Despite being a leading scientist studying data from the Philae space probe, Monica Grady tells Peter Stanford that she is very much grounded in her faith
Science and religion do not always sit comfortably together, as Galileo found to his cost in the seventeenth century at the hands of the Inquisition, and as militant atheists among our most eminent scientists are today fond of proclaiming loudly. Cradle Catholic Monica Grady, however, manages to combine both without too much bother.
“Maybe I just don’t think too deeply about things,” she chuckles with that warm, infectious laugh we have been hearing so much of late. As Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University, Grady was launched into the public consciousness last November when, live in front of the cameras, she greeted the landing of the Philae robot probe on a distant comet with an ebullient display of jumps, fist pumps and a few tears. She even hugged the BBC’s science editor. The footage went viral on the internet.
“I am very happy to require evidence for the science that I do when I am looking at a piece of asteroid,” she says, “or trying to learn about comets, but I don’t need any evidence when it comes to my faith. That’s what faith is. It doesn’t require evidence.”
User Comments (1)
The whole of evolution, cosmological and biological, i.e. the universe as we know it, is flawed – permeated by natural evil as well as good. So Paradise, as described in Genesis, could not have been an historical Garden of Eden on Earth where Adam and Eve enjoyed immortal life, free of disorder, pain, disease and death. These flaws in creation were present in all living forms, before homo sapiens evolved
The published conclusions of the2009 Vatican conference on Darwin support evolution. While Catholic scientists and theologians agree ‘not an iota, or a dot’ (Mt 5.18) of scripture may be changed, they are now inching towards an agreed reinterpretation of part of Genesis, i.e. Original Sin, as seen in the context of evolution
a. Orthodox understanding is: Evolution of a finite universe and all life. Then Original Sin and the fall of humanity in Adam and Eve as an historical event (in Space-time) on planet Earth.
b. The new approach is: Fall of a transcendental design or idea of creation (all matter and all life) and actualization of this design via flawed evolution in the exile of the finite constraints of space-time.
Faith and science reconciled! Truth can not contradict truth
Q.E.D