God amid the stars

Friday, Mar. 18, 2016

DRAPER — Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, who in September was appointed director of the Vatican observatory, had one theme during his talks to three diverse audiences in Utah: Science and religion are more similar than they are different.

His presentation on March 10 at Brigham Young University, titled “Encountering God’s Personality in Creation,” was for the Summerhays Lecture on Science and Religion, a biannual event begun in 2003 to “share insights on how the truths of revealed religion mesh with knowledge from the sciences.”

Following this theme, Brother Guy said there is a false division of faith and science; that human beings use both logic and emotion: “It’s on the basis of both reason and gut feeling that we make all the decisions in our lives.” 

Science and faith have many similarities, including the need for communities that support the work and pass the knowledge onto the next generation, he said. This need for community reveals that God is “someone who loves to get people together to sing together, to dance together, to pray together, to explore together. A god of community.”

A hint of God’s personality also is revealed in the fact that he created the universe as a rational and reasonable place that can be understood by the creatures he created, Brother Guy said, and “the very thing that makes science worth doing and desirable to do are the places where we see God, the places where we get a clue to what God is. … Science needs the sense of awe, and that tells me the last and most important trait of God, a god who is awesome.”

Many in the audience were BYU students, including Michael Williams, who is majoring in the classics and said he appreciated the religious similarities between Catholicism and Mormonism that came out in Brother Guy’s talk. “You can learn a lot about people of other faiths when they talk about faith,” Williams said.

On March 12, Brother Guy was the keynote speaker at the Interpreter Science & Mormonism Symposium at Utah Valley University.

The nine presenters at the symposium focused on the theme “Body, Brain, Mind and Spirit.” 

The first symposium was held in 2013; it is sponsored by the journal “Interpreter.” 

The audience at UVU was primarily scholars from a variety of fields. 

With the title “Astronomy, God, and the Search for Elegance,” Brother Guy at the symposium compared and contrasted science and religion.

“You can’t use science to do religion, and you can’t use religion to do science, and yet religion and science don’t exist independent of the human beings who do them; the human beings who are successful at their knowledge of God because they have learned the difference between a glorious painting and Elvis on black velvet,” he said. “If your scientific taste is like an Elvis on black velvet, you’re probably not going to be a very good scientist even if you can handle the math. That sense of elegance, that sense of knowing the truth and recognizing beauty, is what points us to God and allows us to do the science.”

On March 13, Brother Guy’s presentation was attended by a diverse audience of the general public that included students and families from the Skaggs Catholic Center community.

Prior to his talk, Brother Guy spoke with several of the students who had science displays in the Juan Diego Catholic High School foyer as part of the event. He had several questions for JDCHS senior Rex Alley, who described his science experiment on the analysis of graphite nanoparticles using ion trap mass spectrometry, which was based on research he had done over the summer at the University of Utah.

Alley said he was pleased by Brother Guy’s visit. “I think that as a school we’ve never had such a significant figure in the Vatican come here, especially one who can really inspire a lot of kids to take up careers in science and math.” 

Speaking to students “is what makes me remember why I got into the field in the first place. … I get all of that enthusiasm back,” Brother Guy said.

Other displays included LEGO robots and a student-built Tesla coil. 

“One cannot possibly rank one over the other,” he said. “All of them represent a lot of hard work that only happens when you’ve got passion, and if there’s a message that I have for everybody [it’s that] you’re doing science not to make money, not to be powerful, not to get girls – it didn’t work for me – you’re doing science because there’s a passion there, there is a joy there. And if you think about it, that’s exactly the joy you get in a moment of prayer, and that’s why doing science is an act of worship.”

During his presentation, Brother Guy described the history of the Vatican observatory, which began with a telescope on the walls of the Vatican, then moved to Castel Gandolfo, and now is in Arizona.

As with his other presentations, Brother Guy sprinkled humor liberally throughout his talk. Describing his time working at Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer home, he said, “The floor above the pope’s apartments was the Vatican observatory. As we liked to point out at the time, we were the only people in the entire Vatican, in the entire Catholic Church, who were above the pope.”

Keeping with the subject of his talk, “Adventures of a Vatican Astronomer,” he described spending weeks searching for meteorites in Antarctica.

“There I was in a place just like Psalm 139 describes, where the night is as bright as day. It was a spiritual experience,” he said. 

Afterward, he vacationed in New Zealand, where he was asked to help a woman whose husband plummeted down a mountain and died. The woman, who was German, didn’t speak English, so Brother Guy translated for her.

“I hope we did her some good,” he said. “I know she did me some good, because being a Jesuit brother in the Vatican Observatory doesn’t only mean that I get to do wonderful science, it means that I get to be an ambassador of the Creator in lots of different ways, often ways that I am completely unprepared for, but somehow God is able to make sure I don’t do too badly.”

In his wide-ranging talk and the questions afterward, he spoke about his vocation and the beauty he sees on a regular basis. Concluding his talk, he said, “The heavens do proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament the work of his hands. It is not only my joy and a privilege to be able to get to know those heavens, but to share it with all of you today.”