Today I sit down with two Catholic scientists, Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J. and Father Paul Mueller, S.J. Both men work for the Vatican Observatory, which is based at Castel Gandolfo, Italy. And together they wrote a new book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? and Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-box at the Vatican Observatory (Image Books, 2014).

Brother Consolmagno is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a B.A. and M.A. in planetary science. After earning a Ph.D from the University of Arizona, he taught at Harvard and MIT before eventually lading at the Vatican Observatory. There he works as the curator of the Vatican Meteorite Collection and researches the connections among meteorites, asteroids, and small bodies in the solar system. He has written more than 40 refereed scientific papers and a number of popular books, including his memoir, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist. Earlier this year, the American Astronomical Society awarded him the Carl Sagan Award for excellence in communicating planetary science to the general public.

Brother Consolmagno is also well known for his fun appearance on The Colbert Report:

Father Mueller is a philosopher of science who serves as superior of the Jesuit community at Castel Gandolfo. He holds a B.S. in physics from Boston University, an M.A. in philosophy from Loyola University of Chicago, M.Div and S.T.M. degrees in theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and a Ph.D in the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago.
 

 
BRANDON: Brother Guy, as a PhD physicist, Jesuit brother, Vatican astronomer, and Colbert Report guest, you're a sign of contradiction. How did you end up a religious scientist? Do you find any contradiction between those two roles?

BROTHER GUY CONSOLMAGNO, SJ: I have no idea why you'd see any contradiction; I don't. I struggle mightily to figure out what bad assumptions people are making about science and religion when they think that! I know scientists of all religious faiths, and that should be no more surprising than to say that I know religious people who have all sorts of jobs!

Of course my scientific training shapes the habits of thought I use when I think about God, but I also know that my way of thinking about God is neither the only way to think, nor unique just to me as a scientist. And being a person of faith obviously shapes the kinds of questions I think are fun to work on, and the way that I will go about working on them. For instance, I hate the idea of hoarding data; you learn by sharing, and learning is more important to me than getting a career edge on some scientific rival.

I think the big mistake behind the question is thinking that science and religion are rival sets of "things" that must be "believed." “What do I do, if science tells me one thing but religion tells me another thing? Which do I believe?”

There’s a false assumption at the center of that question—because neither science nor religion are about “believing” in “things”. But my religious belief is not in a “thing,” but in a Person—indeed, Three Persons...the Father, Son, and Spirit as described and identified in the Creed, and in the Church that leads us to those Persons. And science is not about the "things" we call data points, but in the description we come up with to describe how those "things" work. The data points stay the same, but the description changes as science changes.

BRANDON: Fr. Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest, is widely considered the father of the Big Bang theory, which he introduced in 1927. Today it's the most widely accepted theory for the origin of the universe. However, Fr. Lemaître and Pope Pius XII disagreed on the theory's implications for a Creator God. What's the significance of the Big Bang and does it provide support for a Creator?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: Lemaitre himself was adamant that his theory was a nice description based on the mathematics of Relativity and the observations of Hubble, but it should never be taken as a last word... much less something infallible on which one could base one's faith. And in fact, following their conversation, it's pretty clear that he convinced Pope Pius XII of this, as well. I would turn the relationship between Big Bang and Creator around...and suggest that belief in a Creator God, who is "The Word"—the Logos...Logic...Reason—provides support for the idea that we ought to be able to understand Creation in terms of a rational, mathematical theory like the Big Bang.

BRANDON: Back in 2006, the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto from planet to "dwarf planet." In the book you note the special role the Vatican played in this decision. How was the Church involved?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: We were astronomers among our fellow astronomers who debated the point. As it happened, I was on one of the (several) commissions that was involved in the discussion, and Fr. Corbally was on the committee that wrote the final resolution voted on by the IAU. But the whole topic is interesting for another reason: it reminds us that "science" is not eternal, and we shouldn't be surprised when it changes its mind in the face of new data. That's one reason why science is not a good foundation for religious belief.

BRANDON:In May 2014, Pope Francis said, "Imagine if a Martian showed up, all big ears and big nose like a child's drawing, and he asked to be baptized. How would you react?" What would your response be?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: I’d want to be sure they really knew what they were asking for! How could you tell? Well...are they willing to share a meal with me? To help me out if I am hurt, at the side of the road? To offer their life for me? And would I be willing to do likewise?

FATHER PAUL MUELLER, SJ: Let’s not forget that Pope Francis was mainly making a point about humans, not about Martians. He was talking about how the early Church struggled over the question of whether non-Jews could be admitted to baptism. The early Jewish-Christians saw themselves as God’s Chosen People, and saw in Jesus the Messiah who God had promised would save them. They had difficulty imagining how that salvation could be extended to non-Jews. But in the end the Church decided that all people were chosen by God, and that baptism could be extended to all. So I think that the Pope’s question was mainly about us and how we see ourselves as chosen by God, rather than about Martians.

BRANDON: You spend several pages in the book on the Galileo affair. What really happened? Could the dispute have been avoided?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: History is made by individuals; individuals could always make different decisions. What happened to Galileo and all the other people in that time and place was the result of the times and the politics and the fears and the hopes of all those individuals. It's not surprising that it happened; but it wasn't necessarily inevitable.

FATHER MUELLER: What really happened with Galileo is a long and complex story—read our book! But our book can get at only some aspects of the story. Of course the dispute could have been avoided, or could have gone differently. History is contingent, after all. And while we’re at it, the subsequent history of interpretation of the Galileo story also could have gone differently—it didn’t have to be interpreted as a great symbol of conflict between faith and science.

BRANDON: Suppose you had one minute to explain to an atheist how "the heavens declare the glory of God." What would you say?

BROTHER CONSOLMAGNO: Go outside and look for yourself! If there's not a God they are praising, there ought to be!

FATHER MUELLER: You can see the lunch that your wife packs for you just as lunch, or as an expression of the love which she has for you. You can see the stars in heaven just as stars, or as an expression of the Love which God is. For those who believe in the God, who is Love and who is ultimate Creator of being and order, the glory of God is declared not just by the heavens but by everything else that exists: by pebbles, earthworms, and trout scales; by hornet nests, finches’ wings, and hockey players; and yes, by atheists too.

NOTE: Over the past several months, we've had lots of combox discussion about how Catholics read and interpret the Bible. To help us all make sense of this question, we began a multi-part series on the topic. Once a week, for the next several weeks, Mark Shea will unpack how Catholics authentically read the Bible. Last week he offered a general introduction, today he outlines three specific guidelines, and next week he'll begin covering the three main spiritual senses (or lenses) through which Catholic interpret the Bible—allegorical, moral, and analogical.

For some folks, including not a few Catholics, it takes a lot to dispel the myth of the hyper-controlling Church that only permits Bible study after the insertion of the Vatican Orbital Mind Control Laser Platform chip in the frontal lobe of the brain. Indeed, it may come as a shock to such folks to discover that the Church offers Catholics only three guidelines when pointing toward reading Scripture for its literal sense. Dei Verbum tells us:
 

1. Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”;
 
2. Read the Scripture within “the living tradition of the whole Church”; and,
 
3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith.

 
That’s it. That’s all the Church offers. What do these guidelines mean? In part, as we saw last week, they mean that when you read the Bible, you need to pay attention to what sort of literature you are reading. But other things come in as well.

The Bible is a sort of organism, like a goldfish. Many moderns don’t think of it that way, insisting instead that it's just a collection of human writings from widely divergent sources that got stitched together pretty roughly and is therefore “full of contradictions”. Many Bible students, both Catholic and atheist, concern themselves almost entirely with looking for the “contradictions” and shabby seamwork. This can sometimes get pretty silly, as when A.N. Wilson discerns a fraudulent claim that Jesus was a “carpenter” since “no carpenter in real life came anywhere near to having a plank sticking out of his eye".

From the perspective of sane biblical study, this entire approach (technically known by Catholic theologians as the “hermeneutic of suspicion”) is sort of like looking at a goldfish and seeing only a circulatory system, an excretory system, a pair of gills, a pair of eyes, some randomly distributed fins, a bunch of scales, a nervous system, and various connective tissues, all of which just happen to be crammed into a goldfish-shaped space—and then spending all your time looking for “junk DNA” in the goldfish cells while steadfastly ignoring the swimming, living fish.

In fact, the remarkable thing about Scripture is the organic unity of growth one sees in it. Seen from the Catholic perspective, it looks pretty much like what it is: the written record of a Tradition that is growing just like the mustard seed and revealing the gradual revelation of God to man, culminating with the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Yes, you can see the stitching at times, as when Genesis combines two accounts of creation. (But so what? That’s only a problem if you believe the Bible is a purely divine book, not a book written and edited by humans.) So, to be sure, the human authors of Scripture display change over time. But it is the sort of change one expects in a growing thing, not a mutating thing. Ideas found in seed form early on (such as “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”) break out in huge leafy branches later on (such as the conviction found in the prophets and the books of the Maccabees that God will defeat death and even raise the dead at the end of time).

We discover, as we read, that the Bible is an immense conversation across the ages. For Catholics, the Old Testament longs for and looks forward to the New and the New is only comprehensible in light of the Old. In short, there really is a unity to the whole of Scripture. So all of us, regardless of our religious worldview, do well to read it with that in mind. Each verse is related to the verses before it, each paragraph is related to the paragraphs before and after, and each book, especially in the New Testament, is not really comprehensible if you don’t know the other texts to which the author is alluding. So a return to the understanding of Scripture as a single organism, and not merely as a collection of loosely connected cells or systems, is the first order of business for effectively reading the Bible.

The next order of business is realizing that a living goldfish won’t live long outside the water. If you want to get to know the goldfish of Scripture better, the paradox is that you cannot do so by removing it from the Sacred Tradition of the Church, which is the water in which Scripture swims. The absolute worst way to read the Bible is to just go off with it by yourself and ask, “What does this text mean to me?” Catholics approach the text by finding out, as best we can, how the author and his readers would have understood it.

We know to do this with other books, but something goes awry when it comes to the Bible. Many people believe that the Tradition—that is, the fruit of millions of lives of prayer and sanctity, not to mention scholarship of a very high order and even, in some cases, personal familiarity with the apostles themselves—is absolutely worthless if it contradicts one's strongly felt intuition about what the Bible really means.

This faulty approach is primarily a fault of the will, not the intellect. It affects Catholics and atheists alike, and the solution requires humility and a basic reorientation away from self and toward God's revelation through his Church (not just a vague admission that, now and then, the Church gets it right by agreeing with my view of the Bible.) Such a reorientation is vital because without it, the biblical reader inevitably winds up depriving the Scriptural goldfish of the water of Tradition which it requires in order to live.

But let's move on. To keep the water of Tradition from being spilled, the Church tells us to “be attentive to the analogy of faith”. This cryptic remark means, basically, “hold on to the defined teaching of the Church”. The “analogy of faith” is the goldfish bowl that holds the water of Tradition. Without it you’ve got water all over the floor and, soon, a dead goldfish.

So what’s the “analogy of faith”? Well, an analogy is a thing that’s like something else. So a photo of my wife is an analog of my wife. It looks just like her, but it’s not her. The Church proposes various analogies of the Faith to us, such as the Creeds or the dogmas of the Church, to give us a sense of what is and is not part of apostolic Tradition.

A dogma is not the forbiddance of thought (as is commonly supposed) but the conclusion of thought: it’s what you get when you are done thinking something through. Periodically, questions arise in theology as they do in every field. When they do, the Church thinks the problem through and, when the occasion requires it and the Spirit wills it, the Church defines its teaching. The first time this happens is recorded in the book of Acts. The Church is confronted with the question, “Do Gentiles need to keep the ceremonial laws of Moses?”. The Church arrives at the momentous conclusion that Christians are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, not by circumcision, keeping kosher, and so forth. They promulgate this decision in the shocking words, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us...” meaning that the dogma promulgated by the apostles and the elders is the authentic guideline for understanding the meaning of the Tradition with respect to this question.

Where do they get off talking this way? Well, to be fair, they formed the impression because of what they heard from Jesus Christ, who told them “He who listens to you listens to me” (Luke 10:16). So it’s pretty much in the DNA of the Church. It appears Jesus had enough foresight to know that the Church would need a permanent teaching office to navigate the waters of history, just as the American forefathers knew the country would require Congress, judges, and a President to interpret the Constitution through time.

So that's a brief introduction to the three guidelines Catholics use when properly interpreting Scripture. Next week we'll begin exploring the three spiritual senses, or lenses, through which Catholics read the Bible.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Exchange. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Go2Grace)