God in his Heavens

On the other hand, the Vatican has been deeply involved in astronomy for most of its existence. Pinning down the motion of the sun and moon was critically important in determining things such as the date of Easter Sunday and . . . the date of Easter Monday.

But seriously, the fact that the Church of Rome engages in straightforward astronomy is no more weird than General Motors doling out health insurance. Or even the State of Arizona hiring philosophers.

Or the highest-paid state employee in…how many American states now? being a football coach.

His Holiness Pope John Paul II
with CERN Director-General Professor Herwig Schopper

June 1982

They’re doing experimental theology. ;)

like something out of Phillip Pullman

Or Mary Doria Russell.

There is an entertaining SF novel called The Sparrow which is essentially a “first contact” story involving a Jesuit mission to a nearby star.

And let’s not forget James Blish’s Jesuit in “A Case of Conscience” (superior, I think, to the expanded-into-a-novel version).

No real surprise, but the notion that anyone should be surprised at the Vatican funding serious science is a sad sign of how thoroughly modern pharisees (and heck, I’m probbably unjustifiably insulting pharisaism at that) have polluted religious discourse. It used to go without sayest that one of the highest purposes for the faithful was to understand the Creation, rather than to make rules claiming to restrict the creator’s modes of action.

There are some snazzy 18th century pictures of astronomers doing their thing in the Vatican Pinacoteca, if anyone has the good fortune to be in Rome some time and you want to look beyond the Big Names.

The Vatican Museum has in it a piece of moon-rock presented to Pope Paul VI by the Nixon administration.

There is an entertaining SF novel called The Sparrow which is essentially a “first contact” story involving a Jesuit mission to a nearby star.

I read that at first as “a Jesuit mission to a nearby bar.”

matt- I forget who said that man is not the rational animal, but the rationalizing animal.

Paul is right. It shouldn’t be surprising at all to people that the Vatican is intimately involved in scientific research. The Jesuits have always been that way, and some are very active in, for example, evolutionary biology.

I suspect the reason the Vatican isn’t heavily involved in string theory is that they already have enough religion in their lives.

KH has launched an interesting metaphysical discussion here with some earthly roots. Living as I do on a mountaintop ranch, I am interested, as well in the remoteness of the topic. It turns out the Vatican observatory has a storeyed past. The site on Mt. Graham was a kind of Moses venue for Apache aborigines whose prayer adepts communicated with empyrean entities atop its crest, one of the tallest in a remote part of southern eastern AZ on the high Sonoran desert. Besides indigenous peoples, in postcolonial times notoriously tenacious about surrendering their territory to invading Philadelphians and the like, the Mt. Graham observatory had a rocky beginning: an alliance was formed with the Univ. of AZ, but many other contracting universities and institutions bailed from the construction upon discovering diverse resistance from locals in this sparsely populated region. It turns out the mountain encompasses an extraordinary spectrum of biological zones fairly unique in North America, among the denizens rare and endangered animals, and forests only in the 1980s beginning to tumble to the civilized folks’ businesses’ chainsaws. Imagine everything from saguaro cacti trouping across the plains like cryopreserved Jesuit missionaries emerging shadowlike from colonial times when, indeed, Jesuits traveled these lands, to the noble and sparse peak reaching 10,500′ el. The observatory which UA and the Vatican partnered to build marred and rendered profane that pristine crest, as is standard practice in human endeavors, it would seem, even in such noble and lofty projects as measuring the orbs through the refractory and sparse desert atmosphere.
One supposes it is helpful to contemplate the cosmos from a peak. Additionally, it is known that Jesuits are researchers, and their tradition is that of starting universities.
I agree with some of the posters, above, that the participation of the Jesuits has multiple depths; I would expect one such strategem is a mutual bond of trust buidling between the current pope and the leadership of the Jesuit Society, whereby the notoriously liberal voice of Jesuits is putatively less audible when muffled by the loftiness of the mount; however, this is only a momentary benefit, having fewer Jesuits in the mainstream of political and scholarly discourse, as sooner probably than later, they are likely to descend from the mountain, better informed, and waxing loquacious.

One recension of the tale of the Jesuits’ first involvement with this particular site is their receipt of the donation of a cast-off Strategic Defense Initiative telescope, which it cost the Society only $600,000. to house and situate on Mt. Graham; by far, the UA was the largest participant in the construction which occurred over a decade ago.
That is a lot of oracles downloaded; and the state of AZ has a larger scope than the Jebbies. We shall see which entity is best organized to datamine all that unfiltered intergalactic data, for the sake of research. ad astram per asperum.
________
Notes:
if you are a hiker, this is the topo map
geophysical history and Apache prayer promontory, animal communities data Says UA made the environmental organizations go to court to force discovery of names of contracting parties sponsoring construction; lots of FOIA material.
Mt Graham Int’l Observatory’s own site history page.
small swale full of saguaro cacti
saguaro cactus grove in national parklands near Tucson
closeup saguaro grove, ibid.
SJ sponsored Fulbright scholar> on Brazilian deforestation, at Fairfield, CT campus this year.
SJs waxing philosophical

Kieran, the question is how many angels would get out of the way, or in the case of intermittent bursts, dance.

Some Jesuit brothers of interest:

Jos̩ de Acosta, S.J. Р1600: Geophysical Sciences
Fran̤ois De Aguilon, S.J. Р1617: Six books on Optics
Roger Joseph Boscovich, S.J. – 1787: atomic theory
Christopher Clavius, S.J. – 1612: Gregorian Calendar
Honor̩ Fabri, S.J. Р1688: post-calculus geometry
Francesco M. Grimaldi, S.J. – 1663: diffraction of light
Paul Guldin, S.J. – 1643: applications of Guldin’s Rule
Maximilian Hell, S.J. – 1792: Mesmerizing encounters
Athanasius Kircher, S.J. – 1680: Master of a Hundred Arts
Francesco Lana-Terzi, S.J. – 1687: Father of Aeronautics
Francis Line, S.J. – 1654: clock maker
Juan Molina, S.J. – 1829: First Scientist of Chile
Jerôme Nadal, S.J. -1580: perspective art and composition of place
Ignace Pardies, S.J. – 1673: influence on Newton
Andrea Pozzo, S.J. – 1709: perspective geometry
Vincent Riccati, S.J. – 1775: hyperbolic functions
Matteo Ricci, S.J. – 1610: brought scientific innovations to China
John Baptist Riccioli, S.J. – 167I: selenograph
Girolamo Saccheri, S.J. – 1733: his solution to Euclid’s blemish
Theorems of Saccheri, S.J. – 1733: non Euclidean Geometry
Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. – 1669: Astronomy and the calendar
Christopher Scheiner, S.J. – 1650: sunspots and his equatorial mount
Gaspar Schott, S.J. – 1666: experiment at Magdeburg
Angelo Secchi, S.J. – 1878: Father of Astrophysics
Joseph Stepling, S.J. – 1650: symbolic logic and his research academy
Andr̩ Tacquet, S.J. Р1660: treatment of infinitesimals
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S. J. – 1955: The Phenomenon of man
Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. – 1688: Jesuit scientist in China
Gregory Saint Vincent, S.J. – 1667: polar coordinates
Nicolas Zucchi, S.J. – 1670: telescope maker

Oh yeah, Jerry Brown.

The brothers need all the help and overstatement that they can get in these days of mock and ridicule of all things Christian. Oops, I’m suppose to remain light-hearted. :-) Forgive me.

JohnLopresti: that’s ad astra per aspera (to the stars through difficulties). State motto of Kansas, by the way.

logicguru: I don’t think too many posters are saying this is “laughable”–at least, not in a disparaging way. Rather, it’s surprising and delightful. I wouldn’t be too surprised if a few CT readers/posters either work at or were educated at Jesuit institutions, and are appropriately grateful for the Society’s devotion to education.

“The brothers need all the help and overstatement that they can get in these days of mock and ridicule of all things Christian.”

Not ridicule, just a more enlightened perspective.

Remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”?

The flaw with that, as GB Shaw appreciated, is that the tastes of others in a pluralist society may not be the same.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgebern109537.html

Confucius had got there c. 500BC:

“Tsze-kung asked, saying, ‘Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?’ The Master said, ‘Is not RECIPROCITY such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.’
Confucius Analects, Book XV
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/rel/conf/Analects.html

Bob B (post 30):

For too long, scientists have managed to spin the supression of Galileo’s work by the Catholic Church as one of truth vs. falsity. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend argued that the Church supressed Galileo’s work not because they believed it was false (in fact, the opposite), but because they thought the social consequences of the theory becoming widely known would be deleterious, both in general and to their own particular social position. Feyerabend argued that they were quite rational to act as they did.

In any case, the RC Church was not alone in supressing ideas they considered dangerous for society. Isaac Newton did the same with his theological works, claiming that only a small elite should have access to his knowledge.

45. My previous thought of common knowledge has been revised. Of course we of the desert climes are but a stones throw of VATT, and by the way, are too stargazers ourselves.

“But seriously, the fact that the Church of Rome engages in straightforward astronomy is no more weird than General Motors doling out health insurance. Or even the State of Arizona hiring philosophers”

It only counts as astronomy (or science in general) if you are willing to accept the conclusions come what may.
This hardly sounds like the vatican to me.
Historically, of course, there is that whole Galileo business.
Right now before our eyes they are going squishy on Darwin.
Their attitude to the clear scientific fact that you cannot keep increasing the human population forever seems to be to deny that exponential curves actually grow the way math says they do.

They strike me as basically no different from the Bushites — happy with science as long as it delivers what they want, and no further — ie absolutely not the people I want in charge of it.
(And excuses about how “they believed what Galileo said, they just didn’t want it to be publicly known” simply confirm my case.)

Maynard (#49): “Their attitude to the clear scientific fact that you cannot keep increasing the human population forever seems to be to deny that exponential curves actually grow the way math says they do.”

But the Vatican does not believe the human population will keep increasing forever. They believe in the Second Coming of Christ, which will mean a sudden halt to human population growth. Thus, the Second Coming is quite consistent with current mathematics. Indeed, as Frank Tipler showed, it is even consistent with modern physics (pre-String Theory, if I recall correctly)!

52: I didn’t say that the RC Church and Isaac Newton were morally equivalent. I said that the Church was not the only person or organization supressing knowledge it (or s/he) believed to be true because of the perceived ill-effects on society were this knowledge to become widely-known.