On Ottawa, Albertus Magnus and Prof. Michal Heller

I am now safely ensconced in Ottawa, with a new job as scientific researcher, a place to live, and a lot to do. There was a certain degree of culture shock in the first week or so, especially with regards to the increased friendliness of manner and artificial imitation of same by supermarket staff and others (my first encounter with a north american supermarket checkout clerk was a horrific and repulsive experience).

I post in honour of St. Albertus Magnus, Albert the Swabian, whose feast day is today (here's some art I did for the occasion last year). Albert the Swabian bucked his people's reputation as skinflints (legend says the Swabians originally lived in Scotland but were thrown out for being too tight-fisted) by joining a religious order with a vow of poverty, and thence proceeded to become a mediaeval renaissance man, studying just about every subject under the sun. He also discovered arsenic, which may not sound like a useful contribution to the world, but it wasn't hard to find poison if you really wanted to; and arsenic had medical uses as well, so a net plus for everyone.

According to the wikipedia page, he also studied Aristotle and argued for the peaceful coexistence of science and religion. You might think there wasn't much for science and religion to argue about in those days - of the really big potential trouble areas, the round vs. flat earth debate was already ancient history, and Copernicus and Darwin lay in the future. However, there had been voices sceptical of the value and reliability of Reason (I think that was a debate that Christendom had in the 9th century or somesuch - anyone know?), and there were still people sceptical of learning, of the accumulation of knowledge - Sts. Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi were both leery of the potential for arrogance, for steering off-course, of a mind too full of its own wisdom. I don't know how much Albertus did to address this; but the great answer to such concerns came in the form of his pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas, a highly intelligent individual who was also genuinely humble, and didn't seem to understand that there were people in the world less smart than he was. (His giant, unfinished Summa Theologica, a tome of dense, closely-argued philosophical and theological reasoning which scholars have been wrestling with ever since, has as its stated purpose "to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion, in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners".) The fact that Aquinas was rapidly sainted and his insights absorbed into the theology of the Church didn't hurt the scholastic case for the value of scholarship, either.

Leaping to the present, I attended a lecture last week by Prof. Michal Heller, polish cosmologist, philosopher and priest (though he only lasted a year in parish life before realising he wasn't cut out for it), and winner of the Templeton Prize for promoting understanding between Science and Religion. He talked about cosmology and the Big Bang, and what's known of it, outlining the evidence and describing projects that should allow the gathering of new data. It was pretty fascinating, and presented it reasonably easy to understand language. (I was expecting him to start grappling with issues of philosophy of knowledge and suchlike, so was a tad disappointed, but it was still highly interesting.) (I'd have asked the questions myself, but I lack the grounding, and up till a year or two back regarded scientific philosophy in unrepeatably obscene terms due to early exposure to it as a rhetorical club between evolutionists and creationists.)

At some point, he then went on to address the question, which he says he always gets asked: was the Big Bang the point at which God created the universe? (It certainly looks as if someone with root-level permissions said "let there be light!" and everything went from there.) He answer was, we don't know; and while we can't forbid God from having created the universe in this manner, we shouldn't engage in a God-of-the-gaps approach that reduces God to a label for our own ignorance. (He earlier commented on the term "dark matter" in the same terms - it covers our ignorance, and by giving it a label, we tame it, somehow.) He also said that physics is essentially investigating the Mind of God, and even that we can seek God through the equations he made the universe by (calling up a slide with some of these on). I think this is a tad dodgy and will get you along the same road as the Pythagoreans, worshipping numbers and abhorring beans because... actually, why did they abhor beans? I don't know. But I agree with his point that "God is not wilfully malicious" - God doesn't create the universe to mislead, or to maliciously mislead; it has an order that we can strive with, investigate, and (to a degree) master.

Then there were questions, which I made notes on but don't have with me. (If anyone asks I'll put up more details on Monday.) It came up that he knew John Paul II back in the day, and the pontiff-to-be would often go skiing with physicist-priests. There was a Creation Scientist who decided to studiously avoid the fact that all Prof. Heller's research flatly contradicts Creation Science, in favour of saying how much he & a lot of other Creationists respected Prof. Heller's work, and asking a question about whether there's religious revival now in the old communist bloc? To which Prof. Heller replied by sensibly stating that eastern Europe is a big place and you can't generalise, it's different from country to country and, withing Russia, from region to region. He also went on to say that from what he knows of Russia there's an increasing anti-rationalist, anti-science mood in some places, because Marxism was put forward as The Scientific Philosophy (there were a lot of good scientists in the USSR, too, tho he didn't mention that); and hammering the Communism = Science link means that Communism's atrocities and miseries now tarnish the name of Science as well; and that scientists there now find support from the Church against this sentiment.

I'd like to know more about this, as anti-rational sentiment is on the rise in the West as well, and I fully expect it to continue getting worse (or rather, more pronounced; I suppose you could argue that it's a reaction against a debased form of reason that reduces Man to a computer with squishy bits, to which I say "fair enough", but a reaction implies an alternative, and I'd like to know that alternative). The fellow who's now Pope said a few years back. “To my surprise, in a recent interview on the Galileo case, I was not asked a question like, ‘Why did the Church try to get in the way of the development of modern science?’, but rather exactly the opposite that is: ‘Why didn’t the church take a more clear position against the disasters that would inevitably follow, once Galileo had opened Pandora’s box?’” As a scientist that mindset scares the hell out of me, more than any aspect of the Creationist/Neo-Atheist symbiosis.

As I say, if anyone wants I'll dig out my notes. Apparently it's being put up on the internets somewhere as well, so interested parties can probably watch it themselves with a little googling. (Although he kept holding the microphone too far from his mouth so I was straining to hear him. It's probably not going to be easy to make his words out on a recording.)