Not lost in space

The Infinite Tides

The traumatized astronaut is not a new theme in literature. In nonfiction, we have the example of Buzz Aldrin's Return to Earth, which deals with the alcoholism and depression of the second man on the moon, and Brian O'Leary's The Making of an Ex-Astronaut, which chronicles the less dramatic frustrations of a scientist-astronaut who never made it into space. Science-fiction author Barry N. Malzberg penned The Falling Astronauts, in which astronaut Richard Martin gets bundled up by his crewmates after his breakdown and hauled back to earth as a basket case. More famously, Arthur C. Clarke created some extremely stressed astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So ... been there and done that. Besides, the Space Age is old news and these days no one interrupts regularly scheduled programming to report on rocket launches or spacecraft landings. Therefore it might seem just a little surprising that a new author should choose a distressed astronaut as the protagonist of his first novel. What was Christian Kiefer thinking when he wrote The Infinite Tides?

The author shared some of his thought process during the SummerWords conference, which he and his English department colleagues at the American River College organized last month. (Yours truly attended and was most likely the only mathematician in the crowd.) At a session on researching one's story, Kiefer mocked the “write what you know” straitjacket, preferring instead the “write what you can find out” approach. Thus he plunged into astronautics and mathematics, dredging up the information that would give his high-flying protagonist substance and credibility.

Kiefer also talked with the Sacramento Bee, explaining the genesis of his novel to reporter Allen Pierleoni:

Part of it was listening to the news and beginning to feel I might be the only man in America who still had a job. Then sitting at Starbucks (grading papers), watching other men at other tables looking through the want ads, then drifting to the sports pages, then to the funnies, then finally to the front page. Basically using the hunt for a job as a way to fill the endless hours of their otherwise vacant days.

It's pertinent to note that people who have academic jobs teaching math and English—subjects deemed indispensable at college—have a security that is rare in the modern world. We are a privileged few. Who else is so lucky?

Astronauts, perhaps. The men and women of the space program comprise an elite corps of over-achievers. They have reached a literal apex of accomplishment as they leave the earth on their missions. What would happen to an astronaut if he were to find himself grounded, his life and career in ruins? That was the question that Kiefer asked himself and he explores the answers in The Infinite Tides.

Astronaut Keith Corcoran is a genius at math and engineering. His goal is to go into space. Corcoran's entire life is devoted to achieving his goal, even to the point of estranging his wife and daughter. Corcoran notices and regrets the increasing distance between himself and his family, but can't see a way to resolve it without jeopardizing his career. He's actually rather irritated with his wife, who once seemed so supportive, but he plunges ahead regardless.

When it all comes apart in tragedy and illness, Corcoran finds himself alone. Stripped of flight status and living alone in an empty house in a half-built suburban development, he has nothing but time—and nothing to fill it. Having lived all his life with a keen sense of his mathematical trajectory through spacetime, Corcoran struggles to reassess the axioms of his existence. Vectors are mathematical entities possessing both length and direction, telling you both where and what. They beautifully model things like velocities, expressing both where you are going and how fast you're going to get there. For Corcoran, they were real and gave shape to the way he moved through life. Vectors were both tools he used in his engineering work and dynamic forces that drew him through reality.

Tragically, his sense of mathematized reality was one that he had in common with his daughter Quinn, but which also estranged them. While Corcoran lived within the coordinate grid of spacetime, his daughter was not embedded in the same way. While Quinn perceived the same personalities and characteristics of numbers that her father saw, she was nevertheless a different person. She had the gift of being able to live among the mortals, to be popular and social. Instead of jumping at the opportunity to enroll in an elite school to hone her extraordinary gifts, Quinn preferred to stay in a regular high school and join the cheerleading squad. Thus she became a disappointment to her father, who had already mapped out the inevitable trajectory of her life and could not come to terms with her deliberate violation of deterministic fate.

The Infinite Tides is an engrossing book. I read the entire thing over a single weekend, rarely putting it down. Keith Corcoran is a fascinating character, often maddening, whose sense of place and purpose is wobbling out of control. When he starts interacting with the neighbor woman whose daughter reminds him slightly of Quinn, you expect certain things to occur, and some of them do—but never in quite the way you were anticipating. The surprises keep you off balance and make you all the more sympathetic to Corcoran's disorientation. You begin to wonder how the author can possibly bring the book to a satisfactory resolution.

And yet he does. In fact, the final pages of The Infinite Tides bring Corcoran's story to a cusp, where many different things become possible. There is no pat happy ending, but rather a blossoming of choices. The man who lived in a mathematical framework that had become a deterministic cage begins to grasp the key that his daughter had found.

A divergent coda

Having traversed the trajectory of my review, I find myself left with notes and observations that did not fit into the flow. I offer them here as a collection of tangent vectors.

The Infinite Tides is a stunning accomplishment and I exhort people to read it and watch for future works by Christian Kiefer. The man has staying power. What's more, his capacity for assimilation of background research is prodigious. He admits to being relatively innocent of mathematical knowledge, yet he absorbed what he needed and magisterially portrayed the life of a brilliantly obsessive-compulsive mathematician.

I suspect that people who disdain math might occasionally recoil from Keith Corcoran, who tries even a mathematician's patience as he relentlessly invokes “equations” (one of the book's most frequently appearing words) and their solutions. Everything to him is a math problem, but that idée fixe is the protagonist's defining characteristic, the leitmotif of his life.

There is one bobble in the discussion of Hilbert's hotel, a warm scene where father and daughter are sharing a joyous discovery about the paradoxical nature of infinity. Suppose you have a hotel with infinitely many rooms: Room 1, Room 2, Room 3, and so on, going forever. Suppose the hotel has no vacancies, infinitely many guests being in residence. Suppose infinitely many new people show up, all wanting rooms. What is one to do? Quinn suggests a solution to her father:

“They ask every other guest to move down one room.... If n is a room with a guest the n moves to n plus one and then—”

Her father quickly understands. Unfortunately, Quinn should have said that n moves to 2n, not to n + 1. If the occupant of Room 1 moves to Room 2, and the occupant of Room 2 moves to Room 4, and the occupant of Room 3 moves to Room 6, etcetera, then all of the original guests end up in even-numbered rooms, leaving the infinitely many odd-numbered rooms vacant to accommodate the infinitely many new arrivals.

I doubt the matter will cause much distress among Kiefer's readers, but the mathematically inclined may wrinkle their brows.

My other reservation relates to astronomy. For an astronaut, Corcoran is remarkably ignorant of elementary astronomy when he converses with his Ukrainian neighbor. When Peter explains that he likes to look at Messier objects, Corcoran says, “I don't know what that means.” But Messier objects are an Astronomy 101 topic, a catalog of celestial objects that could be mistaken for comets when viewed through a telescope. The Andromeda galaxy is M31 in the Messier catalog. Even more unlikely is Corcoran's ignorance of the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia. One expects astronauts to know such configurations for purposes of stellar navigation if the computers fritz out and the sextant has to be dragged out. (This was actually a consideration during the Apollo 13 mission and a factor in the crippled spacecraft's safe return to earth.)

Perhaps Corcoran was exempt from such lessons since he was an engineer-astronaut instead of a pilot-astronaut, but it struck me as unlikely.

I mentioned 2001 in the opening paragraphs of this article. It appears that Kiefer included a related joke to amuse close readers of his novel. At one point, a man named Campbell says to Corcoran, “I'm a busy man. I have the whole day scheduled to sit here on my bony ass and listen to Frank Poole bullshit about the good old days. Let's get out of here before that old windbag shows up.”

No wonder HAL 9000 killed Frank Poole when he went outside the Discovery to repair the AE-35 communications gyro.

No sense of proportion

Large and small insanities

As Douglas Adams has observed, the universe is so mind-bogglingly big that a sense of proportion can be a dangerous thing to have. That is, at least, if you want to maintain your equanimity and sense of self-worth.

Nevertheless, the absence of any sense of proportion appears to be one of society's major ills. It manifests itself in various forms of innumerate inanity and scientific delusion. I have three very different examples in mind, the toxic impact of which should be readily apparent to any minimally rational reader. Today I'll present the first one, which is a delightful mix of religion and pseudoscience.

Playing center

Lyndon Johnson is supposed to have cruelly quipped that Gerald Ford spent too much time playing center on his football team, looking at the world upside-down from between his legs. I wonder whether Robert Sungenis filled the same position on his high school's team. Whatever the case may be, he ended up as a dedicated exponent of the theory that he is the center of the universe.

Forgive me. I overstate the situation just a little. Sungenis is actually a geocentrist rather than an egocentrist (although I suppose it's possible that he could be both). An ultramontane Catholic apologist who is far outside the mainstream of Catholic thought, Sungenis is a Bible literalist who believes in young-earth creationism and argues that Joshua couldn't have ordered the sun to stop in the sky (Joshua 10:12-13) unless it circled the earth—and not the other way around. Logical, right?

Sungenis is considered an embarrassment to the Catholic hierarchy even though he is trying to defend its old accusations against heliocentrist Galileo Galilei. However, his diocesan bishop has deemed some of his essays anti-Semitic and has ordered him to stop writing such material. You'd think the Church fathers would be grateful!

I have encountered Sungenis before. Any Google search on Catholic apologetics brings up his “Catholic Apologetics International” website, although it has since been renamed the “Bellarmine Theological Forum.” I was reminded of his rabid geocentrism upon being directed to an amusing post on The Greenbelt, where The Ridger gently eviscerates the campaign by Sungenis to discredit Galileo. As she points out, “When Ken Ham finds you too wacky, you are definitely in need of help.”

To get a sense of how ridiculous it is to think that the entire universe spins about a fixed earth, consider the simple case of Neptune. The distance between Earth and Neptune averages 30 astronomical units—that is, thirty times the mean distance of the earth from the sun. Assuming that Neptune's supposed path about the earth is approximately a circle, we compute the circumference of a circle with a radius of 30 AU to obtain a distance of 60π AU. This is the distance that Neptune supposedly travels in a single 24-hour period as it wheels about the earth. So how fast does Neptune have to travel to complete that circuit in the allotted time? Since an astronomical unit is approximately 93 million miles, a little calculator work yields 730 million miles per hour. If we divide by 3600 (the number of seconds in an hour) to convert this speed to miles per second, we get a little over 200 thousand miles per second for Neptune's speed.

Oops. The speed of light is only about 186,000 miles per second. Unless Neptune has warp drive, it can't possibly be traveling faster than the speed of light.

Please note that we were discussing the simple case of a relatively close planet—one that shares the same solar system as the earth. Imagine how much more ridiculous the results would be if we merely extended them to the nearest star, approximately four light-years away. Or the Andromeda galaxy, about a million light-years away. (The folks in Andromeda must be as dizzy as hell!)

Of course, this refutation of geocentricity assumes that Einstein was right. I'm sure that Sungenis is prepared to contradict Einstein in his discussion of “Jewish science.” You know, perhaps we should revisit the “egocentric” issue in his case.

The pope explains the Big Bang

Sweet reason from Benny Hex

Even many Catholics are confused by the concept of papal infallibility. Benedict XVI has put his foot wrong often enough so that anyone could be forgiven for thinking the current pontiff is just a bit off. Or a lot. But papal infallibility applies only to official doctrinal pronouncements. Not to anything else (which is surely obvious by now with this pope). Occasionally, however, the pope gets something sort of right.

Benedict has come forward with a straightforward pronouncement concerning the Big Bang. He accepts it! As far as he's concerned, cosmology's reigning theory for the origin of the universe is simply God's technique for initiating creation. In brief, nearly fourteen billion years ago God said “Let there be light” and the Big Bang happened.

Benedict's acceptance of the Big Bang naturally upsets the hardcore creationists who believe in a young earth, but it's welcome news to Catholics who want a little distance between themselves and their anti-science Protestant brethren. Forward-thinking Catholics can also take comfort in Benedict's sound logic, as illustrated in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle. God was behind the Big Bang for all the best reasons.

E.T. goes to hell

Therefore he doesn't exist

Sound reasoning is a good basis for religious beliefs, wouldn't you say? So what about this example? It's from the first 2011 issue of Answers magazine from those geniuses at Answers in Genesis:

Because Adam's sin affected the whole universe, it would also affect any alien. But as nonhumans, aliens would not be eligible for salvation (this is one reason we are confident that intelligent aliens do not exist). So baptizing an alien would be pointless at best, and a mockery at worst. Jesus did not die for Martians—only descendants of Adam can be saved.

See? Simple, isn't it?

So is Ken Ham, who offers this profound observation:

Secular astronomers claim that the universe evolved slowly over billions of years. But this conclusion does not come from the facts they see but from the assumptions they must make to interpret the unseen past. This issue of Answers, written by leading creation astronomers, shows how the facts actually line up with God's account of a recent creation but can't be explained by evolution over billions of years.

Ken's tight reasoning suffers only from prolixity. I can help him shorten his statement by removing excess words. For example, for “secular astronomers” read “astronomers.” For “creation astronomers,” read “cranks.”

All better now.

A too-easy question

Ooh! Ooh! I know! I know!

The October 2010 issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research is emblazoned on its cover with a colorful display of astronomical images, including the planet Saturn. Text is laid over the cover art, spelling out the question, “Why does the universe look so old?”

I think I know the answer to this one:

Because it's old.

Poor creationists. They have to labor so diligently, so faithfully, and so blindly, to rationalize their God's duplicity. He may have implied in his holy book that the universe was created a scant few thousands of years ago, but then he went and made it look billions of years old. Either their God is a liar or he is a prankster. Loki or Coyote. It's not a very satisfying choice, is it?

A creationist fossil

No evolution here!

The academic calendar offers some generous vacation intervals between school terms. I normally try to take advantage of the time to catch up on cleaning and organizing my residence, which looks like an uncurated archive at the end of each semester. I never get as far as I intend, however, because each dig into the stacks of books and papers produces bright, shiny distractions that draw my attention away from the task.

This week I made one of those bemusing discoveries that stops the housework and drives me back to the computer. It's a photocopy of an opinion piece from the October 11, 1981, edition of the Sacramento Bee. (Perhaps you have something similar lying around in your house!) More than twenty-eight years ago I was inspired to preserve this precious piece of prose. Why, pray tell?

It is a deep-frozen example of creationist cant from an engineer—although from Pittsburgh rather than Salem. Creationism keeps disguising itself with new labels in hopes of sneaking into school science classes, but its arguments are predictably familiar and stale.

The item speaks for itself, but I can't resist interpolating a few remarks:

Creationist Claims Evolution Fails The Test Of Science

R.G. Elmendorf is a registered professional engineer and a graduate of Cornell University, who lives near Pittsburgh, Pa. Five years ago, he issued a $5,000 challenge to anyone who could show how evolution can operate in the same world as the second law of thermodynamics. He says he hasn't paid off yet.

By R.G. Elmendof
Special to The Bee

I am one of a few creationists who do not agree with the “two-model” approach to the teaching of origins in public schools, believing that this approach (1) distorts science, (2) misrepresents creation, and (3) is an unnecessary compromise with evolution.

First, within its own very restricted area, science is a valuable tool In the search for truth, but outside this area, science becomes a distorted, subjective and misapplied thing, no longer true science at all and in great danger of generating philosophical and religious opposition. Not everything that scientists think, say and do is science.

A great deal of misunderstanding about this exists that affects the creation/evolution controversy, for example In the promotion of evolution as a scientific fact on Carl Sagan's Cosmos series and in the term creation-science by proponents of the two-model approach incorporated in “balanced treatment legislation.” The whole question of origin is more accurately history, not science, no matter how much scientists like to investigate and speculate about history. After all, what scientist observed the steamy landscape and erupting volcanos of the evolutionary scenario, or the zap-zap of the creation scenario?

Secondly, if origin is not accessible to science, a choice between creation and evolution must be made on a different basis. As a creationist, I believe, by faith, that the universe, the world, the earth and man came about by the purposeful action of a “clockmaker.” An evolutionist believes, also by faith, that matter by itself was able to make the uphill journey from molecules to man, without any clockmaker being required.

Paging William Paley! Someone just found your watch!

These are the only two options on origins. No rational compromise between them exists. It is possible to compare these two faiths about the past in a logical, organized way, using “models” as conceptual frameworks for the ideas incorporated In each, and it is also possible to examine scientific evidences which seem to “fit” one or the other model better. But it is not possible to put either scheme to an actual scientific test. You can't go back and repeat the experiment. Who's to say what actually happened In the past, except by faith in creation or evolution?

Here we have an engineer who is fixated on running experiments (although I'll bet he's never run one since graduating from college). Elmendorf subscribes to a straitjacketed version of science that can scarcely exist outside of a laboratory. It's funny that an engineer doesn't understand field work. He also suffers from a poverty of imagination. While science can be performed in only one way, the question of origins admits of only two models. Either God did it or Darwin did. This false dichotomy is popular among creationists because any perceived flaw in the theory of evolution is then automatically a point in favor of divine creation. (Hallelujah.)

Whether such faith is equivalent to religion Is beyond the scope of this article, but there definitely is an underlying religious construct involved in the creation/evolution controversy. It is futile for creationists to studiously avoid mention of biblical creation, and for evolutionists to hide the fact that evolution is a basic tenet of humanism and other non-theistic religions. The heart of the creation/evolution controversy is the Bible vs. evolution, and everybody knows it.

I guess that proves that secular humanism is a religion. I am definitely falling behind in my non-prayers to non-God.

On the third point, there is a very important distinction between creation and evolution that is not widely recognized. Evolution, in addition to its historical claims about the past, makes the further claim that it is still operating in the present. Creation specifically excludes such a claim, being a once-only phenomenon, now finished.

This is an extremely significant difference, because by making such a claim, evolution brings itself into the here-and-now natural world where science operates. It can therefore be presented as a legitimate scientific hypothesis, which creation cannot do. However, by taking this position, evolution also subjects itself to scientific testing and possible falsification—a criterion of true scientific ideas.

Elmendorf has creationism retiring (undefeated) from the field of battle because it is not subject to scientific testing. His fellow creationists would probably not be willing to cede this point. It's hardly a good way to get creationism into the science classrooms of America.

The bad news for evolution is that the test has already been made, by direct comparison of evolution with well-established scientific laws, and evolution has flunked the test. Evolution claims to be a self-caused, uphill process, but the principle of the second law of thermodynamics is that all processes are downhill. Evolution claims that life can come from non-life, but the law of biogenesis asserts that life comes only from life. Evolution postulates limitless change in living things, but the laws of genetics set absolute limits on such variation.

Were these arguments ever fresh? The “second law” and “biogenesis” and “absolute limits” on variation. These claims were refuted the first time they got trotted out. How many refutations are necessary before creationists give them up? (Sorry: “infinity” is not a number.)

These and other insurmountable scientific barriers flatly preclude evolution happening by natural means in the here-and-now world, and that means that evolution can be said to have been scientifically disproven. This is an embarrassing predicament for evolution, and the problem has the best evolutionist brains in the country trying to find a way around, over, under or through these scientific laws to save evolution from disaster. But whether evolutionists like it or not, it's all over for evolution's claim to be “scientific.” There is then really no justification for creationists to compromise with evolution by propping it up to look alive in public school science classes with the two-model system.

If evolution was already dead and buried back in 1981, then it sure has become a lively zombie. Remember when D. James Kennedy (the late D. James Kennedy) declared the death of evolution? Good times!

Common sense and fair play certainly call for an end to the present exclusive domination of evolution in public school curricula, but In their efforts to achieve this end, I think that the two-model creationists have misled some important points, and I would like to challenge their thinking with the following questions: Why distort science by leaving the question of origins in science class? Science cannot answer the question. Why deny that creation is essentially a religious faith about the past? Historical evolution is the same thing. Why treat evolution as if it were still a worthwhile “scientific” idea? It's already been scientifically tested and falsified.

Perhaps these questions will be answered during the current American Civil Liberties Union challenge to the Arkansas Balanced Treatment Legislation. I hope so, because the creation/evolution controversy involves far more important issues than many people realize. Creation-science? T'aint so. Evolution-science? Impossible.

As we all know, the Arkansas Balanced Treatment law was struck down in 1982 by the famous McLean decision written by Judge Overton. Perhaps Elmendorf felt vindicated by this defeat of the two-models approach. He has not, however, become an icon of anti-evolution. A Google search has little to say about our editorial writer.

Still, “little” is not the same as “none.” Elmendorf apparently divides his time between two forms of crackpottery: creationism and geocentrism.

That's right. When not fighting evolution, R.G. Elmendorf tries to get people to believe that the sun orbits around the earth. He says he'll pay $1,000 to anyone who can prove heliocentricity.

Can flat-earth theory be far behind?

A flip of the Coyne

Some intelligence on the Vatican

Inside the Vatican is Robert Moynihan's monthly magazine on activities within the highest levels of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Dr. Moynihan holds a Ph.D. in medieval studies from Yale and is a longtime Vatican journalist with an insider's contacts and perspectives. His magazine's editorial policy is closely aligned with the policies of the pope. Although Inside the Vatican is not an official house organ, one can say it faithfully plays the tunes called by Rome.

In fact, when the magazine departs from Church policy at all, it's more a matter of being “more Catholic than the pope” than it is any form of rebellion against Church doctrine. When not lamenting the failure of Benedict XVI to swiftly reinstate the Latin rite Tridentine mass throughout the world, Inside the Vatican also counsels patience to those who pine for the days before Vatican II.

The latest issue, which bears an October 2006 date, offers a news article on the controversy stirred up by the dismissal of the outspoken director of the Vatican observatory. The director had directly challenged some statements in praise of intelligent design “theory” by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. Under the title Intelligent Design?, writer Charles Collins describes the sequence of events and offers statements from some of the participants.

Intelligent Design?

A new head of the Vatican observatory is appointed shortly before Benedict XVI meets with his old doctoral students in Castel Gandolfo to discuss the theory of evolution.

By Charles Collins

When the August 19th announcement came that Father George Coyne, SJ, had retired as the director of the Vatican Observatory, a cheer went up in the Intelligent Design community in the United States.

Intelligent Design advocates believe that the complexity of the universe and biological systems offers scientific proof that there is an intelligence behind creat1on. The theory differs from “creationism” in that it does not identify this “intelligence” as being the biblical God. Most scientists contend that the theory is “creationism through the back door,” and the theory has virtually no support from non-Christians.

Father Coyne, who had headed up the Vatican's chief scientific facility since 1978, is a long-time critic of the theory. “It is a religious movement. In my mind there is no doubt about it,” he said two years ago. “For example, there are arguments from some Intelligent Design people that say the chemical complexities of the human brain are such that it would be impossible that the human brain could be assembled without an intelligent design I don't see that it is necessary to have a person have a designed plan, an intelligent plan, to make the human brain come to be. I just don't see it. It could be! But from our scientific knowledge it is not necessarily so.”

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The Roman Catholic Church, like other Christian denominations, believes that human beings have God-given souls. Unlike many Protestant sects, however, Rome has usually been careful to avoid making dogmatic pronouncements about the literal truth of the creation passages in Genesis. One would like to think the Church learned some lessons in its fight with Galileo.

Intelligent Design advocates are mostly Evangelical Protestants in the United States. The Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University, the most prominent university of the Baptist denomination, was the first academic think-tank devoted to Intelligent Design. In 1999, the Center opened in Baylor's science department.

Proponents of Intelligent Design have long tried to expand their influence, both internationally and among Catholics.

This has proved difficult. Pope Pius XII wrote in Humani generis that the Church does not forbid the teaching of evolution. In 1996, Pope John Paul II told the pontifical Academy of Sciences that evolution is “more than a hypothesis.”

Many Catholic scientists seem perfectly comfortable with the predominant scientific theories. “Pope John Paul II said philosophy and theology have to respect the independence of the scientific approach to things,” Father Coyne said. “They have to admit the great success of the scientific method.”

However, over the past few years, Intelligent Design has received some support from Catholic quarters.

Intelligent Design supporters have been given access to the pages of the journal First Things, which is edited by a Catholic priest, Father John Neuhaus. Father Neuhaus has said he thinks the theory is sound and in accordance with Catholic teaching.

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Father Neuhaus is a former Protestant minister who converted to Catholicism. Few Catholics are as fervent as converts. Neuhaus, however, brings with him into the Church some of the dogged combativeness that characterizes conservative Protestantism, infusing the Roman church with a pugnacity toward the secular truths of science that was alien to it (at least since the time of Leo XIII, the pope who established the Vatican observatory)

The biggest coup for the movement was when the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, published an op-ed in The New York Times supporting the concept of design, and attacking aspects of evolutionary theory. The cardinal was sponsored by The Discovery Institute, a U.S.-based think tank which promotes Intelligent Design. Cardinal Schoenborn came under heavy criticism from Father Coyne for his article.

At a January 31st lecture given at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida, the Jesuit said the Austrian cardinal was misinformed on several points.

“One, the scientific theory of evolution, as all scientific theories, is completely neutral with respect to religious thinking; two, the message of John Paul II, which I have just referred to and which is dismissed by the cardinal as 'rather vague and unimportant,' is a fundamental Church teaching which significantly advances the evolution debate; three, neo-Darwinian evolution is not, in the words of the cardinal, 'an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection'; four, the apparent directionality seen by science in the evolutionary process does not require a designer; five, Intelligent Design is not science despite the cardinal's statement that ‘neo-Darwinism and the multi-verse hypothesis in cosmology [were] invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.’”

Cardinal Schoenborn later issued a clarification of his remarks. He said he was speaking more about philosophy than about physics.

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Just who is Christoph Schönborn, cardinal archbishop of Vienna? The general public can be forgiven for not knowing. Just as Cardinal Wojtyla was an unknown Polish prelate until called to the throne of Peter as Pope John Paul II, Schönborn has been a relatively obscure German cardinal. His stock is supposedly rising in Church ranks with the ascension of his mentor, Josef Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict XVI. His major claim to fame to date was his role as director of the new Catholic catechism, which gives him a leading role as one of the Church's educators and doctrinal apologists.

Some even rank the young German cardinal as a potential successor to Benedict, one of the papabili (an Italian word that basically means “pope-worthy”). A website devoted to the activities and sayings of the cardinal, The Schönborn Site, is nothing less than a fan club. You can even get T-shirts and other Schönborn gear in the on-line souvenir shop. The New York Times editorial and the cardinal's lectures on evolution are also posted there.

Collins doesn't talk about the source of the material in Schönborn's New York Times editorial, but it's not ghostwritten by minions of the Discovery Institute (unlike Ann Coulter's recent anti-evolution diatribes). As one of the Church's leading scholars on the role of science in society, Schönborn was merely offering the latest in a series of Roman Catholic assaults on what they call neo-Darwinism. As the cardinal described it in his editorial, neo-Darwinism is not simply a different term for the “modern synthesis”; rather, Schönborn is criticizing “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.”

The cardinal's argument, in his editorial and subsequent lectures, is less a brief in favor of Intelligent Design creationism than it is a rallying cry for theistic evolution. Unlike some of Schönborn's more eager supporters, the cardinal himself posits that the fact of evolution is well demonstrated. He laments, however, the failure of evolutionists to acknowledge the guiding hand of God. In that sense, he makes common cause with the proponents of ID creationism, whose argument against the sufficiency of natural evolutionary mechanisms serendipitously aligns with his own. (Or perhaps it's not serendipity. The IDists are, as a rule, overt religionists who merely leave their principal motivation unvoiced when they seek to undermine science.)

This confusion of the roles of science and philosophy has often been a cause of confusion in the debate over Intelligent Design. Many scientists say that belief in an “intelligent designer” can come about through philosophical reasoning, but that does not mean that it is a scientific theory. Two years ago, Father Coyne even hosted a dialogue bringing scientists and theologians together to discuss whether or not the universe has a “purpose.” During the meeting, Father Coyne said that scientists have to realize that they cannot provide the answers to all the questions. He said it is the “ultimate questions” which science is least qualified to tackle. These include the existence of God and the spiritual nature of the human being.

The Vatican conference was co-sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, which used to sponsor research into Intelligent Design. This support stopped when scientists associated with the movement were not able to provide valid research supporting the theory.

“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review,” Charles L. Harper, Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, told Salon Magazine in 2004.

Many Evangelicals are also coming to his conclusion. Two years after the Michael Polanyi Center opened, Baylor moved it from its science faculty to the department of theology.

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All the more reason, therefore, that the Roman Catholic Church will maintain a friendly but distinct separation from the ID crowd. It doesn't like to tie itself to losers.

Given the fact that Intelligent Design seems to be in retreat, there was some shock when the Daily Mail published a story on August 23rd entitled “Pope Sacks Astronomer Over Evolution Debate.” The English newspaper claims that Pope Benedict had Father Coyne replaced because of his very public opposition to Intelligent Design.

With the election of Pope Benedict XVI last year, some supporters of Intelligent Design thought they might get papal approval for their movement. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been critical of some aspects of evolutionary theory before his election.

Many observers thought it was significant that Father Coyne was replaced shortly before a September 1-3 meeting of Josef Ratzinger's old doctoral students in Castel Gandolfo. This is an annual gathering which began years before Ratzinger's election as Pope.

This year's meeting focused on... evolution. Yet one of the participants, Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, says the theory of Intelligent Design never came up.

“It wasn't that at all,” Father Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Florida, told Reuters. (Father Fessio is also the head of Ignatius Press, which publishes Pope Benedict's books in English.) The talks were exclusively about evolution, he said, and particular attention was given to the improper use of evolutionary theory in other areas, such as social science.

The talks given at the meeting will be published as a book by the Vatican later this year.

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Some celebratory headlines announcing Coyne's retirement (or “sacking”) are cited at Schönborn Sightings, the blog affiliated with the cardinal fan club. It links to Vatican Dumps Darwinist-Boosting Astronomer from LifeSiteNews (a “pro-life” source) and Pope Replaces Intelligent Design Critic at Observatory from the Religion News Service.

Fessio implied that the Intelligent Design movement is exclusively an American Evangelical theory, and offers nothing for Catholics. “There's a controversy in the United States because there is a lack of awareness of a thing called philosophy,” Fessio told Reuters. “Evangelicals and creationists generally lack it and Catholics have it.”

He agrees that proponents of Intelligent Design are confusing disciplines. “When you look at the world and see what appears to be order and design, the conclusion that there is a designer is not a scientific conclusion; it's a philosophical one,” he said.

The new head of the observatory, Father Jose Funes, SJ, says that he does not understand the furor, and that Father Coyne, at the age of 73, just wanted to retire. “I just want to build on the wonderful foundation that Father Coyne has established here,” he told Vatican Radio.

Father Coyne also responded to the accusations that he was asked to resign because of his beliefs.

He says he had submitted his resignation several times, and had asked the Holy Father to appoint a new person who can offer new input to the important work of the observatory.

In an e-mail sent to journalists, Father Coyne wrote: “The work of the Vatican Observatory under my directorship has been enthusiastically supported by John Paul I, if for ever so short a reign, by John Paul II, in many marvelous ways, and now by Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Benedict, to my mind, has renewed his enthusiastic support for the observatory's work by the appointment of Father Jose Funes and I am grateful to Pope Benedict for his enduring and loving care for this work of the Church.”

Father Coyne will still have a significant role at the observatory. After a year-long sabbatical, he will return full time to Castel Gandolfo. He will also continue to head the Vatican Observatory Foundation, which seeks out financial support for the work of the observatory.

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It was undoubtedly true that the pope would eventually accept Coyne's request to be allowed to retire. There is no reason to think that Coyne is making excuses when he says he was ready to step down. Is there, however, a subtext to the pope's timing in accepting it? Maybe yes, maybe no. Pontiffs are political creatures, but they come to their high office after lengthy careers in the Church—careers in which they learn patience and taking the long view. Benedict XVI has already shown his disinclination toward swift action.

As for Schönborn, a relatively young cardinal with his eye possibly glancing toward the papal throne, expect him to demonstrate to his Church brethren that he possesses the serene patience that epitomizes Vatican policy. And he'll keep giving his catechetical lectures, many of which touch on evolution and so-called neo-Darwinism. Expect to hear and see more. Maybe even on a T-shirt.

The living fossil that is the Roman Catholic Church is not yet done.

A creationist tells the truth

As he sees it, naturally

Creationists are notorious liars. It's as though they can't help themselves when they consciously distort the words of evolutionists as they assiduously go quote-mining for phrases they can cite out of context. I suppose it's okay to break the commandment against bearing false witness as long as you do it in a good cause. Ad majoram Dei gloriam and all that (although I imagine most rock-ribbed creationists would blanch at my quoting the Jesuit motto).

Therefore it is a rare treat to find a creationist who is almost painfully honest by comparison with most of his fellow believers. (I did say “almost”; even this sterling figure is not quite perfect.) The creationist in question has genuine scientific credentials—another rarity in the ranks of the Genesis crowd. Jason Lisle holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He's published research in solar astrophysics. Clearly he's not just another one of the disgruntled engineers who get to call themselves “scientists” once they sign on as anti-evolutionists.

Dr. Lisle came to my attention when I picked up a copy of his book Taking Back Astronomy: The Heavens Declare Creation. While TBA is not the first attempt to explain away the mismatch between the billions of years of history recorded in the sky and the paltry 6,000 years posited in the Bible, no other book appears to have an author of such reputable scientific pedigree. Young-earth creationists with Ph.D.'s in astrophysics are as rare as hen's teeth (if you'll forgive the evolutionary phrase).

Taking Back Astronomy won't help Lisle's reputation among his fellow scientists, but that may be moot anyway. He decamped from the field of real astronomy years ago to become, as TBA's author blurb has it, “a research scientist, author, and speaker at Answers in Genesis in Kentucky, and is the planetarium director at the Creation Museum.” A planetarium in a young-earth creation museum? Well, if it were easy to explain then any fool could do it. Dr. Lisle exercises his book-learning and his smarts to do the impossible, reconciling Genesis and reality.

So how well does he do it? And why do I remark on his truthfulness? Well, in the beginning—as they say—Lisle offers a cogent observation with which I entirely agree:

Glasses of the wrong prescription can make the world appear even blurrier than it otherwise would. Glasses can either distort or make clear, and so can a worldview.

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However, Lisle's comment on the importance of a worldview shares the page with an illustration of a nice fat Bible, an illustration whose caption reads, “The Bible is the history book of the universe.” Well, so much for worldview. Lisle's view is that everything must be contemplated through the lenses provided by a strict literal interpretation of Genesis. As they teach us in logic, you can conclude anything from a false premise, so Lisle is off and running.

As a diligent scholar, however, Lisle doesn't restrict himself to Genesis. No, he ponders other sources of knowledge, too. Like the book of Isaiah, for example:

The Bible indicates in several places that the universe has been “stretched out” or expanded. For example, Isaiah 40:22 teaches that God “stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” This would suggest that the universe has actually increased in size since its creation. God has stretched it out.

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Yes, Lisle is arguing that the Bible anticipates the discovery that the universe is expanding. While he said the Bible refers to this in “several places,” the Isaiah quote is the only citation I found in TBA. I presume therefore that it must be the best. Does the “like a curtain” simile put you in mind of something that grows and grows and grows? That's some curtain. How about the tent instead? God spreads it out and keeps stretching it, rather like a situation comedy camping trip, where you know the tent will come to no good end. If the God in Isaiah is pulling tents out of shape as dramatically as all that, we can assume he never got the merit badge for camping.

Naturally I perked up when Lisle moved on to some numerical arguments:

The Bible often uses the “stars of heaven” to represent an extremely large quantity. Genesis 22:17 teaches that God would multiply Abraham's descendants “as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is on the sea shore.” Genesis 32:12 makes it clear that this represents a number which is uncountable by humans: “the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.”

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Lisle follows this up by pointing out that the stars in the universe and the sand of the sea are approximately equal in number—somewhere around 10²², thereabouts. But didn't the Bible say humans cannot count these? Oh, that's okay! Lisle hastens to assure us that they can be “roughly estimated” but never “counted exactly.” See? The Bible was using figurative language! (Oh, wait a minute. Scratch that!) In any case, I have to say that Lisle's worldview goggles are working really well.

By the way, would Dr. Lisle care to enlighten us as to where we're going to put Abraham's ten billion trillion descendants? It sounds like planet Earth is going to get a little crowded. As for those preachers who like to piously express the hope that Jesus not tarry long in his return, need I point out that a lot of baby-making has to occur before Abraham's children number 10²². For Christ's sake, I hope the waiting room has a comfy chair.

My copy of TBA is from its first printing. Some errors survived the proofing process, but only one was deemed of sufficient significance to prompt the publisher to affix correction stickers on one of the pages. Lisle whips out some calculus to demonstrate that the recession of the moon argues against an old universe. No doubt the proofers were entirely unable to make heads nor tails of the mathematical notation, so the original printing is a mess. One of the errors even survives on the correction sticker, where 10²⁹ is rendered as simply 1029. Quibbling aside, however, I can confirm that Lisle's computations are quite correct. However, a computation is only as good as the assumptions that go into it. Lisle adopts a caricature of scientific uniformitarianism when he says that secular scientists assume that physical processes don't vary over time. (No doubt he's thinking about the assumption by mainstream science that radioactive decay rates and the speed of light really are constant, an assumption Lisle doesn't accept.) Thus he says we should assume, for the sake of argument, that the moon's recession rate constant is k = 1.2 × 10²⁹ km⁷/yr, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen.

The recession rate constant appears in a differential equation for the rate of change of r, the earth-moon distance, with respect to time. Lisle says the equation is approximately given by dr/dt = k/r⁶. Do you feel a pricking in your thumbs yet, because a wicked-awful argument is in the offing? Using the current lunar recession rate of 2.3 cm/yr as an initial condition, Lisle “proves” that the upper bound on the age of the earth-moon system is 1.5 billion years, “much less than the 4.5 billion years that evolutionists require.” First of all, getting this back-of-the-envelope calculation to come out within a factor of 3 of the accepted age of the earth is not exactly a miss. It's remarkably close, in fact, considering that the differential equation is only an approximation anyway. Besides, the earth-moon system was quite different in the past, at least under the principal hypothesis of its formation, so it takes no stretch of the imagination to suppose that k was different eons ago. Nevertheless, Lisle brags

The recession of the moon is a problem for a belief in billions of years, but is perfectly consistent with a young age.

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I guess he has a point. If the universe is only 6,000 years old, you sure don't have to worry about the moon going anywhere.

Lisle continues in this vein throughout Taking Back Astronomy: When scientists offer hypotheses or explanations, he waves them away as if they were no more than Ptolemaic astronomers struggling to “save the phenomena” of the geocentric theory of the universe. When Lisle espies any feature of modern astronomy that is not explained to his complete satisfaction, it's a telling blow against mainstream science and the purported age of the universe. He appears completely sincere and open in his arguments, carefully building everything on a biblical foundation. Eventually, even though he might not think so, Lisle comes to ignominious grief when he cites the work of another credentialed creationist, physicist Russell Humphreys. Mainstream astrophysicists have a big problem, Lisle explains, in understanding the strengths of magnetic fields detected during space exploration. In a solar system billions of years old, magnetic fields should be weak and attenuated. Creation science, however, offers a compelling explanation:

Dr. Russ Humphreys has produced a creation-based model of planetary magnetic fields. This model proposes that when God created the planets of the solar system, He made them first as water which God then supernaturally changed into the substances of which the planets are comprised today.

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You see, water molecules are dipoles that generate a small magnetic field which just might hang around after the water transmogrifies into other elements. Wow! This is working way too hard. The moment Humphreys came up with a “theory” that required God's direct intervention, William of Ockham would have nudged him in the ribs and said, “Hey, buddy, why not just let God set the magnetic field strengths directly? I mean, as long as he's puttering around in the universe doing magic.”

After God transforms the water into other materials, the electric current maintaining the magnetic field will begin to decay as it encounters electrical resistance within the material.

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Not if God doesn't want it to!

I'm sorry, Dr. Lisle. “God did it” is not a scientific hypothesis. You pass your own worldview test with flying colors. Your blinders are in excellent working condition.

Boulder in the sky

What goes around

Look at the moon. I mean really look at the moon. Crane your neck and regard the earth's traveling companion. Try it. Were you stunned by what you saw?

You should be. Unfortunately, the moon is to most of us just an everyday object that recedes into the background. That describes my usual reaction to the moon, too. However, I am a child of the Space Age who was a teenager at the time of the first moon landing. When I dig back into my memories, I recall how it seemed at the time. On occasion, I can still recapture some of those sensations.

It happened again recently. The moon helped. I was out for a late afternoon stroll and a dab of white in the sky caught my eye. The timing was perfect. The sky was blue and clear; the waxing moon was slightly past half full. And it was round. The moon does not always strike the eye as a round object, but a couple of days before or after the half moon is the perfect time to capture the moon's three-dimensionality. The terminator—the line separating the lit side of the moon from the dark—is gently bowed at those times, turning the moon's visual aspect into a ball. Half moon is no good. The terminator is a straight line right down the middle and all you see is a half-disk in the sky. If anything, the full moon is worse. The washed-out satellite turns into a tarnished silver disk mounted on a sable background. The full moon has no more depth or mystery than an Elvis on velvet.

I, on the other hand, looked up at the moon at the perfect moment and saw a huge round rock hanging in the sky. When this perspective seizes your senses, you are suddenly on the greatest thrill ride in the world. There is a huge rock hanging in the sky! And the earth beneath you also becomes an orb, a sphere on which you are standing. Try not to get too dizzy. There is no better moment at which to capture the sensation of living in a planetary system than when you look at the partially lit moon with the understanding that you are standing on a similarly lit sphere.

After some seconds—maybe a couple of minutes if you're lucky—you come back to earth and the moon is just the moon again. Some little-regarded reflector of the sun's glory. But you'll remember that you had the sensation, even if the sensation itself is gone. And one day it will all strike you again.

You are here

I am not a traveler. While I don't mind seeing new places, I find the process of getting there too onerous to endure cheerfully. Airports and security screenings particularly put me off. Any trip that takes me too far away to end up spending the night in my own bed is normally too long a trip as far as I'm concerned. I know that most people are not homebodies to the degree I am, but that's the situation.

Nevertheless, I have been overseas. Once. I travel a few hundred miles every couple of months to visit family (both of my parents are alive and in good health). And recently I was talked into going to a conference for math teachers in southern California. It was sponsored by my publisher and I resolved that it would be a good thing to do. It was. I met some excellent math professors from several western states, had great discussions with them, and enjoyed the off-season resort locale.

I also noticed something I had forgotten about previous trips: Travel really is distracting. Problems that previously obsessed you seem to recede into the background and you end up regarding them from a new perspective. Perhaps you even discover that what you thought was serious is rather trivial. Breaking out of a routine can shake things up and recharge your batteries. I guess that's what people mean when they talk about vacations and recreation. I'll have to remember that.

I am, of course, constructing a parallel here. You don't actually go anywhere when you look at the moon. (Remember, I mean look at the moon.) But it can give you a tiny bit of perspective that reveals the scale at which we live. Whether that pleases or daunts you is an individual reaction.

My nephew and I were discussing the moon the other day. He informed me that you have to wait till night to see the moon. He's six, so he's not to be judged too harshly for his observational lapses. Many adults probably think the same thing. The moon is merely more obvious during the night, but it spends as much time above the horizon in daylight as it does in night-time. It's always there, visible more often than not, ticking away the clockwork of the spinning system in which we reside.

It is an extraordinary occurrence for a planet to have a satellite as large as our moon. Sure, the moons of Jupiter are even larger, but they shrivel to insignificance next to the bulk of Jupiter itself. Proportionately speaking, our moon is an enormous planetary satellite. It is both large enough and close enough to be a spectacular sight in earth's sky—a spectacle to which we have become accustomed. Try, however, to look up at it with new eyes. And brace yourself.