Part II
The Pope’s Astrophysicist, MEET THE VATICAN PRIEST WHO SCANS THE HEAVENS FOR THE ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE. (HEY, GALILEO — WANT A JOB?) by Margaret Wertheim, Wired Magazine, Issue 10, December 12, 2002
*[snip]
In 1891, long after the Church had accepted the heliocentric universe, Pope Leo XIII officially founded the Observatory so that “everyone might see clearly that the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science.”
[snip]
Coyne a courtier who haunts its inner sanctum. Ironically, though, it’s science that got him here. As a Jesuit novitiate from Baltimore, his life consisted mostly of prayer and study. He pursued astronomy and theology with equal vigor, earning a PhD from Georgetown in 1962 and a priest’s collar in 1965. In 1978, he became the director of the Vatican Observatory. Today, he also serves informally as science adviser to the Pope.
Our party is ushered into a room to await His Holiness. He enters accompanied by a burst of song - young priests chanting hosannas. Our conference has been wrestling with evolution, both biological and cosmological. And so has he, John Paul tells us. “The Church’s Magisterium is directly concerned with the question of evolution, for it involves the conception of man.” Though “Revelations teaches us that man was created in the image and likeness of God,” says the Pope, “new knowledge has led us to realize that the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis.” It’s good to hear, but hardly breaking news. The Catholic Church has long accepted an evolutionary worldview, complete with descent from apes and a big bang beginning. John Paul in particular has championed science and lent his personal support to “Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action,” a decade-long program of which our conference is a part.
As the Pope finishes speaking, Coyne approaches the dais. Their lives have followed similar paths: Both were rigorously schooled in theology and philosophy, both speak multiple languages, and both hail from humble backgrounds. But what a difference a throne makes — without hesitation, Father Coyne drops to his knees to kiss his superior’s ring. As a Jesuit, he is bound by absolute obedience to the Pontiff. Symbolic, ritualized, and utterly expected by a priest, it’s an act of self-abnegation that seems shockingly out of place in a scientist. In this gesture lurks a fundamental tension: How can Coyne live both in the hierarchical world of the Catholic Church and the egalitarian world of science, where there is no higher authority?
[snip]
Coyne rejects much of the current discussion about science and religion. Echoing Immanuel Kant, he insists that belief in God is independent of anything scientists discover. More than two centuries ago, Kant argued that science could never disprove the existence of God. But neither, he said, could it prove Him. That hasn’t stopped many people from trying, and today there is a new fashion for the so-called anthropic principle.*
Anthropic arguments are based on the notion that the universe has been specially tailored for the emergence of life. On both the cosmological and subatomic scales, from the force of gravity to electromagnetic bonds, the universe is shaped by powers that seem finely tuned for life to evolve.
Evidence of an intelligent consciousness that built the very laws of nature?
Coyne dismisses this idea as well. “To imagine a Creator twiddling with the constants of nature is a bit like thinking of God as making a big pot of soup,” he declares with a rare flash of sarcasm. A bit more onion, a bit less salt, and presto, the perfect gazpacho. “It’s a return to the old vision of a watchmaker God, only it’s even more fundamentalist. Because what happens if it turns out there is a perfectly logical explanation for these values of the gravitational constant and so on? Then there’d be even less room for God.” In other words, if God is grounded in data, then He is immediately subject to revision every time we get new data — and data tends to improve over time. Coyne sums up his objection to this God of the gaps with an elegant economy: “God is not information,” he says. "God is love."
What’s missing in “this privileging of the cognitive over the empathetic,” as Coyne puts it, is the concept of faith. The crux of the problem is that belief in God requires a leap outside anything science can describe or prove. Coyne insists that this leap does not happen on its own and does not sustain itself. For him at least, it must be continually rekindled: “I thank God constantly that He chose me. But it is not a rock of ages. It’s something I have to renew every day.”
What Coyne calls “the gift of faith” troubled his old friend Carl Sagan, who once asked him, “George, how come God chose you and not me?” If God is so generous, Sagan wondered, then why has He not extended this gift to us all? Coyne’s answer: He has. “God chooses everyone sooner or later,” he told Sagan, “but not everyone realizes it.” Then, with the solicitude that only a true believer could show toward an avowed atheist, Coyne finished his thought. “I hope, Carl,” he said, “that when God chooses you, you will recognize it.”
wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/pope_astro.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/pope_astro.html
Love ya Father Coyne
Take care
I’m praying that your health will improve. Sending you oodles of love
