Today’s Post is by guest blogger Mike S.
At 4:43 am on October 15, 1997, the Cassini-Huygens space probe was launched to Saturn. Despite using the largest rocket available at the time, the spacecraft was so heavy that it was impossible to carry enough fuel to fly directly there. Instead of heading away from the sun, the launch took place in the opposite direction. Cassini flew inward, getting a slingshot boost by passing close to Venus. It orbited the sun a single time, then got another slingshot boost from passing Venus yet again. It swung past Earth (coming as close as 727 miles from the surface) getting a 12,000 mph boost, and received one last giant boost from passing Jupiter in December 2000, traveling as fast as 32 km/sec, or 71,000 mph.
Finally, the probe reached Saturn on June 30, 2004. This was a crucial time. To be captured in orbit around Saturn, it had to reach a very specific spot and fire it’s engines for an exact amount of time. If it came too close to Saturn, it would crash into the planet. If it passed too far away, it would sail on past the planet and out of the solar system. To hit the perfect spot, it actually had to pass through a gap in the rings themselves. Making matters more complicated, Saturn is so far away that radio waves traveling at the speed of light took 83 minutes to reach Earth. Therefore, all of the commands had to be sent ahead of time, and it took nearly 1-1/2 hours afterward to see if Cassini survived or whether it crashed into a rock in the rings. It successfully entered orbit.
As if that wasn’t amazing enough, on December 25, 2004, Cassini released a smaller probe named Huygens. Huygens was designed to land on Titan, one of the moons around Saturn, nearly 3 weeks later. But there were several issues. At the time Huygens was released from Cassini, which slowly backed away, Titan was on the other side of Saturn. So, Cassini had to be lined up with where Titan was “going” to be. Also, Huygens was completely unpowered and simply had to coast for three weeks before reaching Titan. This, too, was a success. Huygens parachuted down, landed successfully on Titan, and sent data and pictures back to Cassini, which relayed them back to Earth.
Since then, Cassini has continued to provide tremendous information and amazing pictures from Saturn. Check them out!
To me, this is simply amazing. The beauty of this approaches an intricately choreographed ballet or a painted masterpiece. The level of understanding of our solar system and the universe needed to successfully launch and steer a spacecraft along a 2.2 billion mile path, past Venus twice, the Earth and Jupiter once each, and into an orbit around Saturn is astounding. Along the way, the spacecraft provided the best confirmation yet of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It is incredible.
Not too long ago, however, this mission would have been seen as a modern tower of Babel. Galileo and others were persecuted by the church for proposing that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. According to tradition and accepted teachings, it was clear and obvious that the Earth was the center of everything and that Man was God’s crowning creation. It was blasphemous to suggest that we were merely on a speck of a rock circling the sun. The scriptures told us that the “sun stood still”. These people were questioning religious authority so it must have been the work of Satan. So a proposal to actually send a spacecraft to Saturn and land a probe on a body not orbiting the earth but another planet was heresy.
It seems so obvious in hindsight. Of course the earth orbits the sun. Of course the universe is vast. And at the end of it all, people still believe in God and Christ. The plan of salvation didn’t change based upon what orbited what. The issue became a non-issue.
While the issues change, the topic still comes up in our day. We all bring to every issue our own personal feelings, experiences, backgrounds, etc. And this happens at every level, from a newly baptized 8-year-old girl talking about dinosaurs to the highest level of our hierarchy. In 1961, while still an apostle, Joseph Fielding Smith said, “We will never get a man into space. This earth is man’s sphere and it was never intended that he should get away from it. The moon is a superior planet to the earth and it was never intended that man should go there. You can write it down in your books that this will never happen.” Since then, we have had Mormon astronauts who have certainly had different opinions.
So, how do we make sense of this? Are there ways to reconcile religion and science? Are there things science can learn from religion and vice versa? Are there insights from religion that we are just now finding out in the scientific world? Yes, to all of these.
This is the first essay of a multi-part series. Future topics will include:
- How do we determine scientific truth?
- How do we determine religious truth?
- How do we integrate these two ways of finding truth? What do WE believe?
- Primers: what are strings or light-years or anything else
- The big: cosmology, Big Bang, galaxies, star-stuff, planets, etc.
- The small: atoms, quarks, intelligences, spirits, multi-dimensions, etc.
- The in-between: us, DNA, scientific faith, evolution, etc.
There are some fascinating insights into science and Joseph Smith, LDS teachings, Eastern religions, traditional teachings, etc. There will be areas that make sense to most of us. There will be areas where we will all agree to disagree. I may change my mind about different things. You may change yours. At the end of the day, however, we will all hopefully know a little bit more about this amazing world and universe as well as our profound role on this little speck of blue orbiting around an insignificant star on a small arm of a moderately sized galaxy wandering through our neck of the universe. It’s really cool.
Questions:
- Does this sound like an interesting series to bring forward?
- Are there any topics you would like brought up in a future post?
- What level of science should I include, basic up through graduate (or both)?
Wheat & Tares 
Yes, this sounds like an interesting series to me. I’d love to see more along these lines.
Thank you and best wishes in further columns.
1 – yes, very interested in this series.
2 – I’m always interested in how scientific theories change, which is similar to how religious theories change. Yet both fields are very dogmatic and apologetic. No wonder they are often at odds.
3 – Level of science – I’d go for around Time magazine level. Allude to the higher level stuff but in layman’s terms and using analogies to explain to those of us who are interested in science, but not working in the field.
Ooh, I love this idea for a series. I’m interested in all the topics you list. Just about anything I’d want covered seems to fit in there somewhere.
I agree with hawkgrrrl on the level of explanation. Looking forward to it!
Love it, Mike. These are things I want to explore, too.
fantastic stuff. I’m curious to know more about the original tower of Babel. The way that story is framed just sounds off.
I haven’t considered that science and religion are exclusive. My impression is that religion attempts to answer the questions of life to its best understanding, but it is still generally man’s understanding, regardless of how often religious leaders say they are speaking the will of God. I don’t blame religious leaders (of all faiths) for doing this. People go to them to find out the will of God, and God doesn’t reveal himself with every answer to every question. So religious leaders are stuck having to provide some answer as best they can. So you get Joseph Fielding Smith saying man will never go to the moon because he’s not supposedly allowed to go to the moon. Did he get that info from God? Seeing that not 8 years later man went to the moon, it seems not.
All: Thanks for the positive feedback. As you can probably tell, this is an area that fascinates me and gets me excited.
Dan: I didn’t list all of the topics above for the sake of space, but there actually are posts planned on the tower of Babel and language, Noah and a universal flood, the origin and migrations of man, Jerusalem and other ancient cities, etc.
The next 5 posts actually directly address some of the other issues you raise:
– How do we define truth in science including coming to a consensus?
– How do we define truth in religion including coming to a consensus?
– Can/should science and religion be reconciled?
– What approaches have been used in the past to reconcile these and why they may be flawed, leading to comments like man and the moon – Inside Out?
– What is perhaps a better way to approach all of these issues – Outside In?
After these more general and introductory posts, there are quite a few posts which each deal with a specific topic. Some examples of these are listed above, but there are many, many more. And there are important insights from BOTH religion AND science for all of these topics.
I think this is going to be fun.
The story of Galileo is actually a lot more complicated than the popular history makes it seem.
Galileo had the bad luck to be publishing when the Catholic Church was trying to out-Bible the newly Bible-obsessed Protestants. (There are a number of Bible verses that appear to state, if you read them literally, that the earth doesn’t move, and the sun does.)
A couple of generations earlier, the (quite worldly) Church hierarchy would have had no problem with heliocentrism. The conventional wisdom is that Galileo’s predecessor, Copernicus, delayed publication of his early work on geocentrism because out of fear of the Church, which is silly; his ecclesiastical superiors, a bishop and a high-ranking cardinal (and confidante of the Pope, which meant that the Pope was on board, too) were the ones who urged the reluctant Copernicus to publish his research. (He hadn’t gotten all the kinks out of his theory, which couldn’t be reconciled with the highly eccentric orbit of Mars; Kepler had to come along later and get that one right.)
Catholicism didn’t rest on sola scriptura. It recognizes Sacred Tradition (i.e., a process by which men, subtly guided by inspiration, reason out doctrinal details from the original, general Revelation of Christ’s life) as a source of doctrine equal to Scripture, or nearly so. The Protestants, on the other hand, looked at what Catholic tradition had gotten — not all of it good, by any stretch — and decided to go straight back to the original, scriptural source. On the plus side, this was liberating: Each person could interpret God’s word for himself. On the other hand, it also tended towards Biblical literalism and fundamentalism.
That was the pickle the Catholic Church found itself in. It felt it couldn’t let the Protestants make a credible argument that Catholics were insufficiently faithful to Scripture — and so it went back to a literal interpretation of the Bible, which was actually *more* restrictive than the more open interpretative tradition that had reigned all through the “Dark” Ages, going all the way back to Augustine. Moral of the story: Not all change is good.
When Galileo wanted to publish his work, the Pope actually gave him broad latitude, asking only that heliocentrism be presented as one of several competing theories. (That was supposed to protect the Church from Protestant charges that, by allowing geocentrism to be advocated, the Church was communicating approval of that unscriptural doctrine.) Galileo, unfortunately, set up his book as a dialogue between the advocates of the various theories — and put the geocentric viewpoint in the mouth of a character named “Simplicio,” who was thought to bear a suspicous resemblance to the current Pope. That didn’t go over well.
In short (too late!), the classic narrative of Galileo falling inevitable victim in a Manichean conflict between Open-Minded Science and Repressive Religion, leaves a lot out.
” Are there ways to reconcile religion and science?”
It’s all about the non-overlapping magisteria.
#7/8 Thomas
Those are great comments. I agree with you re: Galileo, but simplified things for the sake of this post. Exploring the historical science/religious “conflicts” and whether they were real or “inflated”, is a great idea to go into more detail.
Re: non-overlapping magisteria, does God get pushed into the ever decreasing “gaps”, or are there other ways to approach things? No great answers from me, just ways of thinking about it. Looking for insights from everyone as we go through some of these topics.
Thanks for the comments. Can tell there are going to be some thought-provoking issues to explore.
Mike, as I understand it, God’s not supposed to be in the “gaps,” either. God’s sphere is not simply that which natural reason hasn’t found a way to observe yet — it is that which, by definition, is beyond the reach of natural reason.
If a subject is something that actually or even theoretically someday could be measured by science, that’s not religion’s domain…and religion has a very bad track record poaching on that territory.
Bring it on Mike S. I’m excited to see what you have to say.
Despite it’s problems, I absolutely agree that there are ways to reconcile science and religion. The difficulty lies in the fact that science seeks evidence and proof, while religion by definition, is all, or at least mostly about faith.
As I see it, most areas where the two conflict really don’t matter much anyway. They are just details that distract us from Christ, serving our fellow man, and the few other central gospel themes that ought to garner most of our attention. It’s still highly interesting to talk about though – I look forward to the discussion.
Thomas:
Those are very interesting questions that people have wrestled with for centuries – where does God “fit” in all of this? An excellent treatment of this is given by Ostler in his “Exploring Mormon Thought” series. It’s a bit dense and slow reading, but extremely interesting once you spend the time going through it.
While the questions you ask are very important and will necessarily be addressed somewhat peripherally in this series, they do not form the main focus. A few reasons: they touch on metaphysics, philosophy, logical proofs, etc. While I have read quite a bit in those areas, to be honest, it’s not my primary background and I’d be in WAY over my head with someone who actually knew what they were talking about. I also don’t know that many of those questions have actual answers that we can comprehend in a logically consistent manner.
Overall, focus of the series is going to be a bit more “practical” or “applied”. For a simple example, consider John the Baptist.
There is nothing specifically scientific in the account in Matthew 3 where we read that he had a “raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.” However, we can ask several questions. At the time of John the Baptist, did camels live in the Holy Land? Do people actually make clothes from camel hair? Did people use leather belts? Did locusts live there? Did honey bees live there? Did people eat locusts and honey? Could someone live on locusts and honey? Etc.
While this is a somewhat simple example: when we get to the towel of Babel, for instance, there a lot of information about the genesis and evolution of language. How does this correlate with the Bible (and BofM) story? We have multiple references to Noah’s flood in ancient as well as modern scriptures. How does this integrate with science? Joseph Smith talked about coarse and fine matter. Is there a way to correlate this with the latest theories in the structure of everything (I actually think yes – we’ll get to that). And so forth…
I don’t know that we’ll necessarily answer some of the more metaphysical questions definitively, but they will certainly be part of the discussions. So thank you for bringing that up.
#11 Aaron L stated: “They are just details that distract us from Christ, serving our fellow man, and the few other central gospel themes that ought to garner most of our attention.”
I have thought a lot about this over the years. Is the time I’ve spent/wasted studying these issues worth it, or would I have been better off focusing on the “important” things. Three things have kept me going forward:
1) From the institute manual:
The Doctrine and Covenants makes it very clear that the Lord intends for His people to be well educated: “Seek not for riches but for wisdom” ( D&C 6:7 ; 11:7 ). “Teach one another the doctrine of the kingdom” ( D&C 88:77 ). “Teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” ( D&C 88:118 ). “Study and learn and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues and people” ( D&C 90:15 ). “Obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, of laws of God and man” ( D&C 93:53 ). “Let every man learn his duty” ( D&C 107:99 ). “Let him that is ignorant learn wisdom” ( D&C 136:32 ).
Church leaders have always taught the importance of obtaining knowledge and the great effect it has on one’s progression. President Brigham Young said that “the religion embraced by the Latter-day Saints, if only slightly understood, prompts them to search diligently after knowledge. There is no other people in existence more eager to see, hear, learn, and understand truth.” ( Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 247.) He also said: “It is the duty of the Latter-day Saints according to the revelations, to give their children the best education that can be procured, both from the books of the world and the revelations of the Lord” (in Journal of Discourses, 17:45).
So I at least have the words of the prophets going for me.
2) But more importantly for me, there are many religious “traditions” about science taught as “truth” to our children. Where science might disagree, they are taught it is the “wiles of Satan”. At some point, when they go to high school or college or really any time, they are going to encounter scientific facts that perhaps run counter to some of the things they have learned. I worry that any resulting cognitive dissonance will cause them to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Therefore, we need to address these things straight on. We need to show people it is possible to embrace science yet still have faith. We need to wrestle with the hard questions. That is a big motivation for me.
3) And finally, I can’t help myself. I love science. I love thinking about these types of questions. The fact that there are others who might find this interesting is a bonus to me. If I write this for myself, I remain stuck in my own provincial thoughts. If I post them here for everyone else’s thoughts, my own understanding will grow; I will think of things in a different way; my understanding of “truth” will expand. So it’s really quite a selfish motive as well.
So we’ll press forward…
Mike,
This is a great post and topic; I loved the detail and am amazed at the scientific advancements. I would like to see the current advancements in science (particularly space exploration) and how it relates to Abraham chapter 3
Mike — great ideas for posts. I think we as scientists don’t always do a good job explaining how science works. That is to say: we fully and always reserve the right to change our minds when new observations come along.
In response to Hawkgrrrl’s comments about science being dogmatic: it shouldn’t be, but often is. We may come across as dogmatic when refuting new theories, but hopefully, that is just because we must be thorough. A new idea must explain *all* the old observations as well as whatever it was created to explain. A theory of modified Newtonian gravity (meant to get rid of the need for dark energy) has so many different observations to explain, and no one theory has done it all yet, except for the idea of dark energy (which admittedly no one knows what the heck it actually is). But, we’re not being dogmattically in favor of dark energy, just the other theories have failed.
Looking forward to the posts Mike!
I would have less trouble reconciling science and religion, if religious leaders would stay out of scientific issues.
For instance, quit telling us what the people on the moon look like or that we’ll never set foot on the moon. Stop telling us the cause of homosexuality.
The problem is that in this last conference they discussed the 14 fundamentals of following the prophet, which include that the prophet may speak on any subject regardless of training or expertise. Unfortunately, when he does so, he is often wrong.
“The problem is that in this last conference they discussed the 14 fundamentals of following the prophet, which include that the prophet may speak on any subject regardless of training or expertise. Unfortunately, when he does so, he is often wrong.” That’s his problem then (IMO). When I make statements about stuff I don’t know anything about, I am often wrong too. Prophets, like everyone else (and perhaps moreso) should be willing to entertain doubts about their own infallibility or their own understanding of divine will. Humility is the key, but when that fails, we’ve got 14 more church leaders to help course correct.
A few thoughts:
Re Mike S
Great post, I really liked it. I’m looking forward to more. Personally, I would prefer a graduate level of science. However, I have tried including some “grad level” stuff here before and it wasn’t as successful as I would have liked. I got the attention of a few but I think it missed the masses.
BTW, Mike S, what is it you do? Are you in school, are you a scientist, or what?
Re Hawkgrrrl
So I’m gonna disagree and agree with Hawk here:
The Scientific method is most definitely NOT dogmatic. In fact, it is always questioning, always the heretic. Science (and by this I mean the collection of scientists and/or professional journal/conference publications) may be dogmatic, even to the point of a religion. I actually wrote about this for my particular field here.
Also, I think perhaps to an onlooker religious and scientific theories both change, but the particulars, the methods, the process, are VERY different IMHO. And I do think the scientific method is more reliable than the religious equivalent. By reliable I mean its ability to explain, predict, and provide a basis for knowledge upon which we can build. Religious pursuit of truth, IMHO, serves a different purpose and hence its reliability is not as important. The conflict comes when we misplace either religion or science in our lives.
Looking forward to more Mike S!
#16,17: I agree with both of these. In posts numbers 5&6 (already planned) there will be 2 alternative ways of approaching these issues – for the issues raised in #16, I phrase this an “Inside Out” approach. I will argue that an “Outside In” approach is safer, more accurate, and a better way to approach everything. And it will actually be the approach used for the rest of the series. It just takes some development to get to that point.
#18: jmb
I will write for the “masses” but will likely include more “graduate level” for certain posts where it is appropriate. I also plan on a number of “primer” posts to also get people up to speed. An example might be a post on thinking in more than 3 dimensions (ie. Flatland) in more simplified ways. It will make subsequent discussions easier.
Regarding the “scientific method” and the “religious method”, I agree with you. Posts #3&4 discuss these two ways of finding truth, pros and cons of each, where they might be similar and where they might be different. We can get into more details on those at that time.
Re: my background
– I’ve programmed computers for decades. I actually wrote my first professional program for IBM between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. I’ve programmed in everything from assembly language to Basic to Fortran to Pascal to C/C++/C# to HTML to whatever, although I am a bit rusty now
– I majored in Electrical Engineering because I love physics, math, chemistry, etc and wanted to know how computers worked.
– I also took a number of English classes in college and write poetry, songs/music, a few barely developed novels, etc.
– I went to medical school after that because I always wanted to be a surgeon
– I did a residency in orthopedic surgery and a fellowship after that
– And finally, after perpetual studentdom, I have been working as an orthopedic surgeon for nearly a decade.
– I remain a geek at heart. I have thousands of books including dozens just on the intersection of science and religion. I have hundreds of books on all sorts of physics and math and cosmos and human and geography and other nerdy topics.
– And, yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons when younger.
Re Mike S #20
Wow, you’re my hero! I knew there was a reason I liked you.
Mike S, I didn’t mean to imply that spending time thinking about science and how it relates to religion is a waste of time. I guess that I can only speak for myself, but my life has been greatly enriched by trying to reconcile the two and by trying to answer the difficult questions in both religion and science.
I see dogmatism being present in some degree in both science and religion, but probably more so in the latter. The problem is, despite our best effors to be objective, to some degree I think we all make up our minds of what we want to believe a head of time, then seek out what confirms our desires. This process enhances dogmatism. I see it in religion, science, how one interprets history, politics, etc… the list goes on and on.
The interesting thing is, two people can look at the same evidence in any of the above categories and will often still see different things in the data and draw completely differnt conclusions. It is indeed a complicated process that we all go through to determine truth.
Are you in the SLC area? I am a physical therapist, so if you are, we may have unknowingly crossed paths a time or two.
jmb – we’re not in disagreement. I don’t mean science as a discipline is dogmatic, but scientists and even the scientific community can be.
There was an article about the Moroni promise being an actual scientific, disciplined approach to religion. It was a really interesting article. The writer said it was unusual to find a religion trying to create a formulaic, predictable model for spiritual evidence. It remains science if the outcomes are not immediately dismissed if they don’t conform to the expectation (e.g. your answer was from Satan, you didn’t want it bad enough). Those are dogmatic dismissals of a result that doesn’t conform with the hypothesis.
I do have a problem with how Moroni’s promise is treated. It would truly be an “experiment” of sorts, or at least predictive if someone was told, “Pray, if you get an affirmative answer, then the Mormon religion is right for you. If you don’t get an answer, than perhaps your path is down a different road.”
Instead, it is an experiment where there is only one correct answer. If you get a “yes”, then the promise is fulfilled. If you don’t there are all the reasons you listed, and you just need to repeat the experiment.
It’s like claiming that flipping a coin ALWAYS comes up heads. If it comes up heads, then the prediction was right. If it comes up tails, you must have flipped it wrong and therefore you must flip it again.
Oh phew! On the same page.
Yeah, I have often thought of this. I’d like to read the article. My first thought is similar to Mike’s – that is, there’s only one right answer (not very scientific and not a very good test). But my other thought is more philosophical. I will not deny that verification plays a role in science – indeed that is how many theories come to be validated, in part. But overall, the scientific method is clearly modus tollens (denying the consequent) which is logically sound, whereas verification (affirming the consequent) is not.
This problem is particularly manifest in our version of Moroni’s promise. For example, I take his promise, and pray to know if “these things” are true. I get an affirmative. That does NOT imply that the church is true, or that priesthood is real, or that the BoM is historical, or that Joseph was a prophet, etc. etc.
Though I do think it is nice to have at least some semblance of a predictable model. I actually like the old Widstoe/Talmage days for precisely this reason. I think they made a good case for using logic and reasoning in our theology. I like that.
Love the idea, Mike! Full speed ahead. 🙂
I have tough time accepting Moroni’s promise as a legitimate scientific experiment.
For scientific theory to be ‘proven’ correct, it has to be consistently reproducible. How reproducible Moroni’s experiment has been depends a lot on who you ask. Given how many investigators pray about ‘these things’ to know that they are true and don’t join the church, and that well over 50% of those who do join the church ultimately decide that it isn’t for them, I’d say that there isn’t a definite consensus on the issue. Despite that many people do get an answer as promised, the lack of consistency makes the whole process seem pretty dubious to me, scientifically speaking. Hence, you just gotta have faith.
I don’t think that it’s possible to scientifically prove that God exists or that he doesn’t or that any church is true or that it isn’t. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve read a lot from both sides of the issue and am yet to be convinced.