Wow. Go, um, Catholics?!

[dianec42]

Intelligent design 'not science', says Vatican astronomer

I didn't even know the Vatican HAD a chief astronomer. Wow.

Comments

[feoh.livejournal.com]

Bah. They don't tell us which order he's from. I'm betting he's a Jesuit or a Franciscan or something :)

There is intelligent life in the Catholic church, however it has evolved incredible camouflage capabilities to keep from being eaten by the rapacious predators which form the rest of the corpus of the church.

(Jesuits, Paulists, Franciscans, and a handful of other orders have my grudging respect.)

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

He's GOT to be a Jesuit. Those guys rule!

Given that I learned about evolution from the nuns in Catholic school, I'm not sure why any of this surprises me. But it does.

astronomer to the Vatican

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

Oh, heck, yeah. The Pope has an entire astronomy staff. It started up centuries ago, probably because of a need to get the calendar right, but possibly because the Pope at the time wanted to help out a friend. Since then the department became tradition and so has persisted.

I made friends a few years ago with Brother Guy Consolmagno (http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/GConsolmagno.html), who's the Vatican's meteorite curator as well as one of their astronomers. He's a very cool guy who goes to SF cons a lot (he was on panels at Boskone in either '03 or '04)-- I met him when he was Science GoH at ConFusion in 2002.

The reason why the Church supports astronomy... goes back to, in sense it goes back to the reform of the calendar, back in 1582. They hired an astronomer to work out how to make the calendar work right. There's also a sense that the Church, in modern times, wants to show the world that it's not afraid of science, that it supports science, that it thinks science is a wonderful thing. Not only to reassure the scientists, but also to reassure the religious people science is a good thing. Don't listen to people who say you have to choose one or the other.

And there's two things going on there. One is the sense that, if God made the universe, and he made it good, and he loved the universe so much that, as the Christians believe, he sent his only son, it's up to us to honor and respect and get to know the universe. I think it was Francis Bacon who said that God sets up the universe as a marvelous puzzle for us to get to know him by getting to know how he did things. By seeing how God created, we get a little sense of God's personality. And that means, among other things not going in with any preconceived notions. We can't impose our idea of how God did things. It's up to us to see how the universe actually does work.

- Brother Guy Consolmagno, in an Astrobiology interview (http://www.astrobio.net/news/article966.html)

Gotta love those Jesuits. :-)

Re: astronomer to the Vatican

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, heck, yeah. The Pope has an entire astronomy staff. It started up centuries ago, probably because of a need to get the calendar right, but possibly because the Pope at the time wanted to help out a friend. Since then the department became tradition and so has persisted.

There's also the practical matter of getting "The first sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox" (better known as Easter) straight, particularly since the whole ecclesiastical calendar is pegged to that date. Not something that the Vatican would care to outsource to, say, the US Naval Observatory. This reckoning of Easter dates to 325 AD and the First Council of Nicaeda. Don't ask why I remember such things.

---RS

PS: Hi Diane, LTNS. Drop a line sometime, rs@seastrom.com