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WHAT I LEARNED AS A LEARNED ASTRONOMER
© Dr. Catherine Ishida 2009
WHEN I HEARD THE LEARNED ASTRONOMER
© Rev. Joy Atkinson 2009
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
June 14, 2009
What I Learned as a Learned Astronomer
by Dr. Catherine Ishida
Respect for Knowledge. I have a friend who always goes straight to the heart of the matter. When he learned that I was a professional astronomer now preparing for ministry, he asked me what insight I was bringing from my experience as an astronomer into my future work. An answer came to me easily - my experience as a scientist gives me a great respect for the effort it takes to establish a "truth" or "fact" or "knowledge," whatever it is that humans gain from persistent curiosity.
Learning from Books. Are there any book lovers here today? A decade ago, it was easy to believe that all we had to do to learn about something is to pick up a book. Nowadays it is easy to believe that all answers can be found on the Internet. By spending a few days reading an up-to-date introductory textbook, you can be as well informed as I am about the results of astronomy. Here is a magazine publishing beautiful images created by professional and amateur astronomers. It's title: "The World at Night, Where the Earth and the Universe embrace." This is astronomy as it is most inspiring made easily accessible.
Learning from Experience. But what I know as a professional astronomer, and the partner of an amateur astronomer, is that each sentence in a textbook, or a single image may represent the lifework of many people. I spent twenty years contemplating obscure details about galaxies, so I know what it takes to generate the knowledge that may or may not end up as a sentence in a textbook or create a single beautiful image.
But Astronomy Cannot Justify A World View. Astronomy has much to say about classical theological questions such as the origin and fate of the universe, or the relationship of life on earth to the rest of the material world. But astronomy's answers may not be its largest contribution to theological inquiry. One of my former professors always begins his semester long college-level introductory astronomy class with a warning. He tells students that something he teaches them may be proven wrong by the end of the semester, not because he plans to lie to them, but because astronomy is an active science, and our understanding of the universe keeps changing in response to new discoveries. I recommend that you allow astronomy to inform your worldview, but I wouldn't rely too heavily on astronomy to justify your worldviews. There is a curse, whose origin I wish I could remember, it goes: "may your life's philosophy be compromised by faulty logic." I wouldn't want anyone's life philosophy to be compromised by outdated astronomy.
The Process of Inquiry is Essential to Both Science and Religion. It's the lived experience of scientific inquiry that is the most important gift from my life as an astronomer that I carry into my religious life. Asking questions, seeking answers, and dealing with times when neither the questions or answers are clear is part of both science and religion. But there are differences. In science, the bulk of the work of inquiry is in establishing new insights that were previously unknown. Religion is more like engineering - the work of inquiry is in figuring out how to apply known insights to our daily lives. We have a hard enough time implementing the Golden Rule, "do to others as you would want them to do to you," let alone the more counter-intuitive "love your enemy." Although we may need regular reminders about what we already know, I don't think that humanity as a whole needs more religious insights to add to our constantly long spiritual to-do lists.
Truth Requires Effort, Either on the Front End or Back End, or Both. Truth seems to require effort, either on the front end like science, or the back end like religion. Possibly both. People can benefit from the use of a refrigerator without everybody understanding thermodynamics. But benefiting from the Golden Rule requires both some personal experience and collective understanding. In religious matters, everybody is a scientist, participating in the grandest experiment of all time. Anybody care to guess what that is? Life.
When I Heard the Learned Astronomer
by Rev. Joy Atkinson
I have dearly loved astronomy since I was eight years old, but I was discouraged from thinking about making it a career by those who saw my interest as inappropriate for a female. I grew up in the 1950s, a very different time for young women who aspired to be something other than a secretary or perhaps a teacher of young children. I used to frequent the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Once after a program, I went excitedly up to the lecturer, an astronomer, and told him that I too would like to be an astronomer. He said, "You won't. You'll probably get married and have children," as if that possibility and being an astronomer were mutually exclusive. I then wrote to the Planetarium for a pamphlet on what is required to be an astronomer. In that pamphlet, I read that girls often are interested in astronomy, too, but they don't grow up to become astronomers, although sometimes they marry them! Despite these kinds of pervasive influences, I did find myself, sometimes defiantly, dreaming about becoming an astronomer. Perhaps I would have become one, had it not been for the fact that I did not take easily to advanced mathematics in college. But I was also very interested in philosophy and religion, as well as education, literature and especially writing, so it makes sense to me that I wound up in a pulpit instead of under an observatory dome. Still, over the years I have maintained an interest in astronomy, as an amateur.
Whenever I turn my amateur telescope toward the planet Jupiter, and glimpse the moons of Jupiter that I can make out, I get a little chill, remembering that it was the sight of Jupiter's moons on successive nights in 1610 that convinced Galileo of a heretical notion: that the earth is not the center of the universe, around which everything else revolves. He had proof that there were satellites revolving around Jupiter, but this knowledge was so strange and dangerous that some scientists of his day refused even to look through his telescope to see for themselves. They just said, "you're mistaken," and we all know how hard the church came down on poor Galileo for daring to suggest this unscriptural view of the cosmos, though of course the church eventually had to admit that Galileo had been right.
As a practicing young Catholic and aspiring astronomer, I often thought about what looked to me like an incompatibility between the fields of science and religion. On more than one occasion, I remember being in a Catholic confession booth and asking the priest to help me reconcile such ideas as the scientific fact of evolution and the scriptural account of creation. Their answers, that scripture need not be taken literally, satisfied me for awhile, but as a teen I became weary of other aspects of that faith, and finally I left that church.
When I was in high school, I came across this little poem by Walt Whitman, I poet I admired. It's part of his major work, Leaves of Grass:
When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer,
where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
As a passionate amateur astronomer, I found this poem of my hero Whitman to be disappointing. Whitman contrasts the lecture of the astronomer with the raw beauty of the unexplained stars, and finds the lecture lacking. I remember thinking: Humph! I would have stayed and heard the whole lecture, because even the facts and figures of a scientific lecture for me contain beauty and mystery. The astronomy lectures I attended in those days were like religious services to me, in many ways more meaningful than the Catholic masses I had gone to. Perhaps Whitman's lecturer was just very dull, and drained all the beauty out of the science.
Science certainly can be beautiful. Nowadays there are many scientists who experience a kind of beauty, a sense of awe, a religious or mystical feeling, when they study and contemplate the laws and workings of the universe. I am no scientist, but I have had religious feelings aroused in me when reading about and puzzling over quantum physics, or when looking up at stars, comets, planets and galaxies, with the naked eye or through a telescope. It is amazing to me that we live in a universe that is not haphazard and inconsistent, but one that is governed by the laws of physics - a universe in which science and mathematics work.
In his book, The Mind of God, physicist Paul Davies writes:
"Science...does not deny a meaning behind existence. On the contrary...the fact that science works, and works so well, points to something profoundly significant about the organization of the cosmos... The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown. Each advance brings new and unexpected discoveries... but through it all runs the familiar thread of rationality and order... this cosmic order is underpinned by definite mathematical laws that interweave each other to form a subtle and harmonious unity. The laws are possessed of an elegant simplicity, and have often commended themselves to scientists on grounds of beauty alone."
"Beauty alone," says the scientist. There is great beauty in science and mathematics, and many scientists have recognized it.
To ignore the discoveries of science in favor of a literalist religious world-view, as some people, amazingly, still do, is sadly narrow and one-sided. But likewise, to embrace only a mechanistic, scientific materialism which asserts that all phenomena can be explained in terms of the actions of material components - even love and altruism, which are in this view just chemical states in the brain or adaptive functions of evolution - this too strikes me as narrow. There is a ground beyond scientific materialism and religious fundamentalism, a ground where science and religion, cosmologies and theologies, experiments and mystical insights, can meet and converse and perhaps inspire one another.
Albert Einstein said that religion without science is lame, and that science without religion is blind. I would add that science without religion, or at least a sense of awe, wonder and mystery, can be empty and dry - even tragic, when it sees only a cold universe, and fails to marvel at our amazing existence and human consciousness. What I mean by religion here is not a set of creeds, but an openness to the mystery which lies at the center of being.
Cosmologists are getting closer to explaining the first moments of the universe, and some theoretical models speculate that the cosmos was self-creating, emerging naturally 15 billion years ago out of the "super dense singularity," an infinitesimal "point" where space, energy and time are all collapsed together. This singularity exploded into our universe of matter and energy, and has been expanding ever since. Now a self-creating model of the universe requires no prime mover, no God, to set it going. For some scientists, perhaps the idea of the universe as self-creating puts the need for any divine or mystical dimension completely to rest, but other scientists point out that the great mysteries are still there: why is there a universe at all, and where do the laws and the exquisite mathematical equations of physics come from? Whence came the singularity, the "cosmic seed?" As physicist Stephen Hawking puts it, "Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing? ...What is it," he asks, "that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" A theology professor I once had put the question this way: "Why is there not nothing?" In the final analysis, science can bring us right up to the brink of this mystery, but it can't definitively answer it. The big "why" question is, and I believe will remain, in the domain of religion.
The physicist Freeman Dyson has suggested that the universe seems to be constructed in just the right way so as to result in maximum diversity. There is abundant cosmic diversity - many kinds of stars, galaxies and nebulae, many varieties of particles and elements, and there is a great diversity of biological life on this planet, and perhaps on other planets as well. Yet none of it would have come about if the universe were the slightest bit different from what it was at the beginning - if, for instance, the rate of expansion of the universe were smaller by one part in a hundred thousand million million. If the force that holds the nuclei in an atom together were a tiny amount weaker than it is, there would have been only hydrogen in the universe, and if it were very slightly stronger, all the hydrogen would have been converted to helium. In short, if any of a number of factors - speeds, temperatures, forces, were off by an unimaginably tiny amount, stars and the heavier elements would not have formed, and we wouldn't be here contemplating it all. But the force was with us, to borrow a phrase, and here we are! As physicist Stephen Hawking wrote: "the odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications." Hawking is an avowed atheist, yet he finds himself at the brink of the religious when contemplating the fact that we exist at all. Perhaps, as some have speculated, there are other universes, maybe many, where life and the miracle of consciousness that we enjoy did not happen to evolve. For me, that possibility in no way diminishes the sense of wonder I feel that we are here, able to ponder all of this.
This awesome universe of ours breathes to the rhythm of elegant equations, glows bright with mystery and meaning, and shines forth with exquisite beauty and diversity. What an amazing, astounding miracle! I want my religious insights to be informed by science, and my scientific understandings to be infused with religious meaning. I want to listen to what the learned astronomer has to say, and then, go outside, and look up in perfect silence, at the stars.
I close with the words of Paul Davies, from The Mind of God. Here is one scientist taking his particular leap of faith:
"I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here."
Benediction: A Chinook Psalter
Blessing of galaxies, blessing of stars:
Great stars, small stars, red stars, blue ones.
Blessing of nebula, blessing of supernova,
Planets, satellites, asteroids, comets.
Blessing of our sun and moon, blessing of our earth:
Oceans, rivers, continents, mountain ranges.
Blessing of wind and cloud, blessing of rain:
Fog bank, snowdrift, lightning and thunder.
Bless the wisdom of the holy one above us.
Bless the truth of the holy one beneath us.
Bless the love of the holy one within us.
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