In honor of today’s feast of Albert the Great, patron saint of scientists, I’d like to offer some words on humility. Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived, famously compared himself to a boy “playing on the sea-shore ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me” – and said again “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Nothing better induces a sense of the grandeur of God and of our own smallness than contemplation of the universe that science so astonishingly reveals. Unfortunately some scientists – those who tend to gain a hearing through the secular media – exhibit precious little of Newton’s humility. These are researchers who are insolent in the face of our cosmic origins, who speak of science’s demotion of God, who play satanic games with biotechnology.

But if the hubris of scientists rightly gives believers pause, we should also ask whether Christians are always sufficiently humble before the discoveries of science. I do not mean humble as a post-Christian secularist mindset would construe “humble” – witness the oft-repeated nonsense that Copernicus “put us in our place” by relegating the earth to an obscure orbit around an ordinary star in an average galaxy in a vast cosmos, a claim that foolishly commits the very fallacy its proponents pretend to attack (i.e., that of basing a metaphysical statement on the mere accident of physical location). Rather, I mean “humble” in the authentic sense that we must acknowledge truth wherever it is found, since it has only God for its Author, even if it has been discovered and promoted by those with an anti-Christian agenda. Abusus non tollit usum: the abuse of a good thing is no argument against its legitimate use. Scientific truth is mighty and shall prevail, and it were well that Catholics, following the repeated urging of the popes, boldly follow the path of that conquest.

Stanley Grove is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Music at Wyoming Catholic College.

I once read an evocative tale of a monk who, all during his life in the strict confines of the cloister, would find solace and delight, as often as the pressure of his duties allowed, in gazing at the distant glittering stars, oblivious to his surroundings. As I recall, this habit of long years much amused his comrades, no doubt practical prayerful men in their own way. But as the story closes, we are given the poignant image of a frail and white-haired man at life’s end, blind with age but still standing in the garden where he had always stood, with sightless eyes lifted up to the familiar stars in a radiant ecstasy of love.

The story calls to mind something primordial yet too often forgotten: that we are fashioned out of the matrix of the star-studded universe, in order to wonder at that universe and ascend to the contemplation of its Creator.

I can only guess at the extent of psychological and spiritual havoc that modern man, with his brightly-lit metropolises and frantic pace of life, wreaks upon himself by not seeing the starry dome, the cosmic reaches.

But the sky is still dark over western Wyoming, and the stars nightly beckon one into vast silence. To look upward is “to know what God and man is.” Who shall say what thoughts do not take wing, what prayers of gratitude are not raised, what seeds of future joy are not planted, by students living under such a sky?

Stanley Grove is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Music at Wyoming Catholic College.