Ryan Herbert
English Comp. 103
J. Williamson
11/21/94
Since man first looked upon the stars in the heavens, he has wondered what laws governed the movement of such bodies. Historically, what man could not explain through their laws of science, they attributed to God. Early man credited God with controlling everything, creating Earth as the center of the universe and the heavens as just a dome rotating around the earth. When Galileo determined that the Earth and the other planets rotated around the sun, the church thought that the idea was sacrilegious. The Catholic Church felt that such an idea would destroy people's belief in the Bible and disputed it bitterly even though Galileo had strong empirical evidence that his theory was true. Next, Newton came along and developed calculus, which is the basis of modern physics. Again, the church thought that these new ideas would allow the public to have faith in equations and not God. Finally, Einstein developed better, more complex equations to describe the universe around us. Modern scientists claim that this leap in science is man's crowning achievement and with these new explanations there is no need for a god to explain the gaps. However, Einstein's equations still have flaws. God has created a wonderful and complex universe around us, but we will never be able to eliminate God from the universe's explanation.
Galileo Galilei is generally considered the father of modern science. He was the first man to try to understand how the real world works by observing it. When Galileo thought that he had sufficient evidence to support his view that the planets orbited around the sun, he published his ideas in Italian rather than the usual Latin reserved for academic writings. This won him support outside of the universities, but annoyed the academics. They tried to convince the Catholic Church to ban Galileo's ideas. This troubled Galileo, so he traveled to Rome to argue that the Bible was not written to explain scientific phenomena and when the Bible conflicted with common sense it was being allegorical. However, the church still declared Galileo "false and erroneous" and told Galileo never to "defend or hold" his ideas again. Galileo complied, but a few years later a longtime friend of his became the pope. Galileo tried to get the decree revoked, but failed. He did, however, get permission to write an "objective" book comparing the two theories that would come to the conclusion that man could not determine how the world worked because God could bring about the same effects in ways impossible to imagine by man.
Isaac Newton was also not well liked by the Catholic Church. However, he was not as meek as Galileo: in fact, he was quite anti-Catholic. He regularly published ideas contrary to those held by the Catholic Church. One particular quote of Newton's that troubled the Church was that we may not "invoke Angels or the souls of dead men as Mediators between God and Man. For as there is but one God so there is but one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus." Statements like that, combined with his equations describing the elliptical path of the planets around the sun made him quite an enemy of the church. However, the Catholic Church was not as powerful as it was in Galileo's day, and his ideas spread quickly.
Albert Einstein developed the best theory describing the universe to date. However, he was the first major progressive that did not have a belief in God. The power that the church had in his day was little to none when compared to Galileo's time. No significant religious opposition was apparent when he proposed his Special and later his General Theories of Relativity, which encompass many aspects of the universe and predicted such things as black holes, which were discovered after his theory was written. Many scientists have taken his accomplishment and declared it the crowning achievement of man and that it leaves no room for a god. They choose to ignore the fact that the theory is still inadequate, for it does not explain certain key points in the universe, such as the "big bang" (when the universe began or zero time), the "big crunch" (when the universe will collapse and time will end), and singularities (points of infinite density in the centers of black holes which are tears in the space-time continuum.)
Rather than use Einstein's theory to prove that there is no god, I feel that it supports the idea that God is a must. Religion and science are not meant to compete: rather, they should complement each other. Something must be present to enforce the "law of nature" that scientists have observed. Also, the underlying idea of evolution is that in an infinite amount of time, the extremely unique circumstances required to begin life could occur. However, with Einstein's theory, the universe had a definite beginning and will have a definite end. This means that there is a finite amount of time for life to be created, reducing the chances that evolution could occur on its own to an infinitesimal likeliness, yet scientists continue support it as a fact.
Since Einstein's equations are so complex, most of the general public does not understand the ideas. Therefore, many scientists and theorists who do understand them believe that they are better than those who do not and feel that they do not need a god to complete their understanding of the universe. One scientist, particularly disdainful of "inferior minds," claims that he is "so sure that there is no god that [he is] willing to burn in hell." However, being a scientist, he should know that unless he can prove that God does not exist that he must consider the possibility of God. Another stated that since his five year old child stated that there was a brand new invisible car in his yard, and he could not disprove it, that he believed his child. Despite his sarcastic tone, this "invisible car" has no other proof of existence, as God has. No book written by many authors over many centuries has been written about this vehicle, and no phenomena unexplained by science (called "miracles" by those who have "inferior minds") have been attributed to this "car."
The conclusion forced on Galileo by the Church may still prove to be correct: God must bring about similar effects in ways impossible to understand by man, for as we attempt to develop better and better theories and equations, the universe proves more and more complex. It is acknowledged that our present theories are inadequate. Theoretical physicists are working toward developing a "unified theory," combining Einstein's equations and quantum mechanics. However, even if this theory is developed, we will not "know the mind of God" as Stephen W. Hawking has said. The universe will turn out to be infinitely more complex than we originally thought, and God will prove to be the only one to pass the final physics test.
I apologize for not having a Works Cited for my quotes - my word processor had problems importing the old format, so either my Works Cited was lost in the (garbled) translation, or I never had one in the first place.
See other papers and read the plagiarism notice.