Baptist Spirituality

This article is in honor and memory of my father, James LaGuardia, who passed away on August 5, 2013.

By Joe LaGuardia, August 1, 2025.

My father was a television repairman who owned his own repair business since he was 19 years of age. What that meant for my sisters and me was that we always had the newest television technology in the house. That did not mean we had the newest televisions, mind you. Our televisions were often temporary, and we moved from one cobbled derelict to another. Nevertheless, come time for our boob tube sessions and ice-cream-in-a-mug snack each night, my dad insured that we had the best sound and most vibrant colors to have ever filled our tiny living room.

I always joked that I thought my best friend, a few blocks over, was rich because he had a Commodore 64, and he thought I was rich because I had a good television and a VHS player. Despite my father’s TV wizardry, however, there were only a few basic channels that our old rabbit-eared antenna drew to the set. These were the days of three news broadcasts and a couple of dials that differentiated between UHF and VHF. To change the channel, you had to physically get up from your seat, walk over, and “turn the dial.” And, despite the television, you always had to endure – GASP! – static.

Of all the childhood horrors I can remember, it was static that was among the worst sounds and sights that haunted our days of yore. Static meant that either (1) something was wrong with the broadcast or (2) the antenna ears needed adjusting, leading to aluminum foil shortages in the household and siblings yelling at each other, “No, move the antenna a little to the left! No, now to the right! Wait – there! No! Hold up your hand – okay, stay in that position…”

Static was an irritating mix of buzzes and hisses, zigs and zags that created collective sighs and slumped shoulders across America. Little did we know that a portion of that buzz revealed “the face of God” — background cosmic radiation left over from the birth of the universe. It was all there – right there! – in our own home at 23 Buel Avenue, Staten Island, New York. While we yelled at each other to change the channel or adjust the set — occasionally banging the side as needed — little did we know that were receiving a message from the very first “And God said…” of Genesis 1.

While we yelled to change the channel or adjust the set, we were receiving a message from the very first, “And God said…” of Genesis 1.”

It was in the earliest days of astrophysics in the 20th century that scientists were trying to wrap their minds and equations around the possible origins of the universe. Einstein dabbled in relativity. Edwin Hubble (yes, that Hubble) argued that the universe was not static (no, not that static), but an ever-expanding conglomeration of galaxies and quasars and natural elements. In Europe, a priest and mathematician by the name of Georges LeMaitre had a different theory. He posited that if the universe was expanding, then there must be a single point in space from which the universe originated – a singularity, a zero, a “day without yesterday” (Ferris, 211).

LeMaitre’s hypothesis was that if the universe was indeed expanding and there was a single point in space from which all matter originated, then surely there must have been an enormous burst of energy that cast all of that cosmic stuff into the far reaches of infinity. After all, only a few years had passed since LeMaitre, while serving as an artillery specialist in the first World War, experienced the raw power of mechanized warfare and poison gas bombs. Every action has a reaction, and energy exists where energy, well… exists.

LeMaitre argued that this was the primordial beginning, the very first atom. He fittingly called this explosive event the “Big Noise”, which to me fits very well since it was God who spoke creation into existence in the first place. LeMaitre’s theory shifted the very foundation of astronomy and he became known as the “Father of Cosmology.”

Building on LeMaitre’s premise, a Russian scientist emerging in the nuclear age by the name of George Gamow proposed that an explosion of that magnitude would produce heat and energy and radiation. His colleagues Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman honed in on the idea that such radiation should show up across the universe at a warm 5 degrees Kelvin. Just as radiation permeated the sands of Alamogordo Atomic testing grounds in New Mexico well after the first bomb erupted, so too does radiation persist in the billion year journey originating from the center of the cosmos.

With the growth of radio, microwave, and Doppler receivers, scientists pursued these conjectures. Robert Dicke and James Peebles began construction of a microwave receiver in Princeton, New Jersey, while Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson fine tuned a huge horn receiver at Bell Telephone Laboratories not 30 miles away as the crow flies.

Penzias and Wilson, well ahead of Dicke and Peebles, had an operational receiver but detected a constant static hiss that was as frightening to them as television static was to us children. They tuned the receiver, checked their connections, and kicked the tires. They tried to adjust the antenna – “No, to the left! No, a little to the right! Hold out your arm, see if that works!” The only thing they discovered was a family of pigeons in the horn. They took time to relocate the feathery friends, but the mysterious, frustratingly persistent static remained.

By that time, word went from Holmdel to MIT and back to Princeton where Dicke and Peedles were hard at work. They traveled to visit Penzias and Wilson and see the antenna’s progress. The three of them put two and two together.

Measuring in at around 2.7 degrees kelvin, the hiss was none other than cosmic radiation. The team pointed it at the sun. Hiss. They pointed it at the Milky Way. Hiss. They pointed it at the moon. Hiss. Not only did the pair discover the mysterious “afterglow of creation” Gamow surmised years before, but they found that the radiation was evenly distributed over the entire cosmos, like a blanket of information encoded with God’s fingerprints. An aging LeMaitre congratulated the team in what was said to be one of his last conversations before his death on June 20, 1966. Most fittingly, Penzias and Wilson won a Nobel Prize.

We finally know now what all of that buzz, which plagued Dad’s television sets, was all about.