The Church didn’t torture Galileo

That comes as news to a lot of people, along with a fascinating wealth of information about the Vatican’s embrace of science, historically and currently.

Discover magazine has an extensive and thorough article on this very real and deep relationship that should be required reading for members of the media and academia, and advised reading for members of the Church.

Brother Guy Consolmagno occupies a small space of heaven. A Jesuit brother and astronomer for the Vatican Observatory, he works at the observatory’s headquarters…

…at the pope’s summer residence. There’s another one on Vatican property, a very historically important one. But most of the public has no idea what they’ve done, what they do, or how profound their work is today.

“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.”

This should illuminate the truths of the Church’s engagement with science and reason and all that goes into those categories. 

A pope, more than anyone else, knows the exact reason for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In 1992 John Paul II told the members that “the purpose of your academy is precisely to discern and to make known, in the present state of science and within its proper limits, what can be regarded as an acquired truth or at least as enjoying such a degree of probability that it would be imprudent and unreasonable to reject it.” In the pope’s eyes, the academy is an instrument that teases scientific fact from fiction.

The current relationship between the pope and the academy suggests that scientific issues have achieved an unprecedented level of importance within the Church.

Especially with the prominence of several celebrity atheists and the level of heat over the evolution debate in public. Popular thought is that it’s an ‘either/or’ proposition, while the Church actually sees it as a ‘both/and’. Which is theistic evolution.

Retired Vatican Observatory chief Fr. George Coyne has a cordial enough relationship with Richard Dawkins, who he’s engaged in discussion over this as much to inform as to probe about faith and science.

My science helps to enrich that gift [of faith] 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.

Great conversations and debates have been going on in different Pontifical Councils at the Vatican and surrounding universities. Popes John Paul and Benedict and their cardinals and bishops have tackled some of the thorniest issues of modern culture. The media pay most attention when there seems to be a controversy (though it may be a media-created one.)

Despite such difficult episodes, the Vatican readily admits the increasingly dominant role that science and technology play in society and how, for the most part, their advances are positive. It’s the nagging persistence of a mechanistic view of humanity that troubles Church officials. For that and other cultural concerns, the Vatican turns to the Pontifical Council for Culture, which is something of an intermediary between the Vatican and the rest of the world.

“The human being is often considered an assembly of parts and elements that can be cut and pasted, rather than a biological organism and a person of spiritual worth,” explains a council publication. “Addressing this issue is deemed urgent.”

Which is why Benedict does so often, in most of his addresses it seems, by referring in some way to the “new humanism”. Which is the reawakened understanding that people are spiritual and moral beings.

That’s the starting point for everything else.