The Theory of Relativity: Church and Science meet the challenge of the 21st Century

By Jay Ter Louw

In "The Theory of Relativity," Jay Ter Louw navigates the age-old tension between faith and reason. He challenges the discord between the church and science, revealing a history of intolerance and division. From his own fundamentalist upbringing, Ter Louw offers a unique perspective, emphasizing the limits of human understanding.

This book is an impassioned plea for unity and reasoned discourse. It encourages readers of all backgrounds to explore life's profound questions together. Ter Louw's work is a beacon of optimism, reminding us of our shared values, such as love, peace, and kindness, which transcend religious and scientific boundaries.

Join the conversation and embark on a journey of reconciliation with "The Theory of Relativity." Will you heed the call for unity and understanding?

#ChurchandScience #Discord #Tolerance #HistoricalConflict #Politics #Morality #Ethics #Law #Optimism #Goodwill #Peace #Love #ReligionandScience #UnansweredQuestions #HumanComprehension

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781446603789

Book preview

Foreword

The church and science are at odds.  We may think the discord is especially strident in these early years of the 21st Century.  A burn-them-at-the-stake mentality has characterized the church’s attitude in many periods of history, and science historically holds the practitioners of any religion in profound disdain.

Without nuance or tolerance, we have lost the ability to have fruitful discussion of different points of view.  Each side is talking so loudly, they can’t hear what the other is saying—the truth is, they just don’t want to hear it.

I am the product of a fundamentalist church upbringing.  I still believe in God, but believe less in the organized church, and far less in those who are merely using God or the church as a weapon to advance their own personal agenda.  I believe in science, but I am just as skeptical when scientists claim to have all of the answers.  Believing that the entire universe was once contained in the space of a basketball is just as wacky as believing it was created by an all-powerful God.  Both ideas are beyond human comprehension.

The one thing I am sure of is that we don’t have all the answers.  Neither scientists nor theologians can answer all the difficult questions facing the world, especially when the topics turn to ethics, morality, politics, and law.

I don’t know if the world is really at a tipping point.  The earth will survive, just as it survived the extinction of the dinosaurs.  The question is whether our children and grandchildren will still have a viable home here.

Now, I have no hope that people set in their ways, who only seek reinforcement of polar beliefs set in concrete, will get anything of value by reading this book.  The Book of the Samurai suggests, In offering one’s opinion, one must first ascertain whether or not the recipient is in the right frame of mind to receive counsel.

But I am still optimistic.  There are good people on both sides; what the Bible would call people of good will and what the academic community would call true scientists—those willing to test their ideas against new discoveries and alternative theories.

That great theologian, Cat Stevens, laments:

Now, I've been cryin' lately,

Thinkin' about the world as it is.

Why must we go on hating?

Why can't we live in bliss?

‘Cause out on the edge of darkness,

There rides a peace train.

Oh, peace train take this country,

Come take me home again.

People of goodwill agree almost universally that these things are valuable: love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Against such things there is no law.

Please consider this book as a voice crying in the wilderness for you: scientists and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, people of faith, atheists, agnostics, Democrats and Republicans, North and South, all races and all nationalities, to call a cease-fire in this bloody feud long enough to think through some questions with me.  When you are done with the book, I would welcome any reasoned discourse, or accept being burned at the stake.

Jay Ter Louw

Chapter 1: Galileo and the Theory of Relativity

I first heard of inventors as a schoolboy.  Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440.  Edison invented the lightbulb in 1878.  The Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903, and Galileo invented the telescope, sometime around 1609.

It’s much later you learn that inventors stand on the shoulders of giants—they didn’t so much invent things as make something useful from previous theories and experiments of others.  In the Netherlands, opticians were making eyeglasses.  Galileo heard someone had lined lenses up in such a way as to make distant objects appear closer.  By trial and error, he figured out a way to create his own version of a telescope.

What set him apart from the Dutch opticians, scientifically, is he used the telescope to make discoveries supporting a controversial theory that the sun was the center of the universe.  Here also, it was not Galileo’s idea.  Nicolas Copernicus had written down a cohesive argument as early as 1514, though it wasn’t published until about the time of his death in 1543.  Copernicus was not the first either.  Greeks Philolaus of Croton and Aristarchus of Samos had postulated heliocentrism as early as the third century B.C., an idea lost in the Dark Ages, now reborn in the Italian Renaissance.

But in the 1600s, the issue was an existential controversy.  People could lose their lives just for believing that the earth revolved around the sun, because God had established the earth as the center of His creation.

* * *

We know a lot about Galileo’s struggle with the church thanks to 124 letters that were written to him by his daughter.  Dava Sobel tells the story in Galileo’s Daughter.  She was born out of wedlock in 1600, and it would have been hard for him to arrange an honorable marriage for her.  So, Galileo arranged for his daughter to enter the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri when she was thirteen years old.  She took the name Maria Celeste, and never left the walls of the convent until her death in 1634.

From her seclusion, Maria Celeste supported her Most Illustrious Lord Father by ironing his clothes, cooking him treats and preventative remedies against the plague, praying all the time for his success and safety, and editing his manuscripts for eventual publication.

Galileo used his telescope to document sunspots, at odds with the church, since the sun of God’s creation would not have any imperfections crawling across its surface.  Looking at the sun through a telescope damaged his eyes—he would see a halo more than two feet in diameter around a candle flame.

With candied citron and baked pears for Christmas in 1625, Maria Celeste sent him a late-blooming rose.  She wrote:

I enclose a rose which, as an extraordinary thing in this cold season, must be warmly welcomed by you.  And all the more so since, together with the rose, you will be able to accept the thorns that represent the bitter suffering of Our Lord; and also, its green leaves symbolizing the hope we nurture of the reward that awaits us after the brevity and darkness of the winter of this present life, when at last we will enter the clarity and happiness of the eternal spring of Heaven.

Galileo was a moderately successful academic and scientist, teaching mathematics and experimenting with water displacement, pendulums, gravity, and of course, astronomy.  At the same time, Galileo was a devout Catholic, a steadfast son of the church.

Maffeo Cardinal Barberini was Galileo’s friend and patron, calling him a virtuous and pious man of great value, and praising him for his discovery of wondrous new celestial phenomena.  Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, head of the Catholic Church for twenty years, from 1623 to 1643 during an intense fight against heresies and divisions brought about by the reformation.  He sainted the founders of the Jesuits, Loyola, and Xavier.  But ten years later, when the inquisition perceived heresy in Galileo’s writings, Urban could not allow his friendship to intervene and save Galileo from punishment.

What was it in Galileo’s discoveries and writings that caused so much controversy in the church?

Before his time, the church followed the teachings of Ptolemy about the universe: the heavens were perfect and immutable, and God set the Earth in the center of the universe—everything in the heavens revolved around the Earth.  Scientists imagined concentric, glass-like spheres, high in the sky.  Chief in the calculation of which sphere a celestial object inhabited was how long it took to go around the earth, not how bright it was.

Above the Earth’s cloudy atmosphere, the Moon was in the first sphere.  It rotated and cycled through phases.

Mercury and Venus were in the next two spheres, rotating at a slower pace than the Moon because they were farther out, and also cycling through phases.  There was something odd in the rotation of these spheres, as sometimes they would reverse their rotation and the planets would appear to move backwards.  They called this retrograde. Many feared possible negative impacts on world or personal events during this time.

The sun was the prominent occupant of the fourth ring.

Mars and Jupiter were in the next spheres.  Saturn was in the seventh, maybe giving rise to the idea of the seventh heaven.  This was as high as you could go before you reached the fixed spheres of the stars.  While the planets and sun seemed to move independently of each other, the fixed stars all moved together, so it looked like they were all mounted on a single sphere. 

Sometimes the planets were referred to as wandering stars.

Above the ring of fixed stars was heaven, the place where the Gods lived, and anything else too mysterious to have been discovered.

Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope supported Copernicus more than Ptolemy:

•      He discovered the four major moons orbiting Jupiter, which he named after his patrons, the Medici.  They did not revolve around the earth.

•      He discovered that Venus has phases, like the moon, that can be more easily explained in a sun-centered universe.

•      He discovered spots crawling across the otherwise perfect face of the sun.

A circular diagram with symbols Description automatically generated

Earth-centric view of the Universe from Ptolemy

Photo 12 Alamy Stock Photo image TXGPK7

In 1616, The Church warned Galileo that heliocentrism was contrary to current understanding of the Great Catechism of the Council of Trent.  He must not publish anything in opposition to that teaching.  So instead, when it came time to publish his findings, he wrote a dialogue of theories, where three fictional characters discussed the two views of the universe.  I suppose he could not help it if the fictional defenders of Ptolemy sounded more stupid than those defending Copernicus.  But note that he had to submit his book to the inquisition for permission before it was published, and the church approved it.  He called his book Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican.  The book was edited and copied for submission by Maria Celeste, Galileo’s daughter.

In 1633, the inquisition took Galileo to trial over his book, even though it had been approved by the Church.  At the end of the three trial sessions, the verdict was: guilty.

The Cardinal-judges took Bible passages literally: the Sun rises, and the Sun goes down.  In the Old Testament book, Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still over the city of Gibeon—he did not command the earth to stop its movement.  In particular, Cardinal Bellarmino wrote, but as to the Sun and the Earth a wise man has no need to correct his judgment, for his experience tells him plainly that the Earth is standing still and that his eyes are not deceived when they report that the Sun, Moon and stars are in motion.

The judges negotiated with Galileo to accept punishment in exchange for a less harsh sentence; he was made to sign a statement:

"I, Galileo, aged 70 years and kneeling before you, Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, after having been admonished to abandon the false opinion that the Sun is the center of the world and that the earth moves, I caused to be printed a book treating this condemned doctrine, and arguing effectively in its favor.

Therefore, wishing to remove the vehement suspicion justly conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies.

There was some report that Galileo whispered afterward under his breath, But it moves.

Galileo spent much of the rest of his life under house arrest in Arcetri, unable to publish his new discoveries.  A year after the inquisition verdict, Maria Celeste died in the convent on April 2, 1634.  Galileo himself died eight years later, on January 8, 1642, famous but humbled.  Pope Urban had declared that there be no monument, no public oration to commemorate his death.

Ninety-five years later, in 1737, a monument was erected to honor Galileo, and descendants received permission to move his body and the body of his long-time student, Vincenzio Viviani, who had died in 1703.

The few men who could fit inside the tiny original burial chamber broke open the more recent brickwork and extracted the first coffin.  It was carefully carried to the novice chapel and opened to verify the body of Viviani.

Chanting prayers for the dead, they reverently carried his body to the new site, then returned to the original chamber to recover Galileo’s body.  When they broke through the brickwork, they found the coffin damaged, its lid bashed in, and pieces of broken plaster.  When they removed the coffin, they were startled to discover yet another wooden box lying directly beneath it.  Galileo’s grave contained two coffins, two skeletons, and no lead nameplate on either one of them.

The grand duke’s chief physician was called to examine the skeletons and was able to identify Galileo with surprising ease.  Only the top skeleton could belong to an old man—the mandible was detached and there were only four teeth.

The experts concluded that the second skeleton was unmistakably female.  Although the woman had lain dead for at least as long a time as Galileo, she had died at a much younger age.  And so, with the same reverence as before, they carried Maria Celeste, Galileo’s daughter, to rest forever next to her Most Illustrious Lord Father.

* * *

When I first learned about atoms and saw the crude depictions of a nucleus with spinning electrons, I saw an immediate parallel to the solar system.  The nucleus was the sun, electrons the planets.  Some star systems were more complex than others and the scale was different.  It looked like the electrons were orbiting the centers and generally held in place by gravity.  If an electron was bumped out of place it might travel into an atomic-level interstellar space.

I imagined that as things got smaller and smaller, they also got faster and faster.  A hummingbird’s heart beats over 1,000 beats per minute when in full flight.  The bird’s life span is similarly shorter than ours, three to five years.  A house fly only lives two or three weeks.

Because everything is happening faster for these creatures, does their perspective make time slow down for them?  I can imagine a fly getting ready to fly across the kitchen to land on my spaghetti.  Is it like me planning a trip to McDonalds?  Maybe there are a couple of errands to run along the way.

The birds build a nest in a couple of days like we build a house in a few months.  They raise their children in a few weeks like we do in eighteen years.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, just as the earth orbits the sun, the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way.  If you look at some of the recent images from the Webb Telescope, the far away galaxies look like little atoms floating in space, and often orbiting invisible black holes so slowly we can only guess at the movement.

There is a perspective difference in a telescopic view and a microscopic view.  Galileo saw both—he was one of the first to examine a flea under the microscope, perhaps one capable of carrying the plague that decimated the population of Europe in the Middle Ages.  Both perspectives are valid.

* * *

Science is constantly refining our understanding, and the church has become more accepting of many scientific ideas.  It was 1992 before Pope John Paul II offered an apology of sorts to Galileo.  In his October 31st address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope says:

Curiously, Galileo, as a sincere believer, was more far-sighted on this point than his theological opponents.  He writes to Benedetto Castelli: ‘If Scripture cannot err, some of its explainers and interpreters can err in various forms.’

The point is well taken and is further made in modern exegesis of the Catechism of Trent: the problem is not specifically with what the Bible says, but how readers try to interpret it to match their own prejudices.  The modern Pope John Paul II went on to say:

It is a duty of theologians to regularly inform themselves about the scientific results in order to possibly check whether they have to take them into account in their reflection or formulate their doctrine differently.  … The majority of theologians [condemning Galileo] were unable to formally distinguish between Sacred Scripture and its interpretation, and this allowed them to unjustifiably transfer a question of scientific research to the level of doctrine.

We are left with the conclusion that Ptolemy, Cardinal Bellarmino, and the Earth-centered model are wrong.  Everyone knows now that Copernicus, Galileo, and the Sun-centered model are correct.  By the time I got to elementary school and learned about Galileo, the earth is a round globe, it spins on its axis establishing day and night, and orbits the sun every year, establishing the seasons due to its non-perpendicular rotation.  Nine (now eight) planets have roughly circular orbits around the sun; even my fundamentalist church did not object.

* * *

Newton laid down more precise formulae for the orbits of the earth, moon, and other planets.  The gravitational relationship of any two objects in the empty vacuum of space is simple to calculate.  You can determine their position and motion related to each other and fix the trajectory of each of them.  By the time Einstein came along in the early 1900s, we were figuring out that you could express their position and motion from the perspective of either object.

The Moon is 250,000 miles away from the Earth.  Just as true, the Earth is 250,000 miles away from the Moon.

If I am standing on the Earth and observing the Moon, I see that it goes around the earth in about thirty days.  But oddly enough, if I were on the Moon observing Earth, I would see that the Earth goes around the Moon in about thirty days!

When the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto and its moon, Charon, a dramatic time lapse video captured the two bodies rotating around each other, looking more like equals than a planet and its moon.  But regardless of the size of any two objects, it is equally correct to express position and motion from the point of view of either one.

This becomes a simplistic reading of Einstein’s Theories of Relativity.

Whether a freight train is hurtling toward a fly at eighty miles an hour, or the fly is hurtling toward freight train at eighty miles an hour is academic.  If you think about it, in the midlatitudes of the United States, we are spinning around the center of the earth at about 800 miles an hour as the world completes its daily rotation. Like the fly, we don’t feel like we are moving that fast because most everything around us is traveling in the same direction at about the same speed.  The result is the same for the fly—the distance to the train is closing at 80 miles an hour.  And, as Sancho Panza says, whether the pitcher strikes the rock or the rock strikes the pitcher, it’s not going to be very good for the pitcher.

It is much more complex to evaluate the interrelationships when there are three or more objects.  Add the sun, and suddenly we are traveling thousands of miles an hour in complex directions—still some spinning around the center of the earth, but also part of the earth’s orbit around the sun.  Now add that our sun is spinning around the center of the Milky Way, and the galaxies are moving as well.  Though the calculations become more difficult, the theory remains true: Based on this rendition of the Theory of Relativity, it can be said the earth is the center of the universe—the sun, moon, planets, stars, and galaxies all revolve around the earth in complex and contradictory paths.

In the end, Cardinal Bellarmino was right.

John Paul II said in his 1992 statement:

At the time of Galileo, a world without a physical absolute point of reference was unimaginable.  And since the cosmos known at the time was, so to speak, limited to the solar system, this reference point could only be either the Earth or the Sun.  Today, according to Einstein and in view of today's knowledge of the cosmos, neither of these two points of reference has the meaning of that time. This statement does not, of course, concern Galileo's opinion in the dispute; but it can point out to us that, beyond two one-sided and opposing views, there is a broader view that includes and overcomes both views.

* * *

This is critical for us to understand if we want to figure out a path forward.  Whether Pluto circles Charon or Charon circles Pluto doesn’t provide any guidance about how we should live our lives. Your position, motions, actions, influence, relationships, and decisions must be governed from where you are now.

You are the center of the universe!

(But realize that your neighbor, your friend, and your adversary are each the center of the universe, too.)

Chapter 2: The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

The most common way for religious institutions to publish and reinforce their message has historically been through a weekly sermon.  In fundamentalist congregations, regular attendance is an absolute requirement, so the minister has a captive audience week after week.  While this applies to synagogues and mosques, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume we are part of a church.

In some churches, the minister is appointed by a Bishop or some part of the church hierarchy.  In almost all cases, the minister must have been through a rigorous and approved training regimen and accept some kind of ordination where he or she agrees to follow an orthodox belief.  Orthodox means the right way to worship and is defined by each denomination or sect the way the leaders want.

You might assume the church began with a single orthodoxy—it was Abraham or Jesus or Mohammed who could determine what was right with absolute authority.  As soon as a leader takes his first disciple, the orthodoxy begins to break down.  In