SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY

                In the first week of October, last year (i.e. 2005 A.D.), the Catholic Church of England, Scotland and Wales published a teaching document, forwarded by the two most senior Catholics of the land, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminister, and Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St. Andrew’s and Edinburgh, to warn their 5 million worshippers as well as any others drawn to the scriptures that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible. The said teaching document, called the Gift of the Scriptures, was issued as a part of the 40th anniversary celebration of the so called Dei Verbum or the Second Vatican Council. “We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy”, says the document.

                To clarify their stand, the hierarchy of the Church said that the first 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis, in which the story of creation has been told, can neither be “scientific nor historical”. They pointed out the story of creation of woman where Bible says, “So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs and closed up the place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man” (Genesis:11,21-22), and say that it can never be a true description of evolution of  women.

                In fact, the Bible was originated, not by the Lord God, but by the Jews who were pastoral, nomadic and illiterate brutes. And that is the reason why the renowned historian Sir H. G. Wells, while describing the history of the Jewish kings like David, Solomon etc in his Short History of the World., writes,” These are the tales of barbaric kings ruling barbaric people”. It is really astonishing that the enlightened people of the West are still following a vulgar book like Bible and a barbaric faith like Christianity. One can easily understand the level of vulgarity of the contents of the Bible while it says, “Do not dishonour your father by having sexual relation with your mother”, at more than one places. One should be afraid what the Lord God would suggest a faithful whose father is either dead or absconding. However, it is a good sign that the believers of the faith have already started to question the faith.        

In the presence context, it may be recalled that in 1997, at the 60th anniversary meeting of the Pontifical Academy, that advises the Vatican on scientific matters, Pope John Paul II in his massage to the gathering of scientists declared that Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with the Christian faith. The Pope said that the theory of narural selection was more than a hypothesis and the notion had progressibly taken roots in the minds of the scientists following a series of discoveries in different disciplines. But in the late 19th century, Darwin’s works Origin of Species and The Descent of Man had led to a bitter controversy when leading churchmen denounced Darwin’s view as incompatible with the account given in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. It was only in 1950, Pope Pius XII had recommended in his Humani Genesis that it would be better for the church not to reject the theory outright.

                It is evident that the Pope, by accepting the Darwin’s theory, has virtually rejected the biblical story of creation and hence it has raised some serious theological questions. Whether the notion that human beings descended from subhuman animals? Whether those creatures, evolved before man, had souls? This is very important since according to Christian theology, man enjoys a special relation with God and has been favoured with a soul. The Pope tried to sidestep this vexed questions but after a lot of persuatrion, said, “If human body has its origin in pre-existing living matter, the spiritual soul was immediately created by God. The evolution theory does not give enough weight to a person’s spirit and is incapable of establishing the dignity of man”.

Historically, The Christian faith suffered its first setback when Nicholas Copernicus put forward his heliocentric model for the planetary system and in the next century Johannes Kepler established the theory of Copernicus on firm mathematical ground, and thus shattered the geocentric conviction of the church. Fortunately Copernicus could escape persecution as he himself was a cannon of the church and secondly, his book Revolutionibus was published when he was at his death bed. But later on Galileo and Bruno were reviled by the Vatican for maintaining the same view and ultimately Bruno was burnt alive and Galileo was imprisoned for heresy. It is important to note here that nearly a thousand years before Copernicus, India honoured Aryabhatta for propagating the same view.

It should also be mentioned here that only a century ago, Pope Leo XIII, in his endeavour to prove that the Catholic Church is not opposed to science, commissioned the Vatican observatory and despite such an effort, it took another century for the church to declare in the recent past that it was wrong about Galileo. While commenting on these developments, Father Maffeo, the Deputy Director of the Vatican observatory, says, “With the help of science we have discovered that certain things taught in the past have to go – humans  were not descendants of Adam and Eve, but some divine intervention played its role and added spirit or soul into the human body”. It may be recalled here that it was only in 1988, Pope John Paul II acknowledged what Sir Isaac Newton had described in his Principia Mathematica, on occassion of 300 aniversary of that key treatise.

                In near future, the Christian faith is going to face, perhaps, the most bitter confrontation with science when the scientist discover life beyond Earth. According to traditional biologists, life is a freak and hence very rare and most probably confined to this planet alone. But the other view that is gaining popularity is that the biological complexity called life can emerge spontaneously through a process of self organisation and hence it is ubiquitous. This view is in serious contradiction with the Christian faith since the Bible does not say that God attempted to create life anywhere else except on thic planet.

The position of the Earth in our solar system is unique in the sense that its distance from the sun keeps it just adequately warm so that water remains in liquid form. Had it been a bit closer to the sun, water would have evaporated and, in the reverse case, it would have frozen into ice. In either case, life would have been impossible since, according to the biologists, water in liquid form is an essential pre-requisite for the evolution of carbon-based life on this planet. It is therefore a rational speculation that life may exist in Earth-like planets orbitting round the distant stars in the Universe. Astronomers estimate that the  Milky Way galaxy, of which the sun is a member, contains nearly 100 billion stars. On the other hand, the pictures sent by the Hubble Space Telescope regarding the process of the formation of stars suggest that each of these stars have its own planetary system and hence it is quite reasonable that a large number of them are bio-friendly. Apart from that, moons of some giant planets may also be hospitable to life. So scientists are more or less convinced that life is ubiquitous and the notion gains further ground due to some recent discoveries.

Today’s bitterly cold planet Mars was once wet and temperate and many believe that unicellular life flourished on it at that time. Some also believe that those micro-organisms are still surviving somewhere under the Martial surface. This speculation gains ground with the discovery of a strange bacteria Methanococcus Jannaschii, which can survive in a very adverse environmental condition. The existence of Martian life has been further supported by the discovery of bacterial activity in a meteorite named ‘Allan Hills – 84001’ of Martian origin and supposed to have reached the Earth probably 12,000 years ago. Moreover, photographs sent by the space craft Galileo, launched in 1989, made scientists to believe that Europa, the fourth largest moon of the Jupiter, contains liquid water under its icy crust and hence to sustain life much more than that on Mars.

Meanwhile, in December 1995, two American astronomers Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler reported the discovery of two planets orbitting round the stars “47 Ursae Majoris” and “70 Virginis”. Later on the discovery of the 6th planet, 1.6 times heavier than the Jupiter, circling round the star “16 Cygni B”, has been reported by the astronomers. All these discoveries speak in favour of the notion that life is ubiquitous.  “The discovery of alien life would transform not only our science but also our religions, our belief systems and our entire world view”, says Dr. Paul Davies, a professor of natural history in the University of Adelaide, Australia. In such a situation “Christianity faces another peculiar problem – Is Christ the saviour of humans or of all the living intelligent beings of the Universe?”, says Dr. Davies. In fact the existence of alien living beings would imply the existence of an alien God, and furthermore, if those alien beings are more advanced intellectually and spiritually than humans, that would seriously undermine the biblical God.

Curiously enough, the discovery of life beyond Earth would, on the other hand, substantiate the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. Vedanta says that the supreme consciousness Brahman is the ultimate reality of this creation from which all contingent beings evolved and life (prana) is nothing but a particular manifestation of Brahman. So, ubiquity of life is an integral part of basic Hindu thought and a Hindu observes consciousness, the seed of life, even in inanimate objects. “All this world is pervaded by Me, the Unmanifested Being”, says the Bhagavadgita (9:5). In fact, our Bhagavat Purana contemplate billions of Earth-like other habitable worlds and decribe Lord Krishna as the SupremeLord of all these other worlds.