The Vatican's Astronomer

I realize I may be posting a disconcerting disproportion of Catholic-related articles, but hey, it's Pope Week, so I thought I'd also dust off one of my favorite articles from last year - Astrobiology Magazine's fascinating interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno, Curator of Meteorites at the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo.

"The religious fundamentalists, basically, are scared that they don't have faith, which is why they cling so tightly to what little they've got. The science fundamentalists, I think some of them just want to be taken seriously as scientists and they think, well I have to show that I've rejected anything else. So in that sense, science and religion are very separate. And Stephen Jay Gould had it right up to that point in his book "Rocks of Ages". But what he misses is that every human being is a person with religious beliefs, who also is a scientist. At the fundamental level -- Why do I do this? What am I looking for? Why do I choose this question instead of that question to study? What kind of picture of God do I get at the end of the day when I see that the universe is not just a dome over a flat Earth, the way that Genesis describes it, but is infinite numbers of multiverses? -- what science does is expand my view of how big God is."

P.S.: And btw, if you missed Charlie Rose last night, you missed a wonderful interview with the disarmingly funny Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete (Professor of Theology at St. Joseph's Seminary and author of God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity). I would dearly love to have dinner with him and Guillermo - and watch them become best friends.