{"id":43241,"date":"2013-03-26T00:37:33","date_gmt":"2013-03-26T07:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=43241"},"modified":"2014-12-30T00:31:01","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T07:31:01","slug":"will-francins-inspire-more-priest-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2013\/03\/will-francins-inspire-more-priest-scientists.html","title":{"rendered":"Will Francis Inspire More Priest-Scientists?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

John Farrell <\/a>has an interesting speculation about the influence Pope Francis might have inspiring more priests with an interest in the sciences:<\/p>\n

This week\u2019s issue of Nature notes with approval<\/a> that the new Pope Francis<\/a> has a background in science.<\/p>\n

A pope who\u2019s also a scientist is rare. But these days even parish priests who are scientists are not exactly common.<\/p>\n

To be sure, everyone knows the name of Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics. And there\u2019s my hero, the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lema\u00eetre<\/a>, who came up with version 1.0 of The Big Bang.<\/p>\n

But there used to be many more.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, Physicist and author Stephen Barr discussed<\/a> the many contributions that Catholic priests made to science in the early days of the Scientific Revolution. And they are not insignificant.<\/p>\n

The first asteroid was discovered by a priest named Giuseppe Piazzi<\/a>. Fr. Ren\u00e9-Just H\u00e4uy<\/a> is called the \u201cfather of crystallography.\u201d Fr. Christoph Scheiner<\/a> was one of the discoverers of sunspots and discovered the rotation of the sun on its axis.<\/p>\n

An extremely important effect in physics called the \u201cdiffraction\u201d of light was discovered by Fr. Francesco Grimaldi<\/a> in the seventeenth century (something no physics textbook that I have ever seen bothers to mention, so that few scientists are aware of it). One of the top biologists in the world in the eighteenth century was Fr. Lazzaro Spallanzani<\/a>. Among his many accomplishments was to disprove the theory of \u201cspontaneous generation.\u201d (Pasteur later made use of Spallanzani\u2019s work in doing his own famous experiments disproving spontaneous generation.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He goes on to discuss Pius X\u2019s wariness about the sciences, but I\u2019m not so sure I buy the notion that he was \u201canti-intellectual\u201d.\u00a0 Pius was, after all, Pope at a time when social Darwinist racism was approaching its highwater mark and it was not such a bad idea to be cautious about the arrogant claims of SCIENCE[TM].\u00a0 It did, after all, lead to \u201cscientific\u201d eugenics and the experiment in \u201cscientifically\u201d manipulating \u201cinferior\u201d human stocks known to history as the Holocaust.\u00a0 So I can see why a Catholic pope, watching such popular tides of human thought being propounded by such thinkers as Spencer, Galton, and Haeckel would want to put the brakes on.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Farrell has an interesting speculation about the influence Pope Francis might have inspiring more priests with an interest in the sciences: This week\u2019s issue of Nature notes with approval that the new Pope Francis has a background in science. A pope who\u2019s also a scientist is rare. But these days even parish priests who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[156],"class_list":["post-43241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-science"],"yoast_head":"\nWill Francis Inspire More Priest-Scientists?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"John Farrell has an interesting speculation about the influence Pope Francis might have inspiring more priests with an interest in the sciences: This\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2013\/03\/will-francins-inspire-more-priest-scientists.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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