June 09, 2002|By Gary Dorsey | Gary Dorsey,Sun Staff
As the Hubble Space Telescope's new camera blinked to life a few weeks ago, transmitting sublime views of galactic tumult on the outskirts of time, gasping astronomers were not all merely agog over a new set of data points. The phantasmic glow of infant stars and massive galaxies not only promised that the science would continue to advance further into its golden age but, for some, suggested even more transcendent possibilities.
"It's not the awesomeness of the science that makes me believe that there has to be a God," says Howard Bushouse, a Hubble astronomer who studies galaxy collisions and star birth. "I have always believed in God. But when I see these awesome things, it's just that much more confirmation for me that, wow, this is an even greater God than I ever thought before."
FOR THE RECORD - The caption on a Hubble Space Telescope photograph of colliding galaxies that appeared in Sunday's Arts & Society section was incorrectly identified as "The Tadpole." The collision is actually nicknamed "The Mice." The Sun regrets the error.
The fact that private ruminations of professional astronomers sometimes turn metaphysical is a surprising little secret at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the center on Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus that coordinates Hubble research. Of course, astronomers at STSI may raise an eyebrow, as some did recently, when the release of new Hubble photographs prompts a call from someone who insists he has spotted an image of Jesus in the starlit miasmas. But the fact is, the idea of a Divine Hand, God or Beautiful Theory is very much alive in the minds of some scientists who view the same startling images.
They just don't always feel comfortable discussing it.
"The fact that we don't tend to talk about it a whole lot really might be that some people may be a little scared or shy about it," says Bushouse. "Just because of concern about the possible negative reactions from colleagues."
Centuries ago, the religious impulse of astronomers could not be separated from their scientific quests. But as astronomy developed and discoveries continually pushed theological notions further and further into their own separate realm, religion became a topic that was, if not forbidden, rarely discussed in professional circles.
Today the subject of God and astronomy is still not what one might call a hot topic at the institute. Conversation is more likely to buzz over, say, the thermal history of intergalactic gas than whether Hubble's revelation of an expanding universe makes us all more or less the product of accidental events or honored guests at Creation's most hospitable planet. The project's search for origins is explicitly not a search for religious meaning, and at STSI, the imponderable "why" questions of existence often seem less interesting than those "how" questions that scientists actually have some real hope of answering.
Still, with its ability to picture the evolution of galaxy formations and star births since early stages in time, Hubble promises to continue helping scientists detect how the universe came to be. And if they discover the Earth is not the only planet inhabited by intelligent life, or that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes, or that the Big Bang was not the one moment of creation but that there was, in fact, no beginning, well, some might think data points could become theological points pretty rapidly.
Whether scientists themselves see these as religious questions depends on which astronomer you query.
A 'beautiful' theory
Mario Livio, who heads STSI's science division, acknowledges that he is not a religious man. But he defends other people's need for religious viewpoints, and insists they can easily coexist with the disciplines of astronomy and theoretical physics. Religion, he says, is simply a matter of faith about which science has no bearing.
"We are all standing breathless in front of these [Hubble] pictures," he says. "We have to be in awe from all the beauty and complexity of this universe we live in. But there is one difference here between religious people and the pure physicist. If you are a religious person, then presumably it inspires you to think all the beauty and complexity must have had some great designer behind it. And this, I suppose, only strengthens your beliefs.
"If you are a nonreligious physicist, then what you think is, 'Wow, how can I really explain with the laws of physics the emergence of all this complexity?' But it's not as if you have to take every law of physics and translate that into some property that you would like God to have or take any particular property of the universe and say that this does or does not agree with holy writings. That isn't the intent in either religion or science."
That does not mean, though, that the philosophical implications of newly emerging data are lost on Livio. Quite the contrary.
