The Heavens Declare

At Whit's End, Mr. Whittaker invites Renee Carter up to the gallery to try out something new: using Imagination Station technology, he has turned the room into an interactive, multi-dimensional research tool - an idea Renee herself suggested weeks earlier. The topic he has picked for the first test is faith versus science, and Renee quickly guesses why. Camilla's science teacher recently made scornful remarks about religion, and when Camilla stood her ground, the teacher assigned her a report defending religion. Camilla asked Renee for help, and Renee refused - because, as she now admits to Whit, she agrees with the teacher. She believes science and faith are simply incompatible, and she can't in good conscience tell kids otherwise. Whit proposes a deal: let the gallery present its evidence, and if Renee remains unconvinced, he won't stop her from telling Camilla exactly what she thinks. As a scientist committed to open inquiry, Renee accepts.

Whit begins with buildings Renee knows well. Above the entrance to the astronomy tower at Campbell College, a place she has visited dozens of times without noticing, is a Latin carving of Psalm 19: "The heavens declare the glory of God." Harvard's original seal, he shows her, didn't just say "Veritas" but "Truth for Christ and the Church." Then the whole room transforms into the Cavendish Laboratory in 1874, where Renee is starstruck to meet one of her scientific heroes, James Clerk Maxwell, the developer of electromagnetic theory. He is checking a phrase he ordered carved into the laboratory door - another Bible verse, Psalm 111:2. Renee is astonished to learn Maxwell is a Christian, and he cheerfully argues that Christian thinking shaped all of modern science, hers included. Before Christianity, he explains, most people believed nature itself was divine - and no one experiments on something divine. It was Christians who taught that God created nature, making it fair game for poking, prodding, and testing, and that a God who brought order out of chaos made a universe that can actually be understood. Whit sums it up: when those two ideas came together, modern science flourished. Renee scoffs that a few carved verses hardly prove Christianity started science.

So Whit tries another angle. Renee insists faith cannot compete with science, so the gallery whisks them to the top of the scoreboard at last Friday's Odyssey High football game. Competition, Whit points out, requires both teams to be on the same field - but God is not a being inside the universe, not on science's field at all, so science and faith aren't competitors. Next, at a subway construction site under New York City (where a grumpy worker shoos them off for not wearing hard hats), Whit displays the tunnel's blueprints and asks whether they can tell him if New York's courts are just. At the Globe Theatre, during Romeo and Juliet, he asks how Shakespeare used the scientific method to write the play. The questions are absurd, Renee protests - and that, says Whit, is the point. The scientific method is powerful, but it can't answer questions of beauty, justice, art, love, or faith. Claiming it can isn't science at all; it's a philosophy called scientism. People live in two worlds of knowledge, the physical and the spiritual, and both matter. Take away the spiritual, Whit asks, and what are we - lumps of matter? Then why ask questions at all?

Renee has one card left: Galileo, imprisoned and tortured, she says, for proving the earth revolves around the sun, and dead in a prison cell. The gallery takes them to where Galileo actually served his sentence - a lovely villa in Florence that looks more like a resort. Hearing moaning, Renee charges in to rescue him from his torturers, only to find the old scientist has merely banged his elbow chasing a dropped pen. A rather goofy Galileo sets the record straight: the theory was Copernicus's, and the church never objected to it being taught as a theory - only as unproven fact. Its message to him was, as he puts it, "Put up or shut up." He tried to prove it and couldn't quite manage it, and when his old friend Pope Urban VIII wouldn't endorse the theory either, Galileo mocked him as simple-minded in a play. His condemnation, Renee realizes, was more personal payback than a war on knowledge. He renounced the theory, kept his laboratory, kept writing, and died peacefully at the villa in 1642 at age seventy-seven, surrounded by family. Whit adds that the church has since admitted its mistake and formally apologized - then wonders aloud when science last apologized for its mistakes. A final display, the Scientists Hall of Faith, begins scrolling through believing scientists until Renee laughingly surrenders - there are hundreds more, Whit says, a whole tapestry of people using science and faith to the benefit of both.

Renee admits the arguments are compelling - persuasive enough, at least, that she agrees to help Camilla with her report, and Whit reveals Camilla should be arriving any minute. Renee suspects he planned the whole thing. She tells him plainly that she still doesn't share his beliefs. That's okay, Whit answers warmly: "We'll keep working on it."