Vatican Observatory director Brother Guy Consolmagno. Photo / Jamie Morton / File
When Brother Guy Consolmagno was growing up in Michigan in the 1950s, people didn’t talk about a rift between the disciplines of faith and science.
The now-director of the Vatican Observatory, who is currently on a speaking tour of New Zealand, says it was a “wonderful time” to be growing up, imbued with a “sense of unlimited possibilities”.
“It was the years after the war. At that time people didn’t talk about a break between faith and science, because faith and science are what won us the war, and they were very happy together,” Consolmagno recalled in an interview with Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.
“The nuns taught us science, physics and astronomy … I grew up immersed in a universe where you could see God and you wouldn’t doubt God any more than you would doubt the fact that the sun is overhead.
“I never doubted that [science] was a way of getting me some corner of the truth.”
That pursuit of truth through science has landed Consolmagno jobs in some prestigious roles over the years. He has worked at the likes of Harvard, Nasa and MIT, and travelled all over the globe for research and speaking engagements.
His travels even brought him to New Zealand for the first time in 1996 following a successful stint looking for meteorites in Antarctica. He attended a New Year’s Eve party at Canterbury University headlined by the Mutton Birds, and fell in love with the Auckland rock band.
Now heading up a team of astronomers at the Vatican – a role he’s held since being appointed by the late Pope Francis in 2015 – Consolmagno is passionate about advocating for religion and the sciences to be seen as complementary disciplines, rather than competing ideologies.
“I couldn’t do the one without the other,” he told Real Life.
“One of the reasons why I got out of science for a while was I’d forgotten why I was doing it. I was doing it to get a job, I was doing it to get a grant, to get promotion or fame, and all of those were really empty.
“So for a while I went to work in the Peace Corps in Africa, and the Africans reminded me that we do science to engage in the physical universe, because that’s where you find joy – and joy to me is where you find God.
“So my religion, my search for God, my hunger to be with God is what makes me want to be a scientist – and my science is how I can live out that hunger that I have for God.”
Consolmagno says Pope Leo, a fellow American who was appointed Pope earlier this year following the death of his predecessor Francis, sees great value in the sciences.
“[Pope Leo] spends his summers now in Castel Gandolfo, which is where our headquarters is … A couple of weeks ago he showed up and said, ‘Can I look through the telescope? Can I see the moon?’ So he’s interested in what we’re doing,” he told Cowan.
“Leo met with us and had a wonderful set of comments that made it clear his Augustinian view of the world was coming through,” he told Cowan.
While a person of deep faith, Consolmagno says using science to justify the existence of God – as some religious scientists and apologists do – is “antithetical” to the scientific method.
“They’re building their house on sand,” he told Cowan, “because the way science works is it’s in this constant struggle to find out where it was wrong …
“If it turns out I was wrong, then you get really excited. You go okay, I’ve learned something new. But in the process it means the science that I thought I knew back when I was trying to glue it to Genesis or something, turns out to be wrong, at which point that gluing is wrong.
“If that’s why you believe in God, then that God that you believe in is going to be a false God.”
Consolmagno told Real Life he doesn’t believe science will ever prove or disprove the existence of God, because “it would be a boring universe to live that way”.
And he says, despite perceptions, that’s not how people come to faith in the first place.
“When I’m confronted with a scientific problem, I don’t start out with experiments and reason and come to a conclusion. Rather, I look at it and I go ‘I’ll bet you it’s that, let’s see’.
“And after I’ve made that leap, which you may want to call a leap of faith, then you can go back and stack up the bit of logic and see if you can figure out a way to get from here to there.
“I think the apologists are doing the same thing. They already believe in God because they’ve already experienced God, and they’re using the apologetics as a way to try to show people how you can find a God.
“But it’s a God they’d already leapt to; it’s not a God they derived at the end of their logic.”
Consolmagno spoke in Auckland on Friday and Sunday, and will be continuing his tour of the country with speaking engagements in Wellington and Christchurch over the next fortnight.
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
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