A critique of George Sim Johnston’s: Why Catholics Like Einstein

Why Catholics Shouldn’t Like Einstein A critique of George Sim Johnston’s: Why Catholics Like Einstein. This article originally appeared in the March 1996 edition of Crisis Magazine. 
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/why-catholics-like-einstein-2 


G. Johnston: The great irony of the Galileo affair is that until Galileo forced the issue into the realm of theology, the Church had been a willing ombudsman for the new astronomy that emerged in the sixteenth century. In 1543, Nicolai Copernicus, a Polish canon and devout Catholic, published his epochal book supporting the heliocentric (earth around the sun) model at the urging of two Catholic prelates, dedicating it to Pope Paul III, who received it cordially. R. Sungenis: It was condemned shortly thereafter by the next Pope just five years later in 1548. G. Johnston: If the issue had remained purely scientific, Church authorities would have shrugged it off. Galileo’s mistake was to push the debate onto theological grounds. Galileo told the Church: Either support the heliocentric model as a fact (even though not proven) or condemn it. He refused the reasonable middle ground offered by Cardinal Bellarmine: You are welcome to hold the Copernican model as a hypothesis; you may even assert that it is superior to the old Ptolemaic model; but don’t tell us to reinterpret Scripture until you have proof. Galileo’s response was his theory of the tides, which purported to show that the tides are caused by the earth’s rotation. Even some of Galileo’s supporters could see that this was nonsense. Also, ignoring the work of Kepler, he insisted that the planets go around the earth in perfect circles, which the Jesuit astronomers could plainly see was untenable. In fact, the Copernican system was not strictly “proved” until 1838, when Friedrich Bessel succeeded in determining the parallax of star 61 Cygni. R. Sungenis: No, it was only believed that the parallax of Cygni proved heliocentrism. Those who did so erred. We now know that parallax is not proof of heliocentrism since it is also demonstrated in the geocentric system. G. Johnston: The real issue in the Galileo affair was the literal interpretation of Scripture. In 1616, the year of Galileo’s first trial, there was precious little elasticity in Catholic biblical theology. But this was also the case with the Protestants: Luther and Melanchthon had vehemently opposed the heliocentric model on scriptural grounds. Another irony of the affair, pointed out by John Paul II, is that Galileo’s argument that Scripture makes use of figurative language and is meant to teach “how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go” was eventually taught by two great papal encyclicals, Leo XIII’s Providentissumus Deus (1893) and Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943). R. Sungenis: Neither Leo XIII nor Pius XII said anything about interpreting cosmological passages figuratively. Both merely said that Scripture sometimes contains figurative language. G. Johnston: There are fundamentalists out there, Protestant and Catholic, who do not understand this simple point: Scripture does not teach science. The Book of Genesis was written in the archaic, prescientific idiom of the ancient Palestinians. The author of Genesis could not have told us that the universe is twelve billion years old, because the ancient Hebrews did not have a word for one billion, and even if they had the fact is hardly necessary for our salvation. R. Sungenis: By the same token, the Declaration of Independence doesn’t teach religion, but when it touches upon religion (e.g., “all men are created equal and have inalienable rights endowed by their Creator”) it is authoritative and we use such statements as the basis for democracy. The same is true with Scripture. It is not a science textbook, but when it touches upon science in some form (as it does with the cosmos), it is authoritative and we are required to obey it. G. Johnston: If the universe were roughly 6,000 years old, as a literal reading of Genesis would suggest, then we would not be able to see the Milky Way. The light would not have reached the earth yet. R. Sungenis: Not true. If the stars expanded outward when they were created on the Fourth Day (as Scripture suggests when it speaks of the firmament expanding), the starlight would have already been seen on the Fourth Day and the stars would later assume the precise position we see them at today, many billions of miles from the Earth. G. Johnston: As Catholics, we must believe that every word of Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, a claim the Church won’t make even for ex cathedra pronouncements. But we must not think of the sacred writers as going into a trance and taking automatic dictation in a pure language untouched by historical contingency. Rather, God made full use of the writers’ habits of mind and expression. It’s the old mystery of grace and human freedom. R. Sungenis: The method of how God put his own words in Scripture is not the primary issue. The issue is this: is what Scripture says about history completely true or does it contain falsehoods and mistakes? The Catholic Church has always taught that the history is 100% true. That is, Scripture is not merely inerrant when it speaks of salvation (which is a heresy), but true and trustworthy in its history also. G. Johnston: Once we understand how to read Scripture, the vexed subject of evolution should not present a problem. That evolution per se is not an issue for Catholics was made clear by John Paul II during a brilliant series of catechetical talks on creation at his Wednesday audiences in 1986: The theory of natural evolution, understood in a sense that does not exclude divine causality, is not in principle opposed to the truth about the creation of the visible world as presented in the Book of Genesis. . . . It must, however, be added that this hypothesis proposes only a probability, not a scientific certainty. . . . it is possible that the human body has evolved from antecedent living beings. R. Sungenis: According to Augustine and Leo XIII, we are not permitted to read Scripture in a non-literal fashion unless science can first prove that Scripture cannot be read literally. Evolution is only a theory, not scientific fact, therefore we have no right to interpret Genesis figuratively. Lateran Council IV and Vatican Council I state that God created all things instantaneously and nothing evolved into being. G. Johnston: The pope got it exactly right. Not only is Darwinism not proved, almost every aspect of it is currently subject to a heated debate among geneticists and paleontologists. Darwin’s model of gradual evolution does not square with the fossils, which show species appearing fully formed, staying around for a million years or whatever, and then suddenly disappearing (99 out of 100 known species are extinct). There are no transitional forms between any of the major animal groups, and even in “thought experiments,” smooth intermediates between, say, reptiles and birds are almost impossible to construct. Darwinism also does not square with breeding experiments; dogs remain dogs, fruit flies remain fruit flies. While DNA allows a certain elasticity in a species for ecological adjustment, it programs living things to remain stubbornly what they are. The essence of Darwinism is the unwarranted extrapolation of the small changes that happen all the time within species into the really big jumps (reptile to bird); as any statistician will tell you, extrapolation is a dangerous business, and in the case of Darwin it goes flat against the evidence. The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. Bacteria appeared 3 billion years ago, followed by blue-green algae and a few oddities. Then, 530 million years ago, came biology’s Big Bang: the Cambrian explosion. There was a sudden profusion of complex life-forms – mollusks, jellyfish, trilobites, chordates – for which there are no discernible ancestors in the rocks. A man from Mars looking at the subsequent fossil record would say that species are replaced by other species, rather than evolve into them. Primates as a class appear out of nowhere; Homo sapiens also makes an abrupt arrival, fully equipped with a will, intellect, and language – capabilities simply not found in apes. Thus far, there is no coherent scientific explanation of how all this happened. But you have to go outside the Anglo-Saxon countries, where Darwin is dogma, to find honest admissions of this. The late Pierre P. Grasse, the most eminent French biologist of his generation, called himself an “evolutionist” on the basis that all life-forms share certain genetic material, but he was frankly agnostic about how the higher life-forms came about. He dismissed Darwinism as a “pseudo-science” and ended his book on evolution with the admission that on the question of origins, “Science, impotent, yields the floor to metaphysics.” Whatever their differences, Darwin’s staunchest defenders – John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould – are all hostile to religion. Dawkins’s remark that Darwin made atheism intellectually respectable is typical. If you cut through all the verbal camouflage, the basic argument of the Darwinist camp is, “There is no God, therefore it had to be this way.” But this is ideology, not science. Darwinism – like Marxism and Freudianism – has too many philosophical additives to be fully trusted as a science. Evolutionary materialism has a serious flaw that is never acknowledged by its proponents. If man is no more than an accidental collation of atoms, a product of blind material forces that did not have him in mind, then humans do not possess a free will. If this is so, we cannot trust any products of the human intellect, including books by Darwinists. This is the Achilles’ Heel of all materialist philosophies; their truth claims are self-canceling because they downgrade human consciousness to an epiphenomenon of matter. Walker Percy’s remark that Darwin’s Origin of Species explains everything except Darwin writing Origin of Species neatly summarizes the problem. Darwin’s real motive, as revealed by notebooks not published until the 1970s, was to get rid of a Creator, a motive he shares with modern cosmologists like Hawking and Steven Weinberg. And creation is an unsettling idea. The notion that the universe had a beginning ex nihilo is one of the most radical concepts introduced by Christianity into the mind of the West. The Fourth Lateran Council defined it as dogma in 1215. It’s an idea that would have scandalized an ancient Greek, who thought matter eternal, as much as a nineteenth century positivist. Today, the fact that the universe had a beginning with, and not in, time is a commonplace of astrophysics. R. Sungenis: I very much appreciate Mr. Johnston’s critique of evolution by using scientific evidence against it. Obviously, then, we cannot interpret Genesis figuratively. G. Johnston: When Einstein formulated the General Theory of Relativity, which deals with gravity and the curvature of space, he was perturbed that his equations showed an expanding universe, which points to its beginning. So he introduced a fudge factor, the “cosmological constant,” to keep the cosmos static. He later called this “the biggest mistake of my life.” When Edwin Hubble, the American astronomer, published data in 1931 showing that the universe was indeed expanding, Einstein finally accepted “the need for a beginning.” When in 1964 two scientists from Bell Labs accidentally discovered the three-degree background radiation throughout the entire universe, which can only be explained as a remnant of a super-heated Big Bang, modern cosmology came of age – and found Catholic metaphysics and theology waiting there all along. R. Sungenis: The background radiation has about a half-dozen possible explanations, but only one of them is chosen by modern science – the one that promotes a 13.7 billion year-old universe, the Big Bang. But Mr. Johnston should be awakened to the fact that the reason science promotes the Big Bang is not because it believes in a beginning. It promotes the Big Bang because it could never get the Steady-State (infinite time and space) model to work, so they had no choice left but the Big Bang. But the Big Bang is neither the “beginning” that Mr. Johnston is hoping for nor what “Catholic metaphysics and theology” were “waiting for all along.” Modern science says the Big Bang is merely one explosion in an infinite number of explosions that will occur randomly forever, with each explosion creating another universe, which science now calls the Multiverse. In other words, the universes create themselves. There is no need for God. So Mr. Johnston is quite deceived if he is trying to equate Catholic theology and the Big Bang together. G. Johnston: The universe began with an “initial singularity”: all matter was packed into an infinitely dense space. The Big Bang, which may have occurred twelve billion years ago, must not be pictured as the expansion of matter within already existing space; space, time, and matter came into existence simultaneously, a fact that would not have surprised St. Augustine. What Stanley Jaki calls the “specificity” of the formation of the universe is breathtaking. If the cosmic expansion had been a fraction less intense, it would have imploded billions of years ago; a fraction more intense, and the galaxies would not have formed. Picture a wall with thousands of dials; each must be at exactly the right setting – within a toleration of millionths – in order for carbon-based life to eventually emerge in a suburb of the Milky Way. You cannot help but think of a Creator. R. Sungenis: Except for the fact that the “Creator” doesn’t describe it the way Mr. Johnston does. The Creator says he brought the universe into being ex nihilo and instantaneously, not over 12 billion years and not by a Big Bang. The Creator says the Earth was made first and that the sun and stars came later. The Big Bang doesn’t bring us to a Creator, as Stephen Hawking has wisely stated in his book, The Grand Design. The Big Bang brings us to quantum fluctuations which produce the “initial singularity,” and many, many other singularities. The god of modern science is Quantum mechanics, not the God of Genesis. G. Johnston: Einstein’s universe, which is finite and highly specific, presents an enormous opportunity for the rearticulation of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Although the universe points strongly to its dependence on a Creator, Catholics have to be careful not to fall into the trap of “creation science.” Creation is a strictly philosophical concept; it has nothing to do with empirical science, which deals only with quantitative nature. It’s difficult to say who turns themselves into the biggest pretzel: creationists trying to fit science into a biblical template, or agnostic scientists trying to avoid the existence of a personal God. R. Sungenis: The bigger pretzel is that of Mr. Johnston trying to fit the personal God into an impersonal quantum fluctuating multiverse that has no beginning and no end. G. Johnston: Putting God in the gaps unexplained by science has always been a mistake, because science eventually fills those gaps with material explanations. An enlightened Catholic view of science must be anchored in the proposition that God delights to work through secondary causes. God concedes an enormous degree of causality to his creation, and we ought to be in awe as science explains more and more of it. At the same time, we ought to remind those who will listen to us that the universe will never finally explain itself. Modern cosmology will reach its final maturity only when it makes that admission. R. Sungenis: Yes, God often works through secondary causes, but Mr. Johnston must realize that he can only attribute a finite number of secondary causes to God before he comes back to the primary cause. At some point, the primary cause was ex nihilo and instantaneous. Along those lines, Genesis does not say that the primary cause produced an “initial singularity” since God had no intentions of promoting the idea of quantum fluctuations as the Creator. Genesis says the primary cause produced the “heavens and the earth, and the earth was empty and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.” The question is, why is Mr. Johnston so afraid of taking those words literally? Doesn’t he, as a Catholic, take the words “This is my body” literally, even against the wishes of science? Mr. Johnston also should consider the fact that the Big Bang doesn’t work. He forgot to mention that even Einstein’s lambda fudge factor wasn’t enough to keep the Big Bang going. Modern science tells us today that it is missing 95% of the matter and energy needed to make Einstein’s equations of the Big Bang work correctly. Mr. Johnston should then realize that pointing Catholics to the Big Bang is nothing but a big dead end. It doesn’t work. It’s about time he started putting his faith in God, the Fathers and Lateran Council IV instead of theories that even modern science says are failures.