Person

Robert Jastrow

American astronomer and planetary physicist (1925-2008), founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor at Columbia and Dartmouth, and later director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. He is cited in apologetics almost entirely for one book and one closing paragraph, and both are worth getting right, because the citation is frequently mishandled.

The 30-second version:

Robert Jastrow was an American astronomer and founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. His book God and the Astronomers traced the discomfort twentieth-century astronomers felt at a cosmic beginning, and closed with the famous image of scientists scaling the highest peak to find theologians already sitting there. Get one thing right: Jastrow was an agnostic. That makes the citation stronger, a neutral witness conceding the data landed where a religious tradition already was, but the quote is rhetoric, not proof.

Why he is cited

God and the Astronomers (1978, revised 1992) traced the resistance among twentieth-century astronomers to Big Bang cosmology, arguing that the discovery of a cosmic beginning was received with unusual discomfort precisely because it resembled a theological claim. He documented Einstein's insertion of the cosmological constant to preserve a static universe, Eddington's statement that the notion of a beginning was repugnant to him, and the reluctance that met Lemaitre and later Gamow.

The book closes with the passage that made him a fixture of apologetic literature: that for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream, having scaled the mountains of ignorance and being about to conquer the highest peak, he pulls himself over the final rock only to be greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

He also stated plainly that the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same, and that the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time in a flash of light and energy.

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The thing to get right

Jastrow was an agnostic, and said so repeatedly. In the same book he describes himself as an agnostic in religious matters, and elsewhere as a scientist with no religious belief. He is not a convert, he did not become a theist, and presenting him as one is a misrepresentation that a prepared interlocutor will catch and use.

Handled correctly this makes the citation stronger rather than weaker. The value of the quotation is that it comes from someone with no stake in the theological conclusion, observing that the cosmological data landed where a religious tradition already was. A hostile or neutral witness conceding a point is worth more than an ally asserting it, and the concession evaporates the moment he is misdescribed as a believer.

The quotation is rhetorical, not an argument. It describes a historical irony about the reception of a theory. It does not by itself establish that the universe was caused, which is the work of Kalam Cosmological Argument and the contingency arguments. Citing it as though it settled anything invites the reply that a vivid image is not a premise.

Where he fits in the codex

His documentation of the resistance to the Big Bang is genuinely useful evidence for a narrower and more defensible point: that the initial reception of cosmological models was shaped by prior metaphysical preference rather than by the data alone. Fred Hoyle's steady-state theory, and Hoyle's own account of coining the phrase "Big Bang" dismissively, belong to the same history. See Big Bang and Cosmological Arguments, and Argument from Cosmology (Guillen), where the ghost reference to him originated.

See also

• Big Bang, the cosmology his book concerns
• Kalam Cosmological Argument, the argument the citation is usually attached to
• Cosmological Arguments, the family hub
• Argument from Cosmology (Guillen), the codex page citing him
• Michael Guillen, a comparable physicist witness
• Sean Carroll, the contemporary counterweight on the same cosmology
• Antony Flew, for the contrast with an actual change of position