Science

The last reinterpretation to which Catholic biblicists commit themselves in their isolation of the Bible as the exclusive source of knowledge is in the realm of science. Because they believe in a global Flood that is impossible under current physical laws, a young universe in contradiction to a mass of observable data, and a centrality for the Earth that runs counter to Newtonian gravitation and Einsteinian relativity—because their exegesis commits them to ‘dogmas’ that are overturned by legitimate science, they must turn against science itself.

The primary way they do this is by pretending that the situation in science now is not any different from what it was in the past; effectively, there has been no advance in science. Nothing that has been discovered in the past 200 years solves any mysteries about the universe or teaches us anything conclusive. Thus, we must just fall back on what the Bible and the Fathers have said.


Agnosticism in science

As we saw above with Fr Vigouroux’s acceptance of geology’s proof of long ages, Catholic biblicists tend to conclude that anyone who accepts that science can make proofs and that those proofs can influence one’s interpretation of the Bible is doing a discredit to the Bible.

But this is simply not the case: a Catholic who uses legitimate science as an assistant to find the Bible’s true meaning is simply following Catholic tradition. To follow the letter of the Fathers, one must accept a young universe; but to follow the spirit of the Fathers, one must reconcile the Bible with the legitimate science of one’s day, and so accept an old universe. Fr Vigouroux points this out extremely well when he says:

The key issue in this present question is not the details, since the Fathers did not agree on them amongst themselves; the key question is the principles that they followed and which were common to all of them. These principles are that it is necessary to make use of reason, of science, in its certain facts, in order to interpret the Mosaic cosmogony … This principle of our masters in the faith is likewise our own. If we do not agree with them in the details, it is not because the principle has changed. It is rather because science has progressed. We are doing what they would have done in our place. They accepted what the scientists of their time taught; we accept what the scientists of our day teach.

The Fathers believed that reason making inferences from empirical observations does teach us about reality. When those inferences are conclusive, we must be careful not to interpret the Bible in a sense contrary to them. It is precisely because the Bible is inerrant that it cannot contradict science and so must not be interpreted against it. Science can attain truth. As such, it can establish for us what the Bible does not contradict.

Here we have the crux of our entire dispute with the biblicists: may a Catholic or may a Catholic not use science as an assistant in the interpretation of the Bible? Is science a legitimate intellectual discipline that is able to attain truth and makes progress over time? Should we, as Catholics, be careful to respect science and reason in our interpretation of the Bible?

In the end, it would seem that Catholic biblicists, like the Protestant Creation Science movement, mainly use science in an attempt to destroy science. This is similar to the famous Muslim thinker Al-Ghazali, who wrote a philosophical book arguing that philosophy is useless!

It is the idea that science cannot prove anything that leads biblicists to accuse progressive creationists of being overly credulous in scientific matters. For Mr. Owen, the geology of Charles Lyell was just ‘wild speculations’ and Fr. Maximilian Kolbe’s adherence to heliocentrism was due to him being caught up in the cult of Copernicus in his native Poland! On the contrary, St. Maximilian held to heliocentrism because it is supported by solid science. He studied the evidence and found it to be compelling.

In order to show how badly biblicists reinterpret science in order to discredit it and leave the Bible alone on the field of knowledge, perhaps it would be well if we considered the question of heliocentrism in more detail.


The way science works

Science seeks to use empirical evidence as a means of determining the physical properties of our universe. It becomes ‘settled’ or probabilistically conclusive when a scientific theory has attained a preponderant and, sometimes, an overwhelming weight of certainty. It is the long term successful result of an investigative process that starts with a question. In the case of geocentrism and heliocentrism, the question is, “Does the sun or the earth move, or both, and how do they move?”

The question and the proposal of theories to answer it is the starting point, stage one. Next comes the hunt for empirical evidence, stage two. This consists of gathering data from reality, as much as possible, to find which theory is correct. At first, there is not enough data, and multiple competing theories are equally plausible to cover that data. The evidence from reality is too limited to strongly prefer one theory over another.

For instance, both Greek philosophers and medieval scholastics proposed theories on geocentrism and heliocentrism. They realized that the observed movement of the stars could be explained by their actual movement relative to a stationary Earth or by their apparent movement relative to a moving Earth. Since it is easier to think of the Earth as stationary, because of our relative position, geocentrism won out through the ages. But it did not win out on the basis of empirical evidence, since both systems could ‘save the appearances’ or account for the evidence available at the time.

This all changes when science reaches the third and final stage, the stage when empirical evidence ‘chooses sides’, as it were. The accumulating data starts to clearly favor one theory over the others, and this process develops until the point is reached where the whole body of evidence can only be accounted for by the favored theory. The other theories still have sufficient explanatory power to cover certain pieces of the puzzle, but they are utterly inadequate to circumscribe and unify the body of empirical data. At that point, we declare the favored theory the winner and endow it with the phrase ‘settled science’.

In the case of geocentrism and heliocentrism, Galileo’s discoveries of the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter marked the time when empirical evidence started to favor heliocentrism over geocentrism. Galileo’s problem was that he thought he had reached settled science when, in fact, he had only attained certain positive signs in favor of heliocentrism. As indicated in The Realist Guide to Religion and Science (p. 281), it was only when telescopes became sufficiently precise to observe stellar parallax in the 1800s that empirical evidence was weighty enough to turn heliocentrism into settled science. Since then, the empirical data counting against geocentrism has become a mountain, which is why geocentrists are sometimes compared to flat-earthers by those who are familiar with the scientific evidence. Let us look at some of that evidence.


Evidence against geocentrism

The most obvious evidence counting against geocentrism is gravity. It is an attractive force. The heavier a body is, the greater force of attraction it has. Now, the Sun contains 99.86% of the mass of the solar system. As for the remaining 0.14%, 99% of it is contained in the four gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Earth, in other words, is like a pea surrounded by massive boulders. Its attractive force is minuscule in comparison with the rest of the bodies in the solar system. As such, it is gravitationally dominated by the Sun, which causes the Earth to rotate in an elliptical loop every 365.256 days at a distance of 150,000,000km from the Sun.

This same principle holds for the Moon in relation to the Earth. Since lighter bodies rotate around the heavier bodies, in proximity to them, to which they are attracted gravitationally, the lighter Moon rotates around the heavier Earth every 27.3 days. The same principle holds for all of the moons of all of the planets.

To get around this obvious problem, geocentrists claim that the entire universe is revolving and, somehow, the collective residue of its forces in the vicinity of our galaxy counteract the force of the Sun on the Earth and cause the Sun and the planets to rotate around a stationary Earth. They insist that the theory of General Relativity “allows for” this to work for a stationary Earth, but the astute reader notices that it only “works” if General Relativity is made specific and absolute, the very opposite of what the theory holds.

When geocentrists are asked to make their own case, they fail to deliver. They do not actually take the known facts about the stars, compute their gravitational forces in relation to the Earth, model what influences those forces have on the solar system, and demonstrate how they necessarily cause a massive boulder to rotate around a pea. To do such a thing would reveal that the forces of the distant stars on the Earth are negligible in comparison to the influence of the Sun on the Earth. But, until geocentrists make such calculations, they cannot claim to be doing any real science (see also “Here Comes the Sun”).

Another piece of evidence against geocentrism is gravitational bulge. Bodies that rotate on their own axes bulge in the middle and are somewhat flattened at top and bottom. All of the bodies of the solar system, including the Sun, rotate on their respective axes, and so possess this gravitational bulge to a greater or lesser degree. The geocentrists, following their literal interpretation of the Bible, claim that the Earth is stationary, that it does not rotate on its own axis. This makes them unable to say how the Earth’s equatorial bulge is not produced by the same cause that is producing such a bulge in the other planets.

Then, we have known for over a century now that the universe is expanding. The vast and detailed data that we have been able to collect from our telescopes and satellites indicate that all major bodies in the universe are moving away from one another. If such is the case, then there is no center of the universe and so the Earth cannot be the center.

Finally, heliocentrism—the idea that the sun is the gravitational center around which the planets of our solar system rotate—makes a few predictions about how we will observe stars from Earth. The first is that changes of the position of the Earth throughout the year will cause slight shifts in the observed positions of stars in our night sky, depending on their distance from us. This is called stellar parallax. The second is that changes of the velocity of the Earth’s rotation around the Sun will cause different shifts in the observed positions of stars in our night sky, depending on the angle at which they are observed from the Earth. This is called stellar aberration.

It turns out that both of these predictions have been confirmed to exact precision for the stars that we observe. There is no way for geocentrists to account for these phenomena using the known physical forces of the universe. It is true that they have attempted to rearrange the universe so that the same phenomena could be observed with the Earth being at the center of the universe, a rearrangement that they call the Neo-Tychonian model. However, this model:

1. does not have the universe rotate around the Earth, but rather around the Sun, and so is not really geocentric.

2. does not manage to yield the same phenomena that we observe with stellar parallax and stellar aberration. The wobbling universe that they propose to explain stellar parallax does not explain stellar aberration, and vice versa. They have never proposed any model that can explain both (see “Geocentrism and Stellar Aberration: Illuminating the Earth’s Motion”).

For these reasons, it seems clear today that a workable geocentric model is not even possible at the theoretical level. This is why geocentrism is not taken seriously by the scientific community, and should not be taken seriously by Catholics, especially as an alleged matter of faith. The question has been settled far beyond a reasonable doubt. Even the reasons that I have supplied are far from exhaustive. There is quite simply no real science behind geocentrism and the evidence brought forward to support it is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The rhetoric of The New Geocentrists is just an elaborate reinterpretation of scientific fact in order to support their interpretation of the Bible.


Conclusion

Catholic biblicists begin by taking their strictly literal interpretation of the Bible as a revealed truth. They then make the claim that this revealed truth has been “believed and taught by all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching”. As such, it is a “fundamental doctrine of creation”, a “traditional doctrine for faithful Catholics”.

Once they have anchored themselves in this position, they then proceed to reinterpret the copious evidence that refutes that position.

In theology, it is a fact that the Fathers were divided on the meaning of ‘day’ in Genesis 1; that Popes of the 19th and 20th centuries have stated that Catholics are not obliged to follow the Fathers on that question and other questions related to science; that Catholic Biblical manuals, the Catholic Encyclopedia, and Catholic catechisms have advised against the YEC reading of the Bible; that the very secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission who signed its decrees on this question held that ‘day’ meant a long period of time; that it is impossible to find any linking of a belief in long ages to Modernism in the great battle against Modernism in the pontificates of Leo XIII and St Pius X; and that such holy figures as St Maximilian Kolbe had no problem with long ages.

In the face of all of this evidence weighing against a strictly literal interpretation of day as being a Catholic doctrine, the reaction of the biblicists is to reinterpret the evidence. They claim that it is not permissible to believe in an ancient universe if none of the Fathers did; that the PBC teaches that one is only permitted to believe that ‘day’ means either 24 hours or no time at all; that Fr Vigouroux himself did not have a correct understanding of the PBC decrees that he himself signed; that both Leo XIII and Vatican I taught the YEC understanding of Genesis. They even imply that Pope Pius XII supported their reading of Genesis.

None of these claims are true. They are simply statements without any basis in fact.

Further, in history, it is a fact that YEC is not a position that has ever been supported in the Catholic world as a reaction to the advances of science in the past 200 years. It has its real origin in the reaction of American fundamentalist Protestants to the Scopes trial of 1925.

Since the Catholic biblicists cannot find any real support for their opinion in the historical Catholic reaction to the advance of science, they have to reinterpret history. They claim that the freedom in interpreting Genesis on scientific matters that has always been accorded to Catholics really only began during the pontificate of St Pius X, that is, at the very moment that Modernism was being aggressively suppressed in the Church. They claim that the granting of this freedom was part of a ‘pseudo-scientific assault’ on the Bible; that practically the entire Catholic world was contaminated with this pseudo-science; that somehow a belief in long ages and the Big Bang Theory necessarily puts a Catholic into the company of Teilhard de Chardin and Charles Darwin.

These claims, as well, are without any basis in fact. The fight against Modernism has never been a fight against long ages, some of the finest Catholic minds of the past two centuries have explicitly endorsed long ages, and it is impossible to find anything like the Kolbe Center in the pre-Vatican II Catholic world.

Finally, in the realm of science, it is a fact that we now know much, much more about our universe, our solar system, and our Earth than was known in the past, thanks to the powerful investigative instruments that technology has developed. The empirical evidence from these instruments has made it clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, that the universe is expanding, and that both the universe and the Earth are immensely old.

The reaction of the Catholic biblicists to the empirical facts is to reinterpret them. On the one hand, they claim that the evidence is inconclusive, that it has no probative value, and, in fact, that science can never provide us anything conclusive. This leads them to scoff at anyone, such as St Maximilian Kolbe or Fr Vigouroux, who draws any conclusions on the basis of solid scientific evidence. On the other hand, they pretend their own theories about geocentrism or a global Flood can be provided a certain scientific respectability, that is, that those theories can be argued on the basis of science.

In short, Catholic biblicists do not defend Catholic doctrine, but a doctrine of their own making. They reinterpret the magisterium against the very promulgators of that magisterium. They vilify perfectly orthodox Catholics for not believing in a doctrine that is no doctrine at all. And they falsify the legitimate findings of modern science. All of this is done in order to defend and dogmatize their interpretation of Genesis. The freedom that the Church gives, they seek to take away.

This article would be well rewarded if the members of the Kolbe Center and other Catholic biblicists would cease claiming that YEC is a ‘traditional Catholic doctrine’ but would rather recognize that these things do not pertain to our Catholic faith. Catholics are at liberty to hold divergent opinions on these questions, just as the saints were. (cf. Providentissimus Deus, §19)