Guest column

and actively involved as the doer of the world: the Creator.

For an analogy, consider Harry Potter. What caused Harry to be born? He had parents: Lily and James. In one sense, they were the cause of Harry’s birth, which would have had an entirely natural explanation running back down his ancestral line, through the dawn of evolution, to the formation of the stars. (Harry Potter, too, is stardust.)

In an altogether different sense, of course, the cause of Harry’s birth was J.K. Rowling, who conceived of the boy wizard and gave him life between the covers of her books. She was Harry Potter’s doer, down to stardust, among all other doings in his world. For Aquinas, as the world of Harry Potter is to J.K. Rowling, so is our cosmos to its author, God.

Apparently Neil deGrasse Tyson disagrees.

“The cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be,” he solemnly declares, opening the series. These are loaded words: In scripture God is named the one “who is and was and ever shall be.” For Professor Tyson, the cosmos rhetorically replaces God. This suggests that through physics we can probe the depths of ultimate reality. Beyond the cosmos there is nothing further to explore.

Does science warrant such a suggestion? No. Rather than astrophysical, Professor Tyson’s claim is metaphysical in scope. Strange that a series celebrating science would open by announcing someone’s metaphysical opinion.

I hold a different opinion—a religious belief that, once we’ve fully understood the cosmos, we will have scarcely scratched the surface of all that is and was and shall be. This faith can, and must, swallow sound science whole. Many great scientists have shared it. One of the greatest of these was Georges Lemaître: Belgian mathematician, Big Bang theorist, and Catholic priest.