BIG BANGS

Bastille Day, the French National Holiday, is celebrated in Biarritz by popular music concerts, old fogies dancing to accordeon music, a lot of late-night drinking by younger generations and an 11 p.m. festival of fireworks to rival the best that Sydney can offer.  The sound of the aerial explosions is almost deafening, but the beauty of the cascading showers of multicolored incandescent sparks made me think of what happens, on a far more massive scale, in the cosmos.  I have never seen the explosion of a supernova, but tonight I got a tiny glimpse of what one must be like.  These death throes of dying giant stars must make us wonder about the mystery of the universe of which we are but infinitesmal parts.

The world champion in discovering supernovae is an Australian, born like me in 1937 in Sydney.  Robert Evans entered religion, like me, and became a Methodist minister; unlike me, he continued to practise his ministry until his retirement.  His life-long interest in cosmology and specifically in the discovery of supernovae - he has forty-two to his credit - has not changed his faith.  In a "Cabinet" magazine interview (Fall, 2004), he said : "When a person can recognize nature as part of God's creation which shows His wisdom, beauty and power, then I find it becomes a great way in which the glory of God is displayed."  If he were not a Protestant, he would be a Green Catechism Catholic.

A  supernova explosion is, in his own words, "like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once."  He has spent his life exploiting his uncanny "knack for memorizing star-fields" (his words), by noticing such explosions which other astronomers, with far more sophisticated equipment than his modest 16-inch telescope, missed.  But it apparently has not occurred to him to wonder why the God invented by primitive people of the ancient Middle East who knew less about the cosmos than a ten-year old child today, would want such explosions to happen.  The Reverend Evans, who appears to be a level-headed, serene, sincere believer, is no doubt the best home-grown example I know of that dichotomy described by John Haswell earlier in a commentary on this blog : the calm acceptance of both the realities of science and the myths of religion.

                                                                   DELENDA   RELIGIO