Pleasantly surprised to see this on the HN homepage! Our agency (Longbeard) rebuilt this website a few years ago. It was fun working with the great people there, including Br. Guy who is a fantastic ambassador for the VO.
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.
antognini · 4h ago
Back when I was in grad school I observed at LBT (or maybe more accurately I was on a team that was observing at LBT). The Vatican's observatory down the road was affectionately referred to as the "Pope Scope."
latchkey · 3h ago
> Mount Graham
If you want some telescope hardware pr0n, there are some cool pictures in google maps of LUCIFER...
Although I know the church has a lot of money, I can't imagine they dedicate a particularly large budget to the observatory compared to, say, a huge research university or a specialized scientific research project.
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"?
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> Although I know the church has a lot of money, I can't imagine they dedicate a particularly large budget to the observatory compared to, say, a huge research university or a specialized scientific research project.
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.)
ImJamal · 3h ago
This is a very random question, but do you know why it isn't on the va TLD?
dragonwriter · 2h ago
I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.)
pwil30 · 1h ago
> I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.)
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.
sega_sai · 5h ago
They also do month-long astrophysics summer schools for students every two years or so. I was lucky to be part of the school ~20 years ago. We had classes in the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo and audience with John Paul II. It was a great opportunity.
rdtsc · 6h ago
It’s also interesting that the idea of a Big Bang originated with Georges Lemaître — a Catholic priest and theoretical physicist. He called it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom” initially.
The term itself was invented by his opponents who sort of ridiculed Georges initially.
graemep · 5h ago
All radical new ideas seem to be ridiculed.
Retric · 3h ago
Unfortunately that’s not a useful heuristic.
Most radical new ideas are wildly incorrect, only a minuscule fraction are actually real advances.
bombcar · 5h ago
If your idea can’t survive being ridiculed INGMI.
What’s amusing is how often the ridiculous name sticks (big bang, yankee, etc).
rdtsc · 3h ago
Good point, but I think radical ideas that end up being eventually accepted, and also ending up taking the name the opponents give them, sometimes as ridicule, are notable.
erk__ · 7h ago
Brady Haran of Numberphile and a whole bunch of other channels visited the observatory some years back and made some videos and interviews.
I enjoyed the book he co-wrote: "Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: ...and Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-box at the Vatican Observatory"
It took me way too long to realize "brother" is not some postmodern hippie "them/it" kinda stuff.
impish9208 · 1h ago
I suspect a lot of non-Catholics would be surprised by the Vatican’s position on creation, cosmology, evolution, the literalness (or lack thereof) of Genesis etc. A Jesuit priest would probably be considered a heretic by the average American Evangelical.
Neonlicht · 2m ago
Ask one of these famed Catholics how they feel about democracy or gender equality and they are just like all the other Christians. After all they get their orders from the same book.
Animats · 1h ago
Oh, an astronomical observatory, not the newspaper. The Vatican''s in-house newspaper is L'Osservatore Romano.[1]
> 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
I love this quote!
lo_zamoyski · 4h ago
That quotes needs some unpacking, because many people have caricaturish notions of things like "faith" or "science" or "religion".
> 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.
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?
TimTheTinker · 2h ago
> In the beatific vision, faith is no longer necessary
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."
uticus · 3h ago
Was also wondering about the "creationism" phrase here, popped out to me like it was in bold, given the context
IncreasePosts · 5h ago
Jesuits love to play these motte and bailey mind games - ask him if he thinks Jesus actually performed his miracles or not.
abrenuntio · 4h ago
Would a true divine miracle be a suspension of order or a manifestation of it?
Will it ever be possible to prove that some future human theory of reality is complete?
lo_zamoyski · 2h ago
A miracle, by definition, transcends the nature of the thing in question. The cause is not attributable to the power of the thing effected or anything in the world.
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.
IncreasePosts · 2h ago
This is what I mean.
Please let me know how a world with miracles is any different from creationism, which apparently religion needs to be protected from.
NoSalt · 3h ago
They have come a long way since convicting Galileo of "a strong suspicion of heresy".
lordleft · 3h ago
Galileo's treatment by the Church was abominable, but it's often forgotten that the Church not only drew the lines of permissible thought, but also served as the primary vehicle for advancing and enabling the life of the mind through its patronage of the university system. It was not merely an oppressor, nor just a benevolent enabler; it was somehow both.
pwil30 · 1h ago
FWIW, The Vatican Observatory had an interesting podcast series discussing the "real story" of the Church v. Galileo:
When the church stopped being the arbiter of permissible thought, other arbiters rushed in to fill the void -- such is human nature. The question is not whether such institutions exist in society, but who they are at present.
michaelsbradley · 3h ago
Well, science came a long way in general. There were a number of objections to Galileo's ideas that were not religiously motivated.
See The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, in 9 parts, a must read!
This is an unfortunate piece of propaganda popularized by foes of the Church. Its stickiness is partly due to its role as a founding myth of the "faith as enemy of science" mythology which tries to reverse the facts by arrogating rationality and science onto itself and presents the Catholic Church as the great mythic foe of darkness from which science was liberated.
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".
krick · 6m ago
> Galileo was notoriously cantankerous, and it was his habit of insulting and assaulting public figures <...> that landed him in hot water.
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.
aruggirello · 9m ago
> This is an unfortunate piece of propaganda popularized by foes of the Church
As is/was at least in part, with the Inquisition's tools:
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.
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.)
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.
The term itself was invented by his opponents who sort of ridiculed Georges initially.
Most radical new ideas are wildly incorrect, only a minuscule fraction are actually real advances.
What’s amusing is how often the ridiculous name sticks (big bang, yankee, etc).
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno
[1] https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno
I love this quote!
> 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."
Will it ever be possible to prove that some future human theory of reality is complete?
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.
Please let me know how a world with miracles is any different from creationism, which apparently religion needs to be protected from.
Pt 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BNHHy5etQc
Pt 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FYYB9kqkE4
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".
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.
As is/was at least in part, with the Inquisition's tools:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden