The March for Life and the People on the Planet Next Door

Courtesy of Damian Entwistle / CC BY-NC 2.0

The human fascination with finding extraterrestrial life has turned a blind eye to a half century of Roe v Wade. How would we explain Planned Parenthood to E.T.?

January 25, 2023 by Father Gordon MacRae

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: I first wrote this post six years ago in this same week in January 2017. It was written for an older version of this blog so we would have to restore it to make it readable again. I decided instead to rewrite it and publish it anew. This post is substantially revised and updated, but we retained the 2017 comments. Please feel free to add to them.

The annual March for Life took place this past week in the nation’s capital and around the country. It capped off a momentous year in the cause for life with the long-sought overturning of Roe v. Wade.

These events also coincide with a renewed interest in the scientific search for extraterrestrial life. The frenzy is fueled once again by grainy new images of something seen moving in the skies. Whatever it is, it is entirely of human origin for reasons explained in this post.

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Working in the prison law library a few days before a long holiday weekend in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., I was trying to pick out a few books that might help me write a post for Beyond These Stone Walls during the long days stuck inside. I have to be really selective about books these days. I literally have to sleep with everything I’m reading. There is simply no place to put them but on my bunk. I’ll die if I can’t read and I’ll die if I can’t sleep. So I had to find a way to do both in the 60 square feet which I will never call home.

I knew there was a science post coming. I think Liz Feuerborn knew it, too. A dear friend and long time BTSW reader in Lincoln, Nebraska, Liz recently sent me a most welcomed Christmas gift. It’s a printed list of 244 Catholic priests and religious — four of them canonized saints — who have made major contributions to science. The list includes a description of the work of each.

I was very pleased to see among them another BTSW reader and contributor, Father Andrew Pinsent, a priest and particle physicist who has been a guest writer for this blog. Father Pinsent is the Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion at England’s Oxford University. I have written about him in a few posts, one of which he co-authored with me entitled, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.” The list of scientist-priests also includes Fr. Georges Lemaître, of course, a mathematician and physicist of the early 20th Century who is considered in scientific circles today to be the Father of Modern Cosmology. Ironically, he was also the godfather of Pornchai Moontri’s godfather. I am still trying to work out the astronomical odds against that.

Also on the list is Nicolaus Copernicus a priest and astronomer in the late 15th and early 16th Century who actually has a scientific revolution named after him. The Copernican Revolution knocked from the forefront of science the notion that our humble Earth is the center of our solar system. From my point of view, it has been a contribution to humankind’s capacity for humility that the Universe does not revolve around us. Alas, I am not on the list at all, but why would I be? I have no contribution to science except to be an observer. In that role, as I explain below, I have been in very good company.

But first, back to my selection of books for that long weekend stuck inside. The one that most caught my eye was the 2015 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. It contains a few pages about scientific discoveries that have radically changed how we view our place in the Cosmos. A segment that got my attention was a small tribute to Vera Rubin, an American astronomer whose work led to the discovery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and changed the way science views the Universe.

Vera Rubin earned her doctorate in astronomy at Georgetown, a Catholic university in Washington, DC. In the 1960s and 1970s, her observations of other galaxies revealed that the velocity of the movement of stars in their outermost rims is much faster than the existing dogmas of science predicted. Her conclusions demonstrated that the Universe is much stranger than we had ever known, that the matter we actually can see in other galaxies comprises only five to ten percent of the actual Universe. The other ninety-five percent came to be known as dark matter and dark energy. “Astronomers thought they were studying the Universe,” she said, “and now we learn that we are just studying the five to ten percent that is luminous.”

Back at the start of 2017 I opened a copy of The Wall Street Journal and was stunned to see her obituary. Dr. Rubin died a week earlier on Christmas day at her home in Princeton, New Jersey. She was 88 years old, and one of the most accomplished astronomers of the late 20th Century. Much of what she discovered about the nature of the Universe and matter that we have been unable to see is now being demonstrated before our very eyes by a new and revolutionary telescope launched into distant orbit one million miles from Earth, a most important development that I described in 2022 in “The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble.”

Courtesy of Carnegie Institution of Washington and Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Confounding the Scientific Theorists

Dr. Vera Rubin was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1993 for sparking “the realization that the Universe is more complex and more mysterious than had been imagined.” She shared several things in common with Father Georges Lemaître. One of them was the harsh reality that their proven research did not catch on right away. In his case, it was because he was a Catholic priest. In her case, it was because she was a woman. Dr. Rubin was predeceased by her daughter, Judy Young — also an accomplished astronomer — who died two years earlier in 2014. Vera Rubin wrote in 1995 that her role as a scientific observer “is to confound the theorists.” She will be confounding us for years to come.

At the limit of human knowledge just a century ago, the Universe consisted of just a single galaxy, the Milky Way, and astronomer Harlow Shapley demonstrated that our solar system was not at its center, but out on the galactic fringe in one of its spiral arms.

By the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered other galaxies while the Belgian priest and physicist, Fr Georges Lemaître, caused another scientific revolution with his mathematical equations, now supported by empirical science. He concluded that the Universe — all matter, space, and time — began “on a day without yesterday” from a primordial atom, later dubbed by a critic, “the Big Bang.”

Today, science reveals that there are trillions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, one of which is our sun. A recent issue of Popular Science magazine had a two-page spread that was another sort of epiphany for me. It was a depiction of a small segment of the Universe. The two page image contained 50,000 galaxies, and one tiny one was our Milky Way. From such an image, astrophysicist Mario Livio concludes, “From a purely physical perspective, we are just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things.”

In just the last decade, it has been discovered that this one, unremarkable galaxy — one of trillions — contains about a billion planets orbiting its millions of stars. On December 5, 2011, the Kepler space telescope discovered the first known “Earth-like” exoplanet orbiting a star about 600 light years from Earth. It’s a distance of about 3,500 trillion miles.

The flurry of news and scientific speculation surrounding the discovery of other Earth-like exoplanets in orbit around distant stars handed science over to the theorists again. There was a presumption that life MUST have taken hold elsewhere, and that the planets MUST be host to one of the millions of civilizations like ours that MUST exist throughout the galaxy.

And of course the inevitable media target of the speculation is that religion, and most especially Christianity, MUST be made irrelevant when the aliens are finally found, or find us. The hope is that the discovery of E.T. will render obsolete 2,000 years of Western thought about God. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “Those who do not believe in God do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything!”

The story endured until the science media’s “next big thing”: The 2016 discovery of “Proxima B,” dubbed by the theorists to be “a potentially habitable Earth-like planet.” Orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our sun, Proxima B is 4.2 light years away. It’s the planet next-door in galactic terms, about 25 trillion miles away. With current technology it would be a one-way journey of about 1,000 years or so.

In “If E.T. Phones Home, Make Sure It’s Collect” I laid out a series of reasons why I believe that Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life among the planets of this galaxy. For decades, the SETI Project — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — has used radio astronomy to listen for an electronic signature of extraterrestrial technology. Millions of stars and thousands of frequencies have been scanned and analyzed for over six decades, and the result has been nothing but silence.

The SETI project got a big boost in 2015. Russian billionaire, physicist and entrepreneur, Yuri Milner, invested $200 million into answering the basic question that so intrigues us. I wrote of this in “Yuri Milner’s $100 Million Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

That article, published at LinkedIn, quotes a number of prominent scientists who were convinced that humanity is at the very threshold of the Earthshaking discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the Cosmos. Two years into it, and the only available observation to confound the theorists is silence — nothing but silence. The hard truth is that science has produced far more empirical evidence of the spiritual benefit of talking to God — what everyone we know in the known Universe calls “prayer” — than talking to — or listening for — extraterrestrials.

Courtesy of David Daleiden

An American Horror Story

Don’t get me wrong. I have been fascinated and enthused about the science of SETI for my entire life. But until there is scientific observation with actual evidence, then there is only speculation and science fiction. Absent evidence, I have to conclude, like the astronomer and biologist John Gribben, that Earth is the sole abode of intelligent life among the billions of planets in this galaxy.

But if such a discovery is ever made, it would be monumental on every level known to humankind, and the discovery would be in two directions. If other intelligent life exists, then science must assume that E.T. is just as curious and driven to discover us as we are to learn of other life.

I wonder how we would explain the annual March for Life that takes place in Washington, DC and around the country. I wonder how we would account for the reason why tens of thousands of people of conscience — young and old alike — brave the DC winter each year to urge a reassessment of our cultural respect for human life. I wonder how we would explain why our news media virtually ignores the March for Life while hyping anything that places a Catholic or a Catholic conscience in a negative spotlight. Could we ever explain to an alien race the contradiction of our driven pursuit of life out there while we have so blindly squandered the right to life right here?

I just listened to a speech from our present “devoutly Catholic” President who spoke of his driven commitment to the rights, dignity, respect, and equality for all people while condemning the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming the right to life of those not yet born. How would we explain to newly encountered intelligent life the weird enigma of our moral and scientific duplicity?

We humans are just as likely to be discovered BY other life in the Cosmos as we are to discover it. Every radio and television broadcast ever emitted on Earth is traveling at the speed of light in all directions through the vacuum of space.

This is what makes the American Horror Story of abortion without limits and its vast machine so horrible. It’s our blind duplicity.

If we keep at it, the only real evidence of intelligent life in the universe will be the fact that they wisely and silently keep their distance. If they exist at all, as so many in science seem driven to believe but with no evidence whatsoever, then this is as plausible an explanation for their silence as any other.

If E.T. gets wind of Planned Parenthood, we might well appear to be the neighbors from hell.

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Photo courtesy of Webb Space Telescope

Editor’s Note: You might like these other Prolife posts on Beyond These Stone Walls:

After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

Yuri Milner’s $100 Million Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

If E.T. Phones Home, Make Sure It’s Collect

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The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has released its 50-minute documentary film exposing “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom: How Disney Is Losing Its Way.” This film is a must-see for anyone concerned about the erosion of parental rights in the woke indoctrination of children. Watch the Catholic League documentary here.

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One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanowa. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

James Webb Space Telescope illustration courtesy of ESA/Hubble (Northrup Grumman).

As the James Webb Space Telescope entered orbit in a neutral gravity zone one million miles from Earth, the waning days of Hubble revealed an astronomical surprise.

June 22, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or lose the chords of Orion?”

— Job 38:4,31

“Astronomy, Cosmology, Physics, Theology, History! Reading this blog is like enrolling in a graduate program at NYU.” That message was sent to me in a letter several years ago from a friend, an official of the Archdiocese of New York. I have written a good deal about the sciences of astronomy and cosmology, but only about a dozen posts over the 13-year lifespan of this blog.

In a recent telephone call from exile to my friend, Father George David Byers, STD, SSL, he chided me that I am way overdue for a science post. I cite his academic credentials here — a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University Angelicum in Rome and a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and Jerusalem — to reflect that his suggestion of a mere “science” post might contain just a hint of academic hubris. If so, I can only respond with a quote from the great English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.”

I actually did write a science post even before Father Byers brought it up. Please don't yawn or click me away just yet. For me, this is a very big deal and it has a “WOW” factor. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched into Earth orbit in 1990, has been operating for 32 years and has far exceeded its intended operational limit. In the waning days of Hubble, it surprised Earthbound scientists with an amazing discovery. I will get to it below, but first ...

Star Trek: The Next Generation

The next generation of space exploration was born with the December 25, 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It has recently arrived at its designated orbit in what is called a “Lagrange point.” Named for the 18th Century French mathematician and physicist, Joseph Louis Lagrange, a “Lagrange point” is a zone of neutral gravity between the Earth and the Sun about one million miles from Earth. That point is now host to the revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope.

Thousands of scientists and engineers took part in this project on the cutting edge of astronomical science. The Space Telescope Science Institute will operate and monitor it from Baltimore. Webb successfully separated from its launch vehicle and unfolded a giant solar array to power the telescope. Armed with huge primary and secondary mirrors and a suite of cameras, spectrometers, and other instruments, the Webb Telescope is the size of a large truck. It is capable of producing spectral images of 100 galaxies at a time. As one scientist described it:

“[Webb] will crack open the treasure chest of the magnificent infrared sky invisible to the human eye. If a bumblebee hovered in space at the distance from Earth to the Moon, Webb will be able to see both the sunlight it reflects and the heat it emits.”

One of the burning questions of both science and faith that Webb may lend itself to solving is the existence of life elsewhere in the Universe. All the latest media craze about evidence of UFOs points only to Earth-bound technology. Distances between stars are like impenetrable barriers. If sentient life exists, we will detect each other long before we ever encounter each other. So far, after decades of searching, no such evidence yet exists.

A general consensus among astronomers is that life does exist “out there,” but complex life is much more rare, and sentient complex life like us, if it exists elsewhere at all, is extremely rare. I once wrote a post laying out a case for our uniqueness in the Cosmos. It was, “Star Trek and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

That post introduced readers to a remarkable contributor to the science that made the Webb Space Telescope possible. Astronomer Vera Rubin defied all the stereotypes of her time to become one of the great icons of cosmology. She discovered that the visible Universe that we see in the night sky is only about 10 to 15 percent of what is actually there. She wrote of this in “Dark Matter in the Universe” (Scientific American, 1998):

“As we have done for centuries, we gaze into the night sky from our planetary platform and wonder where we are in this cavernous cosmos. Flecks of light provide clues about great objects in space. And what we do discern about their motions and apparent shadows tells us that there is much more that we cannot yet see.

“From every photon we collect from the universe’s farthest reaches, we struggle to extract information. Astronomy is the study of light that reaches Earth from the heavens. Our task is not only to collect as much light as possible — from ground and space-based telescopes — but also to use what we can see in the heavens to understand better what we cannot see and yet know must be there.

“Based on 50 years of accumulated observations of the motions of galaxies and the expansion of the universe, most astronomers believe that as much as 90 percent of the stuff constituting the universe may be objects or particles that cannot be seen. In other words, most of the universe’s matter does not radiate. It provides no glow that we can detect in the electromagnetic spectrum. … We call this missing mass ‘dark matter,’ for it is the light, not the matter, that is missing.”

— Vera Rubin, 1998

In coming months, the first images to come from the James Webb Space Telescope now hovering one million miles between Earth and the Sun may provide humanity’s first illumination of dark matter, that 90-percent of the Universe that we have never before seen. The Webb Telescope enormous primary mirror has unfolded perfectly. In coming months Webb’s first images of the ancient cosmos will arrive on Earth. Be prepared to be amazed!

A Pre-retirement Surprise from Hubble

My favorite post of the past year is one that was only half written by me. The other (and far better) half was written by Fr. Andrew Pinsent, a noted particle physicist and Research Director at the Ian Ramsay Center for Science and Religion at Oxford University in the U.K. I was way out of my element in this joint venture, but it was this humble blog’s best foot forward. The jointly written post was, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang.”

It was among our most popular and enduring posts of the last year. Perhaps it was just a nice break from this world’s seemingly never-ending preoccupations with war, pestilence, scandal, and other obsessions of our time.

In that post, I quoted an excerpt from the book, Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics (Oxford University Press, 2005), a wondrous book by a brilliant mathematician, Robyn Arianrhod:

“In 1931, [Georges] Lemaitre formally sowed the seeds of the Big Bang theory when he suggested the universe had started as an explosion of a ‘primeval atom,’ and that it had continued expanding from that explosive beginning.... Einstein’s equation predicted the universe had expanded not from a tiny piece of matter located in an otherwise empty cosmos, but from a single point in four-dimensional space-time .... Before this point, about thirteen billion years ago, there was no time and no space. No geometry, no matter, nothing. The universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.” ( p. 187)

“The Universe simply appeared out of nowhere. Out of nothing.” And it all happened in an instant 13 billion years ago on “A day without yesterday.” This conclusion of modern cosmology was the work of a brilliant priest, mathematician and physicist, Fr. Georges Lemaitre. If you wonder about the relevance of faith in the scientific world, you may be surprised to learn that science and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are on the same page in describing the origin of a created universe:

“God created the universe out of nothing.” (CCC 290)

“We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to create. God created freely out of nothing.” (CCC 296)

“God said, ‘let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:4). Scripture bears witness to faith in creation ‘out of nothing’ as a truth filled with promise and hope.” (CCC 297)

“Since God created everything out of nothing, He can also, through the Holy Spirit, give spiritual life to sinners by creating a pure heart in them, and bodily life to the dead through the Resurrection.” (CCC 298)

The Hubble Space Telescope is destined to soon retire, but not before it gave us some amazing images of the visible Cosmos. Its latest surprise is a photograph of the most distant star ever seen by human eyes or instruments, a star now called “Earendel.” It is 28 billion light years from Earth. A light year is a measure of distance and not of time. It is the distance light travels in a single year at the constant rate of 186,000 miles per second. A light year works out to be 5.6 trillion miles. Multiply that by 28 billion and that is the distance from Earth to Earendel. Please don’t ask me to convert this to kilometers.

The light Hubble captured from Earendel emanated from the star 12.9 billion years ago in the very infancy of creation as calculated by Fr. Georges Lemaitre. The only reason Hubble could spot this star is because of a rare cosmic alignment. A galaxy cluster beyond the Milky Way — our galaxy — was positioned in such a way that its gravity bent light creating a sort of cosmic magnifying lens.

If you did the math, you might have noticed that Earendel is twice the distance of the age of the Universe which is possible only because the Universe has continually expanded over those 13 billion years. This expansion, and the now proven fact that galaxies are defeating gravity by speeding away from one another, was also a discovery of the physics of Fr. Georges Lemaitre which in the end were applauded and embraced by Albert Einstein.

Who says priests are boring?

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Note: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please visit our “Special Events” page and these related links:

Star Trek and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered The Big Bang

“A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang

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