Vatican Astronomer visits Kilgraston

NE of the Vatican’s top astronomers has debunked the myth that science and religion are incompatible or competing ideologies.

Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, curator of the Vatican’s meteorite collection, spoke of the “irony of the so-called war between science and religion”, arguing: “Science itself is actually borne out of religion.”

Using the opening words of the Creed and several examples from the Bible, he explained: “It is very natural that those who believe in Genesis – the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims – should also support science as a way of getting to know God.”

His comments came during a two-day visit to Kilgraston School this week to mark the opening of a new £1 million science centre. The American research astronomer was taking part in a series of public lectures at the award-winning Catholic girls school to help encourage more young women into science.

In an address entitled Science, Spirituality and the Stars, Brother Guy, a Planetary Scientist at the Vatican Observatory since 1993, explained how for most of history scientists had been men who worked within the Church.

“Until the middle of the 19^th century and the rise of the state universities, many scientists were in fact clergymen,” he revealed. “Who else had the education and the free time to go out collecting and classifying leaves and bugs and all the other day-to-day data-gathering things that form the backbone of science?

And what do we call the work of sorting and filing information? Clerical work. Work done by clerics.”In a wide-ranging talk, Brother Guy described how our understanding of the universe had changed over time.

“It’s not that what we knew before is false, that ‘everything you know is wrong’ and that we’re finally so much smarter than we were in the middle ages, or in the 19^th century, or ten years ago,” he explained. “What these advances tell us is that everything we thought we knew then, is still true, but in a different way than we understood it before.”

He also spoke of how modern science presents both “new” and “familiar” challenges to our understanding of God as the creator of heaven and earth within a huge and complex universe.

“The reality of other worlds has been understood, intellectually, since the enlightenment,” he said. “Indeed, we’ve had stories speculating about life on other planets since Roman times. In the 1920s, the development of the airplane and radio made it feel reasonable that one could possibly travel to such places.”

He explained that 906 out of 3,500 possible new planets had now been confirmed, stating that these discoveries pointed to “the ever increasing possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence”.