Science was never a danger for my Catholicism - Part II

Interview with Manuel Alfonseca. Originally published in Spanish in La NuevaRazón

Questioner: Carlos Sordo de la Rubiera

II Part

Q: In your article “Faith in God in the light of science” you say this: "During the 18th and 19th centuries, believers gave ground as new scientific advances forced them to accept that the Earth is not the center of universe and that the human body is the result of a long and complex biological evolution”. But, continuing with said article "as a consequence of the latest advances in Cosmology and the Physico-Chemical sciences, and for the first time in several centuries, atheism has now got on the defensive." Let's stop at this last point. If atheists go on the defensive, it is because they consider that their atheism deserves to be defended. If, as you also affirm, the human being has a wish for immortality and a longing for infinity, and atheism gives a negative answer to that wish and that longing, how is it possible that a person may decide to take an atheist position?

A: This question is important. The fact that atheism went on the defensive is evident. For example, in a book written in the 1950s by the English astronomer Raymond Littleton, the author compares the Big Bang and the steady state theories, the two competing cosmological theories at that time, before the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, which gave the first theory the accolade and disproved the second, and he says this: A person like me, who does not believe in God, prefers the steady state theory, because the Big Bang would force me to believe in God. He made, by the way, the same mistake that Pius XII was tempted to make: thinking that the Big Bang theory proves the existence of God. Obviously, a person who says this, is on the defensive. When the predictions of the Big Bang theory were confirmed, as early as the 1960s and 1970s, atheists were desperate, because they believed that the Big Bang proved the existence of God. Another astronomer, Jastrow, wrote a book whose last words were: [The scientist] has scaled the mountains of ignorance… as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. In other words, atheists were almost convinced that they were defenseless.

Since then, as I explain in one of my blog posts, The Hijacking of the Big Bang, atheists have tried to turn things around, and now say that the Big Bang proves that God does not exist because the universe arose as a spontaneous fluctuation of vacuum. This assertion is clearly not scientific, because it cannot be proven false, and even if it were true, where did the vacuum come from? Who created the vacuum? To disguise the question and give the impression that they have all the answers, instead of speaking of vacuum they say nothing. But then they are showing that they do not know what they are talking about. Nothing is nothing. It does not exist. This was discovered by the Greek philosophers 2,500 years ago. And from what does not exist, nothing can come out spontaneously.

Regarding the last part of the question, Ernst Schumacher, a famous economist, wrote in his book Small is beautiful that the reason why people assert that God does not exist, that only matter exists, that we are programmed machines, that human freedom is an illusion, is to evade responsibility. This is something that man has been trying to do since the beginning, as shown in Genesis: Adam puts the blame on Eve, and Eve puts the blame on the serpent. We are still doing that. Atheism is a way of avoiding responsibility for our actions. If there is nothing after this life, then no one is going to hold us accountable, and therefore we can rest easy. That is the answer.

Q: You are not simply a theist; you are a Catholic. Why?

A: I am a Catholic because, first, I was brought up as a Catholic; and second, after 70 years reading and thinking, I am absolutely convinced that Catholicism is true. I have never had any doubts. As I’ve said before, science has never endangered my Catholicism.

Q: Perhaps one of the hottest topics today that concerns both science and faith is that of the so-called "voluntary termination of pregnancy." Recently, we have seen how an important newspaper, with national circulation, celebrated, and called a "historic advance" the fact that in Colombia abortion has been authorized until the 24th week. In other words: we must consider as advanced and, therefore, positive, the legal possibility of aborting fetuses up to six months of gestation. How did we get to this point, and what can and should science do to shed some common sense on the matter?

A: I have written several posts against abortion in my blog and otherwhere, always from a scientific point of view. For science, this is very clear: man begins at the moment of fertilization of the ovum by the sperm. An embryo is not a mass of cells, nor is a part of the mother's body; it is a different being, a living being, a human being. Science says this since the mid-nineteenth century, so it is not new. It is something that was taught in high school, and now is concealed, for we are under a dominant, suffocating ideology that censors everything that disagrees with it. Ultimately, it is an atheist ideology; an ideology that denies that man is different from the rest of the animals. Richard Dawkins said this clearly in his book The God Delusion: What is the difference between a man and a cockroach? They are both living beings! One of the most important differences I use to point out is that man is the only species that cares about the well-being of other species. With this argument I have brought some atheists to reflect. After listening to a series of ten or fifteen differences between man and other living beings, they say: “you are right in this one!”. This argument reaches even some of those who try to close their minds.

I know there are atheist biologists who are in favor of abortion. They don’t deny that man begins at the moment of fertilization, and that an embryo is a living human being. They offer legal reasons, not scientific reasons. Scientists who really know about the question and is in favor of abortion have no choice but to look for something outside science in support of their views. Their legal reasons are usually like this: abortion has been made legal by a law approved by the people; therefore it can be done. In a post in my blog I argue that democracy, which is usually used as the justification for laws (in fact they are actually approved by a very small minority, although they tell us that the people makes laws) was discredited in the year 399 before Christ when the Athenian democracy sentenced Socrates to death. Socrates had lived with the dictatorships of the Two Hundred and the Thirty, but it turned out that it was during democracy when he was applied the death penalty.

Q: You have written that, for those who do not believe, a universe provided with a moral law that no one has imposed is an inconsistency. Does this mean that atheism necessarily leads to the belief that there is no absolute moral law, and that all our moral norms (such as respecting life and property) depend on our own subjective decision? In other words, could an atheist or an agnostic assert that there is a natural law? In other words, can they believe in a natural law?

A: Some atheists have told me “I am an atheist, but I believe that there are things that should be done, and things that should not be done.” Others think otherwise, but the accusation that an atheist is automatically immoral is not true. Some may be even more moral than some believers. But they cannot base their morality on a transcendent law, because, if they believed that there is a law above all of us, then they would have to question their belief in atheism. What is then the base of their position? They say that natural law is simply a consequence of natural selection. They say that natural selection has selected favorably certain types of behavior in human beings along their evolution (although in fact, natural selection does not select, it’s just a statistical tool). But this idea has a consequence: if the natural law is just a product of evolution, then we can change it as we please. On the other hand, if natural law has been imposed on us by someone, then we are accountable before that someone. Both positions, of course, are incompatible and cannot get to an agreement, just as the statements "God exists" and "God does not exist" cannot either.

Q: Since we are talking about other worlds, the book The Envoy by J.J. Benítez includes a fictitious interview with Jesus Christ where he says that he had to carry his message to other planets as well as ours. In the event that extraterrestrial life existed, from the point of view of your Catholic faith and 70 years reading, could Jesus Christ have been incarnated on several planets, or does redemption at Earth apply to the rest of the universe? Could there even be extraterrestrial civilizations that do not need redemption because they have not fallen in the same mistakes as we did?

A: This is a hypothetical question, starting from the hypothesis of the existence of extraterrestrial life. I said in one of my books that the probability that extraterrestrial intelligences exist is 50 percent, because we really have no idea. The official position of the Catholic Church is that the redemption of Jesus Christ on Earth is valid for the entire universe. But all those issues you have mentioned have been dealt with by science fiction. For instance, Ray Bradbury wrote in the sixties a story called The Man, about an astronaut who travels in an interstellar spaceship, and arrives at an extrasolar planet just after Jesus Christ has been incarnated there. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador adapted this story for the radio and changed the ending. In the original story, Jesus Christ is not killed, but in Ibáñez Serrador's version they kill him, and then the astronaut says "I must find him somewhere else", and travels from planet to planet looking for Jesus. I think this ending may actually be better than Bradbury's. In Out of the Silent Planet, the first novel in his Cosmic Trilogy, C.S. Lewis says that the inhabitants of Mars did not fall into original sin and therefore do not need redemption. And in his second novel, Perelandra, we meet the first couple on Venus, who are put to the test, and in this case succeed. There are many ideas like these. My personal position is that the universe is subject to original sin from the beginning; and that original sin is a personal sin, prior to the beginning of the universe. Someone called it religion fiction. O.K.! But if original sin predates the beginning of the universe, then any hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence would be automatically subject to original sin, and thus in need of redemption. But, as I said, the official position of the Catholic Church is that the redemption by Jesus Christ on Earth is valid for the entire universe, and if by chance we should be the first (which is possible), that would be a great explanation.

Q: The first, in what sense? The first intelligent species that has ever appeared?

A: Yes. The universe has existed for 13 billion years, and we seem to be at a fairly critical moment. If you look at the universal constants (well, actually they are not constants; for example, what is called the Hubble constant is not constant) then you see that they are at a fairly critical point. There is a book by two scientists (Barrow and Tippler) who, by the way, are not believers, and they argue that we are at the exact moment in which all the variables of the universe combine to make our existence possible. So, it could be that we are the first. In fact, that would explain the Fermi paradox: if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, why aren't they here? I have written a series of posts in my blog about interstellar travel. Interstellar travel, in principle, is not impossible. And perhaps in a few million years human beings could conquer the entire galaxy. Of course, we aren’t going to see it. But, in principle, it is possible. So, if there were any extraterrestrial species a few million years ahead of us, they would be here by now. So perhaps there isn't any and we are the first.