God and science, under the stars

Q & A with Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno

Guy Consolmagno is an astronomer and planetary scientist with degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona.

He is also a Jesuit Brother, dividing his time between the Vatican observatory in Arizona and Castel Gandolfo, Italy, where he is curator of the Vatican meteorite collection — one of the largest in the world.

Brother Consolmagno is steeped in scientific theory, but uses God to account for what can't be accounted for through science, as a glue that holds together the equations of the universe.

Brother Consolmagno is steeped in scientific theory, but uses God to account for what can't be accounted for through science, as a glue that holds together the equations of the universe. He is also the author of God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion.

He spoke recently to Curt Petrovich of CBC News:

Q: How is it you went from a man of science to a man of God?

A: Well, I've always been religious. I was raised in a Catholic family with an Italian father and Irish mother, and it was the nuns who taught me science when I was a kid. And even at university, I was torn: Should I become a Jesuit, should I become a scientist?

At that time, the decision was to go into science. Twenty years later — after looking at my life and career and realizing that maybe I wasn't going to get married or have the family I was looking at — I thought of joining the Jesuits as sort of a Plan B.

Once I got into the Jesuits, I discovered that really was the Plan A … I just didn't realize it.

Q: But at that time you were already a planetary scientist, right?

A: That's right. I started my studies in the early '70s at MIT and got my doctorate from the university of Arizona in 1978. And I was working a good 10 years past that as a planetary scientist, so it wasn't until the late '80s that it finally occurred to me that I could combine my religious interest and my work by joining the Jesuits.

Q: What was missing in the scientific explanation — and what was visible that didn't satisfy you — that led you to incorporate a God in the universe?

(Chuckle) It's not the science that led me to God. It's God that led me to science. And I'm one of these people who has always believed.

I didn't have any great crisis of faith. And I've discovered most scientists are like me. Whether you believe or not has nothing to do with the science you do, it has everything to do with your experience with the universe, your experience with God.

Doing science is like playing a game with God, playing a puzzle with God. God sets the puzzles and after I can solve one, I can hear him cheering, "Great, that was wonderful, now here's the next one." It's the way I can interact with the Creator.

Q: How do you deal with scientists who say that trying to build a bridge between science and God is pointless because there is no experiment that can prove or disprove God — or the existence of any purpose to the universe?

A: In one sense, they're absolutely right. Science does not prove or disprove God, and the whole scientific enterprise is a game where one of the rules is you can't invoke a miracle to explain something you don't understand — that's cheating.

The reason God enters into our science is not because we're invoking God to explain the things we don't explain — that's a very bad idea of God. Nor is it that we're trying to use science to prove or disprove a God because that would make science bigger and stronger and more powerful than God.

It's much more subtle than that. The very reason we're interested in doing the science in the first place comes out of our human nature a curiosity to know, a curiosity to know the truth.

But even deeper than that, it comes out of a belief that this physical universe has laws that can be discovered and is fundamentally good and it's fundamentally worth spending our lives.

It's trying to understand — not to get rich, not to make better Teflon — but for us to just have the pleasure of knowing how the universe works.

Q: The Bible is believed by some to be the literal word of God. The world was created in six days — six real days, and at once — despite what the fossil record might show. How do you reconcile this?

A: Well first of all, it must be very clear that's not Catholic teaching. That's not traditional Christian teaching. If you read the Church fathers, going back to St. Augustine, it's clear that they are not what modern people would call literalists, or Creationists.

In a lot of ways, that's a modern heresy that comes from our mechanical world, where more people are likely to be reading owner's manuals than poetry.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are the great works of classical literature, and it's because people realize there are some things our human language is not capable of describing and we need poetry to describe it.

The Bible is not a science book. And you can tell simply by looking at the fact that science books go out of date.

The story in the Bible is the best science of its day, 3,000 years ago. And the best science of its day said that, no matter how you think the universe was made, the important message is: God did it deliberately, and with love.

Q: If you were to discover life, even bacterial or fossilized bacteria in one of the meteorites you study, would that call the Bible into question?

A: Quite the contrary. Quite the contrary. It would be an expression of God's creative fecundity.

It would be startling if there weren't life elsewhere. One of the places people are very excited about finding life in our own solar system is in the oceans under the ice cap of Europa. And as far as I know, the first suggestion there might be oceans there and there could be life in those oceans, was my masters thesis, back in 1975 at MIT.

So not only am I not afraid of finding life, I've predicted some places where we ought to be looking for life.

Q: What do you say to a scientist who points to the theory of evolution? Or the fact that humans have only been around for a brief period of time on the planet, and it's a human conceit to believe we are special or there is purpose to our being here?

A: They're missing out the deeper question. Why is there anything at all instead of nothing? Why is there a universe that has laws that make creatures like us possible, or inevitable perhaps?

Why does existence exist? There's another question. Why is it we human beings are so programmed to want to find a meaning for life? You know cats and dogs are not particularly worried about meanings for life, and they seem to get along pretty well.

If you assume there is no God, you can build a nice logical system that at the end of the day says there is no God. But that is just recovering the assumption you started with.

If you assume there is a God, you can also build a nice logical system that at the end of the day is completely consistent — doesn't prove there is a God.

What you can do, though, is say: Given these bigger questions for which I do not have answers, postulating the existence of God is a very useful, very powerful way of getting a handle on these questions.

Q: So the questions about why we're here, what the purpose of the universe is, those really aren't questions science can answer?

A: It's not part of the game. Anymore than you can use the Bible to figure out how your VCR works. You know? There are certain things that are in different realms. But the realms do talk to each other.

Q: If God is behind the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago — where is God today?

A: Absolutely the first place I see is in the human being looking through the telescope, in the urge that made the human being want to look through the telescope.

In the human beings that made the telescopes possible. In the human beings that make our entire civilization possible. You find God very clearly in your fellow human beings.

You find God someplace else. In the results we get, one thing that I discover over and over again, is not only does the universe make sense and strangely enough I can actually find logical reasons for why things happen, it does so in a way that's beautiful.

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