Sociology Archives - Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

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 →

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 →

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 →

Pope Benedict XIV – Benedict’s Patronage of Learned Women

Article (book chapter) 20 pages University level “Benedict’s Patronage of Learned Women”, by Marta Cavazza of the University of Bologna, is a chapter in Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment: Art, Science, and Spirituality, a collection of essays concerning the mid-eighteenth-century papacy of Benedict XIV (Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini), published by the University of Toronto Press. Cavazza writes: [A] handful of women… received public recognition in eighteen-century Italy, especially in Bologna, for their philosophical [scientific], mathematical, and anatomical knowledge. The instigator and director of these events was in most cases Benedict XIV… [who] used his moral authority and his sovereign power to encourage and reward women who excelled in the fields of philosophy and medicine, helping them obtain public honours and academic positions that were reserved for men during that era… They became “a symbol of the successes of the Bolognese science” chiefly thanks to Benedict XIV’s patronage. The connection between the promotion of modern science and not only the recognition of … Continue reading →

Kenneth R. Miller – To Find God in All Things: Grandeur in an Evolutionary View of Life

Video 56 minutes High school level and above Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University and author of a widely-used textbook for high school biology, gives the St. Albert Award Lecture at the inaugural conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists. Miller gives an overview of conflicts that have arisen when people have opposed teaching evolution as subject matter in high school, discusses the tendency of some scientists to frame evolution in exactly the way foreseen by those who oppose its teaching, and provides a contrasting view of evolution: a view that “Finds God in All Things”. Click here for an article from Our Sunday Visitor entitled “Catholic scientists discuss faith’s role in work”, on the first conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists—“Origins”—held April 21-23, 2017 in Chicago. Click here for the Society of Catholic Scientists “Origins” conference page. … Continue reading →

The Cultural Values of Science – St. John Paul II

Article 900 words General audiences Pope John Paul II in a November 11, 2002 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences discusses the cultural values of science, and notes that science itself represents a value for human knowledge and the human community: For it is thanks to science that we have a greater understanding today of man’s place in the universe, of the connections between human history and the history of the cosmos, of the structural cohesion and symmetry of the elements of which matter is composed, of the remarkable complexity and at the same time the astonishing coordination of the life processes themselves. It is thanks to science that we are able to appreciate ever more what one member of this Academy has called “the wonder of being human”…. Click here for the full text of John Paul II’s discussion from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences web page. Click here for the full text of John Paul II’s … Continue reading →

Science in the Service of Peace – St. John Paul II

Article 3000 words General audiences Pope John Paul II in a November 12, 1983 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences discusses science, truth, and peace: All knowledge takes its nobility and dignity from the truth that it expresses. Only in the unbiased pursuit of truth do culture and especially science preserve their freedom and are able to defend it from any attempt at manipulation by ideologies or powers. ‘The truth will set you free’: these words from the Gospel enjoy perennial validity and illumine with divine light the endeavours of the scientist who refuses to subordinate his commitment and his research to anything but the truth. Truth is the goal of the whole universe: finis totius Universi est veritas, as one of the greatest thinkers of all time, Thomas Aquinas, wrote. The truth of all beings, their forms and their laws are hidden in the bosom of the Universe, which yearns for its truth to be discovered by the human intellect. … Continue reading →

Interweaving Stories about Reality – Alister McGrath

Article (book excerpt) 900 words General audiences Alister McGrath is the Andreas Idreos Professor in Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. This excerpt has been selected by the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti. In “Interweaving Stories about Reality” McGrath writes: I have set out something of my own personal journey from a sense of rapturous amazement at nature to discovering initially the intellectual delight of the natural sciences, then the elevating and enriching experience of religious faith, and finally the exploration of the richer vision of reality that resulted from allowing science and faith to inform and illuminate each other. Click here for McGrath’s essay, from Inters.org. Click here for a published version of McGrath’s essay, from the 2015 book The Big Question: Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Science, Faith and God (preview courtesy … Continue reading →

What Scientists Really Think: Shattering Myths, Toward Dialogue – Elaine Howard Ecklund

Article (book excerpt) 4000 words High school level and above An excerpt from the 2010 book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, written by Elaine Howard Ecklund (Director of the Program on Religion and Public Life for the Rice University Institute for Urban Research, and Rice Scholar of the James Baker III Institute on Public Policy), and published by Oxford University Press. Ecklund writes: In the classroom, scientists who do not hold a personal faith still have a responsibility to interact respectfully with religious students and not require them to hide their worldviews on philosophical, moral, or aesthetic issues. But many scientists adopt a dismissive or pejorative stance toward religious students, even suppressing discussion of religion altogether. Recall Raymond, a physicist we met earlier, who said that the views of religious students should not be considered because “they’re in the big time now”. Bear in mind also the implications of those sentiments expressed by the social scientist” who tells … Continue reading →

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Category Archives: Sociology