The Daily Beast reports that astronomers met at the Vatican for a conference in honour of Georges Lemaître. Lemaître, a Catholic priest and astronomer, proposed in 1927 the notion of a "primordial atom" from which the Universe originated. His idea is now commonly called the Big Bang theory. The article notes that the words "God" and "religion" are absent from the titles of the presentations.
Slides (PDF) associated with the presentations are available from the Web site of the Vatican Observatory.
further reading:
official announcement
biography of Lemaître
The Cornell Daily Sun article about Lemaître
additional coverage:
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 19 2017, @01:14PM (4 children)
Look at the link or don't comment on Galileo -- the "belief first and actual investigation secondly" is a stronger description of Galileo's methods in this case than his opponents.
As to child abuse, note that the rate of child abuse among Catholic priests hasn't been shown to be significantly higher than it is among Protestant ministers, scout leaders, coaches, school teachers, etc. What the Catholic Church did worse was use its hierarchy to shield priests and shuffle them around, though similar things happened with public school teachers, etc. over the years too. And that should obviously be condemned as evil. But it's much easier to do an investigation when you have a large hierarchical bureaucratic organization that keeps detailed records than it is to investigate millions of other more isolated cases of abuse.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 19 2017, @01:36PM
By the way, if you need some more info about abuse, here's a Newsweek article [newsweek.com] that came up in the first few hits of an internet search. There's other stuff out there, but the reality is that it's much easier to quantify abuse statistics for the Catholic Church due to its records. Given that the Newsweek article quotes people like leaders from National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as well as insurance companies who offer sex abuse riders for multiple denominations -- and they don't see more abuse cases coming from the Catholic Church -- I'll trust them since they're mostly likely to actually know something about abuse stats.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 19 2017, @01:47PM (2 children)
Unlike church(es) Galileo didn't force anyone to believe anything.
As for the sex abuse. The exploitation potential and danger comes from that the church is so ingrained and able to shield offenders.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 19 2017, @01:59PM (1 child)
As I said in my initial comment: "I'm not a Catholic, nor do I think religion is a helpful influence in modern science." And I completely agree with you that, as a matter of free speech/expression, the treatment of Galileo was deplorable and should absolutely be condemned. (Though that could basically be applied to EVERY social/governmental/religious regime at that point in history, who all tended to suppress speech they disagreed with.) But the fairy-tale version of the Galileo story does more harm than good.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday May 19 2017, @05:15PM
> nor do I think religion is a helpful influence in modern science
I'll propose one lonely exception: Religion-driven cultural norms preventing scientists from slicing and stitching all kinds of living things together, just because now they can.