Humans have sought to identify order on Earth and in the heavens for thousands of years: Egypt, Sumer, Persia, Aristotle and Euclid’s Greece, to the present day. Observations, experiments, measurement, reasoning from phenomena, theories proven and disproven, trial and error.
As Catholics, we believe the universe is God’s creation, caused and sustained by the Uncaused Cause. We believe God established, by whatever means in His created time, sufficient order—stability—to obtain galaxies and stars necessary for fostering life, including life in His image and likeness, on at least one planet.
Many scientists are convinced there are billions—1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000—of galaxies in the universe, with billions or trillions of stars in each. Theologically speaking, who can say why? Some argue that 1 or 10 is as a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) suns or years to God. On the other end of the scale from billion-star galaxies is a billion-particle acorn, from its constituent molecules, atoms, and the most fundamental particles inside atoms, among these electrons and quarks; a kind of “galaxy” of things inside a single acorn.
In the past 200 years, science has given us both environmental threats via out-of-control industrialization as well as remedies to those threats. Right into the 20th century, plagues and poor sanitation made water practically everywhere perilous to drink, until science gave us drinking water treatment technology that can reduce drinking water-related deaths and illnesses to almost zero. Agricultural innovations fueled by science dramatically increased yields and reduced pestilence so that millions more could be fed.
Technology has also delivered Weapons of Mass Destruction and rapidly accelerating Artificial Intelligence that recent popes, including Leo XIV, have strongly challenged. Humans might very well travel to Mars in my grown children’s lifetimes. In fact, applied science—engineering—goes back to the invention of the wheel, facility with fire, the bow and arrow, useful in feeding the tribe and in killing enemies.
Fides et Ratio, faith and reason, not faith or reason. God’s gift of freedom.
Pope Leo is right to be concerned about technology, Artificial Intelligence included. Would any faithful Catholic scientist dispute this? Yet, the application of AI has far more to do with the ethos of the world—the things that matter most to the world as compared to the things that ought to matter most—than technology itself. A righter-ordered ethos would produce righter-ordered AI and other technologies. As we have learned, laws, regulations, and international agreements are no substitutes for a rightly ordered ethos.
This year, in my town, a storm badly flooded downtown because the big pipe built in the 1940s that carried stormwater beneath the central city couldn’t handle the peak storm flow. Adopting more of the Netherlands’ applied science, where much of the land is below sea level—dikes, water gates, pumps, allowing flooding to occur where the impact is less damaging, “Managing the Water,” might have prevented, or at least softened, my town’s flooding. With the appropriate strategic infrastructure in place, AI could have continuously read river levels, monitored storms, and at 2 a.m. in driving rain have activated water gates, turned pumps on and off, and routed portions of the water to the least damaging locations.
It would have done so better and more effectively than I could stumbling around in the dark and rain all night when, as a college student working on a Corps of Engineers flood control project, part of my job was to monitor big storms that, on one memorable occasion, required dangerous middle-of-night contractor deployment to knock construction dikes down and let the water flow.
Two essential questions for science and applied science: What can be done? What should be done?
Though many today will disagree, the second is the more important question. For Catholics, though science is subordinate to properly interpreted Divine Revelation, true science cannot contradict Divine Revelation. However, Catholics should take care not to extrapolate Divine Revelation to the interpretation that humanity may dominate the natural world, on the one hand, nor to today’s popular secular interpretation that the lowest organisms in nature enjoy equal status with humanity.
As to life elsewhere in the universe, the range and power of animal senses and adaptations here on Earth, from insects to octopi to elephants, are as “alien” as anything a science fiction writer could imagine in a far-off galaxy.
God’s worthy universe, the unlikely stability of the universe unto planet Earth, not merely life on Earth but stable galaxies and suns including our sun, a stable solar system despite hundreds of millions of years of asteroid strikes, has spawned God-less explanations such as the multiverse of an infinite number of universes that eliminates the fantastically low probability of a lone universe’s—our universe’s—stability.
But there is no evidence whatsoever of the multiverse as of yet. Thus, despite so many advances and achievements, God’s worthy universe is still a worthy challenge for scientists to comprehend.
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We read: “Two essential questions for science and applied science: What can be done? What should be done?”
Apart from the two questions for science, there’s a THIRD QUESTION which has nothing at all to do with doing, so to speak. In his message to a possible attitude in the United States, Pope Leo XIII (!) stressed the priority of contemplation over action (Testem benevolentiae Nostrae (1899). Theologian John Hardon SJ summarized:
“…Americanist tendencies asserted (1) the superiority of ‘natural’ over ‘supernatural’ reality, (2) the superiority of ‘active’ over ‘passive’ virtues (prayer), and (3) reduced the faith to the surrounding culture. It was also recommended that the Church should relax as far as possible the rigor of her requirements for converts, emphasize only what Catholics held in common with other Christians and minimize point of difference” (“Christianity in the Twentieth Century,” Image 1972).
And, about galactic numbers–and now maybe AI–and interior contemplation, the communist convert Whittaker Chambers (a Quaker) offered a SIMPLE STEP into reality for his son:
“What little I know of the stars I have passed on to my son over the years [….] Sometimes I draw my son’s eye to the constellation Hercules, especially to the great nebula dimly visible about the middle of the group. Now and again, I remind him that what we can just make out as a faint haze is another universe—the radiance of fifty thousand suns [actually billions] whose light had left its source thirty-four thousand years before it brushes the miracle of our straining sight.
“Those are THE ONLY STATISTICS that I shall ever trouble my son with.
“I want him to have a STANDARD as simple as stepping into the dark and raising his eyes whereby to measure what he is and what he is not against the order of reality. I want him to see for himself upon the scale of the universes that God, the soul, faith, are NOT simple matters . . . .I want him to remember that God Who is a God of Love is also the God of a world that includes the atom bomb and virus, the minds that contrived and use or those that suffer them, AND that the problem of good and evil is NOT more simple than the immensity of worlds [….] I want him to know that it is his SOUL, and his soul alone, that makes it possible for him to bear, without dying of his own mortality, the faint light of Hercules’ fifty thousand suns (Epilogue in “Witness,” 1952, CAPS added).