The astronomer for the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, says that his study of the universe through science has helped him better understand the person of Christ.
The Vatican Observatory was established in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII near St. Peter’s Basilica but was moved a few miles outside of Rome in 1935, when pollution made visibility difficult. The Vatican established a new division of the observatory in Tuscon, Ariz., in 1980 and built its own telescope in 1987.
Despite people often having the “crazy idea” that science and religion conflict, science is “really one of our best principles for getting to know God,” he told EWTN News.
Brother Consolmagno, who also serves as the Vatican’s curator of meteorites, spoke on March 3 at the Living the Catholic Faith Conference in the Archdiocese of Denver.
During his talk, titled “The Word Became Flesh,” the planetary scientist explained that modern atheists tend to understand God as being merely a force that “fills the gaps” in our understanding of the universe.
“To use God to fill the gaps in our knowledge is theologically treacherous,” he said, because it minimizes God to just another force inside the universe, rather than recognizing him as the source of creation.
Those who believe in God should not be afraid of science, but should see it as a an opportunity that God gave humanity to get to know him better.
Brother Consolmagno said that he believes in God, “not because he is at the end of some logical chain of calculations,” but because he “experienced what physics and logic can show me but cannot explain: beauty and reason and love.”
The primary difference between him and atheistic scientist Stephen Hawking is that he recognizes that God is not another part of the universe that explains the inexplicable, but rather “Logos” and “Reason itself.”
He spoke of the faith needed to embrace Christianity and said that although other world religions and philosophies can give us a rational view of the universe, “only the Gospel could tell us that Reason itself became flesh and dwelt among us” in the form of Jesus Christ.
The Incarnation is remarkable because it happened, he said, and also due to the way it occurred. In coming into the world as an infant, God “exercised a kind of supernatural restraint” which still respected the laws of nature.
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Science itself has no intrinsic philosophical value. Science rests on philosophy, which, without the aid of science, already recognizes material reality as intelligible, thereby rendering science possible. Science does not discover that material reality is intelligible. It depends upon that fact, not to discover or to rediscover that basic philosophical fact, but to delineate that fact in measurable detail. His knowledge of astronomy gives Brother Consolmagno no intrinsic advantage over the non-astronomer in the apprehension and appreciation of “beauty, reason and love”, which are outside the scope of science. Almost the entirety of a scientist’s knowledge of science is based on faith in human testimony. Very little of the scientist’s knowledge of science is based on his own experimental observations, which depend for their significance upon the context of the current state of technological art and scientific knowledge. In contrast, philosophy, which leads to the natural knowledge of God, is based upon the individual’s personal and ordinary experience.
I went to a conference on Saturday given by a famous Catholic author and he feels quite the opposite. Science is causing more sin! We have the chemical witchcraft going on. We have cloning and creating embryos all in the name of science. Science is most definitely adding to the evil of the world! The average person has no idea of the magnitude of evil going on in the labs. There is a war on humanity going on involving babies created in the labs and thrown away. Then we wonder why God allows so many calamities in the world? The good will die with the evil ones. I long for a much simplier time! Perhaps God will knock down our technology and we’ll be back to more of a peasant lifestyle! The way it is now, it just can’t go on…..
True Science is engaged in the pursuit of the Truth through empirical evidence and observation. It’s not a realm of relativists although many moderns have been deceived otherwise. I think a little science can cause a loss of faith, but hard science brings faith and a belief in a Creator. Atheistic scientists are the darlings of the lucifieric media, but they are not the norm.
Diane: The science of which you speak is a good thing which has been corrupted. Science, which is the observation of creation in the pursue of truth, is good. All truth is from God, who is “the Truth”. But when men, including scientists, give in to the temptation to make themselves like God, the good of science becomes an agent of evil. We need to know where the boundaries are! Peace.
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