Sorry Mr G I did not see that you had posted this subject earlier. Accordingly I will repost my initial reaction to the idea that any book using the BIG BANG as a creative act is reintroducing many of the NOW hidden Pythagorean heresies the Church Fathers spent centuries trying to eliminate. I began with the following:
Interview with Fr. Paul Robinson
Fr. Paul Robinson, a native of Kentucky, received a Masters in Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Louisville. After two years in the field, he entered a Roman Catholic seminary to discern his vocation. Since his ordination in 2006, he has been teaching Thomistic philosophy and theology.
What about science?
'In fact, I am harder on modern scientists than I am on Islam and Luther, because some of them take irrationality to its furthest extreme. For instance, 20th century science provided solid, empirical evidence that our universe began with a huge burst of energy 13.7 billion years ago. This put atheist scientists in a terrible dilemma, because they had to admit that our universe, along with space and time, had a beginning. That would seem to make it obvious that an incredibly powerful cause had to be at the origin of our universe.'
Let me begin with the above and we will get on to Fr Robinson's Einstein later. Needless to say, Father feels safe in the company of Pope Pius XII who on November 22, 1951 in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, called '
The P
roofs for the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science.'
‘44. It is undeniable that when a mind enlightened and enriched with modern scientific knowledge weighs this problem calmly, it feels drawn to break through the circle of completely independent or autochthonous matter, whether uncreated or self-created, and to ascend to a creating Spirit. With the same clear and critical look with which it examines and passes judgment on facts, it perceives and recognizes the work of creative omnipotence, whose power, set in motion by the mighty “Fiat” pronounced billions of years ago by the Creating Spirit, spread out over the universe, calling into existence with a gesture of generous love matter bursting with energy. In fact, it would seem that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial “Fiat lux” uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies.’'20th century science provided solid, empirical evidence that our universe began with a huge burst of energy 13.7 billion years ago,' which must be the 'proofs in the light of modern science' according to Pope Pius XII.
So what 'proofs' are these two men basing the Catholic Creator on? Why Hubble's 1912 red-shifts in starlight that science USED to prove the universe is expanding. Now if we forget many scientists who disputed this assumption (such as can be found in Professor Roberrt Gentry's
Earth's Tiny Mystery.) that red-shifts do not necessarily show an expanding universe in Fr Robinson's 'solid empirical evidence' for a Big Bang Creation, I bet both Pius XII and Fr Robinson did not know that in Copernicus's book
De Revolutionibus he wrote that if God created a geocentric universe with the universe turning around the earth like a swing ride then we would find an expanding universe.
In other words there is no solid evidence for any Big Bang. Now let us see the essence of a Big Bang Creator as explained by Professor Marcello Pera.
‘Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that we can refer “not improperly” to the initial singularity [the Big Bang] as an act of creation. What conclusions can we draw from it? That a Creator exists? Suppose still, for the sake of argument, that this, too, is conceded. The problem now is twofold. Is this creator theologically relevant? Can this creator serve the purpose of faith?
My answer to the first question is decidedly negative. A creator proved by [Big Bang] cosmology is a cosmological agent that has none of the properties a believer attributes to God. Even supposing one can consistently say the cosmological creator is beyond space and time, this creature cannot be understood as a person or as the Word made flesh or as the Son of God come down to the world in order to save mankind. Pascal rightly referred to this latter Creator as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not of philosophers and scientists. To believe that cosmology proves the existence of a creator and then to attribute to this creator the properties of the Creation as a person is to make an illegitimate inference, to commit a category fallacy. My answer to the second question is also negative. Suppose we can grant what my answer to the first question intends to deny. That is, suppose we can understand the God of [Big Bang] cosmologists as the God of theologians and believers. Such a God cannot (and should not) serve the purpose of faith, because, being a God proved by cosmology he [or it] should be at the mercy of cosmology. Like any other scientific discipline that, to use Pope John Paul II’s words, proceeds with “methodological seriousness,” cosmology is always revisable. It might then happen that a creator proved on the basis of a theory will be refuted when that theory is refuted. Can the God of believers be exposed to the risk of such an inconsistent enterprise as science?’[1]
[1] Marcello Pera: The god of theologians and the god of astronomers, as found in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.378, 379. MORE LATER.
Topic: Fr Robinson's new book "The Realist Guide to Religion and Science" (Read 8535 times)