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.”

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

The Catholic Church in Belgium can take pride in the story of Georges Lemaitre, the priest and mathematician who changed the mind of Einstein on the creation of The Universe.

(This post needs a disclaimer, so here it is. It’s a post about science and one of its heroes. It’s a story I can’t tell without a heavy dose of science, so please bear with me. I read the post to my friends Pornchai, Joseph, and Skooter. Pornchai loved the math parts.  Joseph said it was “very interesting,” and Skooter yawned and said, “You CAN’T print this.” When I told Charlene about the post, she said, “Well, people may never read your blog again.” Well, I sure hope that’s not the case. I happen to think this is a really cool story, so please indulge me these few minutes of science and history.)

The late Carl Sagan was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University when he wrote his 1980 book, Cosmos.  It spent 77 weeks on the New York Times  Best Seller List. Later in the 1980s, Dr. Sagan narrated a popular PBS series also called “Cosmos,” based on his book. Sagan was much imitated for his monotone intonation of “BILLions and BILLions of stars.” I taped all the installments of “Cosmos,” and watched each at least twice.

More than once, I fell asleep listening to Sagan’s monotone “BILLions and BILLions of stars.” I hope you’re not doing the same right now. Science was my first love as a geeky young man. Religion and faith eventually overtook it, but science never left me.  Astronomy has been a lifelong fascination, and Carl Sagan was one of its icons. That’s why I was enthralled 25 years ago to walk out of a bookstore with my reserve copy of Sagan’s first and only novel, Contact  (Simon & Shuster, 1985).

Contact  was about radio astronomy and the SETI project — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It wasn’t science fiction in the way “Star Trek” was science fiction. Contact was science AND fiction, a novel crafted with real science, and no one but Carl Sagan could have pulled it off. The sheer vastness of the Cosmos unfolded with crystal clarity in Sagan’s prose, a vastness the human mind can have difficulty fathoming. Anyone who thinks we are visited by aliens from other planets doesn’t understand the vastness of it all.

The central theme of Contact  was the challenge astronomy poses to religion. In the story, SETI scientist Eleanor Arroway — a wonderful character portrayed in the film version by actress Jodie Foster — becomes the first radio astronomer to detect a signal emitting from another civilization. The signal came from a planet orbiting Vega, a star, not unlike our own, about 26 light years from Earth. The message of the book (and film) is clear: if another species like us exists, and we are ever to have contact, it will be in just this way — via radio waves moving through space at light  speed.

Here comes the geeky part. For those who never caught the science bug, a “light year” is a unit of distance, not time. Light moves through space at a known rate of speed — about 186,000 miles per second. At that rate, light travels through space about 5.86 trillion miles in one year. That’s a “light year,” and in numbers it represents 5,860,000,000,000 miles. In the vacuum of space, radio waves also travel at the speed of light.

The galaxy in which we live — the one we call “The Milky Way” — is a more or less flat spiral disk comprised of about 100 billion stars. The Milky Way measures about 100,000 light years across.   That’s a span of about 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, give or take a few. Please don’t ask me to convert this to kilometers!

This means that light — or radio waves — from across our galaxy can take up to 100,000 years to reach Earth. One of The Milky Way Galaxy’s approximately 100 billion stars is shining in my cell window at this moment. Our galaxy is one of about fifty billion galaxies now known to comprise The Universe. The largest known to us is thirteen times larger than The Milky Way. You get the picture. The Universe is immense.

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

In a recent post I made a cynical comment about UFOs. I wrote, “The real proof of intelligent life in The Universe is that they don’t come here.” It was an attempt at humor, but the problem with searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is one of practical physics. The limit of our ability to “listen” is a mere few hundred light years from Earth, a tiny fraction of the galaxy — a mere survey of our own backyard. If there is another civilization out there, we may never know it.

Even if we hear from them some day, it will be a one-sided conversation. The signal we may one day receive might have been broadcast hundreds — perhaps thousands — of years earlier. If we respond, it will take hundreds or thousands of years for our response to be detected. We sure won’t be trading recipes, or asking, “What’s new?”  If there’s anyone out there — and so far we know of no one else — we can forget about any exchange of ideas, let alone ambassadors.

Still, I devoured Contact  twice in 1985, then I wrote Carl Sagan a letter at Cornell.  I understood that Sagan was an atheist, but the central story line of Contact was the effect the discovery of life elsewhere might have on religion, especially on fundamentalist Protestant sects who seemed the most threatened by the discovery.

I thought Carl Sagan handled the controversy quite well, without judgments, and even with some respect for the religious figures among his characters. In my letter, I pointed out to Dr. Sagan that Catholicism, the largest denomination of Christians in America, would not necessarily share in the anxiety such a discovery would bring to some other faiths. I wrote that if our galactic neighbors were embodied souls, like us, then they would be in need of redemption in the same manner in which we have been redeemed.

Weeks later, when an envelope from Cornell University’s Department of Astronomy and Space Sciences arrived, I was so excited my heart was beating BILLions and BILLions of times! Carl Sagan was most gracious. He wrote that my comments were very meaningful to him, and he added, “You write in the spirit of Georges Lemaitre!”

I framed that letter and put it on my rectory office wall. I wanted everyone I knew to see that Carl Sagan compared me with Georges Lemaitre! I was profoundly moved. But no one I knew had a clue who Georges Lemaitre was. I must remedy that.  He was one of the enduring heroes of my life and priesthood. He still is!

Father of the Big Bang

Georges Lemaitre died on June 20, 1966 when I was 13 years old. It was the year “Star Trek” debuted on network television and I was mesmerized by space and the prospect of space travel.  Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian scientist and mathematician, a pioneer  in astrophysics, and the originator of what became known in science as “The Big Bang” theory — which, by the way, is no longer considered in cosmology to be a theory.

But first and foremost, Father Lemaitre was a Catholic priest. He was ordained in 1923 after earning doctorates in mathematics and science.  Father Lemaitre studied Einstein’s celebrated general theory of relativity at Cambridge University, but was troubled by Einstein’s model of an always-existing, never changing universe. It was that model, widely accepted in science, that developed a wide chasm between science and the Judeo-Christian understanding of Creation. Einstein and others came to hold that The Universe had no beginning and no end, and therefore the word “Creation” could not apply.

Father Lemaitre saw problems with Einstein’s “Steady State” theory, and what Einstein called “The Cosmological Constant” in which he maintained that The Universe was relatively unchanging over time. From his chair in science at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium from 1925 to 1931, Father Lemaitre put his formidable mind to work.

He developed both a mathematical equation and a scientific basis for what he termed the “primeval atom,” a sort of cosmic egg from which The Universe was created. He also concluded that The Universe is not static, as Einstein believed, but expanding at an ever increasing rate, and he put forward a mathematical model to prove it. In 1998, Father Lemaitre was proven to be correct.

Einstein publicly disagreed with Lemaitre’s conclusions, and the priest was not taken seriously by mainstream science largely because of that. In his book, The Universe in a Nutshell  (Bantam Books, 2001), mathematician and physicist Stephen Hawking addressed the controversy:

“If galaxies are moving apart now, it means they must have been closer together in 
the past. About fifteen billion years ago, they would have been on top of each other, and the density would have been very large. This state was called the “primeval atom” by the Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, who was the first to investigate the origin of the universe that we call the big bang. Einstein seems never to have taken the big bang seriously”

— The Universe in a Nutshell, p. 22

Stephen Hawking actually calculated the density of Father Lemaitre’s “Primeval Atom” just prior to The Big Bang.  It was 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, tons per square inch.  I haven’t checked this math myself, so we’ll take Professor Hawking’s word for it.

Though Einstein disagreed with Father Lemaitre at first, he respected his brilliant mathematical mind. When Einstein presented his theories to a packed audience of scientists in Brussels in 1933, he was asked if he thought his ideas were understood by everyone present. “By Professor D, perhaps,” Einstein replied, “And certainly by Lemaitre, as for the rest, I don’t think so.”

When Father Lemaitre presented his concepts of the “primeval atom” and an expanding universe, Einstein told him, “Your mathematics is perfect, but your grasp of physics is abominable.”

They were words Einstein would one day have to take back. When Edwin Hubble and other astronomers read Father Lemaitre’s paper, they became convinced that it was Einstein’s physics that was flawed. They could only conclude that the priest and scientist was correct about the creation and expansion of The Universe from the “primeval atom,” and the fact that time, space and matter actually did begin at a moment of creation, and that The Universe will end.

It’s an ironic twist that science often accuses religion of holding back the truth about science. In the case of Father Lemaitre and The Big Bang, it was science that refused to believe the evident truth that a Catholic priest proposed to a mathematical certainty: that the true origin of The Universe, and of time and space, is its creation on “a day without yesterday.”

For his work, Father Lemaitre was inducted into the Royal Academy of Belgium, and was awarded the Franqui prize by an international commission of scientists. Pope Pius XI applauded Father Lemaitre’s view of the creation of the universe and appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Science. Later, Pope Pius XII declared that Father Lemaitre’s work was a vindication of the Biblical account of creation.

The Pope saw in Father Lemaitre’s brilliance a scientific model of a created Universe that bridged science and faith and halted the growing sense that each must entirely reject the other.

Einstein finally came around to endorse, if not openly embrace Father Lemaitre’s conclusions. He admitted that his concept of an eternal, unchanging universe was an error. “The Cosmological Constant was my greatest mistake,” he said.

In January, 1933, Father Georges  Lemaitre traveled to California to present a series of seminars. When Father Lemaitre finished his lecture on the nature and origin of The Universe, a man in the back stood and applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfying explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.” Everyone present knew that voice. It was Albert Einstein, and he actually said the “C” word so disdained by the science of his time: “Creation!”

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”

— Albert Einstein

“The more we know of the universe, the more profoundly we are struck by a Reason whose ways we can only contemplate with astonishment” … Albert Einstein once said that in the laws of nature, ‘there is revealed such a superior Reason that everything significant which has arisen out of human thought and arrangement is, in comparison with it, the merest empty reflection.’ In what is most vast, in the world of heavenly bodies, we see revealed a powerful Reason that holds the world together.”

— Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning, (Eerdmans, 1986)

“In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”

— Genesis 1:1

“Live long and prosper.”

— Mr. Spock

For Further Reading:

‘A Day Without Yesterday’: Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang