Cosmos Episode 1: The good, the bad, and the problematic stuff

by Salman Hameed

The rebooted Cosmos has started with a bang. But bangs can go in many different directions. Here are some thoughts on the first episode. But with some caveats first: I was enamored with the first Cosmos. So it is always tempting to compare the rebooted version to the original one. But I watched the original when I was thirteen - and it is impossible for me to be in the same state of mind while watching Cosmos 2.0. Second, the idea of Cosmic Calendar was original in Sagan's Cosmos - and while it has been updated, the new Cosmic Calendar is now a copy. As is the phrase, "we are made up of star stuff". Plus, because of the hype, publicity, and the team behind Cosmos 2, we have to raise our standards of evaluation - and that may not be that fair. With some of these limitations in mind, here are some things that stood out for me:


The Good Stuff: The visuals are spectacular! I also enjoyed the addition of animations in story telling. In particular, I absolutely loved the animated sequence of the development of human civilization at the end of the Cosmic Calendar. Similarly, the pacing of the Bruno segment was perfect (though it had historical problems - see below). The tour of the universe and the Cosmic calendar could have been better with less "information" and more context. For example, there were too many stops in the early part of the Cosmic Calendar - and I think that diluted the overall impact. Oh and a big missed opportunity towards the end of the Calendar when Tyson was talking about the early hominid species. As I remember, the background had the famous 3.5 million year old Laetoli footsteps, possibly of three individuals, preserved in the volcanic ashes of Tanzania. It would have been amazing to have imagined where those three individuals might have been headed - while leaving these footprints that not only have lasted over 3 million years, but also have provided us with the evidence of bipedalism before the development of modern brain. One could have also jumped from these footprints to the importance of Neil Armstrong's footprint on the Moon. Okay - I didn't write the show and it may be unfair to start bringing up new additions.

The Bad Stuff: There already has been criticism for the animated story centered on Giordano Bruno. So lets get it out there: Cosmos 2.0 did not do a good job with history. Here are two reasons why this is a problem: a) It provides unnecessary fodder to places like the Discovery Institute (see here), and b) There is no excuse for bad history. After all, we all complain when bad science is depicted in TV shows and movies. Heck, Tyson was even upset with Sandra Bullock's zero-gravity hair in Gravity. Considering this, they should pay the same respect to other fields, including history. So what was wrong with the Bruno story? Well, the story implied that he was primarily burnt for his 'heretical' view of an infinite universe (with infinite number of worlds) and his belief in Copernicanism. Like the Galileo Affair, this is often depicted as a clash between science and religion, or at least science and catholicism (though Cosmos 2.0 correctly pointed out opposition to Copernicanism from Lutherans and Calvinists as well). Reality is more complicated, and this particular narrative of Bruno vs the Church was created in the 19th century  (See this Irtiqa post from 2008:   Why was Giordano Bruno Burnt at the Stake?). As Corey Powell explains very nicely in his post, Did 'Cosmos' pick the wrong hero?, Bruno was accused of several heresies, and a belief in an infinite universe was just one of them:

The Roman Inquisition listed eight charges against Bruno. His belief in the plurality of worlds was just one. The others involved denying the divinity of Jesus, denying the virgin birth, denying transubstantiation, practicing magic, and believing that animals and objects (including the Earth) possessed souls. You could fairly call Bruno a martyr to the cause of religious freedom, but his cosmic worldview was neither a deduction nor a guess. It was a philosophical corollary of his heterodox belief that God and souls filled all of the universe.

Oh and he thought that most of the Church officials were idiots - and called them "asses". So while, technically it is true that he was burnt at the stake for his belief in plurality of the worlds, to have a story that makes it the only thread is a bit misleading. And just as we don't like bad science in the name of simplicity, we should not like bad history in the name of simpler narratives.

Perhaps the worst thing in all this is that this can become a divisive issue. Similarly, Tyson at one point says that if you are ready to accept scientific methodology (I'm paraphrasing here), then join me in this voyage. I would have guessed that everyone should be invited to join in this adventure, and hopefully, all viewers will come out with a deeper appreciation of science and the universe.

I also thought that after the soaring rhetoric of Cosmic Calendar, where humans are literally insignificant, it was a letdown to end the show with Tyson's meeting with Sagan. Yes, yes, it is about passing the torch. But that was already done at the beginning of the episode. The original Cosmos left us pondering about the future of humanity (what will we do in the next second of the Cosmic Calendar?), whereas the first episode of Cosmos 2.0 left us firmly planted on Earth with Tyson.

The Problematic stuff: In Reflections on the Pale Blue Dot, Sagan wrote:

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

And yet, Cosmos 2.0 started with glorifying one of the current leaders: President Obama. I have no idea what Sagan would have thought about Obama's drone program, NSA spying, and the long solitary confinement by the government of Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning). Sagan opposed many of President Reagan's policies and even declined an invitation to meet with him at the White House. Unlike seeking a Presidential endorsement for his show, I wonder if he would have wooed the audience just by focusing on the grandeur of the universe - like he did in 1980. I think the very beginning of Cosmos 2.0 succumbed to the celebrity culture, and thus became a bit smaller.

Waiting for episode 2. I know that one of the episodes will also feature al-haytham (Alhazen) as one of the major animated characters. Hope they get the history right.

Related post: 
Watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos in Pakistan in 1984

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Saturday Video: An idiosyncratic short film about Giordano Bruno

by Salman Hameed

Here is an intriguing short film (about 20 minutes): Giordano Bruno in Conscious Memory. Bruno, of course, has come to stand in as a symbol for free speech etc., but that is a later construction (see this earlier post: Why was Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake? But this movie, takes it in another direction and presents his broader influence, including on the writings of Shakespeare (they were contemporaries - and some have suggested this connection. I don't know anything about this to comment on it). Despite the acting and some limited camera work, I like the ambitious nature of the short film. Enjoy!

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Irtiqa Conversation with Dr. Stefaan Blancke: Creationism in Europe

by Salman Hameed

There is a new paper out in the Journal of the Academy of Religion that provides a broad overview of the various creationist movements in Europe. The title of the paper is Creationism in Europe: Facts, Gaps and Prospects (you can download the full paper!) and it is authored by Stefaan Blancke, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, Johan Braeckman, and Peter Kjaergaard. The same team is also behind a follow-up edited volume on this topic coming out in 2014, where I have also contributed a chapter on Islamic Creationism in Europe, and Martin Reixinger has a chapter on Turkey.

I had a chance to have a conversation with the lead author for the paper, Dr. Stefaan Blancke, who is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University, Belgium. If you have 15 minutes to spare, here is the video:

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Talk at Hampshire College by Tracy Leavelle: The Awful Crater and The Eternal God

by Salman Hameed

Our next Science and Religion lecture at Hampshire College is tomorrow (March 28th). And it is my absolute pleasure to announce that it will be by historian Tracy Leavelle. I met him back when he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Smith College, and I know that he is a big fan of soccer and the band Wilco! But he is not only a fantastic researcher, but also a great story-teller. Tracy and I have collaborated on the issue of telescopes on the sacred Mauna Kea in Hawai'i (if you follow the blog, you must have seen umpteen posts on that).

His Science & Religion talk does cover the topic of Hawai'i, but not of telescopes. Nevertheless, it sounds fantastic (and I'm not saying this because he is my friend...). If you are in the area, join us for the talk tomorrow. Here are the details for the talk:


Hampshire College Lecture Series on Science and Religion:

The Awful Crater and the Eternal God: Volcanoes and Missionary Science in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i

by Dr. Tracy Leavelle

Thursday, March 28 at 5:30 pm

 Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Peterson Hall

Hampshire College

Abstract: In 1852, Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawai‘i erupted in dramatic fashion, sending fountains of lava hundreds of feet into the air and down the side of the mountain for miles.  The American missionary Titus Coan climbed Mauna Loa to study the event and found himself alone and afraid on the great volcano, aghast at “the awful crater.”  Here, Coan discovered the imprint of a mighty God of creation and destruction.  In a prominent American scientific journal, he reflected, “I seemed to be standing in the presence and before the burning throne of the eternal God.”  The volcanoes of Hawai‘i represented for Coan the dynamic contest between salvation and damnation, civilization and savagery.  As such, they became sites of both rigorous scientific study and deep religious contemplation.

Speaker bio: Dr. Tracy Neal Leavelle is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at
Creighton University and a former Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellow at Smith College.  He has recently been appointed Director of Digital Humanities Initiatives at Creighton.  His first book is The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (Penn, 2012).

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Meet the new Pope, Same as the old Pope

by Salman Hameed

The Catholic Church had a chance to move into the 21st century, but it looks like it will wait another few decades to take that plunge:

But Cardinal Bergoglio is also a conventional choice, a theological conservative of Italian ancestry who vigorously backs Vatican positions on abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women and other major issues — leading to heated clashes with Argentina’s current left-leaning president.

He was less energetic, however, when it came to standing up to Argentina’s military dictatorship during the 1970s as the country was consumed by a conflict between right and left that became known as the Dirty War. As many as 30,000 people were disappeared, tortured or killed by the dictatorship, and he has been accused of knowing about the abuses and failing to do enough to stop them.        

Read the NYT analysis here. Now it is still possible that the new Pope may change his stance on social issues ranging from women's clerical equality and gay marriage to issues of stem cells, abortion and contraception. I think one of the 19th century Pope's, Pius IX, moved from a relatively liberal position to a conservative one - so why not move the other way this time around? Otherwise, the Church will be taken over by the tide of time - as has been going on for the past several decades. All of this is of interest as the Muslim world also faces similar issues but without a comparable institutional structure. The lack of such an hierarchy is probably good as it may be more compatible with the fragmentary nature of the modern world. On the other hand, a religious leader like the Dalai Lama can also speed up the incorporation of a religion into the modern world. We'll see how things will go - but the Church certainly seems to be in no hurry.

And if interested, now we know how the white and black smoke is produced. The Vatican has given up its recipe - and now even you can make the announcement:

Both recipes are fairly standard pyrotechnical formulas. The white smoke, used to announce the election of a new pope, combines potassium chlorate, milk sugar (which serves as an easily ignitable fuel) and pine rosin, Vatican officials said in a statement. The black smoke, which was used Tuesday evening to signal that no one in the first round of balloting received the necessary two-thirds vote of the 115 cardinals, uses potassium perchlorate and anthracene (a component of coal tar), with sulfur as the fuel. Potassium chlorate and perchlorate are related compounds, but perchlorate is preferred in some formulations because it is more stable and safer. 

The chemicals are electrically ignited in a special stove first used for the conclave of 2005, the statement said. The stove sits in the Sistine Chapel next to an older stove in which the ballots are burned; the colored smoke and the smoke from the ballots mix and travel up a long copper flue to the chapel roof, where the smoke is visible from St. Peter’s Square. A resistance wire is used to preheat the flue so it draws properly, and the flue has a fan as a backup to ensure that no smoke enters the chapel.

Read about the recipe here.        

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What Shakespeare would have said of Galileo...

by Salman Hameed

Next year will be the 450th birth anniversaries of Galileo and Shakespeare. Last week's New Yorker has a beautifully written piece by Adam Gopnik on Galileo that wonders what Shakespeare would have written about his contemporary. Actually he delegates that responsibility to Bertolt Brecht and his famous play, Galileo. The article is very good but it also reinforces couple of misperceptions.  For example, it uses the famous 19th century painting of a defiant Galileo above as the set-piece for the article. The problem is that from what is known, Galileo was a frail old man when he came up in front of the inquisition and he did not want to offend them. And the inquisition itself wanted a way out as well and struck a plea bargain with him that would have let him off with a slap on the wrist. It was the Pope - the former friend of Galileo - who overrode the plea agreement. This is not to say that the treatment of Galileo was not shoddy and unjust. But that it is always good to read an article that also gets smaller thing right. The painting more reflects the view of the Church in the 19th century than a depiction of Galileo in front of the inquisition. Gopnik also implies that Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake because of belief in the plurality of the worlds. While Bruno did believe in the plurality of the worlds, and that was indeed considered heretical by the Church, there were also many more reasons for the Church to be angry about. It would be misleading to cherry-pick the reasons four centuries later (See this earlier post: Why was Giordano Bruno Burnt at the Stake?).

But these critiques aside, this is a fantastic and highly enjoyable article:

Although Galileo and Shakespeare were both born in 1564, just coming up on a shared four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, Shakespeare never wrote a play about his contemporary. (Wise man that he was, Shakespeare never wrote a play about anyone who was alive to protest.) The founder of modern science had to wait three hundred years, but when he got his play it was a good one: Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” which is the most Shakespearean of modern history plays, the most vivid and densely ambivalent. It was produced with Charles Laughton in 1947, during Brecht’s Hollywood exile, and Brecht’s image of the scientist as a worldly sensualist and ironist is hard to beat, or forget. Brecht’s Galileo steals the idea for the telescope from the Dutch, flatters the Medici into giving him a sinecure, creates two new sciences from sheer smarts and gumption—and then, threatened by the Church with torture for holding the wrong views on man’s place in the universe, he collapses, recants, and lives on in a twilight of shame. 

It might be said that Brecht, who truckled to the House Un-American Activities Committee—“My activities . . . have always been purely literary activities of a strictly independent nature”—and then spent the next bit of his own life, post-Hollywood, accessorized to the Stalinist government of East Germany, was the last man in the world to be pointing a finger at someone for selling out honesty for comfort. But then the last man who ought to point that finger is always the one who does. Galileo’s shame, or apostasy, certainly shapes the origin myth of modern science, giving it not a martyr-hero but a turncoat, albeit one of genius. “Unhappy is the land that breeds no heroes,” his former apprentice says at the play’s climax to the master who has betrayed the Copernican faith. “No,” Galileo replies, “unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” It is a bitter valediction for the birth of the new learning. The myth that, once condemned, he muttered under his breath, about the earth, “But still, it moves,” provides small comfort for the persecuted, and is not one that Brecht adopted.

Interestingly, Gopnik sees a closer connection of Galileo with that of Michelangelo:

Although the twinship of Shakespeare and Galileo is one that we see retrospectively, another, even more auspicious twinning was noted and celebrated during Galileo’s lifetime: Galileo was born in Pisa on the day that Michelangelo died. In truth, it was probably about a week later, but the records were tweaked to make it seem so. The connection was real, and deep. Galileo spent his life as an engineer and astronomer, but his primary education was almost exclusively in what we would call the liberal arts: music, drawing, poetry, and rhetoric—the kind of thing that had made Michelangelo’s Florence the capital of culture in the previous hundred years. 

Galileo was afflicted with a cold and crazy mother—after he made his first telescope, she tried to bribe a servant to betray its secret so that she could sell it on the market!—and some of the chauvinism that flecks his life and his writing may have derived from weird-mom worries. He was, however, very close to his father, Vincenzo Galilei, a lute player and, more important, a musical theorist. Vincenzo wrote a book, startlingly similar in tone and style to the ones his son wrote later, ripping apart ancient Ptolemaic systems of lute tuning, as his son ripped apart Ptolemaic astronomy. Evidently, there were numerological prejudices in the ancient tuning that didn’t pass the test of the ear. The young Galileo took for granted the intellectual freedom conceded to Renaissance musicians. The Inquisition was all ears, but not at concerts. 

Part of Galileo’s genius was to transfer the spirit of the Italian Renaissance in the plastic arts to the mathematical and observational ones. He took the competitive, empirical drive with which Florentine painters had been looking at the world and used it to look at the night sky. The intellectual practices of doubting authority and trying out experiments happened on lutes and with tempera on gesso before they turned toward the stars. You had only to study the previous two centuries of Florentine drawing, from the rocky pillars of Masaccio to the twisting perfection of Michelangelo, to see how knowledge grew through a contest in observation. As the physicist and historian of science Mark Peterson points out, the young Galileo used his newly acquired skills as a geometer to lecture on the architecture of Hell as Dante had imagined it, grasping the hidden truth of “scaling up”: an Inferno that big couldn’t be built on classical engineering principles. But the painters and poets could look at the world, safely, through the lens of religious subjects; Galileo, looking through his lens, saw the religious non-subject. They looked at people and saw angels; he looked at the heavens, and didn’t.

And he gets back to the question of Brecht's hero towards the end, and I love the way Gopnik then connects it to science in general:

Could he, as Brecht might have wanted, have done otherwise, acted more heroically? Milton’s Galileo was a free man imprisoned by intolerance. What would Shakespeare’s Galileo have been, one wonders, had he ever written him? Well, in a sense, he had written him, as Falstaff, the man of appetite and wit who sees through the game of honor and fidelity. Galileo’s myth is not unlike the fat knight’s, the story of a medieval ethic of courage and honor supplanted by the modern one of cunning, wit, and self-knowledge. Martyrdom is the test of faith, but the test of truth is truth. Once the book was published, who cared what transparent lies you had to tell to save your life? The best reason we have to believe in miracles is the miracle that people are prepared to die for them. But the best reason that we have to believe in the moons of Jupiter is that no one has to be prepared to die for them in order for them to be real. 

So the scientist can shrug at the torturer and say, Any way you want me to tell it, I will. You’ve got the waterboard. The stars are still there. It may be no accident that so many of the great scientists really have followed Galileo, in ducking and avoiding the consequences of what they discovered. In the roster of genius, evasion of worldly responsibility seems practically a fixed theme. Newton escaped the world through nuttiness, Darwin through elaborate evasive courtesies and by farming out the politics to Huxley. Heisenberg’s uncertainty was political—he did nuclear-fission research for Hitler—as well as quantum-mechanical. Science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals. It’s one of the things that make it move.

There is a lot more in the article. If interested in the subject, please read the full article here.

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Pope: God's mind behind complex theories...

Big Bang, for example:

God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said Thursday.

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

But what about simpler scientific ideas - hmm...such as Newton's laws of motion? Or at least these seem relatively simple to us now. Or - what about the law of reflection. This is really simple - so really no need to bring in God's mind here. Fluid dynamics? Difficult, but it is almost too neatly explained by some not so simple ("complex" - ha!) mathematics. What about the formation of the Moon. Well, it is quite complex and the answer is still uncertain. So unless those pesky astronomers get to it quickly, lets provisionally place God's mind behind it. The formation of our Solar system? No -no. There is no need to bring in God in this discussion. This is a relatively straightforward problem of the collapse of a gaseous nebula, and then it basically follows the laws of thermodynamics. Yes, there was a time when we thought that our Solar system was the entire universe, and that the formation of the Solar system was beyond the purview of science. But we know better. So no need for proclaiming God's mind behind the formation of the solar system. Virgo Cluster of galaxies? Well...this is kind of a silly question. Of course, we have a rough idea about the formation of galaxy clusters and much of the large scale structure of the universe - even though our explanations need dark matter and dark energy. Hmm...so this may be a bit dicey to place God's mind behind dark matter / dark energy. After all, this is a bit dicey and can turn out to be wrong. Oh - but there is strong evidence for the Big Bang (thank you Microwave Background Radiation). Hmm...and this is quite a complex idea, and astronomers are, at present, quite clueless about the cause of the Big Bang (despite Hawking's recent proclamations). So...God's mind must be behind the Big Bang. I mean, one can argue that God's mind is behind the law of reflection too - but saying that is not very satisfying. But attributing God's mind behind an unsolved problem really sounds impressive. Of course, we hope that those pesky astronomers don't start figuring out causes for the Big Bang. We are safe for the time being. In case, they really pull up something, we can always ascribe God's to the next unsolved question regarding the universe.

Or you can essentially reduce the above paragraph to the God of the gaps problem.

Actually in all fairness, the problem with Pope's statement lies in the creation of the dichotomy between God's mind and the creation of the universe "by chance". But why not simply put God behind the creation of chance as well? I.e. why not take a broader sweep and say that God is the reason why there is something instead of nothing - and that this is a matter of pure faith independent of any scientific ideas? May be this is what the Pope was trying to say in the first place, but is unfortunately using the term Big Bang. And yes, Stephen Hawking's recent statement that God did not create the universe may only be accurate for this universe, and ultimately a statement of faith (in atheism) regarding the existence of something instead of nothing. So lets call it even here.

Read the full story here.

In case, you are wondering if astronomers are really serious about ways to test out the existence of other universes, here is an example: Observing the Multiverse from Cosmic Variance. Before, I start getting comments that this is all speculation, well at this time of course it is. But my point is that people are seriously looking to test out these ideas.

Related posts:
Hawking, God and the Universe
Lecture Video: Paul Davies - Origin of the Laws of Physics
Multiverse theory: Leave it to science

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Bruno on the stake again...

Giordano Bruno is again getting burnt for his beliefs in the plurality of worlds. For example, an article in last week's Science about the discovery of extrasolar planets started this way (you may need subscription to access it):

For holding firm to this idea of plural worlds, Giordano Bruno spent 7 years in a dungeon; then, on 17 February 1600, he was led to a public square in Rome and burned at the stake. If Bruno had had the power to summon the future, his best shot at survival might have been to show his inquisitors the Web page of the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, circa 2010. Evidence from the year 2000, when the planets in the encyclopedia numbered a mere 26, might not have done the trick. But the latest tally, 505 and counting, surely would have stayed their torches.

Yes, indeed, one of the reasons for his burning was his belief in the plurality of the worlds, but this isn't the full story. Not that burning anyone is a good thing, but there were a host of other reasons as well that ended up costing Bruno his life (please see an earlier post: Why was Giordano Bruno Burnt at the Stake?). From a review in Salon of a recent Bruno biography:

It was what Rowland calls Bruno's "combative personality" that finally did him in. The Roman Inquisition, in an especially insecure and punitive mood on account of widespread Protestant agitation against the church, had only the Venetian nobleman's testimony against the philosopher. Then one of Bruno's former cellmates, a man he'd slapped during a dispute and who feared that Bruno had informed on him as well, stepped forward to relate the various blasphemies and heretical convictions Bruno had spouted during their time together behind bars.

...

The last straw was Bruno's refusal to accept the authority of the Inquisition itself. Even so, his rebellion was peculiarly Catholic: He kept insisting he'd recant if the pope personally confirmed to him that his beliefs were heresy. This infuriated Cardinal Bellarmine, known for his conviction that harsh punishments make good teachers. Sixteen years later, Galileo managed to elude the more extreme penalties meted out by Bellarmine and company with a public (and essentially politic) repudiation of his heliocentric views; he lived to fight another day under a relatively comfortable house arrest. Bruno was characteristically less prudent, and died naked and gagged (by some accounts with an iron spike through his tongue), in flames.

As Rowland points out, Bruno, irascible as he was, had committed no crime, not even the disruption of mass, a common practice by militant Protestants of the day (and also punishable by death). He "had done nothing in his life except talk, write and argue." When his fate was pronounced, he told his condemners, "You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it." It took a long time for that to prove true, yet thanks to those idealistic 19th-century students, everyone who comes to Rome to behold the splendor of the Vatican is also presented with a reminder of its bloody, repressive past. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, free-thinking Romans cover his statue with flowers. While the church has since expressed "profound regret" for his persecution (which it simultaneously tries to palm off on "civil authority"), this can't be comfortably reconciled with the canonization of Bellarmine a mere seven decades ago. Dead 400 years and largely unread but immortalized nevertheless in bronze, Giordano Bruno is still a thorn in their side.

Read the full review in Salon here. But also see the Science article on extrasolar planets that looks at the progress in this direction over the past decade (astronomers have started to detect earth-sized exoplanets, have taken direct images of at least one, and have started to analyze atmospheres of some also). And the next few years should certainly be exciting - especially with Kepler space telescope now in orbit:

Astronomers expect Kepler to find several Earth-like planets in the next few years. Already, researchers are planning new ground- and space-based instruments to take spectra of the atmospheres of some of those habitable planets. Those atmospheres may bear signatures of life, such as oxygen, which researchers believe can be produced only by biological processes. If and when that happens, it would be the ultimate vindication of Bruno's fatal vision of a cosmos teeming with worlds.

Okay, I agree with the Bruno sentiment here.                

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Saint Death in Mexico

Today's Washington Post has an interesting article on the worship of Santa Muerte - also known as Saint Death, in Mexico. The saint is represented as a female skeleton often with a reaper-like scythe in one hand and a globe in the other. So how do we define this religion? Well..we again get to the point of who is doing the defining. There is no question that the festivities are...shall I say, a bit unconventional. For example, drugs are part of the festival. Mexican authorities link the group to the drug war and call Santa Muerte as "narco-saint":

The devotion to Santa Muerte rattles many, even in Mexico. She is widely and purposefully misunderstood. The media focus on the lurid cult as a sign of the country's descent into new-millennial madness, a perfect partner for a danza macabra, played out against the backdrop of a modern plague -- the drug war -- and its obsessions with body counts and ritualized decapitation.

The Catholic Church has rejected the cult, calling it demonic, and the Mexican military has swept across the border region, destroying roadside shrines built in the saint's honor. The authorities have condemned Santa Muerte as a "narco-saint," worshipped by drug traffickers, cartel assassins and dope slingers.

But again, things may be a bit more complicated, especially when separating out those who worship versus who/what they worship:

But the worship is more a reflection of contemporary Mexico, says the anthropologist J. Katia Perdigón Castañeda, the author of "La Santa Muerte: Protector of Mankind." The cult is an urban pop amalgam, New Age meets heavy metal meets Virgin of Guadalupe. It is no accident that it is also cross-cultural -- that the centers of worship are the poor, proud heart of Mexico City and the violent frontier lands of Laredo, Juarez and Tijuana. The cult borrows equally from Hollywood and the Aztec underworld. Altars, necklaces and tattoos honoring Santa Muerte also make appearances in Mexican American neighborhoods from Los Angeles to Boston.

"The believers may be drug dealers, doctors, carpenters, housewives. The cult accepts all. No matter the social status or age or sexual preference. Even transsexuals. Even criminals. That's very important, that the cult of Santa Muerte accepts everyone," Perdigón told me, "because death takes one and all."

Where mainstream Mexican Catholicism promises a better life in the hereafter, "central to the devotion of Santa Muerte is the fact that the believers want a miracle, a favor, in the present, in this life, not when they are dead," Perdigón said. "They want help now."

From a marketplace perspective, this is not a bad strategy to be a successful religion. It casts the widest possible net and promises immediate rewards. Read the full article here. But to get the real flavor, check out the photo gallery here. These photographs are fascinating. I loved number 14, where an aerosol is being used to spray holy water.

So - is this a cult and/or is this part of New Religious Movements (NRMs)? For a prior discussion on definitions, check out Cults, Sects and the Scientology Trial.

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Vatican and Astrobiology

Semester is in its last swing - so the blogging is a bit slow. But below is a piece on Colbert on a recent Vatican conference on astrobiology. Of course, we have to go through this again that the Vatican has an astronomy program that does regular astronomy (no search for God in Andromeda galaxy). You can also add now that the discussion over the possibility of extraterrestrial life is quite old within the Christian tradition, traceable at least to the time of Aquinas (and Bruno was burnt for more complex reasons than simply holding a view on the plurality of worlds - though at the time it was considered one of his many heresies. Hmm...plus he called the Church officials "asses"). Here is Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Gold, Frankincense and Mars - Guy Consolmagno
www.colbertnation.com
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You can download the program of the Vatican astrobiology conference here. It has couple of familiar names: Paul Davies, Chris Impey, and Jill Tarter. There was also an article in Washington Post about the conference and touched upon some interesting topics - especially this amusing quote about "brother extraterrestrials":

Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer, director of the centuries-old Vatican Observatory and a driving force behind the conference, suggested in an interview last year that the possibility of "brother extraterrestrials" poses no problem for Catholic theology. "As a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God," Funes explained. "This does not conflict with our faith because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God."

Here is a bit about other religions and also about debates within Christianity:

The possibility of extraterrestrial life is not much of an issue for Eastern religions, which tend to be less Earth-centric. Islam also has little problem with extraterrestrials because the Koran speaks explicitly of life beyond Earth, as do some newer Christian groups such as Mormons. It is in mainstream Western religious traditions, in which humans and God are central, where astrobiology poses the biggest challenge.

"I think the discovery of a second genesis would be of enormous spiritual significance," says Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist from Arizona State University who is speaking at the Vatican conference. He believes the potential challenge to Christianity in particular "is being downplayed" by religious leaders.

"The real threat would come from the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, because if there are beings elsewhere in the universe, then Christians, they're in this horrible bind. They believe that God became incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ in order to save humankind, not dolphins or chimpanzees or little green men on other planets."

Davies explained the tensions within the Catholic Church: "If you look back at the history of Christian debate on this, it divides into two camps. There are those that believe that it is human destiny to bring salvation to the aliens, and those who believe in multiple incarnations," he said, referencing the belief that Christ could have appeared on other planets at other times. "The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism." (As Giordano Bruno learned.)

Many Protestant scholars agree with Funes, saying that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would not pose a major challenge to their faith or theology, especially if it was not intelligent or morally aware. But on the evangelical side, there is a deep concern, one reminiscent of the battles over evolution. "My theological perspective is that E.T. life would actually make a mockery of the very reason Christ came to die for our sins, for our redemption," Gary Bates, head of Atlanta-based Creation Ministries International, told me recently in a critique of the Vatican conference. Bates believes that "the entire focus of creation is mankind on this Earth" and that intelligent, morally aware extraterrestrial life would undermine that view and belief in the incarnation, resurrection and redemption drama so central to the faith. "It is a huge problem that many Christians have not really thought about," he said.

Read the full article here.

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Galileo's fingers to be reunited!

I had a chance to see Galileo's middle finger at a Galileo exhibit in Florence this past summer. It seems that two more fingers and a tooth (his last one) were also taken as a relic from his body, when it was moved to the church of Santa Croce. But now the other two fingers have been found and will soon be reunited with his middle finger (tip Janine Solberg):

Three fingers were cut from Galileo's hand in March 1737, when his body was moved from a temporary monument to its final resting place in Florence, Italy. The last tooth remaining in his lower jaw was also taken, Galluzzi said.

Two of the fingers and the tooth ended up in a sealed glass jar that disappeared sometime after 1905.

There had been "no trace" of them for more than 100 years until the person who bought them in the auction came to the museum recently.
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The owner who bought the fingers wants to remain anonymous, Galluzzi said, so the museum is not giving more details about who sold them or when.

The museum plans to display the fingers and tooth in March 2010, after it re-opens following a renovation, Galluzzi said.

The museum has had the third Galileo finger since 1927, so the digits will be reunited for the first time in centuries, he added.

Now, if you are asking why take these parts?

Removing body parts from the corpse was an echo of a practice common with saints, whose digits, tongues and organs were revered by Catholics as relics with sacred powers.
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The people who cut off his fingers essentially considered him a secular saint, Galluzzi said, noting the fingers that were removed were the ones he would have used to hold a pen.

Yes...yes, you can fill in your own ironic comments here as well. But we still have to ask, who removed his fingers? Well, here is a bit from Curious Expeditions (remember that Galileo died in 1642):

As with a fine wine, it took some years for Galileo’s finger to age into something worth snapping off his skeletal hand. The finger was removed by one Anton Francesco Gori on March 12, 1737, 95 years after Galileo’s death. Passed around for a couple hundred years it finally came to rest in the Florence History of Science Museum. Today is sits among lodestones and telescopes, the only human fragment in a museum devoted entirely to scientific instruments.

And Anton Francesco Gori was a priest. Again we see it is hard to shape a clear-cut science versus religion narrative. Not to mention the fact that Galileo's remains were transferred to Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence - the largest Franciscan church in the world. He is not alone there. Apart from Franciscan nobles, remains of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Rossini also reside in the Basilica.

Here is the full view of the Galileo sculpture inside Santa Croce in Florence (a close-up of his bust is above-right). It is very nicely done and has a prominent place in the church (Michelangelo's sculpture is across from Galileo's and is of the same size). Notice that people light up candles for him. His body is underneath this sculpture, one floor below.

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Genesis, God, and Tyra

One Old Testament scholar is claiming that at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, God did not create the Earth - but only the humans and the animals:

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.
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She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate".

The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth"

I'm not sure how surprising this really is. I thought the ambiguity involving Hebrew grammar in the first verse of the Book of Genesis was known already and that different translations present slightly different takes on creation. Plus, the idea of Creatio ex Nihilo was, I thought, a later interpretation by Christian scholars. I'm sure, people more qualified than me can comment on this in more detail.

In any case, here is an excellent website where you can look at the various translations. For example, here is the King James Bible (also roughly the same translation in the Jewish Publication Society 1917 edition):

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

But then here is a translation from Young's Literal Translation (another version with similar translation here).

1 In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth -- 2 the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness is on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters

Thus, Ellen van Wolde's assertion above does not seem as shocking as the news story is making out to be. In any case, I think all of this stuff is interesting from an academic sense - but I don't think it makes any difference to how and why people believe in their respective religions.

In any case, read the full story here.

On a more serious note, here is another competing version - this time according to the Book of Tyra (tip from Laura Sizer):

¹ In the beginning Tyra created the heaven and the earth.

² And the earth was without a runway, and void of all fierce colors and outfits; and improper lighting caused darkness upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of Tyra worked the runway upon the face of the waters, striking fierce poses at each step of the way.
³ And Tyra said, Let there be lighting: and there was lighting, and stage hands, and production assistants.
⁴ And Tyra saw the lighting, that it was good, minimized her imperfections, and made her eyes smile: and Tyra divided the light from the darkness to ensure fierce day and night photos.
⁵ And Tyra called the light Tyra, and the darkness she called Naomi. And the evening and the morning were the first days dedicated to the Spirit of Tyra.
⁶ And Tyra said, Let there be a makeup studio in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the women at the counters of Macy’s from the female-like men.
⁷ And Tyra made the makeup studio, and divided the cosmetologists, which were under the firmament, from the make-up artists which were above the firmament: and it was so.
⁸ And Tyra called the firmament the CW. And the evening and the morning provided Cover Girl lighting.

Read the rest of Book of Tyra here and don't miss out the video on the website.

Also check out Crumb's take on The Book of Genesis.

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Ontological argument via cartoon

Our friend Nathan Schneider has a blog entry on NYT on the Ontological argument for the existence of God. He explains it well - and even adds a helpful cartoon (drawn by Nathan himself):

A proof for God’s existence came to Anselm in the dark of early morning, under the solemn sound of psalms, echoing against the stone walls of the church. It was the year 1077, at the monastery of Bec in what is now northern France.
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All the other proofs he knew depended on observations about the world: the order of nature and the physics of cause and effect. Anselm, instead, gunned straight for the dream of the Greek philosophers: a God of pure, abstract reason, a secret God of the inner life, which the wise can recognize everywhere they go, sufficient onto itself. Aristotle called it the self-thinking thought.

The proof, which would come to be called the ontological argument, purports to demonstrate the existence of God from ideas alone: the concept of a God that doesn’t exist wouldn’t be much of a God. A true concept of God, “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived,” would have to be a God that exists. Therefore, God exists.

Yes - it does seem like a sleight of hand. However, Nathan points out correctly what Anselm was really trying to do:

The whole thing dissolved away, along with the sense of certainty. I started to remember the echo of Kant’s devastating complaint against Anselm: existence is not a predicate. God seemed to disappear. But I read on. I was reminded it wasn’t God’s existence that plagued Anselm — of that, he had no doubt — it was the phrasing. Modern arguments and evangelists and New Atheists have duped us into thinking that the interesting question is whether God exists; no, what mattered for Anselm was how we think about God and about one another.

I think this last point is central: for a 12th century monk, of course, existence of God is really not in question. A 21st century frame (heck - or even a 17th/18th century frame) thus looses some of the original meaning and the purpose of the argument (by the way, there were critiques of Anselm's argument even during his own life time - so don't think that all of his contemporaries - also believers in God - were simply blown away by his logic).

Read the full article here. By the way, if you want to learn more about the Ontological argument, check out the link in this earlier post: God and Philosophers I: The Ontological Argument.

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Galileo in the service of Islam

Galileo stays as the poster child for science & religion conflict model. This despite of a strong effort by historians of science to bring to attention the political, cultural, and social aspects of the Galileo Affair - and the fact that Galileo himself was religious, that there were many in the Catholic Church that supported his position, and that his prickly personality had gained him several enemies within the Church (for more science & religion misconceptions, check out this fantastic book, Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science & religion, edited by Ronald Numbers).

But what I find amusing is the use of Galileo misconceptions not in science vs religion debates - but rather by Muslims to present Islam as a superior religion to Christianity. The template goes as follows:
a) Galileo was persecuted by Christians
b) Christians didn't accept Galileo's ideas because Christianity is a corrupted doctrine
c) this caused the tension between science & religion
c) Islam is a scientific religion - thus it has no problem with Galileo or with science
d) Galileo was (of course) right - hence Islam is better than Christianity

There are numerous forums where Muslims make similar arguments (for example, see Dr. Israr Ahmed making this argument at the end of Q&A). But I like the following example as it includes not only Galileo but several other popular ideas that use and misuse science. Intriguingly, this response is part of the rejection of biological evolution:

Thing is, Darwin’s culture was of the Christian West which had persecuted people like Galileo in the past who observed the physical universe was different from the flawed teaching/understandings of the Christian church at the time. The WEST then began to develop a strained relationship with Science.

But with Islam it was different. Muslims in Cordoba/Andalucía the Maghreb embraced science – naturally. If man hadn’t yet corrupted Divine Revelation then how could science contradict religion. It was the Muslims who translated the Greek works which eventually seeded the European Renaissance which the West tries to hijack as being independent of the Muslims. Europe was in the dark ages while Islam was embraced and lifted the people from Jahilliah to success from what’s now known as Spain to parts of China.

So Islam NEVER had a problem with Science. But the European tension with science once again hijacked Science as it’s own and in effect ‘exported’ this tension to Islam when Europeans talked about Science as if it was something that rested solely in their hands.

Eventually, Europeans used science for horrific means: ways to kill and injure people: biological diseases, poison gas, nuclear weapons with an eye to plundering the resources from other countries (like Malaysian tin) without thought for the environment or without much thought for the indigenous people. The Muslims had already largely reached a level of development that was satisfactory and more in tune with the earth so it appeared the Muslims might have stalled.

I have heard these arguments many times before (and some statements in here are even somewhat correct - such as the Muslim contribution to medieval intellectual thought). But the last sentence is new to me: the linking of Muslim lack of scientific development with a concern for the environment. While the Islam and science harmony narrative was shaped in the 19th century by Muslim reformers like Afghani, this particular post-hoc environmental innovation seems to be a 21st century response.

As for Galileo, he must be twisting in his grave at Santa Croce (minus his finger - a post about his tomb coming up) by the way Muslims are dragging his name 367 years after his death - both against Christianity and against an established idea of science.

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Religious embrace of technology

Well...even the Pope is now on Facebook. Here is an interesting article that talks about the historic relation between religion and technology (or more on the embrace of technology by religions). It starts with the Pope:

"Employ these new technologies to make the Gospel known, so that the Good News of God’s infinite love for all people will resound in new ways across our increasingly technological world!"

These could have been the words of Johannes Gutenberg or Billy Graham. In fact, they belong to the current pope, Benedict XVI. He spoke them last month in anticipation of World Social Communication Day, an annual event intended to spread the Good News of God’s infinite love using mass media outlets. The message this year was mostly for the kids: “Young people in particular, I appeal to you: Bear witness to your faith through the digital world!”

Catholics aren’t the only Christians connecting on the Web. When it was created in 2007, GodTube — an alternative to YouTube created for Christians and since renamed tangle — was the fastest-growing website in the U.S. Two years later, it’s just one of millions of such sites where people of Christian faith can find each other, date, discuss scripture, promote business, and debate the effects of technology on believers. There’s christiananswers.net and biblegateway.com, which lets you search Bible passages in over 100 languages (Always wanted to say “The Lord is my Shepherd” in Tagalog?), the rather moderate jesusfreak.com, christian.com, .net, .org…. You get the idea.

But no surprise here. This is helpful in social connectivity and proselytizing.

That Christians have so eagerly embraced the Internet is no surprise. It is at the heart of Christianity to use whatever means necessary to extend the community of believers. This includes technology. “The fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them…for that is not what they do,” the philosopher Stanley Fish recently wrote in The New York Times. Likewise, technology doesn’t have to be based on faith to be at its service. The word of God will be spread to all nations of the world before the world ends. It’s right there in Matthew 24:14. Though Isaiah 44:9-20 tells Christians not to worship the devices humans make to ease the struggle of life, it doesn’t say Christians can’t keep working both toward perfection and better tools with which to achieve it. The Internet makes proselytizing easier. I think Paul would have been pleased as punch to find an Internet café in Antioch. And that is what technology has always provided — techniques for making the things you want to do in life less hard.

Interestingly, the article also includes Noah's ark and his vineyard as examples of technology for the service of religion:

According to the Torah, it was Noah who would relieve men of blood, sweat and tears with techne. He was like a Jewish Prometheus. “This one will bring us rest (Noah means ‘rest’) from our work and the toil of our hands," Genesis 5:29 states, meaning that God created Noah for this specific purpose, to teach people how to improve the tools they use to till the soil. This had been the dilemma of humanity since that little incident in Eden — out of paradise and into the desert. Noah would usher in a new age of prosperity, where people could more easily use the Earth for their benefit. Of course, the new age wouldn’t come until 600 years and one really big flood later. The point is that, for the Jews, man’s first great technological accomplishment was the Ark that gave the world a fresh start. Furthering the case that God gave people the power of technology to improve life, we skip to the next part of the story, Genesis 9:20-21, in which the second great technological feat of Noah was to build himself a vineyard, make some wine, get drunk, and pass out nude. L’Chaim! For a contemporary nod to Judaism’s marriage of technology and alcohol, you can visit the kosher speakeasy behind the Temple Beit Israel, the Second Life Synagogue.

And of course, several religious requirements for Muslims (direction to Mecca, daily prayer times, lunar calendar) drove developments not only in astronomy and spherical trigonometry, but also in technology required for navigation, etc:

And speaking of boats, Islamic doctrine has long inspired technological advancement in shipbuilding, navigation, and a wide number of other fields. Muhammed al-Idrisi, the 12th-century Andalusian scholar and cartographer, created some of the most useful and startlingly accurate maps of the ancient world. And there was the polymath al-Biruni who, excelling in many areas of applied and theoretical science—contributed greatly to the fields of geography and mapmaking; he established, for example, the technique of measuring the Earth using three coordinates to define a point in three-dimensional space. Using advanced techniques to chart the distances between cities was a particular specialty. His estimated radius of the Earth wasn’t ‘discovered’ by the West until the 16th century.

With detailed trade routes and meticulously tracked mariner’s charts, one might argue that it was simply intellectual curiosity or the thirst for empire that drove these innovations. Yet an important chapter in the Koran — Surah 22, which proclaims that “the people shall observe Hajj pilgrimage” — offers another theory. Travel wasn’t always so easy. First of all, you had to know where Mecca was in relationship to where you were. A well-charted map, then, was essential to fulfilling the basic requirements of the faith. Second, you had to get there, so you needed good navigational equipment. Muslims invented all kinds of compasses, clocks, and astrolabes, including the compass dial, which was the world’s version of GPS for centuries. Its inventor, Ibn al-Shatir, developed it initially not just to help find the direction of Mecca, but to help track the times of the Salah prayers (the ones that are performed five times a day) at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

This is all well and good. But it would have been nice if the article also included at least some examples where the same religions thwart (and have thwarted) adoption of new technology - especially when it comes to medical innovations (the last paragraph briefly touches on that - but doesn't provide any examples). Thus, the interesting question is not that religions happily adopt technology - that is obvious - but rather what kind of technologies make religions particularly eager to accept or reject them. The article is interesting - but it gives a skewed vision of religion and technology relationship.

Read the full article here. Also see these posts Halo 3 around some Churches and Recharging soul points: new religious video games.

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"My medical pseudoscience is better than yours..."

Here is a fascinating case of the Catholic Church rejecting the healing powers of Reiki using natural science while endorsing its own miracles (thanks to Laura (Sizer) for bringing it to attention). This came up as part of an investigation of US nuns by the Vatican. Now there are other interesting issues with the nature of the investigation (for example, one of the motivations is that the US nuns have "failed to “promote” the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation"). However, I want to focus on the issue of Reike:

Besides these two investigations, another decree that affected some nuns was issued in March by the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops said that Catholics should stop practicing Reiki, a healing therapy that is used in some Catholic hospitals and retreat centers, and which was enthusiastically adopted by many nuns. The bishops said Reiki is both unscientific and non-Christian.

Nuns practicing reiki and running church reform groups may have finally proved too much for the church’s male hierarchy, said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns,” (Doubleday Religion, 2006).

So how do they come up with the rejection of Reiki? Here are some gems from their report Guidelines for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy (pdf):

The Church recognizes two kinds of healing: healing by divine grace and healing that utilizes the powers of nature. As for the first, we can point to the ministry of Christ, who performed many physical healings and who commissioned his disciples to carry on that work. In fidelity to this commission, from the time of the Apostles the Church has interceded on behalf of the sick through the invocation of the name of the Lord Jesus, asking for healing through the power of the Holy Spirit, whether in the form of the sacramental laying on of hands and anointing with oil or of simple prayers for healing, which often include an appeal to the saints for their aid. As for the second, the Church has never considered a plea for divine healing, which comes as a gift from God, to exclude recourse to natural means of healing through the practice of medicine. Alongside her sacrament of healing and various prayers for healing, the Church has a long history of caring for the sick through the use of natural means. The most obvious sign of this is the great number of Catholic hospitals that are found throughout our country.

Ok...so a divine power is accepted as one of the healing forces. But what about the Church's position on Reiki?

Nevertheless, there are some Reiki practitioners, primarily nurses, who attempt to approach Reiki simply as a natural means of healing. Viewed as natural means of healing, however, Reiki becomes subject to the standards of natural science. It is true that there may be means of natural healing that have not yet been understood or recognized by science. The basic criteria for judging whether or not one should entrust oneself to any particular natural means of healing, however, remain those of science.

And here is the Church's sudden trust in science:

Judged according to these standards, Reiki lacks scientific credibility. It has not been accepted by the scientific and medical communities as an effective therapy. Reputable scientific studies attesting to the efficacy of Reiki are lacking, as is a plausible scientific explanation as to how it could possibly be efficacious. The explanation of the efficacy of Reiki depends entirely on a particular view of the world as permeated by this "universal life energy" (Reiki) that is subject to manipulation by human thought and will. Reiki practitioners claim that their training allows one to channel the "universal life energy" that is present in all things. This "universal life energy," however, is unknown to natural science.

Oh - how crazy! Why would any one believe this Reiki crap? We should get back to the true and tested method of healing by prayers. If this doesn't work, we can always go to Lourdes, where the Catholic Church has officially recognized 67 miraculous healings.

By the way, if you are indeed sick and if you need more than a placebo to recover, go to a doctor. Here is a bit more about Reiki and about the non-existent effects of prayer healing.

Read the NYT story on the investigation of US nuns here, and the report on Reiki here (pdf).

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Some Papal Archaeology

I think I'm reacting to the title of the NYT news story Pope says tests 'seem to conclude' bones are the Apostle Paul's (tip from Laura Sizer). It is an odd way of announcing a scientific work. Yes, we are talking about Vatican archaeologists, but still the reporting should note if the results are being published in a peer-reviewed journal or not. Pope's confirmation does not hold any water in the scientific world nor does it add any value to results. Perhaps, this is already published - but then the NYT should have also cited that journal. Otherwise, its only an unreliable science story:

The first scientific tests on what are believed to be the remains of the Apostle Paul, the Roman Catholic saint, “seem to conclude” that they belong to him, Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday.

Archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of Paul.

Benedict said scientists had conducted carbon dating tests on bone fragments found inside the sarcophagus and confirmed that they date from the first or second century.

“This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul,” Benedict said, announcing the findings at a service in the basilica to mark the end of the Vatican’s Pauline year, in honor of Paul.

Paul and Peter are the two main figures known for spreading the Christian faith after the death of Christ.

According to tradition, Paul, also known as the apostle to the Gentiles, was beheaded in Rome in the first century during the persecution of early Christians by Roman emperors. Popular belief holds that bone fragments from his head are in another Rome basilica, St. John Lateran, with his other remains inside the sarcophagus.
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Vatican archaeologists in 2002 began excavating the eight-foot coffin, which dates from at least 390 and was buried under the basilica’s main altar. The decision to unearth it was made after pilgrims who came to Rome during the Roman Catholic Church’s 2000 Jubilee year expressed disappointment at finding that Paul’s tomb — buried under layers of plaster and further hidden by an iron grate — could not be visited or touched.

Read the full story here.

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Science at the Vatican Observatory

May be they deserve it. The Vatican has indeed meddled in science many times in the past few centuries. Perhaps, it has been tough ceding authority to professional scientists in understanding the natural world. But the Vatican Observatory has been doing fine astronomy for some time - and this message has been tough to get across (see an earlier post, Yes, Vatican Observatory does completely normal science). Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Rome on galaxy disks, organized by the Vatican observatory. It was a fantastic conference - and they followed up with another one in 2007 on the Formation and evolution of galaxy disks.

Now we have an article in today's NYT about the Vatican Observatory that again reminds us that it does normal science:

But in the effort to rehabilitate the church’s image, nothing speaks louder than a paper by a Vatican astronomer in, say, The Astrophysical Journal or The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On a clear spring night in Arizona, the focus is not on theology but on the long list of mundane tasks that bring a telescope to life. As it tracks the sky, the massive instrument glides on a ring of pressurized oil. Pumps must be activated, gauges checked, computers rebooted. The telescope’s electronic sensor, similar to the one in a digital camera, must be cooled with liquid nitrogen to keep the megapixels from fuzzing with quantum noise.

As Dr. Corbally rushes from station to station flicking switches and turning dials, he seems less like a priest or even an astronomer than a maintenance engineer. Finally when everything is ready, starlight scooped up by the six-foot mirror is chopped into electronic bits, which are reconstituted as light on his video screen.

“Much of observing these days is watching monitors and playing with computers,” Dr. Corbally says. “People say, ‘Oh, that must be so beautiful being out there looking at the sky.’ I tell them it’s great if you like watching TV.”

There you have it. This is the experience of being at a modern astronomical facility. But there is one small difference. There is a dedication plaque that inevitably brings God into the equation:

“This new tower for studying the stars has been erected on this peaceful site,” it says in Latin. “May whoever searches here night and day the far reaches of space use it joyfully with the help of God.” At that point, religion leaves off and science begins.

The question is, does this plaque affect their science? There is an ongoing debate going on over science & religion conflict or accommodation (see Jerry Coyne, Chris Mooney, Ken Miller, and just today, a thoughtful post from Sean Carroll). I will have a separate post on this stuff later. But here I wanted to address this question in light of science at the Vatican observatory. Vatican astronomers are certainly accomodationists and their papers are being published in peer-reviewed astronomy journals. Should we (as scientists) have a problem with their plaque and with their beliefs? As long as their science (not necessarily their whole worldview) does not bring in any supernatural assumptions and it goes through the standard peer-reviewed system - like any other work, it should be fine. Is it really a problem if they call their scientific observations, secondary causes?

The target tonight is three spiral galaxies — Nos. 3165, 3166, 3169 in the New General Catalog — lying about 60 million light-years from Earth, a little south of the constellation Leo. Sitting at a desk near Dr. Corbally is Aileen O’Donoghue, an astronomer from St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who is interested in how these gravitational masses tug at one another, creating the stellar equivalent of tides.
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Back inside the control room she explains how the gravitational tides she is studying might be stellar nurseries. As one galaxy brushes by another, clouds of gas are stirred so violently that they give birth to stars.

In the Vatican Observatory’s annual report, at the point where a corporation might describe its business strategy, is a section delineating the difference between creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) and creatio continua: “the fact that at every instant, the continued existence of the universe itself is deliberately willed by God, who in this way is continually causing the universe to remain created.”

Theologians call these “primary causes,” those that flow from the unmoved mover. Sitting atop this eternal platform is another layer, the “secondary causes,” which can be safely left to science.

Dr. Corbally and Dr. O’Donoghue continue working through the night, collecting data on secondary causes — galactic tides, stellar birth. Sleep will wait until morning, and thoughts about primary causes for another time.

Read the full article here. By the way, the article mentions that one of the objects they were observing that night was a spiral galaxy, NGC 3169. Hey - this galaxy is a friend from my thesis. I was also looking at star formation. I wonder if their results are different from mine - and if that is the case, is it because of the plaque? :)

Also, see this lecture by Vatican astronomer Father George Coyne. The Q&A at the end (the last half hour) wonderfully illustrates his position on science & religion.

Oh - and as a bonus, here is an image of NGC 3169 from the Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy is located roughly 70 million light years away - and we are looking the light from a few hundred billion stars. You can also see very cool dust lanes in the galaxy. However, the blue clumps (mostly sitting on top of the dust lanes) identify places where young stars reside. The central part of the galaxy is all awash in yellowish light. This is the result of the combined light of about a hundred billion stars - so many that we can't see them individually. Enjoy!

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