 |
| Ohio State University |
All three work or worked in the Specola Vaticana, or Vatican Observatory, just off the papal gardens at Castel Gandolfo, a short drive from Rome. The observatory is a descendant of centuries of Vatican-sponsored research into the stars, and it is the only Vatican body that carries out scientific study.
The history of the observatory, which has been staffed by Jesuits since the 1930s, is a rebuttal to the notion that the Roman Catholic Church has always sought to stand in the way of scientific advancement, an idea perpetuated by high-profile cases like those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno at the hands of the Inquisition during the Renaissance.
“There are institutions like the Pontifical Academy of Science that tell the Vatican what’s going on in the world of science, but we actually do the science,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, an asteroid honoree (4597 Consolmagno) and director of the observatory, whose website tagline is “faith inspiring science.” In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Brother Consolmagno said that part of the mission of the observatory was “to show the world that the church supports science.”
It’s telling that a former director of the observatory, the Jesuit astrophysicist Rev. George V. Coyne, who died in 2020, played a significant role in getting the Vatican to shift position and formally acknowledge in 1992 that Galileo might have been correct.
“One thing the Bible is not,” Father Coyne told The New York Times Magazine in 1994, “is a scientific textbook. Scripture is made up of myth, of poetry, of history. But it is simply not teaching science.”
from "Centuries of Stargazing Leave Jesuit Names Written in the Heavens",
===========
 |
| Tufts |
The next day, I meet Coyne at his house where we take our seats in the empty bedroom. I begin at the most famous of beginnings.
"When you read Genesis, what are you reading?" I ask.
"I am reading a nice story," he says emphatically, "a beautiful story." Coyne is quite anxious to show off his scientist's bona fides. He has no interest in sounding Jesuitically ambiguous. "One thing the Bible is not," he adds, "is a scientific textbook. Scripture is made up of myth, of poetry, of history. But it is simply not teaching science."
Coyne goes on to say that science and religion "have a lot to learn from each other." But I detect a slight air of discomfort once the topic shifts from the differences between science and religion to their common ground. "The principal criterion for judging the 'truth' of a scientific model," Coyne says stiffly, "is 'unifying explanatory power.' "
This power requires that a model reveal simplicity, beauty and predictability. Theology, too, he says, has this kind of "unifying explanatory power."
But when pressed to explain whether this commonality suggests that science and religion should interact more often, Coyne insists he is no interdisciplinarian: "The risk is to adulterate each other's fields. Science has made its greatest progress by keeping itself pure."
I ask him to provide one lesson science can learn from theology.
Coyne shifts his glasses again. "I do not have a vivid desire to do too much of this," he says, sighing.
Saying that science and religion "have a lot to learn from each other" is the most pat phrase one hears from Jesuit astrophysicists. For Coyne and the others, it's a happy shibboleth, the metaphysical equivalent of singing "We Are the World." It sounds right, but it glosses over major problems.
I shift back to the Bible because there is one undeniable assumption in Scripture. Even the most progressive, woman-ordaining, Paul-was-gay, Jesus-was-illegitimate, Mary-was-a-single-mother, "Kumbaya"-singing Christian must admit that the Bible states that humanity is a unique creation.
"I was never taught to believe that," Coyne says, swatting away my question like a bug. He knows where I'm heading, and we both have a laugh. At the mere hint of a discussion leading to the issue of extraterrestrials, Coyne beats a hasty retreat to the sanctuary of science. He has thought about the issue before.
He puts his hands, palms down, on the arms of his chair like a seated cardinal: "The sun is one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy of which there are a hundred billion galaxies. So you start thinking: Thirty percent of stars are like the sun. Ten percent of these have exactly the right surface temperature as the sun. One half percent of those have planets about them. One half of those have a distribution about them of terrestrial and Jovian planets. One half percent of those can have a planet like earth -- and I can keep going, narrowing and narrowing, and yet you still have billions of planets."
"How can you describe the universe," I ask, "as a vast empty infinitude, largely uninhabited, and still believe in----."
"The centrality of man in the universe?" Coyne says, perfectly completing my sentence. "There's no doubt about it. To our own knowledge of ourselves, we are unique in creation because of our self-reflexivity. I can know myself knowing. I am a having a conversation with you, and I can remember that conversation. To this, the Catholic Church comes along and says, the reason this is true is because you have an individual soul."
When I shake my head, more in confusion than in disbelief, Coyne shows a honest frustration with his own Jesuitical reasoning.
"I don't know what the ultimate answer is," he says. "But I do know in my faith that I'm unique. God loves me as an individual, and I was created by God. But I also know that I evolved, that my ancestors came crawling out of the sea, and that they wound up hanging from trees eating bananas. I believe all that and I believe the two are compatible."
---------------------
Corbally seems more comfortable talking about pure science than religion, even when, at last, he resumes our earlier discussion.
"One uses models in science to understand the universe," he says, "And one can use models in theology to understand the religious experience. In science, you have models such as the Big Bang. Each model has its aptness and inadequacies. With more data, you construct a better model that provides better understanding."
When pressed for an example of a theological model, he is stymied for a moment.
"The Trinity," he says at last, "is understood in terms of models, of metaphors. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a model, if you like. And there are others. The Trinitarian formula speaks of the revealer, the one who is revealed and the revealedness. So to some people, those words are a better description of the Trinity than the traditional one.
"Jesus called himself the Son of Man, not the Son of God," Corbally says, sensing he is on a roll. "It was a metaphor He preferred. There are other titles used for Jesus and God. And they are descriptions, models. And upon examining any one of them, you can discover their aptness, their insights, but also their inadequacies." He pauses for a moment, trying to come up with one competent comparison to illuminate his understanding of God's place in the universe.
"Mathematics is an abstraction," he says. "It is everywhere in reality and it gives us insights into reality. But it is not part of reality. Mathematics is not the form of reality."
For Jesuit astrophysicists, then, God participates in all aspects of the world, but is not a part of it. He is the designing principle but not the design itself. One cannot find God in the scientific sense any more than one could examine a naturally occurring Euclidean line, like the horizon, or a Mandelbrotian fractal, like a seashore, and find "mathematics."
from "Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?",
No comments:
Post a Comment