoo). At the heart of all the amino acids except one there is one of those special carbon atoms and it can be left handed or right handed.

But here's the mystery, they are all left handed.

In fact, you can determine how old a protein is by the number of amino acids in it that have been changed to righthanded due to cosmic radiation (a process that happens at a known rate).

So what is the problem. We need to go back to that symmetry law. It is written in Creation that whenever a left handed carbon is created from non-handed materials there has to be a net symmetry conservation by the balancing creation of a right handed mirror image. Always. There will always be a 50:50 mixture of both.

The possibility that life started with a set of simple proteins still requires literally millions of these amino acids to somehow separate and associate perfectly with the exclusion of all the right handed molecules. The probability approaches the impossible. That is where Einstein, Crick and Dawkins get in the game.

Well, this problem has been in the news recently and they discovered that the amino acids that formed in a meteorite has the same symmetry breaking distribution of amino acids. So it is possible that the origin of the mystery does not have a terrestrial origin. They somehow think that this helps answer the problem as opposed to just deferring it. Blindness is blindness.

Link to article

Pithy Reflection on God's "Two Books"

Came across this old saying that captures the essence of the conservative / fundamentalist position on the priority of God's two books.

"When evidence points out holes in evolution, evolution is wrong.
When evidence points out holes in the Bible, the evidence is wrong"

Mark Noll in his chapter "Thinking About Science" in the book "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" points this attitude out and comments on it rather harshly.

National Geographic: The God Particle

I have always loved the National Geographic, it has a commitment to showing the "truth interpreted" by giving us photos of what "is". There is of course its' rabid anti Christian stance (in my opinion it shows a lot more respect to any other religion than Christianity). But it gets the photos that no one else can.

This month there is an article on the current search by physicists to find a fundamental particle (more energy but that is besides the point). Everyone calls it the "God Particle". It makes for interesting reading but remember the editorial bias of the source.

LINK TO ARTICLE

Rest In Peace: Robert Jastrow 1926 - 2008

LINK to obituary in The New York Times

There was a lot to like about this guy and I remember him on TV during the 60's and 70's space programs. His quotes are well circulated but the ones I like are:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

"There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgements to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science, it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe, and every effect must have its cause, there is no first cause...

This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control...

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced the effect? Who or what put the matter and energy in the universe? Was the universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre existing materials? And science cannot answer these questions".