The Heavens Declare God’s Glory:
Exploring Creation with JWT*

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.  Psalm 19A (KJV)

INTRODUCTION

“Unless you ride on a beam of light, you cannot travel in time.”  What “Der Alte,” Einstein’s name for God, might have said to him, while he thinking about relativity.  But if you do so ride, then you can go back to the earliest times in the universe, and learn how  stars were born  and later, planets formed.   This is what the JWT (the James Webb Telescope) was designed to do.

You can learn more about the JWT at this NASA website  or this article in SPACE magazine.  In this piece I’ll summarize the information from those sources.  Besides the science, I’ll examine possible religious perspectives on discoveries from the JWT:  do the scientific findings have an impact on our Catholic faith?   Or not?

So, let’s start off with a brief description of the JWT.

ABOUT THE JWT

The JWT use  near infra-rad  (NIR) and mid infra-red (MIR).   Why Infra-red?  Infra-red is light (electro-magnetic radiation), but with a greater wave-length than that of visible light.    Because of this longer wave-length the JWT can detect stars further back in time (further away) than telescopes using visible light.  Why? Because the universe is expanding.   As space expands, the wave length of emitted radiation increases correspondingly.  Indeed, for the galaxy GN-z11, the most distant galaxy observed so far, the observed wavelengths are about 12 times greater than  at the time emitted.  Thus we will see IR radiation from far distant stars that was in the visible region of the spectrum at the time of emission.   Moreover,  this far distance  corresponds to an early stage in the history of the universe.  It takes time for light to travel!

Here’s another reason to use IR:  to detect molecules like H2O, CO2 in atmospheres of exoplanets.   Such molecules have vibrational modes which absorb at IR frequencies (whence the infamous CO2 greenhouse effect).  If such molecules are present in a planetary atmosphere, it would be an  indicator (as a necessary condition) that life might be present.    See the image below that shows H2O IR absorption from exoplanet WASP-96b:

However, because of its size, WASP-96b, a gas giant planet located about 1150 light years away, is not a likely candidate for the presence of life. Note the multiple observations required to improve the signal/noise ratio.

In this article I’ll not discuss the mechanics of the JWT.   Please refer to the linked articles to learn more about this marvel of scientific engineering.

Let’s turn now to how discoveries from the JWT might (or might not) affect our  ideas about Creation—and thus intersect Catholic teaching.

COSMOLOGY AND OUR CATHOLIC FAITH

Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span?  Isaiah 40:12 (KJV)

Pope Pius XII was so impressed by Abbe LeMaitre’s Primordial Atom theory (“The Big Bang”) that he wanted to incorporate into  as evidence for the doctrine of  Creatio ex Nihilo.   Abbe LeMaitre dissuaded him from doing so, explaining that the findings of science are temporal, possibly to be superseded by new theories or observations.  On the other hand, doctrine and dogma are eternal.

And so I regard any information about the creation of planets, stars, galaxies that might be provided by observations from the JWT.   They may give us insight into the mechanics of Creation, but they will never help us answer “why” questions, only “how.”  The results from the JWT make us marvel at God’s power and glorify his works, as in Psalm 19a:  “The Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows forth the work of His hands,”  but they will never be evidence that He does not exist.  No result from JWT observations will contradict Catholic teaching.

Those who interpret Genesis 1 literally may deny the inferences about Creation that one makes from the JWT observations, but their cognitive dissonance is not, praise God, shared by most of us.  We see God’s handiwork in the mutable laws of nature.  These laws are mutable not because of God’s limitations, but because of our limited understanding.

NOTE

*JWT stands for James Webb Telescope.  The featured image is of the Carina Nebula (“cliffs..”) provided by NASA, ESA.