Q. What’s your day at the Vatican Observatory. What happens?
Guy: It’s the same as any other astronomical observatory in terms of the workload. You might spend time in a laboratory making measurements. You might spend time at a telescope making observations, but once you have the data in hand, then you’re sitting in front of a computer trying to make sense of the data – trying to clean out the noise and find the signal from the noise, trying to compare it with other people and then writing papers. If you’re going to be a scientist, here’s my advice: while in school, learn how to write because you spend more time writing than you do doing maths.
If you don’t communicate what you’ve done, you might just as well not have done it. I’ve also seen that the scientists who are the best at communicating the work are the ones that get ahead. They’re not necessarily the first ones to do it, but they are the ones who can explain what they did. Anyway, I wind up spending a lot of time writing and reading and preparing articles.
Last year I was asked to write six different chapters for six different books on topics of science and faith. Now, I’m really a scientist and I want to spend my time doing science, but I know we’re called on to explain to the world the science and the faith bit. And so those are the two big jobs. In fact, the Vatican Observatory goes back to the 19th century when Pope Leo asked the Jesuits to show the world that the church supports science, and that means doing the science, but it also means showing the world.
Q: Talking about that tension, I want you to speak a little bit about that.
Guy: I have a hard time understanding why anybody thinks there’s a problem. When people talk about this tension you asked about, I’m thinking ‘what tension?’ I’ve been doing this all my life. I’ve never felt a tension. In fact, just the opposite. The faith supports my science so much. I couldn’t imagine doing science without the faith. Faith is why I do the science. What’s my goal? Is it to get tenure? Is it to get rich? Is it to get girls? I do science because I love truth and I love creation. And both of those come from the fact that I love God, who was the source of creation and the source of truth. And likewise, why do I love God? How do I love God? I love God by spending time with God. And I spend time with God by spending time in God’s creation, which I do as a scientist. So the fit is so natural and so obvious.
I don’t really even get where the problem comes from. When I became a Jesuit at the Observatory, I figured I’d better look into this. And what you find is that it isn’t centuries old. It really dates from the Victorian era. It comes from the idea that steam engines and electricity are going to solve all our problems. And the other bad idea that came out of the 19th century was eugenics. People took a good observation of nature called evolution and turned it into social Darwinism; the fact that I’m rich and you are not means it was only nature. It was meant to be. Well heck with that.
Or there was the sense that we can breed better people. In America at least, better people meant people without vowels at the end of their last name like Conso. It was terribly racist and it was anti-immigrant.
In Italy it came out of the politics of the day. The anti-clerical government of the unified Italy wanted some reason to bash the church, so they invented this whole myth of how Galileo [was persecuted]. I don’t want to turn this into a Galileo story, but everything you think you know about Galileo isn’t true. The truth does not make the church look any better, but it’s not a science-faith thing.
It’s a matter of the personal politics and the personal vendettas that were going on at the time of Galileo. It had nothing to do with his faith or his science. And that means that when you’re dealing with faith in science questions, it’s not so obvious that you can say, well, this piece of faith or that piece of science. It goes to a deeper set of identities that people have. People want to be able to say, ‘I’m on this side of the culture wars’.
Sometimes you’ll find people who say that they believe the Bible says the world is 6000 years old. And you say, that’s not actually even in the Bible. But never mind that they’re saying it not as a scientific fact – they’re saying it as a declaration of where they stand, where their affinity group is. And then I find myself doing the same thing as well. I want people to realise I’m not one of them. And so, I’ll make outrageous statements in some different direction so that you won’t think I’m one of them. It’s a terrible thing that we human beings tend to do. We want to divide ourselves up into groups and somehow lord it over the other groups.
Q: Who are your hero scientists?
Guy: You’re not going to believe this, and yet when you ask who inspires me among the scientists it is Pope Francis. Pope Francis has a background in chemistry, but when he wrote Laudato si’ he showed an understanding of what science is and what science is supposed to be. It’s not a collection of facts. It is a human endeavour that is filled with human joy and human sinfulness all at the same time. And what I admire in him is his enormous patience with the rest of us. He knows in the long run it’s better to have someone whom you’ve converted to be on your side than it is to get rid of somebody because they’re an enemy. The temptation is always to hang out with your friends and listen to the people who already agree with you, and he won’t do that. But that’s also a sign of good science, to hear the data that don’t necessarily agree with your way of understanding the universe and to try to figure out how that fits in and how it can make you grow.
Q: If you could give one message that could be put on a billboard that everyone would see, what would it say?
Guy: Look up and enjoy.
Biography
Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ was born in 1952 in Detroit, Michigan. He obtained his Bachelor of Science in 1974 and Master of Science in 1975 in Earth and Planetary Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his PhD in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona in 1978. He was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Harvard College Observatory 1978–1980, and continued as postdoc and lecturer at MIT 1980–1983.
In 1983 he left MIT to join the US Peace Corps, where he served for two years in Kenya teaching physics and astronomy. On his return to the US in 1985 he became an assistant professor of physics at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he taught until his entry into the Jesuit order in 1989. He took vows as a Jesuit brother in 1991. He studied philosophy and theology at Loyola University Chicago and physics at the University of Chicago before his assignment to the Vatican Observatory in 1993.