How science is really done

According to the Onion, at least.

Benedict XVI Speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Not bad, not bad... but I always liked this guy's thought if not his theology.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am happy to greet you, the members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, on the occasion of your Plenary Assembly, and I thank Professor Nicola Cabibbo for the words he has kindly addressed to me on your behalf.

In choosing the topic Scientific Insight into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life, you seek to focus on an area of enquiry which elicits much interest. In fact, many of our contemporaries today wish to reflect upon the ultimate origin of beings, their cause and their end, and the meaning of human history and the universe.

In this context, questions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise. My predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences. Philosophy in its early stages had proposed images to explain the origin of the cosmos on the basis of one or more elements of the material world. This genesis was not seen as a creation, but rather a mutation or transformation; it involved a somewhat horizontal interpretation of the origin of the world. A decisive advance in understanding the origin of the cosmos was the consideration of being qua being and the concern of metaphysics with the most basic question of the first or transcendent origin of participated being. In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being who is such by essence.

To state that the foundation of the cosmos and its developments is the provident wisdom of the Creator is not to say that creation has only to do with the beginning of the history of the world and of life. It implies, rather, that the Creator founds these developments and supports them, underpins them and sustains them continuously. Thomas Aquinas taught that the notion of creation must transcend the horizontal origin of the unfolding of events, which is history, and consequently all our purely naturalistic ways of thinking and speaking about the evolution of the world. Thomas observed that creation is neither a movement nor a mutation. It is instead the foundational and continuing relationship that links the creature to the Creator, for he is the cause of every being and all becoming (cf. Summa Theologiae, I, q.45, a. 3).

To “evolve” literally means “to unroll a scroll”, that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos. Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos. We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom. Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

The distinction between a simple living being and a spiritual being that is capax Dei, points to the existence of the intellective soul of a free transcendent subject. Thus the Magisterium of the Church has constantly affirmed that “every spiritual soul is created immediately by God – it is not ‘produced’ by the parents – and also that it is immortal” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 366). This points to the distinctiveness of anthropology, and invites exploration of it by modern thought.

Distinguished Academicians, I wish to conclude by recalling the words addressed to you by my predecessor Pope John Paul II in November 2003: “scientific truth, which is itself a participation in divine Truth, can help philosophy and theology to understand ever more fully the human person and God’s Revelation about man, a Revelation that is completed and perfected in Jesus Christ. For this important mutual enrichment in the search for the truth and the benefit of mankind, I am, with the whole Church, profoundly grateful”.

Upon you and your families, and all those associated with the work of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, I cordially invoke God’s blessings of wisdom and peace.

HT: The Holy See

The God Gene?

John Cleese does a pretty decent job of satirizing the reductionist tendencies of some scientists.

Science-related Positions of the Presidential Candidates

If you're interested, these are the positions taken by Barack Obama and John McCain on various issues relevant to science and scientists.

Info from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Academic Freedom?

Lots of Christians are saying that public schools need to allow for "academic freedom" and have criticism of evolution. Some states are attempting to pass laws to this effect. I'm not quite sure how a legislature can enforce "academic freedom," and I find it funny that a whole bunch of Republicans have suddenly decided that government intervening in the school system is a good thing. But that's another topic.

I agree that we should be allowed to question Darwinism, but these laws that are being passed are too sloppy and allow all sorts of ideas that are not science a potential foot in the door of the science classroom.

Here's a question: I'm a Christian who doesn't believe in Darwinism but does believe that the earth and universe are billions of years old. What about those Christian institutions that only allow people who believe in a young earth to teach? Shouldn't I have the academic freedom to question the young-earth paradigm? (Pointing out the fact that these are private insitutions misses the point.)

We're not full of crap...

...about the amazing fine-tunedness of our planet for intelligent life. We're not crazy religious people just making this up.

So claims this recent article at SPACE.com (without reference to the religious stuff).

Earth has liquid water in the just-right amounts, plate tectonics, a large moon, etc., all of which are necessary for the existence of advanced, intelligent life.

Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington debunks the silly speculation regarding the existence of life elsewhere in the solar system:

"You hear all the time how Earth-like Mars is, but if you were taken to Mars you wouldn't feel happy there at all," said University of Washington astronomer Don Brownlee, author of the book "Rare Earth" (Springer, 2003). "It's not Earth-like. And Titan, when the [Huygens] probe landed, there was all this stuff in the media about how Earth-like it is. Earth-like? It is completely different. It has all this methane on the surface. Venus has about the same mass [as Earth], almost the same distance from the sun. But it's a totally different place — no oceans, no plate tectonics — and it's not a place you would want to be."

So far, we haven't seen any planet outside the solar system come very close to Earth either.

Of the nearly 300 new worlds glimpsed elsewhere in the galaxy, most are "hot Jupiters" — large planets that orbit close to their stars, on which life and liquid water are unlikely to exist.

"I doubt that in our galaxy typical stars have planets just like Earth around them," Brownlee said. "I'm sure there are lots of planets in the galaxy that are somewhat similar to Earth, but the idea that this is a typical planet is nonsensical."

This is where the real science is going. And it's teaching us lots of things and making astronomy more exciting.

Who's against the Big Bang? And why?

You can get some hints here.

From this so-called "cosmology statement":

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

Unfortunately, they don't bother pointing out that several independent lines of evidence lead to the conclusions about dark matter, dark energy, and inflation. The underlying motivation of many of the signers is subtle, but it pokes out momentarily:

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end.

Oh yes, that troublesome beginning of the universe that comes with that big bang. Philosophy and theology (or lack thereof) drive most objections to the big bang. However, objections to the big bang often make odd bedfellows. Take, for example, this set of names of signers to the statement:

Harlton Arp
Hermann Bondi
Thomas Gold
Eric J. Lerner
Jayant Narlikar
Anthony L. Peratt

Those are just some of the physicists and astronomers' names I recognize. They all don't like the big bang because they have philosophical objections to the universe having a beginning (especially Lerner). However, there are another couple of names on this list that I find interesting:

John Hartnett
Charles Creager Jr.

These guys are both young-earth creationists. The big bang bothers both atheists who want an eternal universe and young-earth Christians who want a young one.

And of course both groups are claiming that they don't get a fair hearing and that the research is skewed. This isn't really fair either. Some of the astronomers on that list were prominent scientists who made valuable and important contributions to the field, and without their poking and prodding at cosmology we would have never refined the big bang theory. And, of course, young-earth creationists have no shortage of money and attention.

Anyone is free to put forward any model of the universe they choose to be subjected to testing. The facts, however, seem to again and again point in the direction of a big bang universe.

Understatement of the Year

Chemical Engineer: So what do you think happened "before" the Big Bang?

Me: I have my own answers to that, but they don't come from science.