Death By Black Hole

by Tom

(If I get around to it, I will write a part 2 sometime soon... this is a very interesting topic for me!  It is fascinating to get a look at how people in my (possible) profession see people of my faith.)

Last month I started a book called Death by Black Hole (written by Neil DeGrasse Tyson) that was basically a collection of medium-length essays on the universe, physics (astrophysics in particular), science versus religion, and probably a hundred other things.

It ended up being an excellent way to get back into reading for fun (read: non-textbook reading), something I hadn't done in a long while.  There were several places where it got a little too general for me, but it wasn't written for physics majors so I guess I can cut some slack; on the whole I thought it was very entertaining.  It did briefly touch on some things I've been thinking around for some time though, namely the huge (as far as I see it) gap between science and religion.  In fact, this might have been the smallest section of the book, but it is certainly the touchiest for me right now.  A quote: Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion.  I don't have any firm footing on this yet, in a way it's too personal.  But still, here are some more quotes to ponder (emphasis mine):

Through the Church's influence, Aristotelian philosophies became lodged in the common knowledge of the Western world, blindly believed and repeated.  Not only did people repeat to others that which was not true, but they also ignored things that clearly happened but were not supposed to be true.  
In A.D. 1054 [a star] increased in brightness by a factor of a million.  The Chinese astronomers wrote about it.  Middle Eastern astronomers wrote about it.  Native Americans of what is now the southwestern United States made rock engravings of it.  The star became bright enough to be plainly visible in the daytime for weeks, yet we have no record of anybody in all of Europe recording the event... Cosmic events that were "allowed" to happen were routinely recorded...[but] The Bible says the stars don't change. Aristotle said the stars don't change.  The Church, with its unmatched authority, declares the stars don't change.  The population then falls victim to a collective delusion that was stronger than its members' own powers of observation.  
But what happened before all this [the big bang]?  What happened before the beginning?  Astrophysicists have no idea.  Or rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science.  Yet certain types of religious people tend to assert, with a certain tinge of smugness, that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues.  A prime mover.  But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify - a multiverse, for instance?  Or what if the universe, like its particles, just popped into existence from nothing?  Such replies satisfy nobody.  Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist on the ever-shifting frontier.  
People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.  And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy.  "The universe always was" goes unrecognized as a legitimate answer to "What was around before the beginning?"  But for many religious people, the answer "God always was" is the obvious and pleasing answer to "What was around before God?"