Vatican Observatory

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.)

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).

> 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-...

Pt 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BNHHy5etQc

Pt 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FYYB9kqkE4

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