Travelogue - Science at the Museum of the Bible

Aldrin, Galileo, and Lemaître on a recent trip

Hi all. We recently returned from a quick vacation to DC, which vacation actually included a visit to both the Smithsonian Natural History Museum…

…and the imposing and (on the inside) quite technological Museum of the Bible.

Now, I must say that I’ve been twice now to the Museum of the Bible, and if you like old manuscripts, scrolls, and books, it’s a great place to see those things. (The handwriting - and it was handwriting of course - on ancient manuscripts is itself super impressive.) One should not judge too much from one trip, but I was “bothered” a bit by the small crowds and some other things I saw on the visit which might suggest the museum is not pulling in the crowds it is going to need to sustain itself long-term, but I guess we shall see. However the best attended exhibit at the museum when I was there was a temporary basement exhibit on science and Christianity.

It was a well attended exhibit… people want answers on this topic. The world tells them, constantly, that science and Christianity are at odds with each other. The world also, and I think this is increasingly obvious even to many people who are not Christians, makes science (at least the word) into a sort of religion of its own. People don’t want that, people want a harmonious synthesis, or at least a cordial working side-by-side, between science and their faith. So such exhibits are popular.

But now I just want to show you a couple neat things I saw there.

Communion on the Moon

Yes, Buzz Aldrin, a presbyterian, took communion shortly after landing on the Moon.

As the men prepared for the next phase of their mission, Aldrin got on the comm system and spoke to the ground crew back on Earth. “I would like to request a few moments of silence,” he said. “I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.”

Then he reached for the wine and bread he’d brought to space—the first foods ever poured or eaten on the moon. “I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” he later wrote. Then, Aldrin read some scripture and ate. Armstrong looked on quietly but did not participate.

And the Museum had the actual chalice Aldrin used, which is pretty neat.

As you may know, the Apollo 8 astronauts, when orbiting the Moon, read back to Earth a passage from Genesis, which the museum was also playing. It shall forever be said that one of the first things we took to the stars was our faith.

Galileo in his own hand

From circa 1615, they also had Galileo’s own notebook documenting his observations of four of Jupiter’s moons, now called the “Galilean moons”, moons you can see with even a small telescope aimed at Jupiter. Galileo’s observations showed objects orbiting something other than the Earth or Sun, and also showed a “changing” heavens. Pretty neat to see his own handwriting.

They also had a copy of Copernicus’ book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres which was actually owned by Galileo and marked up by him.

The Big Bang Theory

And finally, just about the first thing you saw in the exhibit, which might be surprising to some, was a discussion of the Big Bang Theory. But yes, it was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Roman Catholic priest and cosmologist. And yes, inasmuch as the theory claims the universe had a moment of creation, it was initially disliked by many scientists for that reason (preferring instead to believe the philosophically-problematic [“there are no real infinities”] but atheistically-comfortable idea that the universe had simply always been). And yes, Lemaître called his theory the idea of the “primeval atom”, with “big bang” coined much later.

Of course I recognized the cosmic microwave background radiation immediately, I just hadn’t expected to see it at the Bible museum!

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