Cosmology versus Faith

I have added a section entitled Cosmology versus Faith (see tab above) where I aim to explore the ideas of a most remarkable man whose work I first discovered this year through the writings, interviews and films of Rick Delano and Robert Sungenis.

Wolfgang Smith

Professor Wolfgang Smith graduated from Cornell University at the age of eighteen with majors in physics, philosophy and mathematics.  He received an MS from Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana ) in theoretical physics and was subsequently employed working on aerodynamics at Bell Aircraft Corporation, where he distinguished himself by laying the theoretical foundation for the solution of re-entry problem for satellites. After receiving a PhD in mathematics from Columbia University, he held faculty positions at MIT, UCLA, and Oregon State University. Professor Smith retired from academic life in 1992 to devote himself full-time to his particular interests.

Photo 1995. Public domain, courtesy of Angelico Press via Wikimedia Commons.

As the above paragraph shows, Wolfgang Smith is a scholar and researcher in the fields of mathematics and physics, but he also writes on theology, metaphysics, and religion . His qualifications  in theological, philosophic and scientific disciplines are unique and lend his writings and interviews considerable authority among students and scholars in these fields.

My point of departure is his book entitled:

The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition

(2004 Library of Congress Control Number: 2003109192, ISBN: 0-9629984-7-8)

'Cosmology': Modern Latin cosmologia, < Greek type *κοσμολογία, < κόσμος world + -λογια discourse. Compare French cosmologie.

In philosophy: That branch of metaphysics which deals with the idea of the world as a totality of all phenomena in space and time.
In natural science: The science or theory of the universe as an ordered whole, and of the general laws which govern it. Also, a particular account or system of the universe and its laws.

'Cosmogony': Greek κοσμογονία creation of the world, < κόσμος world + -γονια a begetting (compare κοσμογόνος adjective, world-creating).

Review Panel

Here are the participants in this post's review of the foreword to 'The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition':


JB: Jean Borella
C: Callidior [see Genesis 3, 1]
BB: Blog author

Foreword

BB: The foreword to Professor Smith's groundbreaking work on cosmology (ancient, traditional and modern) was written by Professor Jean Borella who was born in Nancy, France, in 1930.   He is a distinguished academic who in 1962 became a professor in Nancy where he taught philosophy and French until 1977. He later taught at the University of 'Paris X: Nanterre'* before retiring in 1995.
*Now known as 'l'Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense or Nanterre', this is one of the most prestigious French universities, mainly in the areas of law, humanities, political science, social and natural sciences and economics. It is one of the thirteen successor universities of the University of Paris.

BB: Perhaps you could take us through your foreword, Professor...

JB: Gladly. I start by pointing to an anomaly, namely  that there are in the world today religions with followers still standing by their beliefs.This is despite the fact that religious belief is regarded as definitely belonging nowadays to a bygone age. A believer's situation, whatever his religion, is certainly not an easy one. This is especially true for Christianity, because for three centuries it has been directly confronted by the negations of modernity.

BB: What are these 'negations of modernity'? Can you give us some examples?

JB: The blows dealt by the modern world against a people's religious soul are in the first place concerned with immediate and everyday existence.The extraordinary material success of scientific and technological progress is, for many, proof sufficient to refute the world of religion. This is because religion speaks of an invisible world, while contemporary civilization renders the visible, sensory world more and more present, the invisible more and more absent.

C: (interrupting) That is a trifle harsh, professor. Surely mankind is entitled to celebrate the freedom coming from scientific progress. Millions now enjoy the benefits of desktop computers, smart phones, i-pads, laptops, social networks, reality TV shows, contact-less debit and credit cards, not forgetting the vast array of medications and vaccines, including revolutions in surgery such as gender reassignment and selective abortion. The list goes on, as you know. Surely you would not want to take all this away from the ordinary people and return to the... er... Dark Ages, before the Enlightenment?

BB: I promise that in due time we shall discuss those very points. For the moment, please allow Professor Borella to continue.

JB: Thank you. The omnipresence of a world ever more 'worldly', focusing on the material and the sensory, is only the effect, in the practical order, of a more decisive cause that is theoretical in nature, namely the revolution of Galilean science.

C: (With a shudder) 'Galilean'?

BB: Don't worry. This is a reference not to Galilee but to Galileo, who tried to replace the traditional cosmology with the  revolutionary, heliocentric Copernican principle. This proved to be truly earthshaking, in more than one sense (laughter). When men and women were told that their globe orbited the sun and span like a top on its own axis, they grew increasingly giddy as they contemplated the vertiginous possibilities of a brave, new, dizzy world order. When they made their act of faith that the earth moves, it seems the earth moved for them.

C: Thanks for the illumination... but please leave the jokes to me. In cosmology, as in other spheres, I personally have always favoured a revolutionary model. Just picture poor man, trapped on a boring, motionless earth, fixed rigidly at the centre of the universe. In his pride, man thought everything revolved around him. In his delusion, he thought he was a uniquely special creation. Galileo changed all this with his scientific approach. But he was only the first of many. Isaac Newton, himself a dazzling luminary in the firmament, was later able to prove mathematically (with his laws of motion) everything that Galileo had claimed about he earth's motion. Later still, the great Darwin would make monkeys out of those who looked to Genesis for the origins of species, including man. His Evolution revolution was based on science rather than grim fairy-tales. Marx, too, would apply a scientific approach to socio-politico-economic questions in his revolutionary Das Kapital. Then Freud would remove the cure of souls from Christian charlatans obsessed with sin; he would place soul-analysis (psychoanalysis) on a truly scientific, guilt-free footing. His disciples spread the good news of the sexual revolution of the sixties. The science is now settled. Ask any school children. So, please: spare us your 'negations of modernity' and your conveniently 'invisible' but risible hocus pocus religion.

BB: I'm afraid, Callidior, that your revolutionary fervour is shooting the discussion off on a centrifugal tangent. We shall come to these issues in good time. Can we please move forward with the foreword?

JB: Yes, of course. The revolution of Galileo had as a consequence for the Christian believer the subversion of the reality implied by his faith.What remains then is the option either to renounce his faith, or else - an almost desperate solution- to renounce entirely the cosmology that it entails. On the whole, Christian thought has committed itself to this second way: to keep the faith and abandon all the cosmological representations by which that faith has been expressed. This is a desperate solution.

BB: Why?

JB: Because if we disregard these cosmological representations, what remains of all the other representations in the Christian's faith? Scripture informs us that the Apostles saw Christ's Ascension from the earth and disappearance behind a cloud, while Galilean science objects that space is infinite, that it has neither high nor low, and that this ascension, even supposing it to be possible — which they say it is not - is meaningless. Bultmann and the majority of Protestant and Catholic exegetes and theologians have resorted to an immense process of demythologization of Christian scriptures. To demythologize is to understand that this cosmological presentation is, in reality, only a symbolic language, in other words, a fiction.

BB: But why do you conclude that this 'solution' is so desperate?

C: (interjecting) I can answer that! If the Christian rejects the cosmological presentation of the Ascension that we are told  was witnessed by the Apostles, for example, must he not also reject the 'Faith' attached to it? The price the Christian pays for accepting that the cosmological texts in Scripture are mere symbols (ie fairy tales or 'pie in the sky') is that all the other mysteries of his faith suffer the same fate. What price now Adam and Eve, 'original sin', the very need for a Messiah, the
Incarnation, the miracles, the Resurrection?

JB: Callidior is, broadly speaking, correct in so far as many Christians, consciously or otherwise, have made precisely this rejection. His gloating is however a little premature. In the present crisis, in which Christian thought is split between maintaining the 'traditional' in its entirety and confining it to purely moral problems, Wolfgang Smith’s book discloses a liberating perspective which,in the name of science itself, restores to faith its entire truth. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of such a work.

BB: Can you give us a brief idea of this 'liberating perspective'?

JB: Unknown to the public, the Galilean model is obsolete. The advent of the theory of relativity and of quantum physics entails the abandonment of the Galilean model of the universe, a definitive abandonment. Our idea of the cosmos must be completely transformed both in its spatio-temporal structure (relativity) as well as in regard to the constitution of matter (quantum theory). Today, it is nineteenth century materialism that has become a superstition.

BB: Are we to take it that what is being taught throughout the educational system and repeated in the media is... out of date?

JB: Quite. Philosophers, theologians, and exegetes are,however, far from realizing this. The 'scientific' vision of the world that Bultmann opposes to the mythological vision of faith is that of a science largely obsolete even at the time when, in 1941, he expounded his program of demythologization. Basically, Wolfgang Smith shows us in his work,with simplicity and sometimes with much humour, that Bultmann has chosen the wrong object: it is not religion but the customary interpretation of science that needs to be demythologized. Only the doctrine of the philosophia
perennis is able to accomplish this, and thereby to disclose the full truth of science itself. On the most essential points, on the most burning questions concerned with biblical cosmology, heliocentrism, the nature of space and matter, the concept of a true causality, etc., Wolfgang Smith shows how the conclusions of contemporary science cease to be incompatible with the affirmations of traditional cosmology.

BB: This is quite remarkable.

JB: Yes, truly remarkable, as is his courage, for he has dared to confront the dominant ideology of modern culture, which is not without risk, to say the least. This ideology has turned science (a certain kind of science!)into the official mythology of our times.

BB: It seems the premises of the modernists are in one sense out of date...  but in another not sufficiently out of date. Unfortunately, we are now out of time so, on behalf of all our readers, may I thank the members of our panel, Professor Borella and Callidior, for their contributions.Wolfgang Smith himself will be featuring in our next discussion when we shall have a closer look at some of the ideas in his book.

C: (Aside) I can see my team will have to make one hell of an effort to deal with this pestilential Professor's attack on modernity and progress...