What's he on about now?

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   Monday, May 08, 2006

   A PR DISASTER

My Hero of the Week is Vatican astronomer (!) Guy Consolmagno who's openly dismissed the notion that the world was created in six days as "superstitious paganism":

Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.
...
Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. "Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That's why science and religion need to talk to each other," he said.

"Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do."

Brother Consolmagno went on to call the idea of papal infallibility a "PR disaster," instead saying the Pope is simply the Church's "boss, the final authority...It's not like he has a magic power, that God whispers the truth in his ear," he said.

Bravo, Brother, for injecting a little sanity into the proceedings (though I'm sure Pope Benedict has ordered his minions to take the astronomer out behind the woodshed by now). Just one thing, though -- the Vatican has a meteorite collection? What the hell?

Labels: Italy, religion