Interesting interview on the unity of science and religion

The interviewee, Guy Consolmagno, has a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT, and went on to teach there as well, and then some years later he became a Jesuit Priest. This is not a typical career path to say the least. He currently works at the Vatican Observatory in Arizona. He’s also been a lifelong science fiction buff. The show is an hour long weekly popular science show on CBC called Quirks and Quarks, and his interview is about 2/3 of the way through and lasts about 20 minutes.

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/media/2005-2006/mp3/qq-2006-04-15.mp3

 

I’m not quite sure what you’re suggesting but my position was always against what I called the “fundamentalist evolutionist” position that said that evolution and only evolution should be taught in schools. (Any time you try to limit scientific inquiry you are obviously not engaging in good science and are instead either engaging in some kind of “fundamentalist” faith or perhaps merely political manipulation). I was taking ID to mean what it originally mean which was a suggestion that our origins may not be merely the result of random evolution and that some intelligent design component may be involved. The term ID has become more and more synonymous with creationism, however, and when the Catholic church made a public statement implying that they saw the two as essentially the same thing then the term was done for, imo. So to facilitate a discussion on this topic we now need another term that means intelligent design but that isn’t intelligent design because intelligent design has come to mean creationism. Such are the problems with language.

 

rimrocker:
Cool. I live near a very forested area and I have to say I really admire the work you guys do.
“Pope Scope,” I like it.

 

Did anybody listen to it? It’s an interesting interview but I would stop short of saying it was a great because I think he says a couple of things in a way that I think could be misunderstood and be off putting to some in the process, but the key message, imo, is that both science and spirituality should be, and ideally are, a determined pursuit of truth.

 

Yeah, the comment about “meditating themselves out of existence” was an unfortunate attempt at a joke I think. It’s especially odd coming from a Catholic given that there are certainly Catholic monks who do essentially the same thing. I suspect that that was a bias from his scientific side, though. It’s the kind of bias you get from the narrow scientific view that suggests that spirituality is necessarily merely superstition. He said a couple of other unfortunate things too.

The part that I think he got right was the connection between ideal science and ideal Christianity in that they are both purely pursuits of what is truth and right, and they are pursuits that never end. A scientist should never say that we know all there is to know in a given area, and Christians should never stop growing in their spiritual understanding. Science should never discount new avenues of inquiry, like whether earth itself was “terraformed” somehow. And from a Christian standpoint we are told that if we seek we will find, and that the truth will set us free, and I think these concepts are to be understood in the broadest possible sense. If God is truth then genuinely searching for truth will lead you to God. So both paths of inquiry lead you to the same greater whole, imo, and I believe that if each side stuck to its ideals it would eventually discover the other on its own.