There you go, scientists who are also Catholic clergy: Modelling the origin of time: science and religion at “the horizon of mystery”.
Does science make belief in God obsolete? Cosmologist and mathematician Michal Heller’s answer to this ‘Big Question’ this year won him the world’s largest monetary prize given to an individual, the Templeton Prize. On Encounter Professor Heller explores ‘creative tensions’ between science and religion and talks about his research for a quantum gravity theory that might explain the Planck Epoch. And astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ has things to say about meteorites, the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan, and beauty.
I am sure some will quarrel with much that was said, but it is also fair to say none of it resembled the vulgar creationism or “intelligent design” we associate with fundamentalists.
Michal Heller:…the doctrine of creation is much richer than identifying it with the initial singularity. Namely, the traditional doctrine of creation says that creation is not just a single moment or single act but it is a process which lasts always. So the creation is a very special relationship between God and the universe: God is giving the existence to the universe and if at any moment God would cease giving the existence to the world it would collapse to nothingness. So, the creation of the universe is not only the initiation of the existence but of the future history.
I think that the best description of the Christian idea of creation is in the form of a question, the question which was formulated by [the] famous philosopher Leibniz and he asked the following question: Why there exists something rather than nothing? This is a very important question and the answer to is – because God has created something. This something is not only the material world. This something is also the set of physical laws which govern that universe. This is why Einstein was used to say – Einstein said, I want to know only one thing – which was the mind of God when he was creating the universe?
Margaret Coffey: So in the end does your faith reside in a question rather than in a God that can be described in a specific sort of language?
Michal Heller: There are some circles in our society, and unfortunately these circles are growing especially perhaps in the United States but also in Europe, in which the idea of God, which is kind of obligatory in that circles [sic], is very naïve. It is a kind of mechanistic God, which of course does not fit into the scientific image of the world and many people – and I suspect that it’s Dawkins case – rejects such an idea of God and they are right because such a god as they imagine does not exist. God is something much, much bigger.
I think that faith in general, religious faith, is always based on questions. The very fundament of religion is asking questions about the meaning of life, about the existence of the universe, why it exists rather than not, what is after our death, especially the meaning of life.
I oppose faith to certainty myself; the thirst for certainty is understandable, but very dangerous — as I have said before. It is also, I suspect, very presumptuous.
Heller is Polish, by the way; hence an occasional oddity in his English — which is far better than my Polish of course. 
The site referenced at the top has some interesting links. The discussion also serves as not a bad introduction to the current state of cosmology.
Posted by Encounter - 20 July 2008 - science and religion at "the horizon of mystery" Video on July 24, 2008 at 10:24 am
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Posted by DavidG. on July 25, 2008 at 7:52 am
It’s interesting, this quirky ongoing need that humans have to invent then believe in some god or other.
We are still little better than primitive, superstitious savages really.
Posted by ninglun on July 25, 2008 at 10:09 am
I don’t think the men who appear in that program can fairly be classed as little better than primitive, superstitious savages. If we all gave up belief in God (or gods) tomorrow, I doubt very much that the world’s problems would be much nearer solution, though I am all in favour of the demise of dogmatism and false certainty — of whatever kind, including totally confident atheism.
Posted by DavidG. on July 25, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Neil, why do you think humans during the last ten thousand years have invented all manner of gods, hundreds of them in fact? Is it a genetic predisposition? Does it prove conclusively that we are not rational beings given there is not a scrap of evidence to support any of it? Is religion merely an elaborate device which allows some humans to avoid the reality of life?
And why do you claim that confident atheism is a false certainty? What is your proof for this claim (by proof I mean scientific proof not semantic trickery)?
Cheers.
Posted by Neil on July 25, 2008 at 6:00 pm
There is no possibility of any kind of proof (scientific or otherwise) one way or the other — except where hubris may take us — in this matter. Hence my assertion of false certainty. All you can have is some sense of probability. It must be even harder if indeed we are genetically not rational beings!
You may believe what you like. Doesn’t worry me.
Posted by AV on July 28, 2008 at 12:11 am
In Neil’s defence–and I’m probably committing an appeal to authority here–I think his position regarding certainty about the non-existence of gods is not all that far removed from that of Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion.
In David’s defence, I don’t think one needs to be certain about the non-existence of gods in order to be a confident atheist, anymore than one needs to be certain about the non-existence of fairies in order to be confident that they are unlikely to exist. Given the lack of evidence in favour of the existence of either of these entities, I feel quite justified in my lack of belief in them.
This is territory we’ve covered a thousand times before, and I’m sure Neil is quite bored by it, but I just wanted to point out that there is a difference between confidence and certainty.
Posted by Bruce on July 28, 2008 at 1:24 am
…but I just wanted to point out that there is a difference between confidence and certainty.
Confidence is something that can often be measured statistically. Certainty isn’t. Certainty is something that some people (usually those with a low tolerance to ambiguity) convince themselves is inferred by confidence. Classical inductivism being an example.
Popper himself pointed out that this leads to dogmatism (amongst other things) which got David Stove (an inductivist) all riled up.
In any case, the subject matter is still more philosophy than science (as yet), so I’m not quick to entertain conclusions. Suffice to say, recent work by Hawking and co eloquently avoids the need for Leibniz’s question, at least philosophically. Testable predictions are still being worked on.
As for that God thing that is supposedly much, much bigger, given its difference to other Gods and the role they play, I’m not sure “God” is the right word. If Hawking is right, “wave function” may be the right term and that is even more different.
I don’t consider the God hypothesis to be scientific hypothesis, nor do I consider Heller’s view of science entirely correct (passing philosophy off as science), so I don’t subscribe to either his solution, nor to the question he intended to answer!
So much of this, as yet, isn’t even wrong!
Posted by Neil on July 28, 2008 at 8:33 am
Thank you both for your contributions which do add to the interest of my post, though AV’s last point is not far from the truth. In my own comments above I was reacting to what I perceive as dogmatism from David, which I would have thought was obvious.
As for God, it also must be clear that my starting point is really the quite unjustifiable assumption, strictly speaking, that God exists — though I am very loath to be pinned down on what those words actually signify; I do not assume the adequacy of human language or the human mind to make much sense of such things. When it comes to much of the tradition about God I am agnostic, even in some respects an atheist, if the latter term includes confidence that a person sitting on a throne above the sky does not exist. I would thus have more in common with someone like Bishop Spong than I would have with either person featured in that edition of Encounter. Nonetheless, I found what they had to say was of interest.
I do find of interest another Catholic: Diarmuid O’Murchu. I am more poet than philosopher or theologian, by which I do not mean to sound pretentious; it is a cast of mind I am referring to. Fortunately I am in a church where poets are welcome, it seems.
I’m afraid I rather endorse again something I said in 2006 when reviewing the movie of Les Murray’s poem “Widower in the Country”:
Posted by AV on July 28, 2008 at 10:37 am
Snobs mind us off religion, nowadays, if they can. Fuck them. I wish you, God.
I must be missing something here, Ninglun. This statement seems to me like a decidedly chip-on-the-shoulder reaction to non-theism, and if “gut theology” has any virtues at all, the sentence above does very little to recommend them.
Indeed, it’s reminiscent of the kind of chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes we’ve encountered on various fronts of the culture wars: esp. the teaching of English, the teaching of evolution, global warming, refugees, and so on. I’m surprised to find you endorsing it, so I can only infer that I must be misreading something. Could you clarify?
Posted by Neil on July 28, 2008 at 11:00 am
No, because I “clarified” in that comment already — except to say it is not “chip on the shoulder” to use that quote, Les Murray, or rather the voice in the movie, not me — see the entry I linked it to, and, yes, I suspect you are misreading something. I am not put out though; you’ve been reading this blog long enough to know where I am coming from. I am being right-brained, Arthur… And those simple words resonate for me, but not with the resonance you have inferred. I commend paragraphs 2 and 3 of my previous comment, which are highly unsatisfactory, of course, but I don’t recant at all. Those paragraphs are the substance of the comment after all; the last sentence is a tag or coat-trail…
I fear you have done the old “react to the last line” trick here just a bit, so I am now providing another last line…
Bugger the “culture wars” trope; I think I have been eminently clear and committed on that front, here in recent years and in my working life before that — for a decade at least! But in my own way, by my own lights…
Posted by AV on July 28, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I fear you have done the old “react to the last line” trick here just a bit
No, because I wasn’t reading your entire comment in the light of that last line.
Posted by Bruce on July 29, 2008 at 1:27 am
In my own comments above I was reacting to what I perceive as dogmatism from David, which I would have thought was obvious.
I would have thought that you would have thought that it was obvious as well, hence why I didn’t directly address it!