Br Guy Consolmagno

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from Newstalk ZEDB. Follow this
and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio, Real Conversation,
Real Connection, It's Real life with John Cowan on news
Talk ZEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Today. I'm John Cowen and this is real life. And
a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed John Hartley, who
is both a top flight businessman the chair of Kiwi
Bank and Timbland's and a score of other corporate titles
in his CV, who's also an Anglican priest, and I
complained that he confounded the way I categorized people, the
pigeonholes I put people into. It just didn't work. Well,

(00:55):
I've got the same problem again tonight. My guest is
a world famous astronomer and physicist. He's written a stack
of books and he published papers. He lectured at MIT
in Harvard, but after fifteen years he went and became
a Jesuit brother and many years now he's been the
director of the Vatican Observatory. Welcome brother, Guy Consolmno.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, and.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
I hope I didn't mutilate the pronunciation of.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
It works works great?

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Okay, Well, I'll stick to brother Guy from now on
it that's okay. And so brother guy does you're a
real scientist and a real Jesuit brother, right, Not that
I've even sure what auit brother is. But does your
religious self and your scientist self do they get on
with each other?

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Not only that, but I couldn't do the one without
the other.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
One of the reasons why for a while I got
out of science was I'd forgotten why I was doing it.
I was doing it to get a job, I was
doing it to get a grant, doing it to get
you know, promotion or fame, and all of those are
really empty. So for a while I went to just
you know, work in the Peace Corps and work in Africa,
and the Africans reminded me that we do science to

(02:02):
engage in the physical universe because that's where you find
joy and way, to me, is where you find God.
So my religion, my search for God, my hunger to
be with God, is what makes me want to be
a scientist, and my science is how I can live
out that hunger that I have for God.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Okay, So does that mean that the science that you do,
and you still do a lot of science every there
is that tied up with sort of religious ideas of
let's find God, let's look for God's fingerprints on the
planets or whatever. Are you doing that type of stuff?

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Absolutely not, Okay, that would be antithical to what science is,
because that sort of thing assumes you know what you're
looking for, and I already know God. I'm going to
find the God that I already think. I know. What
fun is that You're not going to look around for
things that you already know. You want science to take
you to places, to drag you to places that you

(02:58):
haven't been before, to see a side of God's personality
that you never knew was there.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Now you say that, therefore, that what you're doing does
sort of reveal God and God's personality to you.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
But not in the way that you could write down
as a theological treatise. Rather, it's more, okay, I recognize this,
I get the feeling for that. One of the great
lines that was a mathematician. I think John D. Neumann,
who once said you never understand mathematics, you just get
used to it. I think that's true about God. I
think that's true about the physical universe. You don't understand

(03:34):
it any more than you want to understand your spouse
or your best friend. They're not you know, somebody who
you can check off and yep, got all the answers here. Rather,
they're things you love that you want to experience, and
the more you experience, the more new things you find,
and the more new things you find, the more you
love them in ways that it's really hard to put
to words.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
So how do you feel about these people that try
to use science to justify their interpretation of the Bible
and the or even prove the existence of God.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Well, they're they're building house on sand because the way
science works is it's in this constant struggle to find
out where it was wrong, and science is all about saying,
all right, I think I understand this. I'm going to
make that prediction and see if it works, and if
it does work, I go rat So, I haven't learned anything.

(04:27):
But if it turns out I was wrong, then you
get really excited. You go, Okay, I've learned something new.
But in the process, it means the science that I
thought I knew back when I was trying to glue
it to genesis or something turns out to be wrong.
At which point that gluing is wrong. If that's why
you believe in God, then that God that you believe

(04:48):
in is going to be a false God.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Okay, So what about these people that I sort of
I think they call them apologists and things who will
give you a raft of reasons about why you should
believe in God? Are they real or are they just?
Or are they likely to be just very fairly flimsy.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Here's where my science helps me to understand. When I'm
confronted with a scientific problem, a science, how does this work?
I don't start out with experiments in reason and come
to a conclusion. Rather, I look at it and I go,
I'll bet you it's that. Let's see. And after I've
made that leap, which you may want to call a

(05:29):
leap of faith, then you can go back and stack
up the bit of logic and see if you can
figure out a way to get from here to there.
I think the apologists are doing the same thing. They
already believe in God because they've already experienced God, and
they're using the apologetics as a way to try to
show people how you can find a God. But it's

(05:50):
a god they'd already left to it's not a God
that they derived at the end of their logic.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Do logic.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
I don't trust my logic well enough care does disuppart
my life to it? But that call of God?

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, So how did you get to faith? I mean
I'm assuming that you may have been brought up as
a Catholic and sort of it's a similated it.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
I mean, Irish mom, Italian dad. Oh yeah, very Catholic.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Doomed, doomed indeed.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
And it was a wonderful time to be growing up.
It was the years after the war. I'm a baby
boom kid. At that time, people didn't talk about a
break between faith and science because faith and science what
won us the war, and they were very happy together.
The nuns taught us the science and the physics and
the astronomy, and there was this sense of unlimited possibilities.

(06:40):
So I grew up immersed in a universe where you
could see God, and you wouldn't doubt God any more
than you would doubt the fact that the sun's overhead,
even though growing up in Michigan often you don't see
the sun because of all the clouds.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
You had to take it on faith, You had to
take it on faith.

Speaker 3 (06:54):
Yeah, but you get enough glimpses of the sun to
know you're not totally wrong. I was not somebody who
went through an atheist phase, and I was not somebody
who went through a skeptic science phase. I did go
through a phase where I was one during his science
worth doing, but I never doubted that it was a
way of getting me some corner of the truth.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
So it didn't You didn't say, ah, I see this,
I see this, I see this. Therefore God, it was
just always God was always in your corner. But then,
how can someone who hasn't been raised in that type
of background become convinced that there is a God? If
people if you can't show them sort of things from

(07:38):
science evidence, how do you do how do you how
do you create faith in someone who doesn't have it?

Speaker 3 (07:45):
Then what it really means is identifying the things you've
experienced that you didn't have a word for with. Oh
that's what they were talking about when they're talking about
the love of God. Oh that's what they're talking about
when they're talking about the transcendent. There's there's a lovely
book A fellow named Francis Spufford wrote a few years

(08:05):
ago called unapologetic any talking about the emotional sense that
faith and religion gives you. And it's the whole person
who's going to be a person of faith, not just
the brain, not just the heart, not just the fears.
It's the whole person. It's part of your history. I

(08:26):
think if you had a wonderful set of parents like
I did, then understanding God as a good parent is
really easy to jump to make If your parents were terrible,
then you've got a different You've got to find a
different route to get to God. But the thing that
you're looking for at three o'clock in the morning, when
you're tossing and turning in bed, and the thing inside

(08:46):
you that makes you want to look for that thing,
those are the two elements that immediately tell you there's
something more going on. Incidentally, that's not original with me.
That was Carl Ronner.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Okay, so we'll talk more after this break about your
journey into science, your journey into Jesuits. I sort of
figured that my life is hard enough. Do I really
want to what I really want to sign up with
an order that is going to make me enforced into
all sorts of disciplines and deny me a whole lot

(09:17):
of things. I believe your father is in pr You're
going to have to do some real hard pr work
to convince me that would ever be a good move.
But I'm looking forward to talking to you after the break.
This is real life on news Talks. I'm John John Cowen. Look,
I can't even say I'm my own name. Right there,
I'm John Cowen talking to a brother, Guy.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Consolman Intelligent interviews with interesting people. It's real life on
news Talks.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
It be.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
Welcome back to real life. I'm John Cowen talking with
brother Guy CONSOLMANO, a distinguished astronomer who for ten years
has been the director at the Vatican Observatory in Rome.
And You've picked a lovely bit of music I've never
heard before. What are we listening to?

Speaker 3 (10:17):
It's called Envy of Angels. It's my favorite New Zealand group,
which is probably my only New Zealand group, the Mutton
Birds ah and I heard them perform live at Canterburra
University in the New Year's ninety six ninety seven, having
just come off of the ice in Antarctica where I
was searching for meteorites.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Right, okay, that's a string of words that not many
people can put together. You know that you've just been
Antarctica looking for meteorites, and so that's one of your
areas of interest. Why does the Vatican have an observatory
and what's the sort of work that you do there.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
Well, the pr reason is to show the world that
the Church supports science. So we got two jobs. One
is to do the science and the other is to
show the world. And I do a little bit of both.
That's why I've got the popular books to show the world.
But if I wasn't doing the science, have nothing to show, right.
And that song envy of angels, the line, which I

(11:13):
believe comes from a New Zealand poet, really is saying
that as created beings part of this physical universe, the
angels should be envious of us because we get to
have chocolate, we get to touch pieces of outer space.
We I mean, this life is so wonderful that God

(11:35):
said his only son to be part of it. You know,
he didn't become an angel, he became part of this
physical universe. The physical universe is where we encounter God,
where we have fun, and that's the joy of being
a scientist.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Okay, now you talk about being having fun in your
science and the joy of that. What's the joy of
being a Jesuit brother? And I don't quite understand the
distinction between a brother and a priest not being Catholic,
but I understand you'd be living a life of discipline
and living in the community and the whole lot of
things you can't do and stuck there for life. What well,

(12:11):
you just to drive you there.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
You just described being married, of course, and you do
it because you love the person you're married to, you hope.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
The Juesuit brother is somebody who is living in the
community but not ordained. So I don't have the rights
and necessities of leading public prayer. I don't say mass,
I don't hear confessions. I don't do the sacramental work.
I'm supporting the work of the community. And brothers tend
to be people like me who are really good at

(12:40):
one thing. I'm a really good scientist and not necessarily
good at other things. You know, if you came to
me with your problems, I'd be thinking, why is he
telling me this? Yeah, what do you think? I'm a nerd?

Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah? Okay? And you considered being a priest but thought no,
that's not me.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
I considered being a priest, and God in prayer said, no,
you've got to be kidding. You'd be terrible at that,
which was really a shock because I was eighteen years
old and not used to having God tell me things.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
Oh, I wish a whole lot more clergy heard that,
wass lee. But anyhow, so you became a So why
did you say, Okay, what can you do as a
brother that you couldn't do as a regular scientist serving
God wherever you're it as a light person.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
First of all, the things that I gave up were
basically the things that I wasn't interested in. I grew
up in a fairly comfortable household in Michigan, so I
didn't have that hunger to have things. My education was
paid for, I didn't have debts to worry about. My
parents had good pensions. I didn't have to worry about
supporting them. I had dated for twenty years, and I

(13:43):
was discovering that every time we broke up. You know,
I broke up with somebody, it was like, oh, thank Heavens,
I don't have to deal with her anymore, which is
a shame because in fact, I dated some wonderful people,
and they were smart enough not to marry me. But
also it made me realize, while I appreciate that and
I have my married friends who have fabulous lives, that

(14:05):
wasn't for me. And it took twenty years to figure
that out.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Also, so how will you when you became a brother.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
I was thirty seven when I entered the Novisian Yeah,
I'd been to a scientist for about twenty years. The
interesting thing being a scientist at the Vatican Observatory compared
to when I was living off a NASA grant was
number one. My assignment from the director back then was
do good science. Period. I didn't have to worry about

(14:35):
what was NASA going to pay for. I didn't have
to worry about writing grants. I didn't have to worry
about coming up with results after three years or else
the grant won't be renewed. I could choose the kind
of science that I saw nobody else was doing that
might take ten years or longer to come to fruition,
but which would really contribute to the field. In my case,

(14:55):
I love meteorites. The Vatican had a collection of all
the different types of metiaorites donated to them from a
wealthy French nobleman back in the nineteen twenties, and I
started making the physical p property measurements density porosity, magnetic properties,
thermal properties that now everybody uses because no one had

(15:16):
been able to make those measurements because it takes ten
to twenty years to really get a good database together.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
After ten or twenty years of measuring the density of meteorite,
you're still having fun.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
Absolutely. One of the great things we've started doing was
to measure their heat capacity, and you do that by
seeing how much liquid nitrogen gets boiled off of a
meteorite when it cools down, which means you get to
play with the meteorites and the liquid nitrogen.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
By the way, have you ever used liquid nitrogen to
make ice scream? I'll tell you the recipe you have
already of course, yes, fantastic.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
Every nerd knows how to do that.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Now you travel, you've you've you've got another observatory in Tucson.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
We have a telescope in Tucson and a foundation that
pays for it. Because of course it's easy to get
a million dollars or five million dollars to build a telescope, but.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
To get a little bit.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
But it's hard because you can put a plaque on
the telescope, but nobody's going to put a plaque on
you know, this oil in this oil filter was you know,
donated by so to come up with the annual money
to maintain it so we can continue to do the science.
That's my real job at this point as president of
the foundation, right. But in the same time, I continue
to do the science.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Okay. And you write books. I mean I've I've been
preparing for the night. I've been browsing through Brother astronom Aris,
talking to a friend of mine who's very excited that
you're coming on because he's an amateur astronomer. And he says, oh,
turn left, Ryan, and you know, he was excited about that.

(16:47):
And you've written one written as a dialogue, which is
what is it? What would you baptize the next to terrestrial?

Speaker 3 (16:55):
I've got a new one that's out in America now,
which will be coming here soon, called a Jesuit Guide
to the Stars.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Okay, there is one. Yeah, I suppose you've written it. Yes.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
They came to me with the title and said, we
got a great title. Write the book.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
So I did okay, So do you have insights when
you're doing your science that a non religious person wouldn't have.
I mean, as the answers in the back of the
book that you've got that reading the Bible is alongside
the Book of Nature.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Well, one insight that you have when you're a religious
person you don't have to be a Jesuit. One of
the surprising things I found out when I became a
Jesuit was how many of my friends were also church boys.
In the scientific world, yeah, you find that you want
to find atheists, go look at the journalists. Okay, but

(17:46):
astronomy scientist, how can you look at this universe and
not be amazed by it? But the insight being religious
is you can identify that amazement with the love of
a creator as a line that I've stolen from some place.
Even if you don't believe in God, if you're a scientist,
you have to believe in Oh my God, because that

(18:08):
of discovery and joy, that's what fees you, that's what
makes you keep doing it.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Okay, Now, what of a sort of the challenges that
a lot of people that have a sort of a
bit of an education and perhaps a little bit of religion,
they would see things like, you know, yeah, I believe
in God because he explains the things I can't explain.
Newton's type of God that the god of the gaps,
the god of the gaps, and those gaps are getting
pretty skinny. Yep. As science, it certainly doesn't have everythink.

(18:37):
But those gaps where God was needed to explain the
thunder or whatever, they're not there anymore.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
Those gaps were the same gaps that the Romans were
trying to figure out why is there lightning? And they
proposed a god of lightning. So the God who's going
to fill your gaps is a nature god. It's a
pagan god. It's not the God of love, it's not
the God of scripture.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
So does God interact with this universe at all in
an imminent physical way?

Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yes, how exactly well way for sure, through us human beings.
By asking us little bundles of flesh and free will
to do something or not do something, we physically change
the universe.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah okay, so does that could that ever be scientifically measurable?

Speaker 3 (19:30):
The question? Really, that's a great question. That's one that
I haven't come across. So congratulations, thank you. I mean
it's not measurable, and science can only measure the things
that are measurable. But that's why you can't prove free will.
You can just say, if there's no free will, then
it's a boring question. You know, you had to believe
that goes though the universe made you believe no free will,

(19:54):
and you know, for all I know that could be true,
but I don't believe it because it would be a
boring universe to live that way.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Okay, popping back to the Vatican, Okay, you spent half
a year there hanging out with I think is it
about a dozen other.

Speaker 3 (20:11):
We've got a dozen astronomers. We're all Jesuits, priests and brothers.
We come from four continents, seven countries. We have working
in fields from the mathematics of quantum gravity to classifying
dust as it hits the top of the Earth's atmosphere
and the entire universe in between.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
Right now, you've just you've worked with You've had three popes,
onto a fourth, on to a fourth and he's another Midwesterner.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
Yeah, well takeover.

Speaker 2 (20:40):
It's a if you meet him.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
I have met him, but only once. We have a
summer school every two years, and so our school this
year had already arranged to have an audience with Pope Francis,
and then, of course Francis died Leo kept the appointment.
He met with us. He had a wonderful set of
comments that made it clear that this was his Augustinian

(21:03):
view of the world coming through. So it's not just
like he was reading a piece of paper somebody.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Him he's no idea what an august Anian point of
view would be.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
Well, he was an Augustinian before, and so that kind
of theology and the ideas that's in Augustine. Yeah, we're
permeating the common city who looked at the university who
wrote a wonderful book called on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis,
which blows away modern literalists, right, even though I wrote
it in the year four hundred. He obviously he also

(21:33):
spends his summers now back in Castle Gondolfha, which is
where our headquarters is, right And while I was on
retreat in Australia a couple of weeks ago, he showed
up and said, hey, can I look through the telescope?
Can I see the moon? So yeah, he's interested in
what we're doing.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
It's been great talking with you, and I wish you
all the best for your travels. I believe that that's
a big part of your world and we've got to
go now. But as I say, I wish you all
the best. It's been fascinating looking at your material on YouTube.
Do look him up on YouTube. He's got lots and
lots of great little interviews and things, brother Guy Consolmanno

(22:08):
and lots of books as well, and I've been enjoying
browsing through. Only got through about halfway through two of them,
and well worth having a read. Thank you so much,
brother Guy.

Speaker 3 (22:19):
It's always a late to be in New Zealand.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
I look forward to being back next Sunday night. And
the song we're going.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
Out on is Astronomy Dominie, which was a Pink Floyd
song before they were famous that I would listen to
as I was writing my thesis at MI t on
the very moons that they're singing.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
About fantastic, this is real life. I'm John Cown, looking
forward to being back next week.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
Gain songs whim.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Stay said as snow as.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
My mind.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
The songs so I see the fund the blow.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
For more from News Talk set B listen live on
air or online, and keep our shows with you wherever
you go with our podcasts on iHeartRadio