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| Searching the heavens Vatican astronomer sees hand of God in the stars By Michelle Martin staff writer When Jesuit Father George V. Coyne was a young seminarian, just starting his study of theology, he wrote to tell his his provincial superior he wanted to get close to the heavens another way: as an astronaut. As the story goes, the provincial wrote back, “But George, if I let you go, then everyone will want to go.” Still, he said yes. “So I went to the NASA training center,” said Coyne, some 40 years later. “And I was there for a month before somebody noticed I wore eyeglasses and sent me back.” Coyne, 69, now explores space with a telescope instead of a rocket ship. As director of the Vatican Observatory for the last 24 years, the Baltimore native has spearheaded the construction of Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope at the Mount Graham International Observatory near Tucson—with the highest quality optical mirror on the face of the earth, he said. Coyne also has developed a close relationship with astronomers at the University of Arizona. His own academic specialty is polarimetrics, or measuring the polarity of light, a technique he has used to study stars, interstellar matter and other heavenly bodies. Of his brief foray into the space program, Coyne said, “That was when I was young and even more foolish than I am now.” The Soviets had launched Sputnik just when Coyne began his graduate work in astronomy, and he had done his doctorate on the chemistry of the lunar surface. Then, when he was in his first year of theology study, he heard that NASA wanted scientists for a possible moon landing. Coyne said that was enough to make him agree to postpone his theology studies and eventual ordination. It turned out that didn’t happen, and Coyne said his Jesuit vocation has turned out to be far more important to him than his scientific career. “If I were not a scientist, I would still be a Jesuit and a believer,” Coyne said. “I can imagine not being a scientist, but I can’t imagine not being a Jesuit.” A frequent speaker on issues of science and faith, Coyne’s academic work often brings him face to face with scientific thought on the origins of the universe. Such theories have changed his perception of God—how else can a person try to understand the divine through but the prism of his own experience? he asks—but his science and faith have never come into conflict. Instead, his scientific understanding of the way the world works has infused his spiritual and prayer life. “When I was a young child going through grammar school, I was taught that God created the universe,” he said. “What kind of God would create this kind of universe?” The answer, he said, is not the God of Isaac Newton, the watchmaker who created the world, wound it up and watched it go. The universe Coyne knows doesn’t fit that image of creation. “It’s evolving—physically evolving, chemically evolving, biologically evolving,” Coyne said. “The universe has a certain creativity of its own. Human life came to be because of necessary processes, chance processes and what I call opportunity. God made a universe that held a certain opportunity.” And for human life to arise from the stuff of stars—all 10 to the 22nd power of them—took the vast majority of the universe’s 15 billion years, with various kinds of chemicals zooming through the void, eventually bumping into one another and combining in ways that allowed for complex life to happen. “As the universe ages, you get more complicated molecules, and eventually you get the human brain,” Coyne said. “Did God do this? Do I need God to make the human brain? “As a scientist, I can get completely satisfactory answers without bringing God into the picture. But I find it difficult to accept. It’s a mystery that the universe could come from nothing. … Once I believe in God—and God gave (faith in) himself to me gratuitously—it’s not just a rational process. I can’t prove to you that God exists, but you can’t prove to me that he or she doesn’t. … “The God I now believe in is very different from the God the sisters taught me about. He’s not keeping control of everything. The universe has a dynamism about it, and even the Creator can’t know everything. I see God with the universe as sort of hoping and wishing and setting things up so there’s a strong possibility for human life. There’s a precariousness about that, but there’s also a creativity about it. God with respect to the universe is like a parent with a child. You have to educate that child, but there comes a time when they have to make their own choices.” One of 10 children, Coyne knows about the love that can exist within a family, and that it isn’t always perfect. But the analogy is the only way he knows to describe how he understands God and God’s relationship to the world. “I can be challenged for saying what you’re doing is making God in your own image and likeness,” Coyne said. “But God is far greater than anything we can understand him or her to be.” Being one of 10 children meant Coyne’s parents could not afford to send him to Loyola, the local Jesuit high school. But that didn’t stop his eighth-grade teacher, who spent three months of Saturdays drilling him on old versions of the school’s scholarship exam, an investment that paid off. “It clearly was not a question of intelligence, but of being trained like Pavlov’s dogs,” Coyne said. That necessary process—getting into a Jesuit high school—gave the teenage Coyne the opportunity to fall for what he saw as the Jesuit lifestyle among the scholastics who taught there. Scholastics—young Jesuits who had finished their undergraduate training but not yet embarked on theology training or ordination—worked hard but also had a good time together. Coyne wanted to be like them, he said, the same way a Little League slugger might have wanted to be like Babe Ruth, and he entered the order right after high school. From that seed of hero worship, Coyne’s Jesuit vocation has grown deep roots and blossomed. “I don’t know how I would function as a happy person if I were not a Jesuit,” he said. “In a way, it means more to me than being a priest.” If he were not a Jesuit, Coyne might not even be a scientist, even though his attraction to astronomy did conflicted with the rules of his order. As a seminarian studying Greek and Latin, before getting a graduate degree in astronomy at Georgetown University, he and his classmates were restricted to reading the classics. But one professor, Jesuit Father Hayne Martin, had a way of moving off onto tangents, especially into practical astronomy. He soon noticed that Coyne’s interest reached a zenith on those occasions, and offered to teach him more. To do that, Martin gave Coyne his own public library card, and a flashlight so he could read about the radio waves coming from the stars after dark, under his bedclothes. Both men were scolded when the rector of the seminary spotted Coyne carrying astornomy books, but Martin did not give up his instruction, and Coyne learned to use a book bag. “He was the best teacher I ever had,” said Coyne, who has taught at the college level for years and serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona. “First, he recognized my interest. Second, he knew he had to feed it while it was there. And third, it was forbidden fruit, so it was all the more interesting.” His interest has only continued to grow as the Hubble Space Telescope has sent back images of distant stars, images coming from so many light-years away that they really are the baby pictures of the universe. The Vatican Observatory’s Advanced Technology Telescope cannot see anywhere near as far, but it provides exceedingly high-quality pictures of galaxies and stars much closer to home—and thus, much nearer our astronomical age. The two sets of images can help show how the cosmos changes over time, Coyne said. “We’re seeing parts of the universe, objects in the universe we never saw before,” he said. “And the more we see, the more we know, the more ignorant we are.” Front Page | Digest | Cardinal | Interview |
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