science

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What is the Future For Our Children, Our Grandchildren?


What we do right now will necessarily affect our children and our grandchildren with how we treat our planet.

Amaericans seem to have difficulty believing what our nation’s scientist tell us. Sadly, I believe it is our politicians who, for their own personal enrichment, tell us their truth when the science behind it does not line up with the actual truth. For too long it has been “us” against “them,” Democrats vs. Repulicans. It would be too easy to blame Republican’s for our present state as they have most recently poo-poo’d what scientists told us about Covid-19. In truth, Democrats are equally to blame. Republicans, notorious for resisting change, made themselves the target of Democrats but Democrats spoke as if they were well-versed in the science behind COVID-19. They were not. But what I found truly headscratching were two Replublicans, both of whom hold medical degrees, backing Trump when he declared early on that the virus would quickly go away. As public sevants, they are given the public trust to do what is best for their constituency even when it goes against what others in their party resist. The two senators, McConnell and Paul, knew the truth but backed what was politically expedient. This is abhorrent to what our Constitution demands. There are two our physicians in the senate who were largely silent, Cassidy and Barrasso. Each to an oath, “first do no harm,” for which they conveniently forgot and in turn hurt not just their constituents, but our entire nation. And our House of Representatives there are 13 physicians. Where were they during the outbreak?

And now we come to climate change. I want to first qualify by saying that I worked at MIT for a number of years where I was hand-in-hand with some of our nation’s most brilliant minds. Those people, and others at our nation’s leading research facilities, have no political agenda. Their’s is the search for the truth in science. They necessarily are pragmatist. These people frequently are pubished in journals that are revied by their peers and to misspeak brings rebuke.

For two decades now those best and brightest have been warning about the harm we are doing to our planet. But scientist can only report on their findings. They can, of themselves, bring some change, but it is up to the politicians of the world to bring about true change. And their is one thing true in all nations, most scientists act the same in their quest for the truth: they do not bend to politically motivated pressures. That was easy to see last year when Dr. Faucci cringed at so many of Donald Trump’s pronouncements. But were you to go to Russia or China, you will find that the scientists in those countries have little interest in politics.

It is absolutely necessary, right now, for all Americans to weigh the ideas of scientist much more heavily than those of politicans. Here in the United States most our our politicians are lawyers. And most lawyers seldem move from the law degree to advanced degrees in science. Even so, each time we elect one of them to the house or senate, it is in them that we are giving public trust that they will do what is best for everyone and not just for their political base.

I spent most of my working life in science but now retired I have taken to teaching our children and grandchildren. I frequent remind them that what they do right now affects what they will do in the years and decades to come. Ergo, what I polticians decide right now absolutely affects generations of Americans down the road. It is up to each one of us to pressure them to do “the next right thing” and not the next politically motivated thing. They must be pragmatists and not fold to the desires of one small portion of their constuency. They must think both locally and nationally. In the end, their decisions affect all Americans. It is on this point that I believe the members of both parties fail.

The best example of a political appointee doing what is in the best interest of our nation was when George H. W. Bush put David Souter on the US SJC. In Souter, Bush believed he was putting a good conservative on the bench. But what happened was that Souter always took the high road, putting politics aside, and being a pure pragmatists. We need our politicans to act thusly. Our children, our grandchildren are deserving of the very best we can do but sadly, right now, that is seldom the case. This being true, it is ultimately up to each one of us to think of our children and grandchildren when we elect those who represent us. We must make them show that they are fully capable of doing what is in the best interest of our nation. Time is fast running out. Save our planet, not our political ideas.

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A Few Questions For My Creationist Friends


From what I can find most creationists believe the Earth to be between 5700 and 10,000 years old.  I think the most important questions they need to answer is:  “Why would God create a universe, and the science that goes with it, and play a trick on us?”  The trick is that the very science He had to create allows us to date the Earth at approximately 4.5 billion years of age.  Another question which needs answering is: “Why would God create an entire species, dinosaurs, and then destroy them?”  He also makes us believe them to have died out about 250 million years ago.  Does this mean that He loves being the trickster, the magician, who relies on sleight of hand?  Even more importantly, why not keep the entire human race at a relatively low level of intelligence so we would not confuse ourselves with what appears to be facts?  The creationist credo says God does not make mistakes and that all human are created in His image.  How does that explain human beings who are born so developmentally impaired that they not only can never care for themselves, there is good reason to believe that it is impossible for them to comprehend the existence of their maker?

Creationist hate Darwin and his theories of evolution.  I can understand how the concept can be difficult to comprehend but that does not make it fantasy.  If there is not constant evolution, how does the creationist explain that the average height of a man during the time of Jesus was about 5 feet 1 inch but today it is 5 feet 9 inches.  That is close in evolution pure and simple.

Here’s a mind blower.  Our nearest neighbor in the universe, to our Milky Way Galaxy, is the Andromeda Galaxy.  It is 2.5 million light years away.  Why would God bother to create other galaxies in the first place and then place the nearest one 2.5 million light years away, about 13,540,372,670,807,453,416.15 miles away. And that is just the closest one.  There are other galaxies which are billions of light years away.

pillars

The above picture was taken by the Hubble telescope.  Astronomers have named it “the Pillars of Creation.”  But the creation they are talking about is of stars.  It is a star nursery, if you will.  They are 7,000 light years away.  The height of each of the pillars is measured in the 100s of light years.  But the laws of physics, created by God of course, tells us that what we are looking at is at least 7,000 years old but even more, took millions of years to create in the first place.  But even more, those “stars” you see in the background are actually more galaxies so far distant that they look like tiny specs of light.

I believe that God is sitting, where ever He sits, and is mumbling to himself, “I created all this, gave you high intelligence, and the best you can come up with is that it has all only been around a few thousand years?  I also gave you an imagination, try using it to consider that I actually created this a very long time before that!”

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Science Proves God Exists!


My title, of course, is fictional but I firmly believe that one day it will be science that definitely proves, or disproves, the existence of God.  The best of all possible outcomes would be a theologian, who is also a scientists, is the one who finds that proof.  It is not any religion’s task to prove God’s existence, theirs is one of providing faith to their followers.  But faith, by definition, is a philosophical belief system which works in the absence of proof.  That is a good thing.  But some religions, the more conservative, seem to believe it is their job to proclaim that certain theories and facts of science are nothing more than the work of the devil, or that such science is in direct contradiction to either the teachings of God and Jesus, or contrary to what is said in the Bible.

It seems that the Bible, of all things, is the root of some problems between certain religions and science.  Those people who believe that the Bible is the source of many absolutely which man needs to accept, fail to allow for certain conditions that must exist when dealing in absolutes.  That is, when someone, in this case the writers of the Bible, declare something to be true it is their responsibility to offer either empirical or first hand proof.  The first five books of the Bible were written by Moses.  Moses’ only first hand experience appears in the book of Exodus.  He certain lived long after the book of Genesis as he relates it and offers no proof.  The rest of the Bible was written by at least 40 different people none of whom claim first hand experience.  This includes the New Testament.  Theological scholars have dated the earliest New Testament documents having been created at least 60 after the death of Jesus.

The New Testament is full of quotes attributed to Jesus.  It is my belief, however, that most of those quotes are truly paraphrases.  The most basic problem of that day is the extreme lacking of literate people at the time of Jesus and for many centuries following.  By tradition, stories of family, history, and religion were passed along by story tellers.  These story tellers can be compared to today’s television news reporters.  They take a story reported to them and pass it on to others.  The story tellers of Jesus’ day were paid to do their job, just as news reporters are today.  The Hebrews, Romans, and all other civilizations required such people to maintain their traditions from one generation to another.  A scribe was a rare person who was usually connected to persons of political position or wealth.  The population of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus was approximately 50,ooo.  The number of scribes in that one city likely did not exceed 10, most of whom would have been assigned to Roman politicians.  And in looking at who the 12 disciples of Jesus were, it is unlikely any were literate, to include Jesus himself.  Scientists today know that human memory of any particular incident is accurate for about 48 hours.  After that, without a concerted attempt to remember, our ability to recall details quickly diminishes.  This is not to say that people living at the time of Jesus could not have remembered with great accuracy what he said it did, but that it would take much effort to do so.

Theologians know for fact, for instance, that Moses actually brought in excess of 500 commandments to his people for his supposed meeting with God.  This, of course, raises the question of what to believe.  The Bible says there are only 10 commandments, but theologians know there were truly at least 500.  Jesus lived 1500 years after Moses.  Unfortunately, whatever progress there was in creating the Bible was insignificant if you want to use it as a document for historical fact.  More moderate theologians will tell you it is a book a faith.  What is certain, in this case, is that it cannot possibly be both a book of fact and faith.  Either the “prove it” or “disprove it” argument necessarily win out.  It is best left as a book of faith to be interpreted by each person according to his own conscience.  Left in that sphere, it is an exceptional book worthy of much study and faith.

Most scientists do not deny that certain aspects of creationism have associate truth.  But conservative religions fail to give that same respect to science.  What they fail to realize is that their most basic belief, that God created everything, necessarily means God created science, and with it all the laws of science.  In His creating the universe, God created all the laws of science which scientists use every day.  God gave man the blueprint to find Him, but only if man choses to look.  For reasons which confound me, it seems conservative religions do not care to see God.  Science named the Higgs Boson as the “God particle.”  And Steven Hawking has stated that when we figure out the “big bang” we will see the hand of God.  These are not idle comments made by extremely intelligent people to poke fun at religion.  It is their true belief.

Recently, astro-physicists have offered pictures of the universe as it existed about 250 million years after the big bang.  In astronomical times, that is very close to birth.  The truth is, scientists have absolutely no desire to disprove, or prove for that matter, the existence of God.  Their job is to tell us, in as exacting terms as possible, why things are happening, and how they happened in the past.  That being the case, like a good detective novel, you eventually find and prove “who done it!”

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The Face of God


universe

The above is a picture taken by the Hubble Deep Space telescope.  Every one of those points of light is a galaxy.

For some time now I have been trying to come to grips with a question I have had, is God and the universe one and the same?   I have come to the conclusion that the answer is a resounding YES!

Yesterday I heard a noted English scientist who is also a priest in the church of England say that science is all about figuring out what things are and religion is all about why things are.  In essence he said that science and religion complement each other.  Problematic to such a belief is the fact that many noted scientists contend God does not exist, while many religions say large amounts of scientific data is wrong.

Jinx 003

The above is a picture of my cat Jinxie.  She has no knowledge of there being a God and as long as I feed her and give her a place to sleep, she does not care a wit about science.  But in her, as in all creatures, is the hand of God.  But her ancestors looked more like the picture below.  This is a scientific fact, but it does not discount “intelligent design.”

cats

Man is famous for coming up with answers and solutions to things and problems he does not understand.  Until Copernicus, everyone believed the Earth to be the center of the universe.  To suggest otherwise was considered heresy which is exactly why Copernicus did not publish until just before he died.  Copernicus only moved the center of the universe to the sun but that was a huge step, and one most people of his day could not accept.  Now, we not only know that the sun is not the center of the universe, but that our sun is no where near the center of our own galaxy, and that is a good thing!  No one with a lick of sense argues this fact any more either.  Why?  We improved our knowledge of all things around us.  But all good scientists accept that every answer gives birth to at least two more questions we had not previously considered.

A Roman Catholic priest, of all people, George Lemaitre, came up with a theory in the 1920s that we all know as “The Big Bang Theory” today.  After Edwin Hubble figured out earlier that decade that the universe was expanding, Lemaitre came to the logical conclusion that as you went back in time the universe must have been smaller until it was a single tiny point of energy.  The two question that answer brought forth are, “What triggered the big bang” and “Where did that point of energy come from?”  To this the physicist, Steven Hawking, said that to know that answer is to understand the mind of God.  Not bad for a guy who is seemingly an atheist!  But in Hawking’s statement we find the perfect answer to science’s most thought provoking question.

Even more, in a funny way, the Bible’s book of Genesis is proven true, at least in its first instance, the declaration that prior to anything there was darkness, and the first creation was light.  This is 100% in line with the Big Bang theory.

For some time now quantum physicists have been looking for the every elusive “Higg’s boson.”  This particle is also known as the God particle.  This is important because it is believed that this tiny particle is the most basic part of “mass.”  Mass is what gives everything weight, or for that matter, existence.  They think they’ve found it, but are still discussing the fact.  It is called the “God particle” because they believe it was the first most basic particle at the time of the Big Bang.  They are saying, “here’s what God started with and went on to make everything else.”

Another group of scientists, astro-physicists, figured out what the chances are that we human beings came into being at all.  What they came up with was the odds are so slight that under any other circumstance, in consideration of anything else, we would entirely discount to possibility.  At that point you can rightfully insert that when, 13.7 billion years ago God caused the Big Bang, He also created the absolute certainty that, at least here on Earth, we would come into existence.  Now, remember back to my original statement of how many stars are in our galaxy and how many galaxies exist?  The math states that there are at least 200 billion billion (200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the universe.  Given that intelligent life evolved once, why not twice, or ten times, or a million times?  Science cannot discount such a possibility and God has not.

Historical man goes back 7,000 years, more or less.  But it is only in the last 100 years that we have evolved enough to begin to understand our place in the universe, and for the most part, we really do not know very much.  But the fact is, God did not give us brains so we could sit on our hands!  It is only logic that intelligent design that built intelligent beings would want those beings to educate themselves.  It is a fact that every answer to every single question we have, God has placed in plain sight.  But it has always been up to us to see and understand what is right in front of us.  The only thing which keeps us from understanding God is our own prejudices and biases.  God certainly is not hiding anything, so why would anyone want to deny the possibility of anything, including God!

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God’s Universe vs. Science’s Universe


For as long as man has been able to consider his existence, he has been trying to explain it.  But for most of man’s existence he has been almost entirely reliant upon the religious beliefs of his local area for that explanation.  The Judeo-Christian explanation can be found in the Bible.  It is a remarkably succinct accounting for the formation of the universe, and for all of recorded history, until the 20th century, was generally regarded as the only explanation.  This was largely due, however, to man’s inability to see either outward in the vastness of the intergalactic universe, or inward, towards the bits and pieces of the sub-atomic universe.  Albert Einstein is largely responsible for the beginning of our shifting attitudes towards understand our creation, and our creator, if there is one.

Since the time of Galileo it seems science and religion have been at each other’s throats.  The one denying the other’s ascertations.  For most of the history of man religions have feared scientists as being a threat to their tenants.  And to some extent, that was true.  But in the latter portion of the 20th century, and continuing into the 21st century, many of the larger religions have included scientists within their ranks.   This is particularly true of the Roman Catholic Church where the Jesuits seem to be leading the way, although though they are certainly not the only group within that church.  What they now espouse, and I find particularly inviting, is the idea that science actually explains God’s existence rather than dispel it.

The renown physicist Stephen Hawking states that science does not need God to explain the big bang.  Hawking is of a group of physicists who believe that the big bang, the beginning of the universe, came from nothing.  He has even made a theory of a multi-dimensional universe, 11 in all, that exists.  He theorizes that at the time of the big bang a single, but unseeable, dimension existed, and from this our physical universe came into being.  My personal problem with this is that Hawking, and his peers, are desperately trying to make 0 = 1.  This, of course, is an absolute impossibility.  But Hawking will use a combination of theoretical mathematics with quantum physics to explain how it actually can be true.  To be fair, mathematics uses two symbols that have limitless possibilities, i is the symbol for imaginary numbers, and of course ∞ which is the symbol for infinity.  For my purposes infinity is the only relevant symbol.  Mathematics can actually prove that infinity exists but its very nature says that it is without bounds.  The joke is, what does infinity plus one equal?  It is a concept human beings are incapable of understanding.  And yet most physicists will argue the concept of an infinite number of possibilities when they consider the “multi-verse” theory.  That is the theory that our universe is but one of an infinite number of other existing universes.  To understand this you need only consider a mug of beer with its bubbles floating within.  Each bubble is separate and of exactly the same size, and each representing a universe unto itself.

It is impossible for any human being to fully comprehend even numbers much smaller than infinity.  The number 1 trillion is actually a rather common number in terms of our universe.  Consider the size of the Eagle Nebula shown below.

nebula

This cloud of gas is 70 light years long.  A single light year equals 5.865 trillion miles.  Now multiply that by 70.  Now look at the picture below.

nebula

In the circle above is that same Eagle Nebula.  See all the gas around it?  It of course is immense.   If the length of the clouds within that circle are 70 light years, what of the distance invovled in the gas surrounding it.  Beyong our grasp.  And this is just a single example of billions and billions of more nebulae just like this scattered all through our universe.

What does any of this have to do with the existence of God?  It comes from the fact physicists universally agree that there is an extremely precise mechanism behind the existence of our universe and that the tiniest of variation at its beginning, one part in one trillion, and our universe does not come into existence.  Statistics tells us the our flashing into existence as the universe did, given the odds, was unlikely to the extreme.  And yet here we are.

But even that happening, the same mathematics, statistics, show the unlikelihood to the extreme that not just intelligent beings should come into being, but that a platform for their existence, the earth in our solar system, also required extremely exacting and unlikely to the extreme.  Earth had to be formed at the distance from the sun it is, have a megnetic core, and have water just to sustain the meagerest of life forms.  And yet again, here we are.

There is a large group of scientists today who believe in a theory called transcendence.  This term simply means the ability to rise above and go beyond the normal and usual human and physical constraints.   Hawking will tell you that time did not exist prior to the big bang, that another unknown dimension did.  To be fair, time is a human invention to describe our movement from what came before to now to what comes next.  But it none-the-less is a standing contradiction to Hawking’s belief.  But an even more salient contradiction to the something from nothing idea of the Hawking group is the maxim in physics that states matter can neither be created nor destroyed.  What Hawking is suggesting is even though that is true now, it was not true in the beginning.  To that I respond, what a bunch of crap!  Either the laws of physics are immutable or they are not.  You cannot have it both ways as Hawking suggests.

We are truly in the infancy of our scientific knowledge.  I firmly believe that science in no way contradicts theology, nor theology science.  In the long run, science will confirm the existence of God, and even more, that there is some true to the first chapter in the book of Genesis in the Bible.  We actually have already have done that.  The Bible states that in the beginning there was darkness and that God created light.  Modern physics states that is exactly what happened in the beginning.  Prior to the big bang there was absolute darkness.  But at the moment of the big bang when huge amounts of energy were released, there of course was the accompanying light.  This was day one according to the Bible.  And if we consider that the concept of time is an entirely manmade concept that day was actually some 400,000 of our years long before the creation of atoms, stars, planets, etc. started.  And there we have day two.

I do not, nor have I ever, considered the book of Genesis to be an accurate description of the beginnings of the universe and then of man, but it sufficed until we could fathom a more God-like rationale of its creation.  The men who wrote the Bible were incapable of conceiving the universe as we now know it.  Their divine inspiration was to put into words concepts that the people of the day could understand, and even more importantly, accept.  We are now moving beyond that.  Remember the possibility of the universe as we know it existing is of the smallest of possible odds.  And yet, here we are.