Grandma's Concept of the Universe

Grandma and The Space Program

The (Apparent) Conflict Between Religion and Science

Recently our daily paper ran a contribution from a reader entitled, "Embrace science" It read:

A friend of mine, asked why science points to the universe being billions of years old, says it is only 6,000 years old and that God made it look older. My first question is why? If God is real, why the big mystery? Why not show himself? Why not erase all doubt? My answer is no such being exists. There is no proof of a god but plenty to prove science is correct. No tooth fairy no Santa Claus, no Easter bunny, no celestial dictator. Only when this magical thinking is erased from the world will we finally progress as a species.

Our preacher thought this was a sufficiently serious attack on everybody's religious expression that he commented on it in church. I hadn't seen the article, so I didn't know what he was talking about (a not unusual situation) until I looked it up. I was intrigued by the claim that the "friend" maintained that the universe is "only 6,000 years old and that God made it look older," to which the writer's "first question is why?"

Why, indeed?

I note that the writer herself did not offer an opinion one way or the other about the age of the universe, only that her "friend" says that the universe is only 6000 years old in response to an assertion that "science points to the universe being billions of years old." To what religion does the "friend" subscribe, do you suppose?

I was reminded of my step-grandmother who visited us for Christmas, 1968, when astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders visited the moon in the Apollo 8 spacecraft, watched from all possible angles on worldwide live television. Grandma knew better; she knew that the whole Apollo program was a Big Lie!

Grandma was a voracious Bible reader, and so she knew that the moon was not a solid body, as the earth is, but rather that it is a "light in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth." (Genesis 1:16-17).

Grandma also knew that the word "firmament" comes from the word "firm," meaning "solid." Therefore, she knew positively that no one had ever shot a rocket into space, let alone cruise around there, because it would have hit the solid firmament of heaven and broken to smithereens! In fact, she knew that there was no such thing as outer space, because the entire universe consisted of a firmament that "divided the waters (of a limitless ocean) which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament" (Genesis 1:7) on which the sun, moon and stars rolled around like dried peas in a bowl (albeit upside-down).

To the end of her days, Grandma couldn't understand why other people were unable to see the wires that she fantasized to hold up the astronauts allegedly floating around in front of the television cameras. She knew that they were in a studio out in the desert somewhere (probably in Utah or Nevada); operated by agents of the Devil who were industriously laboring on sending the souls of those of little faith to perdition!

Grandma did not intend to be one of them! She was saved by faith, and her faith was strong, indeed. Not particularly well informed, to be sure, but incredibly strong!

On the other hand, not even Grandma claimed that the universe is only 6000 years old (or was in 1968). She surely didn't read it in the Bible, because it just isn't there. That assertion came from Irish Anglican Archbishop James Ussher, who added up all the durations in the Bible that were there and reportedly came to the conclusion that God created the universe at 6 PM on 22 October, 4004 BC according to the Julian calendar. So the "friend" is just wrong! It was Archbishop Ussher who claimed that the universe was 6000 years old (in 1996), not the Bible. Unfortunately, he was wrong, too, because he simply ignored the durations that the Bible doesn't specify. Maybe the "friend" is an old Irish Anglican.

Finding "secrets," especially dates, "hidden" in the Bible has always been a popular pastime for people who worship a god who would deliberately mislead supposedly less perceptive people. The latest popular "biblical prophecy" is that the world will end on 23 September, 2017. (Also 23 April, 2018. Quick, check your calendar!) Archbishop Ussher was 73, a remarkable age at the time, when he published the foregoing conclusion in his "Annals of the Past," so he might simply have been suffering from age-related dementia. One probably doesn't get to be Primate of All Ireland by being basically stupid. Logic suggests an alternative reason for his ill-advised opinions.

As just the first of thousands and thousands of examples of where Archbishop Ussher went wrong, the King James Bible (Genesis 1:1-3) says:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
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.
And God said, Let there be light: and [*] there was light.

What it does not say is anything, anything at all, at the asterisk. Not in the King James Version, not in the Revised Standard Version, not in the New American Bible, Revised Edition, not in the Vulgate (dixitque Deus fiat lux et [*] facta est lux -), not in the Douay-Rheims, not in the Jerusalem Bible, Not in the New World Translation, etc.

Among the absolute infinity of things it does not say is "instantly," "immediately," "right away," "some time afterward," "after a while," "380,000 years later," and so on. Archbishop Ussher, perhaps without really thinking about it, defaulted to "instantly." I think it was because it was just easier, and there was no more evidence at that particular state of maturity of the understanding of cosmology, as there is now, for any other choice.

We know better now. The current best estimate of the beginning of light after the beginning of the universe is "after about 380,000 years or so." (Nobody seems to have specified a precise date!) That does not contradict the Holy Bible any more than "instantly" does, but it does jibe with everything else we know about all creation so far (which "instantly" does not). We can see the early universe with our own modern telescope-aided eyeballs, which is certainly a lot more than Archbishop Ussher ever did. On the other hand, assuming that his addition was right, he showed that the Bible supports the assertion that the universe is at least 6000 years old, which agrees 100% with modern cosmology. Good for him!

So the question is valid: "If God is real, why the big mystery? Why not show himself? Why not erase all doubt?" The answer "God made it look older" is no more valid than the answers: "The scientists are all liars and heretics," "All humans are part of the power supply of a giant computer Matrix that is filling all our heads with images that only simulate reality," "Reality is simply your personal illusion," "We just don't know," and especially, "no such being exists."

The "god" the friend was talking about does not appear to be the most gracious, most loving, most powerful God that more mature religions worship. Her god is as real (or unreal) as Anunnaki, Ennead, Isis, Baal, Gitche Manitou, Huitzilopochtli, Dagda, Shangdi, Nana Buluku, Osiris, Set, Horus, Zeus, Teshub, Viracocha, Anu, Chiminigagua, Dushara, or Odin. It is a human construct, George Carlin's puny "invisible man living in the sky:"

"Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! ...But he loves you." - George Carlin

The concept of God as "an invisible man living in the sky" was perhaps most precisely portrayed by Michelangelo in his famous paintings of a fierce elderly male figure in the Sistine Chapel. Western perceptions of the deity are probably strongly influenced by this image. It is a far more popular representation than pictures of a black hole (We'll get to that later.) Jesus, or a woman (Mother Nature?) or as the sun (the driving force of life, which George Carlin claims to worship) or as, say, a rain forest, a department store, a WalMart, a manufacturing facility, or other obvious "sources of good things."

This is the angry, capricious god of the pagans, the creator of a universe so simple and limited that even a child (or a pagan) could fully understand it (and him), who makes it look older simply to confuse human beings for his own purposes, whatever they might be. Unlike the Most Gracious, Most Merciful God who "is Truth," this god is one of lies, a being fully capable of maliciously creating a universe and deceitfully preventing the rational beings he put in it from understanding it. He also deliberately creates "non-elect" human beings for the specific purpose of torturing them for all eternity, with absolutely no way for them ever to obtain redemption. What reason could there possibly be to believe anything such a god does or says? The "proof" for the existence of this kind of a god seems to be "God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It," with no rational interpretation whatever. Modern science requires a bit more rationale. It certainly produces more tangible results (like the Apollo moon rockets), that's for sure!

One has to wonder how Grandma would have explained the Apollo LEM lower stages still visible on the moon, the Space Shuttle, how the Global Positioning System works, Google Earth images, weather satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope pictures, the Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons photographs, satellite TV, and the fact that anybody with the right equipment can bounce a laser off the retroreflectors that the Apollo 11 astronauts put on the moon like Sheldon and his friends did in the Big Bang Theory (...or, come to think of it, what Grandma thought about the Big Bang Theory itself)

For believers like Grandma, the idea of a god who can be completely understood by average people, most of whom don't even understand how modern television works, is somehow comfortable and reassuring, if not particularly enlightening. They choose to believe what they think he had written down even if he deliberately confuses people and condemns them to hell for no reason. "Childlike faith," as opposed to, say, "childlike" table manners or "childlike" toilet habits, is often praised as a virtue. It is also compatible with what they believe to be "His Word," as contained in various vague, confusing, contradictory and obfuscatory publications printed by an assortment of book publishers, and concerning the understanding of which there has never, ever been any clear consensus.

As I see it though, the main reason for rejection of this belief is that it produces an irreconcilable trichotomy between faith, personal experience, and common sense. It leaves gullible people open to sometimes fatal exploitation by the likes of Jim Jones, David Koresh and Marshall Applewhite, to name just some of the recent most egregious. Evolution and modern communications media work to improve the human race by purging it of the followers of such beliefs - even if they don't believe it does.

An example of faith-based angst is the crisis of conscience experienced by a young computer science student of mine many years ago. Her clergyman claimed that everyone who used the Internet was going to hell (a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where she would live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time). Apparently abandoning this belief would lead to the same result, a lose/lose situation with my student in the middle. I explained to her, as patiently as I could, that my course was required to graduate, and that using the Internet was necessary to pass it. I suggested that the only logical options seemed to me to be quitting college or transferring to one that did not require Internet use. I don't recall what her decision was, but I feel sorry that she was forced by the faith to which she subscribed to make it.

It appears that the desire to worship a deity of some kind, like the desire to learn things, is part of human nature. That alone does not prove that any kind of a god exists, but it does suggest that we humans, working together, might be able to find out, one way or the other.

To begin with, Judeo-Christian monotheism began with a deity worshipped by an ancient Semitic people whose enduring cultural literature claims that He first made Himself known to a person now known as "Abraham," the "father in faith," as the "most high God" (Genesis 14:18-20). Obviously, the concept of "god" was well established in Abraham's time. He understood such a being as something powerful and mysterious that should be worshipped and to whom it was appropriate to offer sacrifice in thanksgiving for the blessings Abraham and his family perceived. The story of Moses has Him meeting "face to face" (Exodus 33:11) and revealing a personality and His secret name, "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14). Twelve hundred years of history later, the pagan Aristotle came to the independent conclusion that this same entity, an uncreated, immortal, unchanging being, or "Unmoved Mover, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world" must exist. Given the name, the powerful, mysterious God Abraham worshipped seems to be the very same exact being that Aristotle was talking about.

Various other religions from world history seem to have followed a similar route to a belief in a "supreme being" with unlimited power and ability. This is not Grandma's god, because it (He?) is fully compatible with everything else we know about the universe, but itself (Himself?) is beyond our limited human understanding, just like the nature and source of dark energy and what happens inside a black hole (so far).

There is a word for "people who don't believe in God." The word is "atheist" ("without God"). The word does not, however, offer any clue about whatever it is that the atheist does not believe. Christian atheists don't believe in something different from what Jewish atheists don't believe in, for example. A relative of mine claims to be an atheist, but the god he doesn't believe in seems to be Grandma's deceitful god, which I don't believe in, either. That would not surprise Grandma, though. She was pretty sure, as an astrophysicist and space facilities engineer, that I was some kind of heathen.

Catholic Christians, like me, start with the historical Jewish God and come to the conclusion that the same being can be known from reason alone, so that reason and faith are complementary to, and enlighten, each other. Pope John Paul II wrote an encyclical, "Faith and Reason" that explains this position. However, nothing in Jewish, Christian or Muslim Scripture, or in Aristotle's reasonable conjecture, requires God to be visible, or any particular size or shape. The demand for God to "make himself known" assumes that He can be observed by human vision, is small enough to be seen and recognized as the being described in the Bible, and not too far away to be seen at all. That might not be (and from what we can deduce about Him, probably is not) the case. There are lots of things that we can't see, even with technological help. We can, however, demonstrate their existence by their effects on things we can see!

The God we Catholics worship is of such a nature that he is immaterial, immortal and not subject to the limitations of space and time. We see Him as industriously, zealously, persistently and tenaciously doing everything He can to resolve this dilemma, to make Himself known in every way possible by everything we can perceive, even with the enhancements of modern instrumentation and observation technology. We maintain that heaven and earth are filled with His glory! We Christians believe that He even went to the extent of becoming an actual, physical human being so that we could not only see, but also hear, touch and smell him, and to help us understand who and what He is. But we find it impossible fully to do that, nonetheless, because we humans just aren't that bright.

One of the brightest of our species, Albert Einstein, predicted in his General Theory of Relativity the existence of what came to be called black holes. These are actual holes in the fabric of the universe (firmament?) from which nothing that falls in, even light, can escape. Black holes are invisibly black, extremely long lived, unbelievably large, and immensely powerful. They are surrounded by a vortex of infalling matter that produces intense radiation, resembling the artistic device known as a "glory." Their gravity is so strong that even the largest stars that come too close are torn apart and devoured! The known laws of physics break down at their edge, called an "event horizon," so that nobody knows what might happen inside them.

They are so bizarre that their actual existence was generally doubted until the black hole Cygnus X-1 was discovered in 1971. Since then, evidence has accumulated that there are very many, possibly billions or more, of them. Their number is still being debated. (We can't count them, of course, because we can't see them!) In April of 2019, one of them, in the M87 galaxy, 55 million light years from earth, was actually photographed. The black hole itself is completely, invisibly, unreflecting, black, but the radiation from the intensely hot gas around it reveals its shape, which is very large and perfectly round. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotates around a black hole called Sagittarius A* ("Sagittarius A Star") containing a mass about 4.3 million times that of our sun, with a radius of about 14 million miles, about 32 times the sun's. Its apparent density is therefore about 131 times greater than the sun, almost 23.5 times that of pure iron! - A really, really, really heavy hole! It was precisely located by observing the orbits of the many stars immediately orbiting it. We can't completely understand it, but its awesome gravitational force dominates our entire galaxy. We know what it is, where it is, and what it's doing, even though it's over 26 thousand light years away! It's not possible actually to see the hole (because it's an invisible hole), but we know it's there from the brilliance of the superheated infalling gas and dust, that we can see, and the orbits of every star in the Milky Way that orbits around it.

Armed with the knowledge of what and where it is, and what it's doing, Sagittarius A* was photographed on Thursday, May 12, 2022 by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, a collection of eight synchronized astronomical radiotelescopes, specifically designed to look for black holes. This was the same instrument array that photographed the one in the M87 galaxy in 2019.

This image of the black hole Sagittarius A* shows the "glory," or "halo" of radiation of the gas and dust superheated to billions of degrees by the effects of the hole's enormous gravity. The hole itself is in the center. It can't be seen in the image because it's invisible.

If we can know so much about an invisible black hole from its effects on our entire galaxy 26,000 light years away, why do we balk at the concept of an invisible God that influences everything right here at home in all of our own experience?

Even though we can't examine God as we can black holes, our perception of God might be enlightened somewhat by what we perceive of other people. Most of our friends are at least partially known to us by the clothes they wear, dressing for decoration or success or comfort or protection or seduction. A person in a general's uniform is probably responsible and decisive; one in dirty rags is likely a vagrant. Someone completely encased in a diving suit or a space suit is probably a diver or astronaut, respectively. The universe is God's clothes, by which we are able to draw conclusions about the wearer. St. Paul put it this way:

"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things." - St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans 1:20-23)

A quick and dirty proof of the existence of this kind of God is my Timex digital watch. This little gadget has symbols on it that change in a precise, repeating sequence, which happens to be in exact synchrony with the motion of the "firmament of heaven," which most of us now know is actually due to the rotation of the planet earth on its axis and its revolution around the sun. There must be some direct link between my digital watch and the motion of the earth. What could possibly be such a link is left as an exercise for the student.

The bottom line here is that God is actually manifestly and completely obvious, by His own activity (including creating us in the first place). He is a "big mystery" only because we are unable, with our limited monkey minds, to understand Him, and just possibly the totality of His universe as well. But our limited minds can learn more and more about everything including the "Unmoved Mover," and reconcile it with what we already know. If reconciliation is not possible, we are doing it wrong.

Our preacher, being a Catholic clergyman, accepts this description of God at least in principle, but admits to having trouble with the concept of an unchangeable God, who creates things by saying this and then that (in Shakespearean English) but somehow doesn't change at all! Since we perceive the entire universe as evolving over time, it is as easy for us to imagine God "doing" different things at different times, like we do, as it was for Grandma to imagine her provincial universe surrounded by "waters." Of course, that doesn't mean that we'd be any more right than Grandma was.

The concept of a universe that revealed the reality of black holes includes a reasonable demonstration of the possibility that an extratemporal being (God) could create, control and view the evolving universe all at once, without any change in Himself or His activity whatever. I explore this elsewhere, so I won't do it here.

Grandma refused to believe in a god that she could not fully understand, regardless of the contrary evidence of her own senses and those of others around the world. As a result, she became an atheist. She chose not to participate in the world-wide effort of the space program to find out more about God and His "mighty works" by going out and looking for Him in new places. She was content to remain invincibly ignorant and to worship a false god, a pathetic idol, a fictitious construct of her own limited imagination.

So I agree with the writer. There is no proof of Grandma's kind of a god but plenty to prove science (which examines God's handiwork) is correct. No tooth fairy, no Santa Claus, no Easter bunny, no celestial dictator. Only when this magical thinking is erased from the world, including the last vestiges of the "invisible man in the sky with a list," will we finally progress as a species.

Thank God!

John Lindorfer

Astronaut Bill Anders took this unplanned photograph of earthrise over the lunar horizon during the Apollo 8 mission. He also read and transmitted to Earth the first four verses of the Book of Genesis. Subsequent verses were read by Jim Lovell and Frank Borman as a 1968 Christmas message to those watching on "the good Earth."