The Cat\u2019s Eye Nebula, one of the first planetary nebulae discovered, also has one of the most complex forms known to this kind of nebula. Eleven rings, or shells, of gas make up the Cat\u2019s Eye.
Credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI\/AURA)
Acknowledgment: R. Corradi (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Spain) and Z. Tsvetanov (NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I sometimes get a kick out of the online comments of a fellow who espouses a particularly crude and simplistic scientism.\u00a0 He recently posted the following:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nYou won\u2019t find even one instance where science has had to say it was wrong, and someones sacred scriptures from antiquity got it right.\u00a0Not. one. time. not. one. item.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nWell . . .<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
My response will occupy three blog posts.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll start with an extended quotation from the prolific Alister McGrath, one of whose many excellent books I\u2019m currently reading.\u00a0 (And, for the benefit of a certain online critic of mine, who has recently taken\u00a0to suggesting that, in quoting Dr. McGrath, I\u2019m quoting a scientifically ignorant Anglican priest in an attack on science, I\u2019ll mention \u2013 again \u2013 that, prior to his ordination and his acquisition of Oxford doctorates in divinity and intellectual history, McGrath first earned an Oxford doctorate in molecular biophysics.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once upon a time, people thought that the universe had always been here. \u00a0That was what the great philosopher Aristotle taught.\u00a0 Early Christian writers, committed to a notion of the divine creation of the universe, thought that Aristotle was wrong.\u00a0 During the first five centuries, they insisted that the universe was not eternal but had come into being.\u00a0 Nobody seems to have taken much notice of them.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Augustine of Hippo (354-430), probably the greatest and certainly the most influential Christian thinker of that age, taught that, since time was part of the created order, God could not be said to have created the universe in<\/em> time; rather, God created the universe with<\/em> time. . . .<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Augustine argued that God brought everything into existence in a single moment of creation.\u00a0 Yet this created order was not static.\u00a0 God endowed it with the capacity to develop.\u00a0 The creation is meant to change over time, becoming what God intended it to be, rather than having been created in its final definitive form.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
When the great intellectual renaissance of the Middle Ages began, Augustine\u2019s approaches to the evolution of the created order and the nature of time did not fit the dominant philosophical narrative of the day, and so were marginalized.\u00a0 Augustine was seen as a major \u2013 indeed, the<\/em> major \u2013 theological authority of that age.\u00a0 Yet Aristotle was widely regarded as the supreme scientific authority, and his ideas came to dominate the scientific theories of the time.\u00a0 Medieval science was thus committed to the idea of the eternity of the world, because this was such a significant feature of Aristotle\u2019s thought.\u00a0 This put Christian theologians in a difficult position.\u00a0 They liked Aristotle, especially his ideas on intellectual method.\u00a0 But they could not go along with his core belief that the universe had always existed.\u00a0 It seemed like an irreconcilable difference between science and religion \u2013 between Aristotle and Augustine.\u00a0 Both sides remained committed to their positions, and no reconciliation was really achieved.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
By the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus remained roughly the same on the issue of the eternity of the universe.\u00a0 The great Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927), who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1903, wrote a best-selling work entitled <\/span>Worlds in the Making<\/em> (1906).\u00a0 In this he argued for an infinite, self-perpetuating universe without beginning or end, based partly on the recently discovered principle of the \u201cindestructibility of energy.\u201d\u00a0 Arrhenius made clear his fundamental \u201cconviction that the Universe in its essence has always been what it is now.\u00a0 Matter, energy, and life have only varied as to shape and position in space.\u201d \u00a0Matter and\u00a0energy might move around the universe; there was, however, no overall change within the system as a whole.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Alister McGrath, The Big Question: Why We Can\u2019t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God<\/em>\u00a0(New York: St. Martin\u2019s Press, 2015), 78-80.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thus ends Part One of Three.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 I sometimes get a kick out of the online comments of a fellow who espouses a particularly crude and simplistic scientism.\u00a0 He recently posted the following: \u00a0 You won\u2019t find even one instance where science has had to say it was wrong, and someones sacred scriptures from antiquity got it right.\u00a0Not. one. time. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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