A long time ago, I decided to get closer to the sources, opinions, voices and curators that I thought were right for me. Being exposed to Krista Tippett interviews have changed my point of view in some cases, in others have enriched my own findings and thoughts. This post serves as a way to point out some resonance of this interview, that in any case, may find another listener who can be benefited by them and the voices within each podcast.

Guy Consolmagno and George Coyne -Asteroids, Stars, and the love of God

Excerpts from the Krista Tippett interview Podcast at On Being

-It’s only human beings that have this curiosity to understand: What’s that up in the sky? How do we fit into that? Who are we? Where do we come from? And this is a hunger that is as deep and as important as a hunger for food, because if you starve a person in that sense, you’re depriving them of their humanity. And being able to feed this, being able to make a person more human…

-Whoever’s responsible for this universe has a great sense of humor, because whenever you’re expecting something, you get what you expect, but from a very, very different angle than the way you were expecting it.

-And so earthquakes and hurricanes are all part of the of science that I’ve studied that explain how “the world,” planet Earth, actually works. And yes, it’s destructive. And yes, it causes this terrible human tragedy. And at the same time, I can marvel at volcanoes, even as I know volcanoes kill people. I can marvel at space images of hurricanes and then also remember that, yeah, that’s destroying cities underneath those hurricanes.

–BR. GUY CONSOLMAGNO 1

-…my personal life is built upon the following: I’m a scientist. I try and understand the universe. My understanding of the universe does not need God.

-I think to drag God in when we find that our science is inadequate to understanding certain events that we observe in the universe, we tend to want to bring in God as a god of explanation, a god of the gaps. And we constantly do that. Newton did it, you know? If we’re religious believers we’re constantly tempted to do that. And every time we do it, we’re diminishing God and we’re diminishing science.

-…if God created this universe — “if,” a big-I “If” — why don’t I use my scientific knowledge to reflect upon what kind of god would make a universe like this that I know as a scientist? And when I do — I marvel at this magnificent god. He made a universe that I know as a scientist that has a dynamism to it. It has a future that’s not completely determined. We know that as scientists. The evolutionary process — if you want to take evolution in a very broad sense of cosmological, physical, chemical, biological evolution, this is a magnificent feature of the universe.

-So there is a unity in our scientific knowledge if we search for it. I mean, human life is so rich with life and death, with suffering, with music, and art, and love, and hatred. To limit our human experience to our scientific knowledge is to really impoverish all of us and I’m afraid many scientists do that. Science is the only way to true and certain knowledge; a kind of scientist. And I think that really impoverishes all of human culture.

– FR. GEORGE COYNE 1

Source:

1. Taken from the transcript for Guy Consolmagno and George Coyne -Asteroids, Stars, and the love of God. September 24, 2015
   http://www.onbeing.org/program/guy-consolmagno-and-george-coyne-asteroids-stars-and-the-love-of-god/transcript/7956#main_content
   

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