Posted on 10/08/2009 10:23:40 AM PDT by NYer
Ancient radiation, the birth of the universe and the future of the galaxies around us: for Marco Bersanelli, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Milan, such mysteries are all in a day’s work.
For the past 17 years Bersanelli has been a member of the science team of Europe’s recently launched Planck observatory, a telescope currently orbiting the sun 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in a mission to map traces of radiation left
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over from the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. Essentially, Planck is grabbing images of the universe’s earliest light and, hopefully, clues as to how the universe will continue to evolve in the future.
To a culture in which popular science is often fueled by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Britain’s celebrated atheist-scientist, Bersanelli offers a calm explanation of the relationship between his line of work and deeply rooted Catholic faith.
“To me, it is in the wonder and the beauty and the connectedness of the whole creation ... that I see a sign of the Creator,” Bersanelli said in an interview with Headline Bistro last week, prior to giving a presentation at Columbia University with 2008 Templeton Prize winner Father Michael Heller.
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To follow the evolutionary process of the universe, seeing it “opening up like a flower” and finding mankind “rooted in the cosmic history for 14 billion years” – “it’s a beautiful and very moving thing,” said Bersanelli, who co-authored the recently released book “From Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of All.”
But Bersanelli says he’s not looking for proofs for God in the Planck observatory’s maps of the cosmic microwave background – rather, he views science as providing “more signs that indicate the ultimate origin.”
While the body of his research is directly based on the radiation leftover from the Big Bang, Bersanelli stresses a distinction between it and the ongoing process of creation sustained by God.
“The Big Bang is not creation,” Bersanelli said, adding that creation “is much deeper than that. (It) is dependence of every creature in the entire universe on God, on the mystery that makes everything. Every instance is created.”
As for how the Church should approach evolution, Bersanelli thinks it’s doing well, being open to science while warning of the degeneration of science into ideology.
As Bersanelli speaks, a theme becomes evident: his science and overall approach to life is framed as a pursuit of truth – as he puts it, an honest and distinct “way of looking at reality.”
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Take evolution – as a Catholic, he doesn’t see a problem with evolution “as a search for the process that makes the universe flourish.”
Likewise, he would encourage students interested in a scientific career to not be afraid of the perceived divide between faith and science.
“Follow with courage what is true, what is beautiful, because beauty is the face of truth,” Bersanelli said. “I think that’s a call you should not disregard if you’re gifted for that. That is where your testimony will be asked, precisely in showing there is no truth that can be opposed to a bigger truth.”
One can see the influence of the international Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, a movement founded in the ‘50s in Milan by theologian Msgr. Luigi Giussani and which Bersanelli says has completely “penetrated” his approach to his work.
Bersanelli encountered the movement – which takes its name from the concept of Christianity, lived in the communion of the Church, as the foundation for mankind’s true freedom – in high school in Milan, when he met a group of students involved in its meetings.
“I wanted to share that intensity that I could see somehow, and I didn’t know what was behind that,” he said. Later he developed a friendship with Msgr. Giussani himself.
In his seminal work “The Religious Sense,” Msgr. Giussani wrote that “a trivial relationship with reality, whose most symptomatic aspect is preconception, blocks the authentic religious dimension, the true religious fact.”
Musing on how he and Richard Dawkins could come to completely different conclusions about God, Bersanelli suggests that science is not the only realm that invites misconceptions.
“I could say there are very different perceptions of what it is to have a baby or to marry ... or what is worthwhile in life,” Bersanelli said. “We all face the same thing and have different approaches. Science is no exception.”
Any of those big questions – love, the existence of God – serve as a challenge for us to exercise our freedom and judgment, testing to see “how we stand in front of reality – with a positive openness, or with a prejudice or narrow preconception,” Bersanelli said.
Dawkins aside, Bersanelli said most scientists he knows, regardless of their religiosity, are usually sensitive if not curious about his faith. After all, he said, “it is probably a trait of the scientist to be open to the unknown, for we do research facing the unknown every day.”
And as a Catholic scientist, Bersanelli said he’s discovered “increasing satisfaction for whatever piece of truth I can find or struggle for.”
“Everything is a sign,” he emphasized, “a sign of the ultimate happiness for what we are made.”
He got a flood of that satisfaction last month, when the Planck observatory sent back its first mapped images of the cosmic microwave background.
After 17 years of development, to see that Planck’s instruments were functioning in outer space “and, finally, to see the signal from the bottom of the universe we were starting to get – well, that has been a very exciting time,” Bersanelli said.
Wonderful article!
Wonderful article!
Outstanding, NYer! Thank you so much for this excellent article!
Marco Bersanelli is saying what I’ve always been saying and thought. Science and Religion is not exclusionary. From the Big Bang and even to Evolution, one can see God’s hand at work (God works in mysterious ways).
Articles, such as this, often bring me great comfort in that they validate what I too think and believe, most of which goes against the mainstream ;-) Glad to know that I am not alone in this forum.
Thought this might be of interest to your list.
I feel so sorry for scientists who can look at the majesty of God's creation -- and not see His hand at work everywhere!
And I feel sorry for Christians, who, just to cling to their simpleminded devotion to the bran-barfs of Bishop Ussher, deny the worshipful experience that observation and admiration of God's creation affords...
Ditto here. We were taught evolution in Catholic grade school.
Outstanding article. In an era where almost everything gets reduced to ideology, he has a genuinely balanced scientist. (Though I suspect the ideologues would disagree with me.)
No, you're not alone. And though not 'on this forum' add Albert Einstein to the list. And IMO that's pretty good company to keep :-)
His Theories proved on 'the Large Scale' that there was order to the Universe. Everything could be explained by Physics and their Equations. But when it came to the sub-atomic world and its particles there was no order, it's chaos. He didn't believe GOD would do this. That's why he fought against, and dismissed Quantum Mechanics and spent his last years trying to solve with 'regular Physics' a grand equation, a Unifying Theory of Everything. To prove God made everything with an order.
His dismissal of Quantum Mechanics cost him professionally. At the end of his life he was mocked, treated like the 'Crazy Uncle', and not even considered in the top tier Physicists of the 20th Century.
I've also read or heard that Einstein was an 'Atheist', hardly.
Gotta go now.
My meds are starting to make my eyes blur. Happens every day about this time.
Which happens all too often these days.
For a lot of people, science has replaced religion, with its adherents promising that science can do only what religion and God are capable of doing, that is leading to truth and giving meaning and purpose to life.
I do too, TXnMA, and wonder about this phenomenon. Is this a willful blindness to the splendor, beauty, and order of creation? Or is it an expression of revulsion for the very idea that the cosmos is ordered — and not by man (except maybe in his own imagination)?
But if it is not "ordered," science itself would have nothing to do.
I admire what Albert Einstein — not a particularly "religious" man in the conventional sense — had to say about this:
“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.” — Einstein’s Credo, 1930 [emphasis added]
Chaos is in the eyes of the beholder. I don't doubt that should the day come when we could gain enough knowledge, that which we don't understand now about how it works, would make sense.
I think it's only really labeled chaos and random because of our lack of knowledge and understanding, as opposed to it being truly chaotic and/or random.
Amen!
i wouldn’t call it science. it’s really the desire for authority to explain things to those who don’t want to take time to understand for themselves. “science” is a misused shorthand for the scientific method; itself a model of simplicity.
observe conditions
form a theory
test the theory
reach a conclusion
climate change is the most recent example of the use of “science” to stamp an authoritative label on something that does not deserve it. the claim can’t stand against scrutiny using the scientific method, but its adherents tirelessly repeat the claim that scientists believe it. it’s as tiresome as listening to a person telling of the origin of the universe because a minister said it was thus.
Thank you both so much for the heads up to this wonderful article!
My pleasure! It’s been a while since the three of us have “FRellowshipped” (new term?) together here — and, I, for one have missed it... ‘-)
I love the term! And yes, I miss our FRellowshipping, too!
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