Vatican Astronomer Discusses the Harmony Between Science and Faith

In a lively lecture on big questions about science, faith and the evolution of the cosmos, the director of the Vatican Observatory told a packed auditorium at the AAAS on 27 March that science is quite capable of explaining the remarkable complexity of the natural world without reference to an intelligent designer.

The Rev. George V. Coyne said modern science has revealed a cosmos shaped by the interplay of randomness and necessity over the nearly 14 billion years since the Big Bang, a world of such fertile chemical variety that the emergence of life was inevitable.

Coyne argues that intelligent design—the notion that there is empirical evidence for the existence of an intelligent agent beyond nature—actually belittles God by requiring divine action to explain unresolved questions about the material world.

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