Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, delivers the inaugural Dr. Benjamin T. Chu Distinguished Lecture at St. Norbert College.

New Lecture Series Celebrates Intersection of Faith, Science and Reason

St. Norbert College sparked fresh discussion this spring in the realm of science and religion with the new Dr. Benjamin T. Chu Distinguished Lecture. The series aims to highlight faith and reason at Catholic institutions and recognize major scientific contributions made by Norbertines throughout history.

“This lecture series is an expression of our core commitment to searching for truth and meaning as it relates to the deepest questions about our humanity and its meaning in the larger universe,” says President Laurie Joyner.

The series aims to bring scholars to campus who not only have made waves in the physical sciences but who have shared that faith plays a major role in their scientific career and personal lives.

The college welcomed its first Chu Lecture speaker, Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, on March 19 with his talk “When Science Goes Wrong — And Why We Love It!” in the Fort Howard Theater.

Failure means we learn
While science and religion are often pitted against each other in areas of modern public discourse, Consolmagno’s lecture attempted to dismantle that narrative and show how faith and reason blend together in human advancements.

A native of Detroit, Consolmagno earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Ph.D. in planetary science from the University of Arizona. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and MIT and taught physics at Lafayette College before becoming a Jesuit in 1989. He’s been at the Vatican Observatory since 1993 and was appointed director by Pope Francis in 2015.

At St. Norbert, Consolmagno addressed a mixed audience of current students, faculty and local community members. He shared one lasting adage that remained relevant throughout the evening: “Learn what is wrong so you find what is right.”

Society is at an information-rich point in time, he said. Google returns immediate answers after typing “can I look at the solar eclipse” and plenty of other questions in the search bar. Yet there’s an increased uncertainty around experts in these fields — the scientists whose research and observations bring us closer to so many aspects of the universe, whether it’s the solar eclipse, the God particle, or even a vaccine for a new respiratory illness, Consolmagno said.

Learning when the science behind these discoveries, inventions or innovations is wrong, or in more accurate terms a little bit wrong, is as important as affirming that it’s right — or at least still widely accepted by the scientific community as the best explanation available, Consolmagno said.

“Failure is not an option, it’s a requirement,” he says. “We learn by making mistakes.”

Generally, there’s an expectation that scientists, doctors and researchers have the answers. But sometimes the answers need to change in order to get closer to the truth — hundreds of years later or even in real time, much like the world saw in the early days of the Covid pandemic.

As a scientist himself, Consolmagno has had holes poked in his graduate essays from years ago, which is a good thing, he says. In his eyes, it means the science has evolved into something new.

“Getting the right answer isn’t actually the point of doing the science,” he says. “It’s just a way of judging how good our current understanding is.”

Observe what’s around you
Much of Consolmagno’s talk delved deep into how older scientific theories that are now considered obsolete were necessary and cutting-edge in their time. Humanity has long observed the world, the sun, the moon and the stars to make sense of what they considered their deities’ creation. They made some world-shattering discoveries, too.

“We study and adore the universe, which was made by God,” Consolmagno says. “We are made to be astronomers or poets or photographers or the people who do all the things who feed our souls because we don’t live by bread alone.”

The lecture progressed with interpretations and iterations of how humans have viewed the Earth amid the universe, some of it in concert with theological thinking, and how their methods and processes were of sound science in that era. Early views ranged from those who purported the Earth as the center, like the Aristotlian design in which the middle of the Earth was the bottom of the universe, to Ptolemy’s in which the sun, moon and other planets all orbited the Earth in their own spheres.

Consolmagno explored theories that fulfill our current heliocentric view, too, or how the sun is the center of our system. While Galileo and Copernicus are considered to have developed the long-standing accepted theory we now use, Copernicus’ version wasn’t entirely accurate either, Consolmagno illustrated. He had the sun moving in its own small circular orbit around a center of the universe, while we now understand that the sun is stationary. Kepler’s heliocentric version ended up being wrong at a more overarching level, but the math he used for his orbital ellipses eventually allowed for Newton’s law of gravity.

“By not being 100 percent correct, Kepler actually pushes science further,” Consolmagno explained. “All of the work that went into trying to understand the size of the universe was based on assumptions that were very reasonable, but wrong. When people talk about the universe today and what we know today, it’s still based on assumptions that are very reasonable until we find out they’re wrong.”

May 30, 2024