Well before he became Rhode Island’s Episcopal bishop, the Right Rev. W. Nicholas Knisely lived in two worlds. As a priest and rector of a church in Bethlehem, Pa., he looked after people’s spiritual needs. Then he’d hop in a car and travel across the river to nearby Lehigh University to teach physics and astronomy.
His double role came about in part because the school had learned that before he became a priest he had earned degrees in both astronomy and physics. In agreeing to the post, however, Knisely had one condition: that he’d be allowed to teach class wearing his clerical garb.
But as Bishop Knisely recounted to packed pews at a forum last week at St. Andrew’s-by-the-Sea, the priestly attire created quite a stir. Many were stunned to see a man of the cloth teaching science.
This comment is a truly sad commentary on the state of our present system of public education: [blockquote]Many were stunned to see a man of the cloth teaching science.[/blockquote]
Presumably, those stunned students were apparently unaware of (among other examples) the fact that Gregor Mendel, generally considered the founder of “genetic science” was an [b]Augustinian friar[/b], nor were they aware that Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and [b]Roman Catholic priest[/b], was the formulator and initial proponent of what came to be called the “big bang theory.” Bishop Knisely is simply a successor, not only to the apostles, but to those predecessor Christian clerics using their God-given reason to increase our knowledge of the creation with which God has created for us: [blockquote]Independently deriving Friedmann’s equations in 1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and Roman Catholic priest, proposed that the inferred recession of the nebulae was due to the expansion of the Universe.*
In 1931 Lemaître went further and suggested that the evident expansion of the universe, if projected back in time, meant that the further in the past the smaller the universe was, until at some finite time in the past all the mass of the Universe was concentrated into a single point, a “primeval atom” where and when the fabric of time and space came into existence.â€
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*Lemaître, G. (1927). “Un univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques”. Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels 47A: 41.
†Lemaître, G. (1931). “The Evolution of the Universe: Discussion”. Nature 128 (3234): 699–701. Bibcode:1931Natur.128..704L. doi:10.1038/128704a0.[/blockquote]
There is a strong argument to be made that without the western Church’s fostering of investigation into the sciences, human life today might well still fit Hobbes’ description, to wit: nasty, brutish and short.
[i]Pax et bonum[/i],
Keith Töpfer