Science, Religion & Society Archives - Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

The Popular Creation Story of Astronomy Is Wrong

Article 3000 words General audiences In this May 2018 article in Nautilus, author C. M. Graney discusses Johannes Kepler’s view of the universe, a view that does not conform at all to modern ideas. Graney argues that understanding the views of scientists such as Kepler, even when they are unusual, is important to understanding science today, and important to countering anti-science attitudes. Graney writes: In the early years of the 17th century, Johannes Kepler argued that the universe contained thousands of mighty bodies, bodies so huge that they could be universes themselves. These giant bodies, said Kepler, testified to the immense power of, as well as the personal tastes of, an omnipotent Creator God. The giant bodies were the stars, and they were arrayed around the sun, the universe’s comparatively tiny central body, itself orbited by its retinue of still tinier planets. Click here to access this article from Nautilus. … Continue reading →

Physics Today: Thinking differently about science and religion

Article (Letter to Editor) and Responses 9 pages (total) General audiences In February 2018 the journal Physics Today published a letter by Tom McLeish, Professor of Physics at Durham University, chair of the Royal Society’s education committee, and author of the book Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford University Press, 2014). The following June Physics Today published a number of responses to McLeish’s letter, along with additional remarks from McLeish. McLeish writes: Driving an unhistorical and unrealistic wedge between science and religion has got to stop. It leads, in part, to the optionalism that we see in some public and political attitudes toward science, from climate change to vaccination. It damages the educational experience of our children, and it impoverishes our understanding of our own science’s historical context. Human beings live not only in a physical world but within historical narratives that give us values, purpose, and identity. Science sits on the branches and draws from the sap of many … Continue reading →

The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions

Book 468 pages University level This is a book by an artist and a scientist. The artist is Robert Wagner, who has produced several books of illustrated poems and translations of the Psalms, and created a stained glass window for St. Mary’s Iffley in Oxford. The scientist is Andrew Briggs, Professor of Nanomaterials at Oxford, who holds degrees in both physics and theology. The authors argue that over time, science and metaphysics have grown side by side as mankind has asked questions central to our existence. The book, published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, discusses a wide range of historical figures, from Anaxagoras to John Philoponus to Al-Ghazali to Kepler to Maxwell to the scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider. The use of illustrations is a prominent feature of the book. From the publisher, Oxford University Press: When young children first begin to ask ‘why?’ they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of … Continue reading →

Father George Coyne Interviewed by Richard Dawkins

Video Approximately 1 hour General audiences This is uncut footage of a 2008 interview by Richard Dawkins with Father George Coyne, S. J., who was Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 through 2006. The interview was recorded for Dawkins’ television program “The Genius of Charles Darwin” for Channel 4 in the UK, but was not used. … Continue reading →

An Interview with Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J.

Article 8 pages General audiences This 2018 interview with Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 through 2006, was published as part of John Carroll University’s “Re-engaging Science in Seminary Formation” project. From the introduction to this interview: At every turn during our science in seminaries project, we found ourselves inspired and encouraged by the life and work of Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J., an astrophysicist and former director of the Vatican Observatory for almost 30 years (1978–2006). Father Coyne was not only on the front lines promoting the need for dialogue between scientific and theological communities, but he also unrelentingly advanced the cause of scientific literacy as a critical component of seminary formation. We contacted Father Coyne at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, where he is McDevitt Chair of Religious Philosophy and McDevitt Chair in Physics. He graciously agreed to be interviewed by Reverend John Kartje, Rector-President of Saint Mary of … Continue reading →

Pierre Duhem, Entropy, and Christian Faith

Article 18 pages University level In this 2008 article published in the journal Physics in Perspective, historian of science Helge Kragh discusses Pierre Duhem and the status of science and religion in the second half of the nineteenth century, when developments in the science of thermodynamics challenged the idea of an eternal, unchanging or cyclic universe. Kragh writes: The French physicist and polymath Pierre Duhem was strongly devoted to Catholicism but insisted that science and religion were wholly independent. In an article of 1905 he reflected at length on the relationship between physics and Christian faith, using as an example the cosmological significance of the laws of thermodynamics. He held that it was unjustified to draw cosmological consequences from thermodynamics or any other science, and even more unjustified to draw consequences of a religious nature. I place Duhem’s thoughts on “the physics of a believer” in their proper contexts by relating them to the late-nineteenth-century discussion concerning the meaning and … Continue reading →

Rather than working against one another, faith and science together offer a fuller picture of creation

Article 850 words General audiences Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., an astronomer with the Vatican Observatory, discusses in this article from from Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly how science and religion sometimes give us different pictures of God’s universe. Click here to access this article directly from Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly. Rather than working against one another, faith and science together offer a fuller picture of creation We shouldn’t be afraid if science and religion sometimes give us different pictures of God’s universe Brother Guy Consolmagno OSV Newsweekly 10/29/2014 “What do I do if science tells me one thing but religion tells me another thing? Which do I believe?” There’s a false assumption at the center of that question, because neither science nor religion are about believing in “things.” Our religious belief is not in a “thing,” but in a person — indeed, three persons. Our faith is in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as described and identified in the creed, and in the … Continue reading →

Life as We Know It

Article 3000 words General audiences A 2012 article from Notre Dame Magazine, by Michael J. Crowe, a historian of science with the University of Notre Dame, and Christopher M. Graney. Crowe and Graney write: The Aristotelians were wrong; the Copernicans were right. Our home is not the center of the universe; it is merely one planet circling one star in an incomprehensibly vast universe. But what is the deeper significance of this important claim? David Wootton suggests an answer in his recent biography, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies. The Copernican theory, he writes, “[O]ffered a view of the cosmos in which humankind, and the things that matter to humankind — love and hatred, virtue and vice, mortality and immortality, salvation and damnation — were irrelevant. Far from embodying a scheme of values, far from embodying a telos or purpose, [this] universe appeared to be indifferent to moral and metaphysical issues, and even indifferent to our own existence. . . . Galileo’s greatest … Continue reading →

These Are Not Your Mother’s Sundials: Or, Time and Astronomy’s Authority

Article 26 pages University level A discussion by Sara Schechner of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, regarding sundials in the collection of the Adler Planetarium. This essay was published in The Science of Time 2016: Time in Astronomy & Society, Past, Present and Future, of which Fr. Pavel Gabor, S. J., an astronomer with the Vatican Observatory, is a co-author. Schechner writes: Drawing upon the exquisite collection of sundials and time-finding instruments at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago—currently being catalogued by the author—this essay offers examples of sundials made of silver, gilt brass, ivory, wood, and stone between 1500 and 1900. They were designed to be portable or fixed, pocket-sized, or monumental, but all did more than tell the time. By critically examining them, we can see the influence of the cultures in which they were made and used. These material objects tell stories of race, empire, labor, religion, fashion, and politics. And by so … Continue reading →

The Leap Second Debate: Rational Arguments vs. Unspoken Unease

Article (book chapter) 9 pages High school level and above A brief, somewhat “tongue-in-cheek” essay by Fr. Paul Gabor, S. J., an astronomer with the Vatican Observatory. Gabor provides a brief historical overview on the subject of time, standards, power, and societies. This essay was published in The Science of Time 2016: Time in Astronomy & Society, Past, Present and Future, of which Fr. Gabor is a co-author. Gabor writes: The ancient and sacred task of timekeeping, linking the eternal with the everyday, is one of the oldest missions of astronomy, originating long before the dawn of written history. The succession of timekeeping schemes throughout millennia has been a search for a balance between the practical and the symbolic. In the current Leap Second Debate, there are rational arguments, focused on practical considerations, and there is a certain unspoken unease, emerging from the symbolic substrata of the issues involved…. [T]his paper will examine the presuppositions and perceptions overshadowing the debate: … Continue reading →

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