CHAPTER 3

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The Astronomer-Priest

BERNIE HAISCH WAS born in Germany, but his family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1952, when he was three. Four years previously, in 1948, Bernie’s aunt and her husband had moved to Indiana to escape life in postwar Germany, which in the years immediately following the war was intensely bleak. Bernie’s aunt wrote long letters to Bernie’s mother telling her what a wonderland America was. So Bernie and his parents took off from Genoa, Italy, on a steamer bound for the Land of Opportunity.

Bernie’s aunt told his mother of a bakery near their home that was for sale. Bernie’s mother and father could buy it, she said, and carve out a piece of the American dream for themselves.

The bakery, however, turned out to be a mirage (or, as Bernie likes to put it, “half-baked”), and Bernie’s parents found themselves stuck in a new country where they didn’t speak the language very well and had few prospects for work. The Haisches moved into a small two-bedroom apartment near downtown Indianapolis. The neighborhood was, as Bernie told me, “fairly low-class, but terrific compared to Germany.”

After several weeks, Bernie’s dad got a job at a custom aluminum metal products company where, to his surprise, most of the employees spoke German, so he didn’t have to worry about learning the troublesome language of his new country. Meanwhile Bernie’s mother turned their apartment into a comfortable home, joined the local Catholic church, and set herself to becoming an American.

Bernie’s earliest memory from America is of being on a pedal car when he was about four. “I’d pedaled off the beaten track, into a stretch of woodland,” he told me. “At least that’s what it felt like at the time. It was probably just an undeveloped plot of land—a place with no houses on it yet, though there soon would be. I got scared, and I started calling out, ‘Mamma, Mamma!’ ”

Bernie’s mother was in their apartment, way out of earshot, but somehow she picked up on Bernie’s situation and ran to his aid. You might say this was Bernie’s introduction to what scientists call action at a distance: the phenomenon of one object affecting another without any apparent means of doing so. It would turn out to be a subject that Bernie spent a lot of time thinking about in the future.

Bernie also has a memory of playing in a sandbox with a car that he decided, in that strange, instantaneous, and unarguable way that imaginative children do, was not a car at all. It was a space vehicle, moving through the ghostly white dunes of the moon.

“Those early childhood years of mine,” he told me, “were the start of the real heyday of excitement about space. For a lot of people these days, it’s hard to understand just how exciting it all was back then. When Sputnik, the first Russian satellite, went up in October of 1957, I was in third grade. It was, of course, too bad the Russians did it instead of us, but it was still a miracle. A new world was opening up right above our heads, and for me it all seemed so close that I could almost reach out and touch it.”

After school, Bernie watched a program called Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. “It was pretty hokey stuff from today’s perspective. Cardboard sets, ridiculous costumes, planets clearly made from Styrofoam. But I loved it. I imagined myself traveling through space at the helm of my own personal rocket ship, just like Rocky Jones did, joystick in hand. Looking at the moon on clear nights, it just felt so close. Space was this whole vast new domain, a new world waiting to be explored. And I could be one of those explorers.”

When Bernie was eight, he started drawing his own comic book series: Bernard Haisch, Space Cadet. He put his brother and cousins in the stories, exploring space, finding new worlds. As a young teen, he read a lot of science fiction. But in spite of the plentiful films he saw and comic books he read featuring malevolent, multi-armed, laser-eyed aliens, for Bernie the universe was, from the very beginning, a distinctly friendly place.

“For me as a kid, space was not some harsh wasteland, but close and approachable: a place that was basically beckoning to us. It was, in a way, what the computer world has become for so many of today’s kids. The place where new worlds were to be found, new adventures were to be had. You could almost say it had a kind of holiness to it. It was a true frontier. Alpha Centauri, our nearest star next to the sun, was just four light-years away. Well—” Bernie stopped himself, making what I soon came to recognize as a characteristic correction. “Actually Proxima Centauri is a little closer. But the point is that these bodies were out there, we knew how far away they were, and they were screaming to us to be learned about. People need a sense of wonder—a sense of larger worlds yet to be seen. They wither up and die without it. Space, back then, delivered that sense.”

Bernie knew by first grade that he wanted to be an astronomer. Stars were Bernie’s first love, and the desire to study them stayed with him through high school. Bernie’s mom was a devout Catholic, and the Haisch household had a strong religious atmosphere. But instead of jettisoning the Catholicism of his youth as he grew older, Bernie saw himself as combining his mother’s faith with his wonder at the stars into a single, contradiction-free package.

“There are some things,” he writes in The God Theory, “that you just know—especially as a child, when your world is not yet filled with the ambiguities and doubts that grow and haunt you later in life.”

“I knew I wanted to study space from basically as early as I can remember,” Bernie told me. “I can’t remember a time when the stars and planets—and especially the stars—weren’t calling to me to study them. But my early memories are also about the house, the atmosphere, that I grew up in. And that was a house, and an atmosphere, saturated with Catholicism. My mother was a deeply religious person, and pictures of the saints, of Mary and Jesus, were simply part of the visual furniture of my imagination from the beginning. So what does that do? Until someone comes along and tells you otherwise, you believe in a world where saints, stars, and planets all happily coexist.

“Which,” he was quick to add, “they have long done in places outside my childhood home. . . . There have been plenty of astronomer-priests, from Father Giuseppe Piazzi, who discovered the first asteroid, to Father Angelo Secchi, who developed the first system of classifying stars according to their spectra—that is, the wavelengths of the light they give off. The Vatican has an observatory, and they also maintain a modern research facility here in the States, on Mount Graham in Arizona.”

After grade school Bernie attended the Latin School of Indianapolis, an institution dedicated to preparing its students—all boys—for seminary.

“I was very lucky,” he told me. “You can’t accuse the Catholics of being slouches when it comes to teaching science. The education I got in Algebra, Biology, and Physics—not to mention the classes in the humanities—at that school was on par with what I would have gotten had my parents had the money to send me to some pricey East Coast prep school. Of course, there were also courses in Latin, Rhetoric . . . that kind of thing. Basically, I received a stunningly rounded education, all due to the fact that I was on track to become a priest.”

“But then you changed your mind,” I pointed out.

“You might say I let the Church down by jumping ship and becoming a scientist in secular institutions,” Bernie said. “But in another way, I feel I’ve done the Church a better service by going out into the world. Because fundamentally that’s my whole message. Sure, there are a million discussions—or arguments—that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ can have with each other. But beyond, and beneath, all those arguments, there is, I believe, a secret harmony. It’s that harmony that I’ve been focused on, especially in my previous book, The Purpose-Guided Universe.”

After graduating from the Latin School at the top of his class, Bernie attended—for a year—a college seminary run by the Benedictine monks of the Saint Meinrad Archabbey in southern Indiana. “It was a place straight out of the Middle Ages,” Bernie told me. “The monks in their robes, the early-morning prayers and Gregorian chants. I loved it, in a way. But at the same time, it only took a day or so for me to realize I didn’t really belong there. On one level, you could say I left for the most popular reason people leave the priesthood: human weakness. The plain fact was that like most young men my age, I was eager to investigate two lines of study not on the bill at the monastery: beer and girls . . . with emphasis on the latter. But ultimately it was science that lured me away from the monastic life of Saint Meinrad.”

For while physics and Gregorian chants could be made to survive side by side at the Latin School of Indianapolis, in the monastery science faded into the background. And for Bernie, that was simply not acceptable. So the following year he left the monastery for Indiana University, and majored in Astrophysics. He then went on to get his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of the top schools in the field. He was an excellent student, and when he left school it was for a lifetime of employment at the highest-level institutions.

But throughout all those years, working at places like the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Colorado, the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany, and the Space Research Laboratory in the Netherlands, Bernie never abandoned his belief that science and religion were two parts of a single domain. No matter how much he learned—and discovered—about the sun, about star formation, about the age and nature of the universe, none of it ever pushed God out of the picture.

“In the sciences today,” he told me, “the emphasis is always on practical results. You’d be amazed at how little a student of physics today is taught about the deep conundrums that something like the discipline of quantum physics raises.”

Quantum physics, which deals with “quanta,” or subatomic particles—as we’ve already mentioned, the smallest “things” in the physical world—is the single most accurate scientific discovery in history. But quantum physics is also the most mysterious, baffling, and downright frustrating, because its appearance made it necessary for physicists to throw most of what they’d thought they knew up to that point in the trash.

“Much of our technology,” Bernie told me, “from cell phones to computers to the navigational devices of airplanes, ships, and submarines, relies on quantum science at some level. University of California physicists Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner suggest in their book Quantum Enigma that fully one-third of our economy is based on quantum theory. Without it, the technological world we take so for granted would grind to a very speedy halt.”

Yet from a commonsense perspective—that is, the perspective we see the world from in day-to-day life—quantum physics makes no sense. We can, and do, use it to our great advantage, but crazily enough, we cannot yet explain how it works. It’s like a magic machine, allowing us to accomplish all sorts of previously undreamed-of tasks, but with a hood that we simply can’t get open to see what makes it run.

I asked Bernie for some examples of these quantum physics conundrums that physicists are still struggling with.

“Well, let’s see,” he said. “How is it possible for a subatomic (that is, smaller than an atom) particle to carry out instructions coming from the future? From our point of view, this goes against all common sense; how can objects do that? Yet you can perform an experiment involving subatomic particles, and the results of that experiment will depend on how you choose to measure those results after the experiment is done. This means that the results of the experiment will retroactively change, depending on how we choose to examine those results.”

“So,” I said, “it seems important to understand that what you’re talking about here is plain facts, not some kind of mental sleight of hand. This is for real . . . right?”

“Yes,” said Bernie. “This isn’t some semantic trick, some ‘way of talking’ that makes it appear as if a particle can alter its behavior depending on how we choose to measure it retroactively. It really happens. Here,” said Bernie, “is another example: How is it possible for a subatomic particle to be in two places at once? A 2003 issue of Physics News from the American Institute of Physics carried the headline: ‘3600 Atoms in Two Places at Once.’ Just as linear time is essentially an illusion that we experience but which does not apply if we train our eyes upon the subatomic world, the same goes for an object’s existence in physical space. At our level of experience—in the world you and I see and understand—an object is either in one place or another, but not both places at once. But at the subatomic level, objects do not exist in this static, clunky mode. Objects exist in probability fields, which means it is quite easy for a photon, say, to be both ‘here’ and ‘there’ at one and the same time.

“This is hard—make that impossible—to envision, because our imagination is tailored to work at our level of existence. But if you go down small enough, you find a world where nothing acts like we’re used to it acting. This isn’t, again, an ‘illusion.’ It’s a simple result of the fact that our ordinary ways of understanding are very limited. We simply aren’t built to live at that level. But thanks to mathematics and technology, we can enter that world and experience it at one remove, as it were. And what we find, when we do that, is a world that shows us that our ordinary level of perception is an extraordinarily limited one.”

I imagined there were scores of physicists out there attempting not just to make sense of these apparent contradictions of the quantum world, but to fathom their religious and philosophical implications. But from Bernie I learned otherwise.

“Sure, there are writers doing that. But there aren’t that many serious physicists doing it. At the higher levels of study, and even at the undergraduate level,” he told me, “your focus is on practical results, and that only intensifies when you leave school behind and enter professional life. The emphasis is on getting stuff done, and done fast. If some aspect of research doesn’t hold some promise for being concretely useful, it doesn’t receive funding. So young physicists are not encouraged to spend their time pondering the philosophical implications of the discoveries science has made, and keeps making, in the subatomic realm. If it’s not likely to yield profitable results, why bother?

“But,” Bernie continued, “I simply didn’t see it that way. Getting the practical stuff done was fine, but what I was after was a deeper knowledge. I was happy to do the jobs assigned to me, and I was delighted that my work was good enough to get me hired at places like Lockheed Martin, and to work on and even lead NASA research projects. But neither Lockheed Martin nor NASA are particularly interested in the philosophical or theological implications of physics or astronomy.

“While I was at Lockheed, I produced a very sophisticated star catalog because the CIA needed an ultra-accurate star map to use as a reference for situating their spy satellites. Was I interested in spying? Absolutely not. But I figured: Countries are going to spy on one another. In fact, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Having rivals know each other’s capabilities is a good way to keep the peace. If I can help America do a better job of watching what the Russians are up to, well, I don’t see anything wrong with that. They were certainly doing the same with us.

“But I personally wasn’t there to learn what the Russians were up to. I was there to learn about the universe. I often felt like a university professor when I was doing my NASA-sponsored research . . . except that I did not have any teaching duties. There was also a pretty close relationship between the Lockheed research labs in Palo Alto and Stanford University, just a few blocks away. I considered myself very lucky. The way this generally worked was that NASA would issue a call for proposals. These could range from, say, twenty-five thousand dollars for a small scientific investigation, to major instrument development projects, like the Hubble Space Telescope, approaching a billion dollars or more. If you had a favorite research project that meshed well with the capabilities of a NASA mission, you would write up a request for observing time on that satellite (that is, time to get behind the wheel, as it were, and use the viewpoint provided by the satellite to do exploring of one’s own from down here on earth), along with a research justification and a plan for analyzing the data and interpreting the science. A panel of experts would convene to review and rank the proposals. Needless to say, competition was very stiff. One of my favorite research topics was the detection of flares in the ultraviolet and X-ray regions of the spectrum, from stars that are smaller and cooler than the sun. These types of emissions can only be observed from space. It was quite a thrill when my proposal to catch an X-ray flare occurring on Proxima Centauri succeeded using one of the orbiting NASA observatories.”

A lot of Bernie’s work involved studying the star that we know vastly more about than any other: our sun.

“Our sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago and is about halfway through its hydrogen burning phase. So it’s a lightbulb that’s about half used up. It’s a single star, which is a very great bit of fortune for us because if it had a twin, as many stars do, that would mess up the extreme stability of the orbits of its planets. And we’re lucky that the planets move around our sun in orbits that are very close to circular. Sometimes planets circle stars following a more elliptical trajectory, meaning that at certain points they get much closer to their star and at other times much further away. If we had that situation, the earth would alternate between seasons of unimaginable cold and blazing heat. Stability is what you want if you are looking for life, and extreme stability is exactly what we have on earth, thanks to the size and nature of the sun, our distance from it, and the regularity of the distance at which we orbit it.

“The sun is also a much livelier place than people might think,” Bernie continued. “We look at it from our perspective and it appears much the same from day to day. But up there, both at the sun’s surface and deep within it, it’s a different matter. Solar flares, sun spots . . . these things all affect us here on earth in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways. The sun doesn’t, obviously, hold physical life. And yet . . . it is an extremely lively place, and of course it’s completely responsible for earth being the life-filled place it is. When I consider the sun, I see a source of tremendous mystery and romance. Everything the earth is, and everything you and I are, comes courtesy of the sun. It’s beyond me how anyone can look at it with even a trace of boredom.”

It occurred to me that for Bernie, the sun was a little like what wolves, sharks, the ocean, and thunderstorms were to me: the place where the world we know overlaps with something beyond that world. I told Bernie about the poet William Blake’s famous statement that when an ordinary person looks at the sun, he or she sees an ordinary disk about the size of a ha’penny—a British coin that was in common use in Blake’s time. But when Blake looked at the sun, he saw a crowd of angels singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord.”

“That’s it,” said Bernie. “Well, the spirit of it at least. Angels may be up there, but I’ve never seen them through a telescope.”

Bernie, though in a very different way, had been up to what I’d been up to. He’d been going about his business, but all the time he’d had his eye on a figure at the edge of the set: a figure not mentioned in the script, who was in charge of it all.

Immersing myself in a book that tackled such large questions, being the layman to Bernie, the expert, could, I felt, only do me good. No matter how close I got to an answer, the very trying would nourish me.

On our next phone call, I told Bernie that not only was I up for doing a book with him, I even had a title for it.

Of course, I knew what I was getting into with that title. I had discovered that writing books about spiritual subjects with the catchphrase “proof” in the title got on a lot of people’s nerves. Eben Alexander, after his rise to fame with Proof of Heaven, was subjected to blistering attacks from people both in and out of the scientific community, bemoaning the fact that today, when the existence of a spiritual world had been resoundingly disproved, a Harvard neurosurgeon would have the audacity to produce a book with the words “heaven” and “proof” in the same title. Proof of Heaven, the late Oliver Sacks had complained in one review, was not just unscientific, it was anti-scientific.

Voices closer to home agreed. “What’s the next one going to be about,” a friend of mine had asked recently. “Proof of the Easter Bunny?”

I knew, of course, that the notion of a short book claiming to prove God’s existence was problematic in other ways as well. Philosophers had been trying to prove the existence of God since the days of the ancient Greeks. Scientific proof and religious faith, it was generally agreed, were two different things entirely, and combining them would only serve to further highlight their differences. Suddenly I was going to come along and prove this tried-and-true sentiment wrong?

I decided I’d see what Bernie thought of the title. After all, he was a serious scientist who’d already told me how much he disapproved of the flaky, irresponsible books about the overlap of science and religion that flooded bookshelves today. He might be outraged at the idea.

He wasn’t. “That sounds great,” he told me cheerfully when I floated the title to him next time we were on the phone.

Wow, I thought. That was simple.

I decided to press Bernie a little more about where he stood on this God business. Did he really and truly know God existed?

No, Bernie told me. No scientist worth his salt “knew” anything. The minute you started walking around thinking you knew something, you stopped being a scientist and started being a dogmatist.

“Real scientists,” he told me, “don’t issue decrees. They are much more likely to say things like ‘we think so,’ or ‘we’re not sure.’ ”

Bernie, I soon discovered, said things like this all the time. Yet when I asked him for a solid number—that is, how sure, percentage-wise, was he that God existed?—he was happy to oblige.

“Ninety-nine percent,” he said. “If you’re a scientist, nothing’s one hundred.”

That sounded like a pretty good number to me.

That night, I went up to Colleen’s and my bedroom. Getting into bed, I looked at the three koi swimming around in the thirty-gallon tank over on my side of the bed. Koi are carp. They come from Japan and are essentially goldfish, only they’re bigger, tougher, and—to my mind—more personable than goldfish, which have always struck me as having a kind of dead, dumb, vacant look.

Koi are likable, but they grow fast—way faster than the man at the fish store who’d sold me my first batch of them had gotten around to telling me they did. Consequently, when I went to bed at night and stared at the koi staring back at me, I’d inevitably feel conflicted. Had one or two of them grown too big for the tank? Was it time for me to take the sad (because I always got attached to them) but necessary step of transferring them from our tank to a friend’s pond, where they could swim wild and free and live more fun, if more dangerous (there were no herons or snapping turtles in my aquarium), lives?

“You’re projecting,” Colleen would sometimes say when I would bring up this issue of whether this or that fish was getting too big for the tank. “You just wish your own tank was bigger.”

Who doesn’t? I’d think when she would tell me this.

Lying there in the semidark of the bedroom, listening to the aquarium’s bubble machine toil away, I thought about where things stood with my new project.

Bernie was a scientist: one with good standing in the scientific community. He was also a scientist who believed that God was not a fiction. Acknowledging God’s reality was, Bernie felt, central to the human project. Without God, Bernie felt, we were all in trouble.

God was, in Bernie’s mind, the sole and supreme reality in the universe, upholding every micron of it at every second. Deprived of God, we could not exist. But . . . we could be deprived of the knowledge that He exists, and that was just about as bad.

I believed in God. There was little question for me, personally, that He existed. But did I believe in him enough? And was there, perhaps, some new strategy in this belief that Bernie’s knowledge could give me?

It occurred to me that if I were to jump with both feet into this project and work to understand what Bernie was saying in as deep a way as I could, my understanding of God, and of the world, might change. A question that had always been at the forefront of my mind, yet out of sight as well, might find a new, and different, and stronger, answer than I had thus far been able to provide.

The aquarium that I lived in might grow a little bigger.

Bernie and I put a proposal together and I submitted it to Howard Books, the publisher of Proof of Angels. I showed it to Colleen, and she had only one quibble.

“Just promise me,” she said, “that you won’t agree to some crazy deadline.”

Due to my habit of immediately agreeing to the first deadline date a publisher suggested, I was, when writing a book, in a pretty much constant state of panic. I took a certain sort of pride in being able to produce books not only quickly, but absurdly quickly. In asking that I this time not say “sure” to the first date my publisher suggested, Colleen was attempting to fend off the crash-and-burn phase that was becoming a regular (and unnecessary) stopping point in my book-writing process. Added to this was the fact that I was always writing books in which I almost instantly found myself in over my head. For me, writing a book was like falling through the air, trying to grab as much information as necessary and figure out how things all fit together before I hit the ground.

Truth be told, I kind of liked it that way, even if no one living with me during the process did.

On top of all this, there was the inevitable problem of doing sufficient research in a limited time. Most of the half-dozen books I’d written so far had been produced with the constant anxiety that I was writing about things too deep, too complex, and too fugitive for my abilities. In a way, this was part of the fun—though “fun” wasn’t usually the first word that would occur to me each morning when I sat down at my computer. Somewhere about halfway through the writing of whatever book I was working on, the pressure would overwhelm me, and for several weeks the house would become a combination of a mental ward and Mission Control during the Challenger crash.

Far from being an exception, this next book showed all the signs of being the clearest demonstration of this habit yet. There had been other dramas in the house that year, and Colleen explained that she just wasn’t ready for another book implosion.

“Tell them,” she said, “you need a year. They’ll understand. There’s no reason you need to write what is obviously going to be a challenging book in just six months.”

“Okay,” I said, “I will.”

That was in early May. Two weeks later, I signed a contract promising to have a full manuscript by November 1.