[dropcap type=”4″]O[/dropcap]ne thing I’ve learned over my lifetime is that, while we search for answers and justification for our faith, there is no empirical proof of God just like there is no such proof of a Black Hole. The Creator of the universe, by His very act of creation, is beyond our measurements and instruments. Our faith, based upon reason, sustains us but people keep writing books about proof.
“Rocket Ships and God,” by Rocco L. Martino, Ph.D. is just such a book and from the scientific side, Dr. Martino is the real deal. His Ph.D. dissertation calculations allowed humankind to develop heat shields for spacecraft re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere and he was one of the inventors of the smartphone. Both big.
Dr. Martino takes the notion of faith and truth and paints broad-strokes directly into the secular world. His first point is that faith is not exclusive to the religious realm. For something as simple as a sunset, for example, Martino posits that we take it on faith, despite it being a scientific fact, that the sun will rise the next day. But we are bound to ask, why is this the same kind of faith as religious faith? Because, as careful and reproducible as our calculations and observations might be, there are some suns that no longer rise in the universe, those that have gone super-nova and spread their star stuff all over creation.
[quote_box_right]
Rocket Ships and God
Author: Rocco L. Martino, Ph.D.
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Length: 113 pages
Release Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1622822096
[/quote_box_right]
Just as there are many logic systems — deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, formal, informal, and Boolean logic — there are many systems of knowledge. Martino suggests that the truth of a thing can be approached using many logic systems and systems of knowledge and that if the thing is indeed true, then it will be true in all knowledge systems. The scientific method is one such knowledge system, but so is emotional knowledge, psychological knowledge, philosophy, and of course, theology.
In our present day, many limit themselves to the scientific method or a knowledge system called scientism. Scientism is the limiting factor. When I think of the limitations, I think of a credit card stashed between two bricks. The thickness of that credit card is the limits of scientific knowledge and the bricks are barriers to other knowledge systems.
The one thing that Martino points out, for all of us, is that truth is NOT a variable. Truth is not relative; it is immutable. In science, some things have been discovered as truths. Black holes, for instance, exist but we know virtually nothing about them. And we cannot mistake these truths for reality, which, strangely enough is perceptual. Our senses, and whatever instruments we design are limited in their abilities to assure truths. Throw in quantum physics, and reality is easily tossed on its head.
Take a particle of light, for example. We see them all the time. But when we measure a particle of light, we discover that it is also a wave, at the same time!
Another thing Martino points out is that when people say that there is no absolute truth, they mean it absolutely!
Martino’s proof of God is absolute and is the same as mine (not to brag). All of existence that we know and can know, occurred in much less than a nano second at a moment in time called the Big Bang (discovered by Msgr. George Lemaître). Edwin Hubble’s later “red shift” calculations showed that the entire universe was moving away from us, as we from it, and that extrapolating backwards, we come to a single point in time. Prior to that Big Bang, something is causative, and even though some, like a local fellow by the name of Lawrence M. Krauss, Ph.D. (Arizona State) proposed that nothing existed prior to the Big Bang, the amount of energy and matter measured today makes that proposal impossible. Martino is clear, he doesn’t care what one calls the causation — I don’t care what anyone calls it — we both call it God.
The great thing about this book is that it is easily readable and breaks down the imaginary wall between science and faith. I give it the Big Bang thumbs up.
