Category: Science

Some time ago I did a couple of posts (part I, part II) on the age of the world, in which I looked at Vatican documents dating from recent years–the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the International Theological Commission's document on our being created in the image of God. 

Both of these documents took an open stance regarding the findings of mainstream modern science concerning the age of the universe and the existence of some form of biological evolution. 

They did not impose these as matters of faith, for they are not matters of faith–which was precisely the point. At present the Magisterium and related bodies like the ITC have determined that the sources of faith do not conflict with the findings of mainstream modern science on these points, and so one may follow the scientific evidence where it leads. (On other points, such as the creation of the world out of nothing and the special creation of each human soul, including those of the first humans, the faith does have something to say and the same liberty is not enjoyed.)

You might question how long the Magisterium has held this position, and that's a good question. I, for one, would love to know the answer.

Certainly, though much of Christian history a young earth view was common, though there were also voices urging that the biblical creation accounts, especially Genesis 1, should be handled with care and that they might not be the kind of chronological guide many thought. (St. Augustine, in particular, went into a great deal of depth on this point.)

It seems to me that this view is correct, that a careful reading of Genesis 1 shows that it never intended to offer a purely chronological account, and that it overtly signalled this to the original audience by placing the creation of the sun three days after the creation of the day/night cycle. People back then understood that the sun is a light, that it lights up the sky, and that it thus causes the day/night cycle.

Indeed, the ancient world was full of people whose religion was intensely bound up with this fact, such as the Egyptians, who held that the sun god Ra had to fight with the serpent monster Apophis every night so that the solar barge could return to the sky and bring daylight again. An occasional Apophis attack on Ra during the day was the explanation for eclipses and the darkness they bring. The idea was that Apophis swallowed the solar barge earlier than normal in the daily cycle, and Ra's forces were able to cut him free in a short space of time.

Genesis 1 rejects this pagan understanding of matters and simply refers to the sun as a "light." It doesn't even use the Hebrew word for "sun"–shamash–because this word as also the name of the Canaanite sun god and the author didn't want any confusion about God creating the Canaanite solar deity. So he just calls the sun a light, with the implication: "It's just a light, Don't worship it."

The point is, though, that the ancients understood the fact that the sun is the source of daylight and thus by putting the creation of the sun after the creation of the day/night cycle, the author of Genesis 1 is showing us a topically-structured rather than chronologically-structured account.

At least in my humble opinion.

For those who came from different cultural traditions, who were not as in touch with ancient Semitic ways of writing, this kind of detail could be easily missed and the whole account taken as what it superficially appeared to be–a chronologically-organized description of the creation of the world in one, seven-day week.

The need to be careful in such matters was stressed by Pius XII in his 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu:

35. What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. 

36. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East. The investigation, carried out, on this point, during the past forty or fifty years with greater care and diligence than ever before, has more clearly shown what forms of expression were used in those far off times, whether in poetic description or in the formulation of laws and rules of life or in recording the facts and events of history.

A bit earlier in the same encyclical, Pius XII notes some of the historical difficulties in interpreting the early chapters of Genesis:

31. Moreover we may rightly and deservedly hope that our time also can contribute something towards the deeper and more accurate interpretation of Sacred Scripture. For not a few things, especially in matters pertaining to history, were scarcely at all or not fully explained by the commentators of past ages, since they lacked almost all the information which was needed for their clearer exposition. How difficult for the Fathers themselves, and indeed well nigh unintelligible, were certain passages is shown, among other things, by the oft-repeated efforts of many of them to explain the first chapters of Genesis; likewise by the reiterated attempts of St. Jerome so to translate the Psalms that the literal sense, that, namely, which is expressed by the words themselves, might be clearly revealed.

A few years later, in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, which deals with biological evolution, he also commented on the literary character of the early chapters of Genesis in a way that anticipates the approach taken by the Catechism:

38. . . . the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which howevermust be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters . . . in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give apopular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.

Now, I don't quote these passages from Pius XII as having a great deal of bearing on the age of the universe. They are illustrative of the Magisterium's attitude toward the early portions of Genesis.

So what does Pius XII say on the age of the world from a scientific perspective?

This is found in a speech he gave in 1951 to the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences. In it, he says [My comments added in red–JA]:

35. First of all, to quote some figures–which aim at nothing else than to give an order of magnitude fixing the dawn of our universe [so he's not signing off on any specific date], that is to say, to its beginning in time–science has at its disposal various means, each of which is more or less independent from the other, although all converge. We point them out briefly [Note that in what follows Pius XII mixes evidences regarding the dates for the origin of the universe and the origin of the solar system, both of this he is evincing regarding "the dawn of our universe." He does not clearly distinguish between the two–a conflation which may have been common at the time. This conflation is in part responsible for the range of dates he considers.]: 

(1) recession of the spiral nebulae or galaxies: 

36. The examination of various spiral nebulae [i.e., galaxies], especially as carried out by Edwin W. Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory, has led to the significant conclusion, presented with all due reservations [so even the scientists are being tentative about this and the Church isn't signing off on it as a certainty or an article of faith], that these distant systems of galaxies tend to move away from one another with such velocity that, in the space of 1,300 million years, the distance between such spiral nebulae is doubled. If we look back into the past at the time required for this process of the "expanding universe," it follows that, from one to ten billion years ago, the matter of the spiral nebulae was compressed into a relatively restricted space, at the time the cosmic processes had their beginning. [Ten billion is a little on the small side, viewed by 2010 mainstream science; 13-14 billion is the common estimate today, though this doesn't matter since Pius XII is only aiming for an order of magnitude.]

(2) The age of the solid crust of the earth: 

37. To calculate the age of original radioactive substances, very approximate data are taken from the transformation of the isotope of uranium 238 into an isotope of lead (RaG), or of an isotope of uranium 235 into actinium D (AcD), and of the isotope of thorium 232 into thorium D (ThD). The mass of helium thereby formed can serve as a means of control. This leads to the conclusion that the average age of the oldest minerals is at the most five billion years. [This agrees with the common age held for the formation of the earth and the solar system: 4.6 billion year.]

(3) The age of meteorites: 

38. The preceding method adopted to determine the age of meteorites has led to practically the same figure of five billion years. [Meteorites, as part of the solar system, ditto.] This is a result which acquires special importance by reason of the fact that the meteorites come from outside our earth and, apart from the terrestrial minerals are the only examples of celestial bodies which can be studied in scientific laboratories. [This was, of course, before we went to the moon and started bringing back samples from there and–robotically–from elsewhere in the solar system.] 

(4) The stability of the systems of double stars and starry masses: 

39. The oscillations of gravitation between these systems, as also the attrition resulting from tides, again limit their stability within a period of from five to ten billion years. 

40. Although these figures may seem astounding, nevertheless, even to the simplest of the faithful, they bring no new or different concept from the one they learned in the opening words of Genesis: "In the beginning . . .," that is to say; at the beginning of things in time. The figures We have quoted clothe these words in a concrete and almost mathematical expression, while from them there springs forth a new source of consolation for those who share the esteem of the Apostle for that divinely inspired Scripture which is always useful "for teaching, for reproving, for correcting, for instructing" (2 Tim., 3, 16). 

E. THE STATE AND QUALITY OF ORIGINAL MATTER 

41. [In this section, the pontiff again seems to conflate the origin of the universe with later events–the later events in this case being the creation of heavy elements. This may be because the concept of stellar nucleosynthesis–the creation of heavier elements in stars rather than in the Big Bang–was a new concept in his day that had just been proposed and was still being worked out.] In addition to the question of the age of the cosmos, scholars have, with similar earnestness and liberty of research and verification, turned their daring genius to the other problem which has already been mentioned and which is certainly more difficult, concerning the state and quality of primitive matter. [Here he seems to mean the matter at the beginning of the universe, at or just after the Big Bang.] 

42. According to the theories serving as their basis, the relative calculations differ in no small degree from one another. Nevertheless, scientists agree in holding that not only the mass but also the density, pressure, and temperature of matter must have reached absolutely enormous proportions as can be seen from the recent work of A. Unsold [Albrecht Unsold], director of the Observatory of Kiel (Kernphysik und Kosmologie ["Nuclear Physics and Cosmology"–see a short English language abstract of the paper via Google Bookshere.], in the Zeitschrift fur Astrophysik, 24, B. 1948, pag. 278-306). Only under such conditions can we explain the formation of heavy nuclei and their relative frequency in the periodic system of the elements. [Perhaps at the time this was the only way they could see such elements being formed; later thought–and according to a recently proposed theory by Hubble at the time–the pressures and densities found in the life cycle of certain stars will do the trick just fine. This is now the received view.] 

43. Rightly, on the other hand, does the mind in its eagerness for truth insist on asking how matter reached this state, which is so unlike anything found in our own everyday experience, and it also wants to know what went before it. In vain would we seek an answer in natural science, which declares honestly that it finds itself face to face with an insoluble enigma. [Both of the preceding sentences seem to confirm that he is thinking about the Big Bang and the state of matter in it.] It is true that such a question would demand too much of natural science as such. But it is also certain that the human mind trained in philosophical meditation penetrates more deeply into this problem. 

44. [Now Pius XII begins to meditate on the religious implications of the foregoing.] 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 [i.e., native, indigenous] 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" ["Let there be Light"] 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. [Note the quickness to associate the creation of light with the Big Bang; though this can be done in a literary or poetic way, one must be cautious not to take it too literally; see the link in the next paragraph.]

45. It is quite true that the facts established up to the present time are not an absolute proof of creation in time [VERY important point, as written about before; good to see the point being made in this context!], as are the proofs drawn from metaphysics and Revelation in what concerns simple creation or those founded on Revelation if there be question of creation in time. The pertinent facts of the natural sciences, to which We have referred, are awaiting still further research and confirmation, and the theories founded on them are in need of further development and proof before they can provide a sure foundation for arguments which, of themselves, are outside the proper sphere of the natural sciences. [This theme very much taken up in later documents: Science can take us to a certain point but not farther.]

46. [Now the pontiff comments on what an earthquake the Big Bang turned out to be for the previously accepted view in mainstream science.] This notwithstanding, it is worthy of note that modern scholars in these fields regard the idea of the creation of the universe as entirely compatible with their scientific conceptions and that they are even led spontaneously to this conclusion by their scientific research. Just a few decades ago, any such "hypothesis" was rejected as entirely irreconcilable with the present state of science. 

47. As late as 1911, the celebrated physicist Svante Arhenius declared that "the opinion that something can come from nothing is at variance with the present-day state of science, according to which matter is immutable." (Die Vorstellung vom Weltgebaude im Wandel der Zeiten, 1911, pag. 362). In this same vein we find the statement of Plato: "Matter exists. Nothing can come from nothing, hence matter is eternal. We cannot admit the creation of matter." (Ultramontane Weltanschauung und Moderne Lebenskunde, 1907, pag. 55). 

48. On the other hand, how different and much more faithful a reflection of limitless visions is the language of an outstanding modern scientist, Sir Edmund Whittaker, member of the Pontifical Academy of Science, when he speaks of the above-mentioned inquiries into the age of the world: "These different calculations point to the conclusion that there was a time, some nine or ten billion years ago, prior to which the cosmos, if it existed, existed in a form totally different from anything we know, and this form constitutes the very last limit of science. We refer to it perhaps not improperly as creation. It provides a unifying background, suggested by geological evidence, for that explanation of the world according to which every organism existing on the earth had a beginning in time. Were this conclusion to be confirmed by future research, it might well be considered as the most outstanding discovery of our times, since it represents a fundamental change in the scientific conception of the universe, similar to the one brought about four centuries ago by Copernicus." (Space and Spirit, 1946, pag. 118- 119). 

Conclusion: 

49. What, then, is the importance of modern science for the argument for the existence of God based on the mutability of the cosmos? By means of exact and detailed research into the macrocosm and the microcosm, it has considerably broadened and deepened the empirical foundation on which this argument rests, and from which it concludes to the existence of an Ens a se [i.e., a being not contingent on another], immutable by His very nature. 

50. It has, besides, followed the course and the direction of cosmic developments, and, just as it was able to get a glimpse of the term toward which these developments were inexorably leading, so also has it pointed to their beginning in time some five billion years ago. Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, it has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the cosmos came forth from the hands of the Creator. 

51. Hence, creation took place in time. Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists! Although it is neither explicit nor complete, this is the reply we were awaiting from science, and which the present human generation is awaiting from it.

The takeaway message from this is that the Magisterium's openness to the idea that the universe is billions of years old is not some new, sinister, modernist, post-Vatican II thing. It was accepted–enthusiastically–by Pope Pius XII–the pope who defined the Assumption of Mary and, incidentally, just the year after he defined it.

He also used the finding of Big Bang cosmology and Old Earth science to buttress the idea of the existence of God, while noting a number of important caveats that this reasoning from science cannot be taken as definitive. 

Over at CatholicCulture, Uncle Di has an interesting post about conflicting poll numbers in Massachusetts concerning which candidate is likely to win Ted Kennedy's former seat. 

He writes:

Last week, a Boston Globe poll of likely voters show the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, leading the Republican, Scott Brown, by a comfortable margin: 50- 35%.

A Public Policy Polling survey of likely voters, released the same day, showed Brown ahead, 48- 47%.

The Globe poll claimed a margin of error of +/- 4.2%; the PPP poll said its margin of error was 3.6%. Go ahead: try the numbers. They don't work.

Wait; there's a possible explanation. The Globe poll was taken January 2- 6; the PPP poll was January 7-9. So you might say that as a Little Christmas gift, Scott Brown got 13% of the likely voters.

Alternatively, you might say that there's a margin of error to the pollsters' margin of error.

Di is exactly right that there is a "margin of error" to the pollsters' margin of error–a margin that pollsters very seldom talk about.

What pollsters mean when they say that a poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points (or whatever number) it does not mean that the true figure is really within 4 percentage points of the figure they name. They have no independent way of knowing what the true figure is. All they can do is estimate what the true figure is based on the sample of data they got.

But sometimes you get unrepresentative data, which is what the margin for error is supposed to allow for. It's a fudge factor that means, in essence, if we ran the same poll a bunch of times, the result would vary but would tend to remain within the stated margin of error.

Yet sometimes you get really unrepresentative data, and this is what pollsters don't generally point out.

In standard polling, the margin of error is based on what the result would be approximately 95% of the time, or nineteen out of twenty times. ( . . . keeping this simple so we don't have to get into standard deviations and normal distribution and confidence intervals and other technical minutiae).

So, for example, if pollsters went out and polled the right number of people to give them a 4 percent margin of error, and 48 percent of the people said that they'd vote for Candidate X then what this means is that if you re-ran the poll that nineteen out of twenty times the result you would get back should be between 44 and 52 percent, all else being equal.

But one time out of twenty the result you would get back would be wildly off, either below 44 or above 52.

So . . . bear that in mind when looking at poll numbers.

Even when the poll is properly done, one in twenty polls produces a reading so anomalous that it falls outside what the margin of error would be if you ran it another nineteen times.

On average.

We think.

SDG here jumping with joy at the thought of seeing two early Pixar classics in theaters, back-to-back, in 3-D!

Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are back in theaters in a double feature, and they’ve been converted to Disney Digital 3-D. This is in anticipation of next year’s debut of Toy Story 3 in 3-D.

Converting a computer-animated film like the Toy Story films to 3-D is an entirely different proposition from doing a 3-D conversion on a movie like, say, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (which will also be back in theaters in 3-D in a couple of weeks or so).

The Nightmare Before Christmas is stop-motion animation, which means it was filmed using real 3-D objects in real space. Had they wanted to make it 3-D originally, it would have been comparatively easy to film it in 3-D the same way you would a live-action movie, by using two cameras together, one for the left-eye perspective and one for the right-eye perspective.

That’s how 3-D works: by presenting two slightly different perspectives on the same action to each of your two eyes, which your brain compiles into a single 3-D perception of spatial relations. That’s the way you perceive actual 3-D space too: Your left eye and your right eye have slightly different perspectives on the world, and your brain does the math of mapping how close or far objects are depending on how different the perceptions are from each eye. The further away objects are, the less difference it makes to your left eye versus your right eye; the closer objects are, the more different they appear and the more their position shifts relative to one eye versus the other.

For example, your left-eye view of your nose is completely different from your right-eye view of your nose, because your nose is really, really close to your eyes. Looking at these words on the computer screen, if you close first one eye and then another, you’ll see the words jump slightly to the left or the right — but not as much as your nose, which jumps completely from one side of your visual field to the other side. Then if you look out a window at objects that are far away, they shift even less.

Of course, whenever you have one eye closed, you’re seeing a 2-D view on the world, just like a photograph or a movie, although your brain still understands space well enough to work with a 2-D picture — though not as well as if you can use both eyes.

Among other things, even with one eye, your brain makes judgments about space not only based on the same sort of judgments you make looking at a photograph, but also as your head moves your brain gathers additional information about what things look like from different perspectives, and uses that information to make better judgments about distance.

Ever seen a cat bob its head up and down before making a jump? Same thing — it’s gathering more information to make the best possible estimation of the distance. It’s almost like having four eyes instead of just two. (I think maybe some athletes, like tennis players, might get a similar benefit by swaying back and forth, though that’s probably mostly about being ready to move in any direction.)

Anyway, getting back to The Nightmare Before Christmas, although it would have been comparatively easy to film in 3-D originally, in fact like any non–3-D film it was filmed with a single camera point of view, which means that now all the information about those objects in space has been reduced to a 2-D image representing a single point of view — not enough to create a 3-D image.

Creating a 3-D effect in that case means extrapolating (i.e., creating) additional information that doesn’t exist on the film about what those objects would look like from two different points of view, as well as what we would see of objects behind them if we had a slightly different perspective, etc. In other words, you have to cheat and make stuff up. Fortunately, computers are powerful tools and the effect is pretty good, though not as good as filming in 3-D in the first place.

With Toy Story, though, it’s completely different. The great thing about computer animation is that even though the film images were rendered by computers in 2-D, prior to being rendered the films were staged and animated in a virtual 3-D environment — and all that lovely 3-D information still exists on hard drives at Pixar. For example, in a scene in which we see Andy playing with Woody and Buzz, we see them on screen from only one perspective — but the animators originally mapped out where Andy, Woody and Buzz were in relation to one another in virtual 3-D, and the computer files with that information still exist.

In principle, the animators could swing the virtual “camera” 180 degrees around the room and render to show us Andy, Woody and Buzz from the back — or what it would look like from a bird’s eye view over their heads, etc. You could never do that with a 2-D film like The Nightmare Before Christmas — you’d essentially be painting an entirely new image with all-new information.)

To give us 3-D, though, Pixar just have to render two different points of view similar to the original camera angle for a left-eye and a right-eye shot.

Then both images are projected on the screen at the same time, and the images are filtered for the left eye and the right eye using polarization, i.e., controlling how the light waves move for each of the two images and then using polarized 3-D glasses to filter for light traveling in one direction versus the other. (In the old days of 3-D, polarization was linear, e.g., vertical or horizontal, but newer circular polarization, which is left or right, is much better and doesn’t depend on the angle of your head. With the old linear-polarized glasses, if you put two pairs of glasses together and turned one at right angles to the other, you would see almost nothing. That wouldn’t work with circular polarized glasses — but I bet it would if you opposed them face to face.)

None of this, of course, has anything to do with why Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are such classics … for that, you can read my reviews. (Oh, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, not exactly a classic, but quite a fun little film, and fun to revisit around Halloween.)

Next week: The return of the Petrine Fact!