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    God's Planet
    God's Planet
    God's Planet
    Ebook138 pages1 hour

    God's Planet

    By Owen Gingerich

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An “eminent scholar . . . shows how religious perspectives have played significant roles in major scientific discoveries and frameworks. . . . fascinating.” (Choice)

    Today, science and religion are the two major cultural entities on our planet that seek a coherent explanation for the structure, origins, and fate of the universe, and of humanity’s place within it, though their interpretation of evidence differs dramatically. Many scientists look at the known universe and conclude we are here by chance. The renowned astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich looks at the same evidence?along with the fact that the universe is comprehensible to our minds?and sees it as proof for the planning and intentions of a Creator-God. God’s Planet exposes the fallacy in thinking that science and religion can be kept apart.

    Gingerich frames his argument around three questions: Was Copernicus right, in dethroning Earth from its place at the center of the universe? Was Darwin right, in placing humans securely in an evolving animal kingdom? And was Hoyle right, in identifying physical constants in nature that seem singularly tuned to allow the existence of intelligent life on planet Earth? Using these episodes from the history of science, Gingerich demonstrates that cultural attitudes, including religious or antireligious beliefs, play a significant role in what passes as scientific understanding. The more rigorous science becomes over time, the more clearly God’s handiwork can be comprehended.

    “Owen Gingerich provides new facts and deeper understanding of [Copernicus, Darwin, Hoyle].” —Freeman Dyson, author of The Scientist as Rebel

    “[A] short, punchy, accessible, and thought-provoking book.” —Christian Century

    “A rich volume you’ll want to keep in your library.” —Forbes.com
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 22, 2014
    ISBN9780674745018
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    • 5/5
      Published by the Harvard Faculty and Fellows, as a tribute both to the writer and his stunning accomplish- ment of joining two traditionally conceived as strictly unconnected fields, science and religion, GODʻSʻ PLANET is a Harvard Astro-physicistʻs exposition of "intelligent life," in scientific terms and how it is endowed by human consciousness reflecting upon itself, as such, by faith, another form of the intelligent lifeʻs self. The writerʻs deeply abiding Mennonite rich faith carries an integrity of his scientific faith and knowing to a stunninngly SIMPLE, ERUDITE, ELEGANT, LUCID, and COMPREHENSIVE UNDERSTANDING OF E=MC square. Gingerich does not engage Christian faith, but the concept and act of faith itself, which he claims is a part of the intelligent life in E=Mc square. Rarely does one see a book published by the Harvard Faculty and Fellows, as though both are making personal statements of its excellence of scholarship and literary facility -- the tone never rises to a plea, never descends to an argument, for it is a rational exposition throughout. Outstanding is the simplicity both of the scientific and religious expositions by reason so that even the faith of the equation is not naked in spirit from its body. Gingrich, we learn, was born in a place called Goshen, a Mennonite town in Iowa, went to school in Indiana, and graduated from Harvard, retained by Harvard for teaching and retired from Harvard, at which time he was asked to deliver an address on the formidable double ranging subject as one to a little known group, consisting of Christians testifying as Scientists and Scientists testifying as Christians in little known Gordon College, Mass., deep in the New England woods along weedy byways perhaps. Everything about the groupʻs enterprise is small, simple, direct, and integrity laden, like a school of scientific scholars who carry their reasoning by questions from the smallest particles to the evolving future ascribed, because the product is intelligent and living, to an Intelligence that the mathematician Roger Penrose phrases as a question "Is the Universe Conscious" in THE EMPEROR HAS A NEW MIND. The tenor of the writing of this astoundingly lucid, choicely worded, simple accountis like that of the better known Amish and Quakers -- profoundly quiet. Gingerich is a retired Professor of Astrophysics and the History of Science. In this book, he is a man of abiding faith in the search for public knowledge in science and the recognition, by home rule that is the personal spirit of life, in faith in what Gingerich calls GOD and many others call Spirit. This book is a modern version of John Bunyanʻs Pilgrimʻs Progress; but it is not an allegory. It is a genuine scientific discourse, in writing, on the Spirit part of the Body that is, with the quarks and atoms of natural bodies that visibly and less than visibly but knowably whirl in space/time, a veritable body that does the same out of the Consciousness that Roger Penrosesuggests out of his displays, in his calculations and by cubes, the mathematical reason and beyond reason parts of the Existing Intelligent Life equation that Gingerich expounds in simple sentences..This book is a Classic. It is iconoclastic. Yet you would never hear a pin drop. It is profound.

    Book preview

    God's Planet - Owen Gingerich

    Prologue

    ARISTOTLE HAD a word for it: metaphysics. It stood for his inquiry into the big questions, literally beyond physics.

    At a Renaissance university, the professor of mathematics lectured from Aristotle’s De Coelo (On the Heavens) about the celestial motions of the stars and planets in their unending circles, and about the linear terrestrial motions based on Aristotle’s Physics.

    Aristotle’s book Metaphysics was reserved for the more senior professor of philosophy. In that book the ancient Greek sage inquired into eternity and final causes. What moves without being moved? Aristotle asks. It must be the eternal heavens, with unceasing movement, he responds. But why? It must be the desire for the good, and the final cause is therefore love. In the climax to this passage, Aristotle writes, "If then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this is wonderful, and if in a better state this is even more wonderful. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for actuality of reason is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and continuous and eternal duration belong to God, for this is God." This, then, is the unmoved mover.

    When Galileo was negotiating the terms for a position at the court of Cosimo dei Medici in Florence, he was comparatively indifferent about the amount of his salary, but he was firm about his title: Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke. Galileo wished to discourse not only about the apparent motions of the stars and planets, but he also wanted to be credentialed to speak with authority on how the heavens were really made, the deep and even controversial issues of cosmology.

    The metaphysical issues are with us even today. Included are big questions that touch on observational or experimental questions of science, but which generally lie beyond the normal bounds of science. And included are questions that fall in the domain of theology, and also rather differently, in the domain of religion. The relationship between the arena of science and the religious domain has been tense going back to the time of Galileo and beyond, but it has been particularly fraught in twentieth-century America, with issues relating to the age of the cosmos and the rise of life on earth.

    And here my late Harvard colleague Stephen Jay Gould enters the fray. In 1973 Steve and Niles Eldredge, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, published evidence that some invertebrate species evolved comparatively rapidly, followed by long periods of stasis during which the species remained constant, a pattern they referred to as punctuated equilibrium. Their critique of the standard evolutionary theory, according to which species changed slowly but continuously from small mutations, riled up the classical evolutionists, and soon Creationists seized on the controversy to declare that evolution was falling apart at the seams. Steve was appalled and began to take a greater activist role in defending evolution. In 1981 he was one of six science experts who participated in the Little Rock Creationism trial. In 1999, when he had been elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he published a defense of evolution in a volume provocatively entitled Rocks of Ages.

    In his book Steve recounted the ongoing discord between science and religion in American society. He declared that true science and religion are not in conflict, and that each domain, or magisterium, had valuable contributions to make provided each kept to its own territory. What he advocated was NOMA, or non-overlapping magisteria.

    NOMA sounds like a great idea, but can it, and did it ever, actually work? Can physics truly be separated from metaphysics? In Book VI of the Metaphysics Aristotle says it must include theology because if the divine is present anywhere, it is present in things of this sort.

    The three Herrmann Lectures that comprise this volume, given at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, in October of 2013, examine from a historical perspective how the magisteria have repeatedly overlapped over the past centuries and how today it seems unlikely that the overlaps will cease. Yet an appreciation that there are differing magisteria, with differing paths to understanding, may ameliorate the long-standing conflict.

    Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). Portrait by Isaac Bullarts, Académie des Sciences, vol. 2, 1682.

    1

    Was Copernicus Right?

    FOR MANY YEARS I have puzzled about the nature of science and its theoretical structures of explanation. What gives science the ability to make predictions? In 1705 Edmond Halley predicted that a bright comet he had observed in 1682 would return again in 1758, and if it happened, he said, he hoped that candid posterity would notice that it had first been predicted by an Englishman. He was lampooned for placing the date of the comet’s return well after his lifetime, so he would not have to face public scorn for such a ridiculous prognostication. But the comet did return and has borne his name ever since.

    And there have been many later astronomers who envisioned planets around many distant stars, though they had little hope of actually verifying this. Today, with the recent Kepler mission, direct evidence for this prediction has been attained for nearly a thousand extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, as they are called. In another field, biologists have concluded that the ancestors of whales lived on the land, and today paleontologists have found hundreds of skeletons of early whales that still have vestiges of legs. Or in physics, we have all heard of the massive search for the so-called Higgs boson, which was predicted to exist and was finally found this past year.

    This uncanny ability to make such a coherent picture of the physical and biological world has now allowed science to reign at the top of the tree of knowledge. This has not always been the case. Five centuries ago in Western civilization theology was considered the queen of the sciences, that is, the queen of knowledge. So what is the epistemological relationship between science and theology today? Are they separate magisteria, each going its own way, entirely unrelated? This is a major puzzle, and one I do not expect to resolve. Nevertheless, it is a central puzzle that I hope to address in these chapters, gradually circling around the issues from a historical perspective.

    The theme of this first chapter is Was Copernicus right? Nicolaus Copernicus was of course the Polish astronomer who introduced the earthshaking heliocentric cosmology. When this first chapter was presented as a lecture, I remarked that presumably nearly everyone in the audience would agree that his cosmology was right. A few might have suspected that I had a perverse reason to answer no and a few others may very well have hoped that I would simply say yes, he was right and sit down. Either response would of course have led to a scandal, and the audience wouldn’t have wanted to miss that.

    But then again, if Copernicus’s cosmology was right, why did it take a century and a half before a majority of educated people accepted the idea that the Earth moved and the Sun stood still? So that is the particular puzzle facing us. First we should look briefly at the astronomy involved and then at the cultural and theological milieu into which it was thrown.

    Let me begin by introducing Copernicus. He was a contemporary of Columbus and of Martin Luther, two other personalities who reshaped our world views. Young Nicolaus came under the patronage of his maternal uncle, who was making great strides in ecclesiastical politics, and who became bishop of Varmia, the northernmost Catholic diocese in Poland, a post in authority and power comparable to being governor of the province. Nicolaus was elected a canon of the Frombork Cathedral in Varmia, which meant that he was one of the sixteen members of the cathedral chapter, that is, its board of directors. Never ordained as a priest, he nevertheless took minor orders and had charge of one of the cathedral altars. His uncle sent him to Italy to study law and medicine, two areas of interest to the diocese. As a graduate student in Italy, Copernicus was in Bologna on the same day as Leonardo da Vinci, though it’s unlikely that the eminent artist met the aspiring young canon lawyer.

    Even as an undergraduate in Cracow, Copernicus had taken a keen interest in the stars and planets, and had armed himself with a few basic books in astronomy. Remember that the printing of books was not even fifty years old; had Copernicus lived a century earlier, it would have

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