A Passion for Truth: Reflections of a Scientist-Priest

A Passion for Truth

Reflections of a Scientist-Priest

John Huntington

Copyright © 2018 John Huntington

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2018

Cover: Baptism of Ruby Catherine Hobbs

ISBN 978-1-64350-078-2 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64350-079-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Charlie

The University of Wisconsin

Brown University and MIT

What Quantum Mechanics Teaches Us

The Cold War and Ayn Rand

Earthquake

The Church Divinity School of the Pacific

Obedience

Saint Cuthbert and Saint Ignatius

Holiness

Scientific Truth

Darwin, the Human Genome and the Holy Spirit

The Magisterium

For Judy

Who is the love of my life

Preface

This book is the product of many years of preparation. It is meant to help its readers to reflect on the world we live in and our place in it. I do not to want convince anyone of anything, but only to open up new ways of thinking. I present my own learning as a personal narrative in order to engage and sustain the interest of readers. This was not an easy decision. We scientists have not been trained to write in the first person and to spill our guts, but rather to write dryly with many footnotes, hardly mentioning ourselves at all.

Over time I have uncovered a number of fallacies embedded in our Western culture that cramp our thinking and hurt us. Those fallacies are sometimes used to advance one or another petty agenda. Exposing them is a principal purpose of this book. A new understanding can be therapeutic, since to name a thing accurately is to gain some control over its effects. At the root of all of those fallacies is the idea that it is acceptable to be careless with the truth. In liberal academic circles this mindset is dignified as postmodernism, as if it were a new and superior kind of enlightenment; its equivalent in theology is called relativism. Uncritically crediting scientists with insights and authority that they do not possess is given the name scientism. A passion for truth can lift us up above the petty agendas supported by those fallacies to the place where love, justice, freedom and authenticity are to be found. I hope that you will read this book with a supple mind conformable to the truth as you encounter it.

I am a priest to the soles of my feet. I am also a physical scientist to the soles of my feet. My worldview is rooted in objective truth teased out of information received by our natural senses, augmented with observations made by the instruments of physical science. While what we see of the world can be confirmed by consensus, care must always be taken that the outlier who sees something else be heard with patience. Common sense is fallible, and we must be very careful. The observations of physical science are of a different order. You could shoot a physical scientist and break his equipment, but his observations would stand. We would be confident that, were another scientist to come along with the interest and resources to do so, he could build similar equipment, and he would see the same things. This order of objectivity does not depend on common sense. It is what has given physical science its high reputation, and it is the firm ground on which my worldview stands.

The language of physical science is mathematics. If, as I argue, quantum mechanics is the physics of fundamental processes, we have a problem: we cannot easily talk about it. Even today, about ninety years since the discovery of quantum mechanics, the principles of quantum mechanics are not widely understood by our people. But all is not lost. There are two ways that one could say a person understands quantum mechanics. One could spend years in graduate school acquiring an MS in Mathematics and the set of mathematical rules that constitute the subject in order to be competent to define, formulate and solve practical problems using quantum mechanics, or one could simply study the phenomena that are characteristic of quantum mechanics and that can be described in ordinary language, as I have done here. For the sake of the narrative flow, I will use terms freely that I do not stop to explain. Though I expect that you will find the Bibliography helpful, I trust that you will use the internet to delve further. The resources available on the internet far exceed the wonders of the library in ancient Alexandria. Whether your question be one of physical science or theology and I do not stop to explain, please just Google it.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, a book of 904 pages, is only the second comprehensive catechism published by the Vatican in two thousand years. It was commissioned and promulgated by Pope John Paul II to provide a systematic presentation of the Catholic Christian faith. It is a product of the Magisterium, that is, the teaching authority of the Church. It says the following regarding truth: "Truth as uprightness in human action and speech is called truthfulness, sincerity, or candor. Truth or truthfulness is the virtue which consists in showing oneself true in deeds and truthful in words, and in guarding against duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy.… Thus, the pastoral duty of the Magisterium is aimed at seeing to it that the People of God abides in the truth that liberates and further, Man tends by nature toward the truth. He is obliged to honor and bear witness to it: ‘It is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are persons…are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth.’" Relativism in its religious sense is an attack on the unique truth claims of Catholic Christianity, that is, of dogmatic theology. It cannot be accepted as the basis for ecumenical or interfaith dialogue.

On Bullshit, a beautiful little essay by Princeton professor emeritus of philosophy Harry Frankfurt, explores the troubling cultural phenomenon of being careless with the truth. It seems acceptable to say anything one wants to on any subject, without consequences. Everything must be permitted, and nothing seems to matter. I thank God for the corrective tonic of Professor Frankfurt’s clear thinking.

The glossary of the Public Broadcasting System website www.pbs.org offers the following definition of postmodernism: A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person.

Carelessness in physical science is a stone on my heart. I see it almost everywhere. As a community, we physical scientists know how to do things right. Too few of us bother to do so. We could begin by writing and speaking in the subjunctive mood when addressing hypothetical ideas. Why not be clear about what is a hypothesis and what is a law? Why not be clear about the limitations of physical science? Why not be examples of trustworthiness?

In The Passion of the Western Mind Richard Tarnas describes the ancient Sophists as, in effect, the postmodernists of their day. To counter their influence, Socrates rose up, a man of singular character and intelligence, who was imbued with a passion for intellectual honesty and moral integrity rare for his or any other age… His words and deeds embodied an abiding conviction that the act of rational self-criticism could free the human mind from the bondage of false opinion… Disarmingly humble yet presumptuously confident, puckishly witty yet morally urgent, engaging and gregarious yet solitary and contemplative, Socrates was a man consumed by a passion for truth.

Our intellect and will are gifts from God that mark us as human. To be faithful to our Creator we must strive for clarity of mind as an act of loving obedience. May God bless your inquiry.

How to Read this Book

Make a glossary, using a word processor. Share it with a discussion group. This could be a college seminar class or a book club. Update the glossary as your understanding deepens. Work toward definitions that ring most true. With e-mail and Skype, members of a discussion group could be anywhere. Give one another the courage to challenge conventional wisdom. Bravo!

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the nurture I received from

my aunt Gladys and uncle Hermann Burian,

who welcomed me into their home

at the University of Iowa;

my scientific fathers

Joseph Hirschfelder and John Ross;

and

my spiritual fathers

Canon Douglas Williams; Thomas Schultz, OHC; Bernard Bush, SJ; Vincent Hovley, SJ; and Carleton Jones, OP.

I am most grateful for the hospitality extended to me

by the Society of Jesus at

El Retiro Jesuit Retreat House of Los Altos, California;

Santa Clara University;

Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat House in Sedalia, Colorado; and Woodstock (Jesuit) Theological Center at Georgetown University, where it was my privilege to serve as a

Senior Fellow.

This book was written in fulfillment of promises made to

Prof. André Delbecq and Vincent Hovley, SJ.

Some of the ideas in this book were first aired

in the Colorado Catholic Herald.

Charlie

In the spring of 1945 in the dusty little town of Socorro, New Mexico, our family experienced a tragedy that changed my life. My little brother Charlie drowned, and I became a philosopher. It happened this way.

Dad heard that big catfish were being caught in the irrigation ditches along the Rio Grande, and we were off. We met Ash Henderson at a bridge over a pair of ditches that carried torrents of brown water. Ash was an engineer who worked for Dad at the manganese mine outside of town. Dad and Ash rigged their rods and got to fishing in the water just downstream of the bridge. My older brother Richard and I rigged up as quickly as we could. Men and boys were fishing for big catfish. But Charlie was with us. Our pickup was parked on the bridge with its doors wide open, a bag of potato chips on the seat. A gust of wind blew the chips out the door and onto the road