Why does the Vatican have an observatory?

I suppose that folks like Jack Chick and Co. would tell you it's so that nameless, faceless Jesuit drones can spy on other people and work on nefarious, top-secret plans to dominate the world using space age technology. But journalist Michael Mason presents a much different picture in a lengthy and quite excellent piece for Discover magazine that can be accessed on MSNBC. It's apparent that Mason put some serious effort into the article, "How to teach science to the Pope," (Aug. 19, 2008), which has some fascinating and revealing quotes from a number of people, ranging from Brother Guy Consolmagno to Richard Dawkins to Monsignor Melchor Sánchez de Toca to Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.

A couple of excerpts:

“The idea that the universe is worth studying just because it’s worth studying is a religious idea,” Consolmagno says. “If you think the universe is fundamentally good and that it’s an expression of a good God, then studying how the universe works is a way of becoming intimate with the Creator. It’s a kind of worship. And that’s been a big motivation for doing any kind of science.”

As a scientist who is also a Jesuit brother, Consolmagno suggests that science poses philosophical questions that in turn spark religious inquiries.

“A hundred years ago we didn’t understand the Big Bang,” he says. “Now that we have the understanding of a universe that is big and expanding and changing, we can ask philosophical questions we would not have known to ask, like ‘What does it mean to have multiverses?’ These are wonderful questions. Science isn’t going to answer them, but science, by telling us what is there, causes us to ask these questions. It makes us go back to the seven days of creation — which is poetry, beautiful poetry, with a lesson underneath it — and say, ‘Oh, the seventh day is God resting as a way of reminding us that God doesn’t do everything.’ God built this universe but gave you and me the freedom to make choices within the universe.”

And then there is this priceless quote from Dawkins:

“We call [Dawkins’s stance] sci­entism, and there is reference to it in the encyclical,” says Father Rafael Pascual, dean of philosophy at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome.

“Scientism,” Dawkins tells me later, “is the pejorative word sometimes used for the view that science can explain everything and kind of arrogates to itself the privilege of explaining everything. Science cannot tell you what is right and wrong. When it comes to really interesting questions, like ‘Where did the laws of physics come from?’ or ‘How did the universe arrive in the first place?’ I genuinely don’t know whether science will answer those deep and at present mysterious questions; I am confident that if science can’t answer them, nothing else can. But it may be that nothing will ever answer them.”

Scientism, then, is a "pejorative word" used for the belief that only science can ultimately explain everything. But Dawkins, in contrast, believes that only science can answer the deepest and most mysterious questions, if they can answered at all. Do you see the difference? What, there is no difference? Well, how would you know since you aren't a biologist? Well? Hilarious.

Finally, as if Dawkins' lack of intellectual integrity isn't bad enough, there is simply his lack of integrity, period:

Dawkins expresses skepticism at the Church’s mission to build a bridge between science and theology with the use of philosophy. “There is nothing to build a bridge to,” he says. “Theology is a complete and utter non­subject.” At one point in my talk with Dawkins, Father George Coyne, the well-respected retired head of the Vatican Observatory (and, as such, a former member of the Academy of Sciences), becomes the subject of conversation.

“I met him a few weeks ago and liked him very much,” Dawkins says. “And he said to me that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe in God, and so I said, ‘Why do you believe in God?’ and he said: ‘It’s quite simple. I was brought up Catholic.’ When I think about good scientists — and some are devoutly religious and many of them are Catholic, Jesuit brothers and priests, for instance — I can never make out whether they are compartmentalizing their minds. Sometimes if you press them, it turns out that what they believe is something very different from what it says in the Creed. It turns out that all they really believe is that there is some deeply mysterious unknown at the root of the universe.”

Dawkins’s comments stuck with me. In the many interviews I had with priests, each expressed a sophisticated theology that seemed far more abstract than what you might find occupying the mind of an average believer. Is belief in a deeply mysterious unknown root of the universe such a bad thing for science, even if it is perceived through the framework of Christian concepts and imagery?

“I did not tell Richard Dawkins that there was no reason to believe in God,” says Coyne, who counts Dawkins a friend. “I said reasons are not adequate. Faith is not irrational, it is arational; it goes beyond reason. It doesn’t contradict reason. So my take is precisely that faith, to me, is a gift from God. I didn’t reason to it, I didn’t merit it — it was given to me as a gift through my family and my teachers.... My science helps to enrich that gift from God, because I see in his creation what a marvelous and loving god he is. For instance, by making the universe an evolutionary universe — he didn’t make it a ready-made, like a washing machine or a car — he made it a universe that has in it a participation of creativity. Dawkins’s real question to me should be, ‘How come you have the gift of faith and I don’t?’ And that’s an embarrassment for me. The only thing I can say is that either you have it and don’t know it, or God works with each of us differently, and God does not deny that gift to anybody. I firmly believe that.”

Read the entire article.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Excerpts:

• Professor Dawkins and the Origins of Religion | Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P. | From God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins
• Dawkins' Delusions | An interview with Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P., author of God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins
• Excerpts from Chance or Purpose? | Christoph Cardinal Schönborn | From Chance or Purpose?
• Website for Cardinal Schönborn's Chance or Purpose?
• Atheism and the Purely "Human" Ethic | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice | Carl E. Olson
• Designed Beauty and Evolutionary Theory | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• The Universe is Meaning-full | An interview with Dr. Benjamin Wiker
• The Mythological Conflict Between Christianity and Science | An interview with Dr. Stephen Barr
• The Source of Certitude | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• The Mystery of Human Origins | Mark Brumley
• Intelligent Project website

Comments

[Mark Brumley]

At a seminar I gave almost two decades ago, a man stood up during the Q & A period and began to explain why the Vatican had an observatory. He challenged me to admit the truth. The observatory was a front for the Vatican's particle beam weapon, which the Pope would use against the "space brothers". These extraterrestrial friends of the human race wanted to bring the blessings of their advanced civilization and profound spirituality to the human race, but the Pope was preventing it.

So now you know. The truth is no longer out there. It is right here.

[Joe]

"The only thing I can say is that either you have it and don’t know it, or God works with each of us differently, and God does not deny that gift to anybody. I firmly believe that."

Huh? He must be related to Rowan Williams for all his double-talk. A Vatican scientist who can't bring himself to say the Heavens declare the glory of God, and who is happy zinging Fundamentalists instead.

The quotes from the other Vaticanistas are great.

[Nick Milne]

Richard Dawkins misunderstanding something about religion? Shocking.

[Ed Peters]

Mark, do you know how long it took us to hunt down everyone at that meeting and, er, uh, eliminate them? Now, thanks to your post above, we've got to start all over again.

[Joseph Previtali]

For an interesting critique of the Intelligent Design movement that does not hold, as Fr. Coyne seems to, that "there is absolutely no reason to believe in God," see this short talk by Dr. Michael Tkacz of Gonzaga University: http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/calhoun/socratic/Tkacz_AquinasvsID.html

[brendon]

So now you know. The truth is no longer out there. It is right here.

I'm glad to know that at least the Church is preparing to draw a line in the sand against the extraterrestrial invasion coming in 2012. Has the Vatican been able to prepare a vaccine or antidote against the "black oil"? Will it be made available to the faithful through local parishes? Will a new, high-tech, alien-fighting military order be founded? Where can one go to join if one feels one has a vocation battling ETs for the safety of the human race and the glory of God?

So many questions. This Catholic thing keeps getting better every day.

[Telemachus]

I'm astounded by the quality of this article. I found it as a whole to be one of the most balanced and in-depth pieces of writing I've ever read from the MSM. I suppose Dawkinsists would be angry that their messiah didn't get more air time, but I was quite pleased to see his silliness exposed primetime. Is Dawkins *conscious* of the fact that he twists peoples actual words into knots in order to make them say what he wants? If not, what a dishonest son-of-a-gun.

The only thing that I found suspect in the article was the mention of Giordano Bruno and his death. He was never convicted for his views on the make-up of the universe, but rather his heresies. Bad way to go though; I wish things like that had never happened. I read it all by ma' self: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm.