The Pontifical Academy of Sciences traces its history to the Academy of the Lynxes first founded in 1603, of which Galileo was a member. It is a group of 80 life members plus two honorary members and four members )including the director of the Vatican Observatory) who belong by right of their office within the Vatican.
Its goals are promoting the progress of the mathematical, physical and natural sciences, and the study of related epistemological questions and issues, recognising excellence in science, stimulating an interdisciplinary approach to scientific knowledge, encouraging international interaction, furthering participation in the benefits of science and technology by the greatest number of people and peoples, promoting education and the public’s understanding of science, ensuring that science works to advance of the human and moral dimension of man, achieving a role for science which involves the promotion of justice, development, solidarity, peace, and the resolution of conflict, fostering interaction between faith and reason and encouraging dialogue between science and spiritual, cultural, philosophical and religious values, providing authoritative advice on scientific and technological matters, and cooperating with the members of other Academies in a friendly spirit to promote such objectives.
The best place to start to learn about the PAS is at its own web site (click here).
Modern Cosmology and Life’s Meaning
- Book chapter
- 9 pages, 3600 words
- University level
A book chapter by Fr. George Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, from the 2002 book The Cultural Values of Science, published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Fr. Coyne writes:
Cosmology today is ever more human; it stimulates, provokes, ques- tions us in ways that drive us beyond science in the search for satisfaction, while at the same time scientific data furnish the stimuli. In this context the best cosmology, to its great merit, does not pretend nor presume to have the ultimate answers. It simply suggests and urges us on, well aware that not all is within its ken. Freedom to seek understanding and not dogmatism in what is understood characterize the best of cosmology. It is, in fact, a field where certainties lie always in the future; thus it is vital, dynamic and very demanding of those who seek to discover the secrets of the universe.
Click here to access this paper from the Pontifical Academy of Science.
[Download PDF]
Coyne PAS article
Modern Cosmology, a Resource for Elementary School Education
Book chapter (PDF)- 9 pages, 7000 words
- General audience
A book chapter from the 2001 book The Challenges for Science. Education for the Twenty-First Century, published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In this chapter Fr. George Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, writes:
(1) We should start teaching children from where they are at present, their current knowledge, interests, fears, and so on; (2) all of us humans, those who teach and those who are taught, “have been made in heaven”, it has been said. This refers to the well known need for stellar nucleosynthesis to provide the chemical abundances required for life in the universe. It has been indicated that one of principal goals of teaching children should be an awareness of this birth of ours from star dust, if only at an elementary level. I would suggest that the didactic order be reversed and that this awareness should be the beginning point of elementary school education; (3) the aim to develop “scientific literacy” has been a recurrent theme but I have not heard it defined. I propose an elementary definition which suits the purposes of my presentation: To be scientifically literate means to have an understanding of ourselves in the physical universe (the emphasis being on physical, but with the implication that I am speaking of all of the natural sciences: biology, physics chemistry and their derivatives); (4) Much has been made of the distinction between the methodology and the content of teaching. I would like to suggest that these two aspects of elementary school teaching find a unity in an ideology, a guiding theme, a single dominant perspective on ourselves in the physical universe.
Click here to download the chapter from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Pope Pius XII – The Structure of the Matter of the Created World as a Manifestation of the Wisdom and Goodness of God
Article- 3200 words
- High school level and above
A Papal Address to the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, April 24, 1955. This article 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. Pope Pius XII says to the assembled scientists:
As we bid you welcome in this house, whose doors have always been opened wide to those who cultivate the arts and sciences, we desire also to express to Your Excellencies, Members of our Academy, our lively satisfaction.
Your life, consecrated as is to the study of natural phenomena, enables you to observe every day more closely, and to interpret, the wonders which the Most High has inscribed on the reality of things. In very truth, the created world is a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness of God, for all things have received their existence from Him and reflect His grandeur. Each of them is, as it were, one of His words, and bears the mark of what we might call the fundamental alphabet, namely those natural and universal laws derived from yet higher laws and harmonies, which the labour of thought strives to discover in all their amplitude and their absolute character.
Created things are words of truth. In themselves, in their being, there is neither contradiction nor confusion. Rather, they always cohere one with the other. Sometimes they are difficult to understand because of their depth, but always, when clearly known, they are seen to be in conformity with the superior exigencies of reason. Nature opens up before you like a mysterious but astonishing book, which must be turned page by page and read in an orderly manner, with the aim in mind of progressing ceaselessly. In this manner, every forward step is a continuation of the preceding ones, corrects them, and climbs continually toward the light of a deeper understanding.
The mission confided to you, therefore, ranks among the most noble, for you should be, in a sense, the discoverers of the intentions of God. It pertains you to interpret the book of nature, to describe its contents, and to draw the consequences therefrom for the good of all….
Click here for this article from Inters.org.
Click here for this article from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Science and Religion Advance Together at Pontifical Academy
- Article
- 3 pages
- General audiences
This 2001 article written by Charles Seife for the journal Science discusses the Pontifical Academy of Science, with a side-bar article on the Vatican Observatory. Seife writes:
Since its founding, the Pontifical Academy has numbered among its members such scientific luminaries as Alexander Fleming, Niels Bohr, Chandrasekhara Raman, and Werner Heisenberg (elected in 1955)…. Candidates are nominated and elected by the members, although technically they are appointed by sovereign act of the pontiff—who looks for more than mere scientific eminence. The institution’s charter specifies that members must possess “acknowledged moral personality.”… Once on board, members share a simple set of duties: to meet and talk. Members say they choose their own speakers and topics and debate issues freely. “The Catholic Church is supporting this academy,” says Crodowaldo Pavan, a geneticist at the University of Sao Paulo and a member of the academy. “They pay for this meeting and don’t say what we should say—they give us total freedom.”… The academy’s November session drew an eclectic mix of people: physicists, biologists, philosophers, theologians, and clerics. Dominican robes and Jesuit collars mingled with suits that had seen more than their share of chalk dust.
Click here to access this article via JSTOR (available through many libraries).
Click here to access this article via Science.
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. You, Men of Science, who welcome the world into your minds, work upon it in your laboratories, and investigate its most secret byways in your dedicated efforts, what are you seeking if not the truth?
Have courage and the boldness of reason that untiringly seeks the truth and you will find in the Church and in this Apostolic See your most convinced allies. Of course, the conquests of science are at times provisional, subject to review and rethinking, and they will never succeed in expressing the whole truth hidden in the Universe. The sense of mystery is part of your intellectual heritage and reminds you that what you do not know is much vaster than what you do know. In the search for truth, the boldness of reasons is linked with the humility of its own limits, the joy of knowing goes hand-in-hand with wonder at the unknown.
Furthermore, the sense of mystery also envelops those truths which science cannot discover, but which question the mind of the scientist in the innermost part of his being, where he experiences an irresistible longing and yearning for the divine. The goal of the Universe is not only to reveal the truths it holds within itself, but to manifest the First Truth which gave the worlds its origin and form.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….
More than any other, the scientific community is a community of peace, for your rigorous search for the truth in the field of nature is independent of ideologies and therefore of the conflicts that result from them. Your activity demands sincere collaboration, and the frank communication of the results or your research.
The scientific community, a community of peace, must be extended to all nations, through the foundation everywhere of institutes for the research and sound technological application. It is not enough that political colonialism has ceased; every form of scientific and technological colonialism must cease as well. I cannot fail to note with satisfaction that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences includes an ever greater number of scientists from all the nations of the world, with no racial or religious discrimination. This is a form of cultural ecumenism which the Church, as the promoter of the true religious ecumenism, cannot but regard with a sense or lively satisfaction.
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 Vatican’s web page.
The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology
Book- 262 pages
- University level
This 2005 book by John Farrell (published by Thunder’s Mouth Press/Avalon Publishing Group) provides an in-depth and at at times technical discussion of the life and work of Fr. Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest who used the ideas of Albert Einstein to developed what is now known as the “Big Bang Theory”—the scientific idea that the universe had a beginning on a “day without yesterday”. Among his other accomplishments, Fr. Lemaître served as president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1960 until his death in 1966.
Click here for a preview from Google Books.
From the dust jacket of The Day Without Yesterday:
Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the twentieth century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. Is the universe evolving to some unforeseen end, or is it static, as the Greeks believed? The debate has preoccupied thinkers from Heraclitus to the author of the Upanishads, from the Mayans to Einstein. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaître convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaître called “the day without yesterday.” Lemaître’s skill with mathematics and the equations of relativity enabled him to think much more broadly about cosmology than anyone else at the time, including Einstein. Lemaître proposed the expanding model of the universe to Einstein, who rejected it. Had Einstein followed Lemaître’s thinking, he could have predicted the expansion of the universe more than a decade before it was actually discovered.
Also from The Day Without Yesterday:
[B]y the time Lemaitre had come to the fore with his expanding model of the universe, the opposition between science and religion had become fodder for journalists. And it’s interesting, for this reason, to go back to the early interviews with Lemaitre when he returned to California in 1933 and how he responded to the already typical question – just how did a priest-physicist reconcile his faith with his science?
The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less – some more than others – on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or as ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors of historic or scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if errors relate to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them.
The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation they must also be right on all other subjects is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.
You can already detect a note of impatience with Lemaitre’s answer, as in, Why should this be a question? But it was.
Tradition and Today: Religion and Science, in Science in the Context of Human Culture II
- Book
- 333 pages
- University/academic specialist level
A scan of a book, Science in the Context of Human Culture II, issued by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1991 including articles by Michael Heller and Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., who was Director of the Vatican Observatory at the time.
Click here to download the complete book from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Tradition and Today: Religion and Science, in Science in the Context of Human Culture II
- Book
- 333 pages
- University/academic specialist level
A scan of a book, Science in the Context of Human Culture II, issued by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1991 including articles by Michael Heller and Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., who was Director of the Vatican Observatory at the time.
Click here to download the complete book from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Modern Cosmology and Life’s Meaning
- Book chapter
- 9 pages, 3600 words
- University level
A book chapter by Fr. George Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, from the 2002 book The Cultural Values of Science, published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Fr. Coyne writes:
Cosmology today is ever more human; it stimulates, provokes, ques- tions us in ways that drive us beyond science in the search for satisfaction, while at the same time scientific data furnish the stimuli. In this context the best cosmology, to its great merit, does not pretend nor presume to have the ultimate answers. It simply suggests and urges us on, well aware that not all is within its ken. Freedom to seek understanding and not dogmatism in what is understood characterize the best of cosmology. It is, in fact, a field where certainties lie always in the future; thus it is vital, dynamic and very demanding of those who seek to discover the secrets of the universe.
Click here to access this paper from the Pontifical Academy of Science.
[Download PDF]
Coyne PAS article
Science and Religion Advance Together at Pontifical Academy
- Article
- 3 pages
- General audiences
This 2001 article written by Charles Seife for the journal Science discusses the Pontifical Academy of Science, with a side-bar article on the Vatican Observatory. Seife writes:
Since its founding, the Pontifical Academy has numbered among its members such scientific luminaries as Alexander Fleming, Niels Bohr, Chandrasekhara Raman, and Werner Heisenberg (elected in 1955)…. Candidates are nominated and elected by the members, although technically they are appointed by sovereign act of the pontiff—who looks for more than mere scientific eminence. The institution’s charter specifies that members must possess “acknowledged moral personality.”… Once on board, members share a simple set of duties: to meet and talk. Members say they choose their own speakers and topics and debate issues freely. “The Catholic Church is supporting this academy,” says Crodowaldo Pavan, a geneticist at the University of Sao Paulo and a member of the academy. “They pay for this meeting and don’t say what we should say—they give us total freedom.”… The academy’s November session drew an eclectic mix of people: physicists, biologists, philosophers, theologians, and clerics. Dominican robes and Jesuit collars mingled with suits that had seen more than their share of chalk dust.
Click here to access this article via JSTOR (available through many libraries).
Click here to access this article via Science.
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 Vatican’s web page.
Modern Cosmology, a Resource for Elementary School Education
- Book chapter (PDF)
- 9 pages, 7000 words
- General audience
A book chapter from the 2001 book The Challenges for Science. Education for the Twenty-First Century, published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In this chapter Fr. George Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, writes:
(1) We should start teaching children from where they are at present, their current knowledge, interests, fears, and so on; (2) all of us humans, those who teach and those who are taught, “have been made in heaven”, it has been said. This refers to the well known need for stellar nucleosynthesis to provide the chemical abundances required for life in the universe. It has been indicated that one of principal goals of teaching children should be an awareness of this birth of ours from star dust, if only at an elementary level. I would suggest that the didactic order be reversed and that this awareness should be the beginning point of elementary school education; (3) the aim to develop “scientific literacy” has been a recurrent theme but I have not heard it defined. I propose an elementary definition which suits the purposes of my presentation: To be scientifically literate means to have an understanding of ourselves in the physical universe (the emphasis being on physical, but with the implication that I am speaking of all of the natural sciences: biology, physics chemistry and their derivatives); (4) Much has been made of the distinction between the methodology and the content of teaching. I would like to suggest that these two aspects of elementary school teaching find a unity in an ideology, a guiding theme, a single dominant perspective on ourselves in the physical universe.
Click here to download the chapter from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Pope Pius XII – The Structure of the Matter of the Created World as a Manifestation of the Wisdom and Goodness of God
- Article
- 3200 words
- High school level and above
A Papal Address to the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, April 24, 1955. This article 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. Pope Pius XII says to the assembled scientists:
As we bid you welcome in this house, whose doors have always been opened wide to those who cultivate the arts and sciences, we desire also to express to Your Excellencies, Members of our Academy, our lively satisfaction.
Your life, consecrated as is to the study of natural phenomena, enables you to observe every day more closely, and to interpret, the wonders which the Most High has inscribed on the reality of things. In very truth, the created world is a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness of God, for all things have received their existence from Him and reflect His grandeur. Each of them is, as it were, one of His words, and bears the mark of what we might call the fundamental alphabet, namely those natural and universal laws derived from yet higher laws and harmonies, which the labour of thought strives to discover in all their amplitude and their absolute character.
Created things are words of truth. In themselves, in their being, there is neither contradiction nor confusion. Rather, they always cohere one with the other. Sometimes they are difficult to understand because of their depth, but always, when clearly known, they are seen to be in conformity with the superior exigencies of reason. Nature opens up before you like a mysterious but astonishing book, which must be turned page by page and read in an orderly manner, with the aim in mind of progressing ceaselessly. In this manner, every forward step is a continuation of the preceding ones, corrects them, and climbs continually toward the light of a deeper understanding.
The mission confided to you, therefore, ranks among the most noble, for you should be, in a sense, the discoverers of the intentions of God. It pertains you to interpret the book of nature, to describe its contents, and to draw the consequences therefrom for the good of all….
Click here for this article from Inters.org.
Click here for this article from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
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. You, Men of Science, who welcome the world into your minds, work upon it in your laboratories, and investigate its most secret byways in your dedicated efforts, what are you seeking if not the truth?
Have courage and the boldness of reason that untiringly seeks the truth and you will find in the Church and in this Apostolic See your most convinced allies. Of course, the conquests of science are at times provisional, subject to review and rethinking, and they will never succeed in expressing the whole truth hidden in the Universe. The sense of mystery is part of your intellectual heritage and reminds you that what you do not know is much vaster than what you do know. In the search for truth, the boldness of reasons is linked with the humility of its own limits, the joy of knowing goes hand-in-hand with wonder at the unknown.
Furthermore, the sense of mystery also envelops those truths which science cannot discover, but which question the mind of the scientist in the innermost part of his being, where he experiences an irresistible longing and yearning for the divine. The goal of the Universe is not only to reveal the truths it holds within itself, but to manifest the First Truth which gave the worlds its origin and form.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….
More than any other, the scientific community is a community of peace, for your rigorous search for the truth in the field of nature is independent of ideologies and therefore of the conflicts that result from them. Your activity demands sincere collaboration, and the frank communication of the results or your research.
The scientific community, a community of peace, must be extended to all nations, through the foundation everywhere of institutes for the research and sound technological application. It is not enough that political colonialism has ceased; every form of scientific and technological colonialism must cease as well. I cannot fail to note with satisfaction that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences includes an ever greater number of scientists from all the nations of the world, with no racial or religious discrimination. This is a form of cultural ecumenism which the Church, as the promoter of the true religious ecumenism, cannot but regard with a sense or lively satisfaction.
The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology
- Book
- 262 pages
- University level
This 2005 book by John Farrell (published by Thunder’s Mouth Press/Avalon Publishing Group) provides an in-depth and at at times technical discussion of the life and work of Fr. Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest who used the ideas of Albert Einstein to developed what is now known as the “Big Bang Theory”—the scientific idea that the universe had a beginning on a “day without yesterday”. Among his other accomplishments, Fr. Lemaître served as president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1960 until his death in 1966.
Click here for a preview from Google Books.
From the dust jacket of The Day Without Yesterday:
Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the twentieth century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. Is the universe evolving to some unforeseen end, or is it static, as the Greeks believed? The debate has preoccupied thinkers from Heraclitus to the author of the Upanishads, from the Mayans to Einstein. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaître convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaître called “the day without yesterday.” Lemaître’s skill with mathematics and the equations of relativity enabled him to think much more broadly about cosmology than anyone else at the time, including Einstein. Lemaître proposed the expanding model of the universe to Einstein, who rejected it. Had Einstein followed Lemaître’s thinking, he could have predicted the expansion of the universe more than a decade before it was actually discovered.
Also from The Day Without Yesterday:
[B]y the time Lemaitre had come to the fore with his expanding model of the universe, the opposition between science and religion had become fodder for journalists. And it’s interesting, for this reason, to go back to the early interviews with Lemaitre when he returned to California in 1933 and how he responded to the already typical question – just how did a priest-physicist reconcile his faith with his science?
The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less – some more than others – on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or as ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors of historic or scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if errors relate to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them.
The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation they must also be right on all other subjects is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.
You can already detect a note of impatience with Lemaitre’s answer, as in, Why should this be a question? But it was.
Pontifical Academy of Science Website: http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en.html