Brother Guy Caonsolmagno, an astronomer,
inside the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo.
Image courtesy of Michael Mason
Maxine Singer, a leader in the field of human genetics, had praise for the academy’s work even before she became a member. “I went to a study week on genetics [in the early 1980s] and listened to a discussion about new reproductive techniques that were just beginning,” she says. “It was fascinating to be at the Vatican talking about such things when the newspapers and media would have you believe that the Vatican wouldn’t discuss them.”
The Academy of Sciences’ roots reach nearly to the Renaissance. In 1603 Prince Federico Cesi, a botanist, founded the Accademia dei Lincei, or the Academy of Lynxes, named because its members—renowned Italian scholars like Galileo and Fabio Colonna—needed eyes as sharp as lynxes’ in order to pursue scientific discovery.
The Accademia slowly dissolved, only to reconstitute again in 1745, then vanish and reappear once more in 1795 under the guidance of Padre Feliciano Scarpellini, who brought together a diverse collection of scientists from the Papal States (a large Church-ruled territory in central Italy). After more organizational hiccups caused by political unrest, in 1870—following Italy’s unification—the group morphed into two separate bodies: the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and what would become the Vatican Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which took its current form in 1936.
Today the academy’s mandate involves promoting the progress of mathematical, physical, and natural sciences and participating in the study of related epistemological questions and issues. The academy convenes plenary sessions in which its members offer presentations addressing a certain theme. Held every two years, the meetings highlight the most recent advances in the sciences. The next session is slated for October.
Although the academy’s mission seems as benign as that of any other scientific body, its presence within the Vatican invites controversy. During the early 1990s, at a time of alarm about population problems, the academy issued a report saying that there was an “unavoidable need to contain births globally,” a position that supposedly infuriated Pope John Paul II.
A pope, more than anyone else, knows the exact reason for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In 1992 John Paul II told the members that “the purpose of your academy is precisely to discern and to make known, in the present state of science and within its proper limits, what can be regarded as an acquired truth or at least as enjoying such a degree of probability that it would be imprudent and unreasonable to reject it.” In the pope’s eyes, the academy is an instrument that teases scientific fact from fiction.
The current relationship between the pope and the academy suggests that scientific issues have achieved an unprecedented level of importance within the Church. The Vatican has recently taken a firm stand on a range of science-related issues. In 2007 Vatican officials weighed in on end-of-life concerns, stating that there was a moral obligation to sustain the life of a person in a vegetative state, even if there was no hope for recovery. The position opposes the wishes of those whose advance directives request termination of hydration and nutrition if they enter such a state. And while the Vatican supports organ transplants, in 2004 the vice president of its Pontifical Academy for Life told Reuters that the cloning of human embryos is “a repeat of what the Nazis did in the concentration camps.”
Catholicism and Controversy
Since 1993 Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo has presided over the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Though not a clergyman, he has been weathering countless criticisms of the Church’s handling of science issues. Still he remains resolute and disarmingly pragmatic in his views on science and religion.
When asked if he thought the scientific understanding of life’s beginnings demanded a belief in God, Cabibbo turned heads. “I would say no,” he told a journalist at the National Catholic Reporter, adding, however, that “science is incapable of supplying answers to ultimate questions about why things exist and what their purpose is.” Cabibbo’s statements reflect the Church’s ongoing effort to reconcile science and religion, a topic that extends far beyond the walls of the Vatican.
These days it’s practically impossible to strike up a conversation with anyone in the Vatican’s science programs without invoking the work of the outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins, a prominent evolutionary theorist, wrote the book The God Delusion, which became an international best seller.
“What you find in his book is a caricature of my religion,” says Monsignor Melchor Sánchez de Toca, undersecretary of the Academy of Sciences’ sister organization, the Pontifical Council for Culture.
“He has an excellent reputation as a scientist, but he isn’t a theologian,” Consolmagno says.
“We call [Dawkins’s stance] scientism, and there is reference to it in the encyclical,” says Father Rafael Pascual, dean of philosophy at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome.
“Scientism,” Dawkins tells me later, “is the pejorative word sometimes used for the view that science can explain everything and kind of arrogates to itself the privilege of explaining everything. Science cannot tell you what is right and wrong. When it comes to really interesting questions, like ‘Where did the laws of physics come from?’ or ‘How did the universe arrive in the first place?’ I genuinely don’t know whether science will answer those deep and at present mysterious questions; I am confident that if science can’t answer them, nothing else can. But it may be that nothing will ever answer them.”
Dawkins expresses skepticism at the Church’s mission to build a bridge between science and theology with the use of philosophy. “There is nothing to build a bridge to,” he says. “Theology is a complete and utter nonsubject.” At one point in my talk with Dawkins, Father George Coyne, the well-respected retired head of the Vatican Observatory (and, as such, a former member of the Academy of Sciences), becomes the subject of conversation.
“I met him a few weeks ago and liked him very much,” Dawkins says. “And he said to me that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe in God, and so I said, ‘Why do you believe in God?’ and he said: ‘It’s quite simple. I was brought up Catholic.’ When I think about good scientists—and some are devoutly religious and many of them are Catholic, Jesuit brothers and priests, for instance—I can never make out whether they are compartmentalizing their minds. Sometimes if you press them, it turns out that what they believe is something very different from what it says in the Creed. It turns out that all they really believe is that there is some deeply mysterious unknown at the root of the universe.”
Dawkins’s comments stuck with me. In the many interviews I had with priests, each expressed a sophisticated theology that seemed far more abstract than what you might find occupying the mind of an average believer. Is belief in a deeply mysterious unknown root of the universe such a bad thing for science, even if it is perceived through the framework of Christian concepts and imagery?
“I did not tell Richard Dawkins that there was no reason to believe in God,” says Coyne, who counts Dawkins a friend. “I said reasons are not adequate. Faith is not irrational, it is arational; it goes beyond reason. It doesn’t contradict reason. So my take is precisely that faith, to me, is a gift from God. I didn’t reason to it, I didn’t merit it—it was given to me as a gift through my family and my teachers.... My science helps to enrich that gift from God, because I see in his creation what a marvelous and loving god he is. For instance, by making the universe an evolutionary universe—he didn’t make it a ready-made, like a washing machine or a car—he made it a universe that has in it a participation of creativity. Dawkins’s real question to me should be, ‘How come you have the gift of faith and I don’t?’ And that’s an embarrassment for me. The only thing I can say is that either you have it and don’t know it, or God works with each of us differently, and God does not deny that gift to anybody. I firmly believe that.”
