Guy Consolmagno > Quotes

“(A Jesuit and a Franciscan are walking through a garden, silently engaged in prayer, when the Jesuit pulls out and lights up a big cigar. The Franciscan whispers, “My spiritual director says one should not smoke while one prays.” The Jesuit replies, “Mine said it’s all right if I pray while I smoke.”)”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“Except they kept asking me questions like 'What is your biggest source of conflict about the Pope?' Or 'Has the Pope ever tried to suppress your scientific work?' Completely out of left field!
"They didn't want to hear me tell them how much Pope Benedict supported the Vatican Observatory and its scientific work. So, finally, frustrated that they weren't getting the story they wanted out of me, one of them asked, 'Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?'
"What did you answer?"
"Only if she asks!"
"I love it! How did they react?"
"They all got a good laugh, which is what I intended. And then, the next day, they all ran my joke as if it were a straight story, as if I had made some sort of official Vatican pronouncement about aliens.”
― Guy Consolmagno, SJ

“Few of us have the power to heal broken legs, but we all have the power to forgive our neighbor. Yet how often do we do so?”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“In On the Incarnation Athanaseus explicitly states that creation is good, and that it is a path to lead us to God. He argues against those who assume creation is evil. And he brings forth the insight that by participating personally in His creation, God has elevated the status of nature. By implication, he maintains that the honor and duty of one who knows and loves God is to know and love His creation.”
― Guy Consolmagno, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist

“Everyone has a religion, whether they admit it or not. For some it’s Catholicism; for others, Vegetarianism or Elvis or Linux/Macintosh/Windows.”
― Guy Consolmagno, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist

“Nothing within the universe itself can exist to explain the fact that it exists.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“For what it’s worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“Beauty is worth looking for.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“Edwin tells us that he became an atheist in college; but as he grew to know the limits of science and then began seeing what he called “too many coincidences” in the universe, his atheism slipped to agnosticism. Then, he recalls, a professor showed him that you could find truth in poetry and once said to him that “an agnostic is an atheist with no courage.” That clearly shook Edwin’s easy agnosticism.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“To put it another way, I am not trying to convince you; I am trying to convince myself.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“true art, be it painting or novel or drama or music, selects and arranges.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“he is able to appear inside locked rooms and come and go in ways an ordinary body could not do.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“The whole of his argument centers on this fact; having established that creation can contain God, and show us the path to God, Athanasius now uses the statement that man is a part of creation to argue that the Incarnation is reasonable, that God can be present in the person of the man Jesus.”
― Guy Consolmagno, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist

“I do not mean to deny the existence and importance of rules. A techie understands the value of rules; any attempt to reduce religion to a set of “feel-good” emotions, besides being dishonest, would imply to a scientist or an engineer that religion is without substance and thus devoid of worth. And though a typical techie would love to be an expert in everything, the more realistic among us realize that there are times when we’re forced to rely on the expertise of others. For many of us, religion is one of those times. That’s when we depend on rules to guide us.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“Is it easier to say, `Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, `Take up your pallet and walk'?" Ouch. Few of us have the power to heal broken legs, but we all have the power to forgive our neighbor. Yet how often do we do so?”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“If there’s one thing I hate about religion books, it’s that arrogant attitude of smug satisfaction that we get when we think we’ve produced the ultimate answers to all the deep questions that have bothered the greatest thinkers of the ages. If the answers were so simple, those questions wouldn’t still be with us.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“But I want more. I want reasons to have faith in my faith, to have a reasonable confidence that there is actually truth in what my religion teaches me about God and my relation to God. And that faith has to be based on something within myself that I already trust: it has to be consonant with my experience of the universe and my abilities to reason about that universe.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“misguided to ask whether the Big Bang theory would provide evidence for or against a scriptural story of Creation; the Big Bang Theory is a scientific theory, concerned with physical causes that are proximate and contingent. And it’s wrong to ask whether a scriptural story of Creation would provide evidence for or against the Big Bang theory; scriptural stories of Creation are concerned with ultimate origins and with humanity’s personal relationship with God. Those are the wrong questions for the tools at hand.”
― Guy Consolmagno, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: . . . and Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-box at the Vatican Observatory

“Some fundamentalists have done their best to turn the term Christian into a dirty word, signifying all that is narrow-minded and bigoted and self-righteous. But then, a hundred years ago, the sloppy liberals at the other end of the philosophical spectrum tried to turn it into a formless generic term, where a “Christian” was anyone who had ever had an occasional urge to be a nice guy.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion

“No matter how deeply we believe God is involved in our religion, its tenets are expressed in human words by human teachers and fall on our own undeniably limited human ears. Our understanding of God is always incomplete; even Saint Paul insisted he saw only “through a glass, darkly.” Indeed, Catholic theology carefully notes that all doctrine, no matter how authoritative, embodying divine truth, still requires interpretation because our understanding of that truth is expressed in a given time and in a historically conditioned language and culture.”
― Guy Consolmagno, God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion