Vatican Observatory
vaticanobservatory.org
vaticanobservatory.org
As you can imagine the Castel Gandolfo telescopes are mainly historical at this point due to light pollution, so their VATT facility in Arizona (Mount Graham) is now where most of their actual astonomical work is conducted.
Interestingly, the VATT in AZ is directly adjacent to the LBT facility on Mount Graham, which has a near-infrared instrument formerly named - believe it or not - LUCIFER (Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Spectroscopic Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research).
This was changed to LUCI in 2012 as the name predictably caused some problems and confusion.
This exactly. When our agency was working with them, there was some initial hope that we could consolidate the websites on the .va property, but we quickly realized that was not going to happen, primarily due to the separation required with the foundation wing.
Also, it is in general very difficult for an outside vendor to get clearance to build on a .va domain, and you need someone internally to apply a lot of leverage to get the wheels spinning with Vatican IT. Our agency was able to do this with building out the migrants-refugees.va website, thanks to the help of (now Cardinal) Michael Czerny who ran the M&R Section at the time and was given a lot of direct executive power from Pope Francis, but boy, that was still not easy.
If you want some telescope hardware pr0n, there are some cool pictures in google maps of LUCIFER...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Large+Binocular+Telescope+...
Openly musing, I'm just curious how they decide which projects to pursue, and how they contribute to the community? I know nothing about astronomy, but I imagine like many areas of research, they have conferences on various topics, so perhaps the VO scientists participate in conferences relevant to their research. Which again, of course, brings up the question "how do they decide what to research"?
The VO has about the same share of the State of Vatican City's budget as NASA does of the US budget (but the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope has a separate foundation, largely funded by private donations, that funded its construction and funds its ongoing maintenance, without going through the general Vatican City budget.)
The church chose a mildly ridiculous, astronomically difficult and contentious definition of Easter: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox.
So it combines 3 complex systems: sun, moon and calendar.
Religious extremism and pedantry increased the priority of accuracy and agreement. For some reason, Christians argued (fought wars) over the definition of Easter, and then regarded anyone picking the wrong day as a malevolent heretic.
I imagine Easter could be one of the issues that led Swift to write the Lilliputian egg dispute in Gulliver's Travels.
The term itself was invented by his opponents who sort of ridiculed Georges initially.
What’s amusing is how often the ridiculous name sticks (big bang, yankee, etc).
Most radical new ideas are wildly incorrect, only a minuscule fraction are actually real advances.
The Pope's Astronomer - Interview with Brother Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0DAKaR16cY
The Pope's Telescopes - A tour of the observatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccoGKAL6Qas
The Pope's Space Rocks - A look at their collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OI4wb2XIZc
I love this quote!
Will it ever be possible to prove that some future human theory of reality is complete?
Please let me know how a world with miracles is any different from creationism, which apparently religion needs to be protected from.
If God is distinct from what is created, then a miracle cannot be said to be a manifestation of what is created. Pantheism, on the other hand, must deny miracles, because God and the universe are one, and so all apparent miracles are merely unaccounted for manifestations of reality and perhaps explainable by "some future human theory of reality".
Since Jesuits (ostensibly) hold to a Catholic view in which God and the created order are distinct, they must therefore believe that miracles are not only possible, but do happen. The question is then largely whether a particular effect is miraculous or not.
> Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality
To make this more comprehensible, I will render this as "Faith needs reason to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality" or "to make faith actually faith, not wishful thinking or superstition". That is the Catholic view.
True faith, pace pop culture, is never blind. Faith concerns what is beyond what is knowable through reason. This is the reason for the parental analogies in the Bible. A child cannot understand why a parent is guiding him a certain way, but he trusts the parent to guide him well. By analogy, human reason cannot know certain things in its present condition, but some things have been revealed on authority established by other evidence or truths (hence why Christ argues from the Torah, etc. and performs thousands of miracles, with the resurrection at the pinnacle, to demonstrate his identity and his authority). So, faith is no substitute for reason; instead, reason puts faith in its place. In the beatific vision, faith is no longer necessary, analogously to how when a child becomes an adult, he no longer needs to trust his parents in the way he used to. He himself knows the things his parents did when he still did not.
> to protect it from creationism
I don't know what this means. Partly, this is because "creationism" is equivocal and means various things.
The Catholic position accepts creatio ex nihilo, which is to say that the universe is created/kept in existence by God - the first cause - out of nothing, i.e., not as a mutation or transformation of some preexisting being. It has no official position on "evolution" per se (which is also equivocal), but it does reject evolutionism which is a metaphysical position. There is no official position about the details of how the first parents came to be, but it does hold that there were first parents from whom all other humans descend. The intellect and will (usually called the "soul") are taken to be the result of special acts of creation at each conception, and therefore not something generated by the parents.
Catholics are permitted to believe in a range of evolutionary explanations (like adaptation and selection) and they are permitted to believe that the universe was created in 6 days (though blanket Biblical literalism is not traditional and rather modern; note that the Catholic Church compiled the diverse genres making up the Bible in the first place). Most Catholics probably accept the general prevailing cosmological view of an old universe, a figurative 6 days, evolutionary explanations in relation to the human body plan, etc. This may seem odd to those who come from certain American evangelical circles, which tend to get more attention in the American media.
Those with a taste for speculation about how modern biology and Biblical accounts might be reconciled will find Ed Feser's posts [0][1] on the subject interesting.
> which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god
This is interesting, because one thing that is characteristic of paganism is that the gods are of the world. They are beings like us, or personifications of natural phenomena. But God in the Catholic sense is not a being among many, but Being Itself by which all beings are.
I'm not sure what Br. Guy's definition of "creationism" is here, though. A web search doesn't really give me a coherent picture of what he means either. I suspect he may be attacking a mechanistic metaphysics in which secondary causality doesn't really exist and God is some kind of cosmic occasionalist puppet master. In that sense, I you could argue it sounds more pagan - or pan(en)theistic - rather than Christian.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-...
[1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-...
I can’t say I manage to convince myself of any supernatural argument, but I often find them fascinating, and the philosophy and theology in Christianity is a lot more complex and interesting than many other atheists give it credit for (although I tend to agree it is “complicated” rather than “complex”, making knots for itself to untie, but I think this about secular philosophy too).
How did you build this understanding of theology? Any book you’d recommend?
Many traditions argue that faith and hope are temporary, since in God's presence all is revealed. But on the basis of Paul's statement "these three remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love", others argue that faith and hope remain within the culminating beatific vision, since even the saints in his presence know him truly but not fully in the infinity of his nature. Faith and hope are at that point an enduring confidence that he will continue to be and do what is ultimately for his glory and our good throughout the "ages to come."
"Other nations need to reform certain unjust structures, and in particular their political institutions, in order to replace corrupt, dictatorial and authoritarian forms of government by democratic and participatory ones." Encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis, Pope St. John Paul II (1987)
"The Church values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate. Thus she cannot encourage the formation of narrow ruling groups which usurp the power of the State for individual interests or for ideological ends." Encyclical Centesimus annus, Pope St. John Paul II (1991)
"People sometimes complain of the slowness with which an authentic democracy progresses, yet it continues, if used well, to be the most effective historical instrument for ensuring its own future in a way befitting to human beings. [...] Democracy will attain its full actualization only when every person and each people have access to the primary goods (life, food, water, health care, education, work and the certainty of their rights) through an ordering of internal and international relations that assures each person of the possibility of participating in them." Address to members of the "Centesimus Annus" Foundation, Pope Benedict XVI (2006)
"[...] we can think about the crisis of democracy as a wounded heart. That which limits participation is right before our eyes. If corruption and illegality reveal a 'heart attack', then different forms of social exclusion must also be a concern. Every time someone is marginalized, the whole social body suffers." Address at the pastoral visit to Trieste on the occasion of the 50th Social Week of Italian Catholics, Pope Francis (2024)
I've heard the same comparison made of Martin Luther (that the average American evangelical would consider him a heretic).
See The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, in 9 parts, a must read!
Part 1: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
Part 2: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
Part 3: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
Part 4: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
Part 5: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
Part 6: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/6-great-ptolemaic-smackd...
Part 7: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/7-great-ptolemaic-smackd...
Part 8: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/8-great-ptolemaic-smackd...
Part 9: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackd...
On the contrary, it is in the bosom of the Church that intellectual life flourished in Europe. Scholastic thought brought to fruition a degree of rigorous thinking unseen before. It worked out the intellectual foundations that made modern science possible. As Stanley Jaki argues, despite the obvious ingenuity of various ancient cultures and civilizations, science never really took off anywhere else to become a sustained enterprise. This is not a coincidence, but a result of worldview and beliefs about the nature of reality, the possibility of knowledge, and the point of human existence. If you believe reality is fickle and unintelligible, if you believe life runs in circles and leads nowhere, you will have little motivation to pursue science.
Where Galileo is concerned, the whole affair was hardly a matter of science. Galileo was notoriously cantankerous, and it was his habit of insulting and assaulting public figures (which included some who were his friends) that landed him in hot water. (Public insults were his way of responding to people who either disagreed with his unproven claims, ones he pushed aggressively, or tried to explain to him that he had not actually demonstrated his claims.) Heliocentrism was not heretical, so there was no possible doctrinal basis for accusing him of heresy. And the penalty was that an old man was put under house arrest in a comfy apartment overlooking the Vatican gardens. Whatever you might say about the justice of the penalty, given the norms of the day (witch hunts in Northern Europe anyone?), this was relatively mild, and nothing to do with "science".
As is/was at least in part, with the Inquisition's tools:
> Despite its reputation as a medieval instrument of torture, there is no evidence of the existence of iron maidens before the 19th century.
I take his point to be precisely that the iron maiden wasn't really used.
That is very well put. On the topic of his punishment, I must say, you seriously downplayed it, but it really must be emphasized just how much he brought it onto himself. It's not even that there was "no possible doctrinal basis", but the Church was very purposefully evasive about this, trying to keep its official position somewhat neutral, and it was Galileo who really insisted on starting a process he wasn't going to win.
And you really don't have to dig deep to understand why — simply reading his "The Assayer" by any somewhat socially-aware adult must be enough to get what was the issue with Galileo. The man really knew no chill.