For almost a millennium the Roman Catholic Church has conducted a vigorous science program. The tragic experience of Galileo — an aberration—has blinded many Protestants to this reality.
Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168-1253), bishop of Lincoln, was the founder of the “Oxford School,” the source of experimental physical science. The Vatican Observatory in Rome is one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world. In recent decades Stanley Jaki, a Benedictine priest with Ph.D.s in physics and theology, has been a leader in this endeavor. He argues that science has its roots in Christianity (Genesis 1:1 is crucial), not in Greek geometry and astronomy; also, that modern science was born 700 years ago at the Sorbonne in Paris, through the writings of Buridan and Cresme.
We need go no further than the words Galileo and astronomy to see the timeliness of this subject. Public school boards all over the United States are being rocked with controversy over “Intelligent Design.”
And now a new Roman Catholic scientist, who acknowledges his debt to Stanley Jaki, is making his presence felt. Stephen Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute for the University of Delaware. His book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith is a gem.
There are five references to John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. For example, “God has manifested himself in the formation of every part of the world, and daily presents himself to public view, in such manner, that they cannot open their eyes without being constrained to behold him” (p. 13).
The book is deep, but written in mostly plain English. There is a serious effort to avoid the jargon of science.
Barr wants us to grasp the intensity of God’s relationship to his creation. This concept of God as the lawgiver not only for human beings but for the cosmos itself is found explicitly in various passages in the Bible. Barr cites Jeremiah 33:25-26, “When I have no covenant with day and night, and have given no laws to heaven and earth, then too will I reject the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David” (p. 67).
Rather than a shotgun approach, I am going to focus briefly on only three of Barr’s subjects:
1. The Big Bang
The universe we behold on a clear night was once smaller than an atom. And then there was an explosion. Barr writes:
One second after the Big Bang … the density of matter was several thousand times the density of lead, and the temperature was about 10 billion degrees centigrade. The early universe was a raging inferno.
The heat of this “primeval fireball” meant that the universe was filled with intense radiation. Indeed, in technical jargon, the universe was “radiation dominated” for the first several million years of its existence. Much of this radiation was in the form of light. There is some historical irony here. Once, it was a common argument against the literal interpretation of Genesis that light was created on the “first day,” while the sun and starts were not made until later, on the “fourth day.” It now appears that the biblical chronology was quite right in this respect. Light indeed existed virtually from the beginning, while stars took many millions of years to appear (p. 45).
2. Biological Evolution
All the responsible arguments about evolution make a clear distinction between the “what” and “how” of evolution.
Concerning the “what,” a surprisingly large number of Christians believe that the earth was created 6,000 years ago in six 24-hour days. But the evidence indicates otherwise. Examine any railroad or highway cut; the layers of sediment indicate that the earth has been around for a very long time. The layers themselves reveal a growing complexity — an evolution — of plant and animal life through time.
Barr says, “On earth it took billions of years to produce multi-celled creatures, and several hundreds of millions of years more to produce animals with complex brains” (p. 160).
Concerning the “how,” there are three reasonable Christian positions and they all reject the hardcore Darwinian argument that all plant and animal life are the result of genetic mutation and natural selection (survival of the fittest) without the hand of God.
Intelligent Design says that certain organs of living beings are “irreducibly complex.” Their formation could not take place by small random mutations, because something that had only some but not all the features of the new organ would have no reason for existence and no advantage for survival.
A second position says that the laws of biology, while not contradicting those of physics and chemistry, are more complex. There is no other way to explain the way living organisms strive for life and growth.
Finally, there is Barr’s “Theistic Darwinism,” a position he has fine-tuned in recent issues of the journal, First Things. What is random from a scientific point of view is included in God’s eternal plan. In the October 2007 issue of First Things, Avery Cardinal Dulles summarizes Barr’s position: “God, so to speak, rolls the dice but is able by his comprehensive knowledge to foresee the result from all eternity.”
I feel ambivalent about Barr’s Theistic Darwinism. As a trained zoologist, it makes a lot of sense to me. But as a Reformed Christian, I believe in the doctrine of providence. God is not an absentee landlord—and yet this is what Barr seems to be hinting at.
3. Determinism and free will
Barr writes:
This issue of determinism and free will is one of the few where scientific theories have the potential of being in clear contradiction to religious doctrine; and such a contradiction really seemed to exist at the end of the nineteenth century. All that had been learned about the physical world in the preceding three centuries pointed in the same direction — toward deterministic laws of nature, while the religious believer was in the uncomfortable position of having to argue…that somewhere along the line determinism would fail.
The amazing thing is it did fail. Completely against the expectations of the entire scientific world, determinism was overthrown in the 1920s by quantum theory. To say that this was unanticipated would be a tremendous understatement. It was a shock, and a very unwelcome one to many physicists. In the three-quarters of a century since quantum theory was discovered, there have been unceasing efforts to restore determinism to physics. “Quantum indeterminacy” still rules (p. 176).
And there is much more!
Wesley R. Harker is honorably retired, living in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
