“They feel more able to speak freely at the Vatican Observatory,” Gionti said.
A practical reason for the respect, Consolmagno said, is because “we do not compete with them for positions or for money … This, as Father Gionti said, makes us a ‘neutral ground,’ where they can come, in a beautiful setting in Castel Gandolfo, and know that we don’t have an agenda.”
According to organizers, 40 scientists will participate in the conference in person, and another 150 will join online. Conference attendees expect to have an audience with Pope Francis during the week if the pontiff’s schedule allows.
Fabio Scardigli, a theoretical physicist from Italy who helped organize the conference in Castel Gandolfo, said they have assembled a “dream team” of scientists and thinkers from two different communities: cosmology and astrophysics.
Hopefully, he said, through open discussion and debate, there can be “a small step forward” in bringing these two groups into dialogue.
Father Matteo Galaverni, a cosmologist of the Vatican Observatory, said they want the conference “to bring forth new points of view” and to create a “healthy optimism for those who believe in research.”
Consolmagno referenced the opening of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), in which the pope says that “faith and reason are the two wings that bring us to the truth.”
“That image,” the brother said, “reminds us that faith is not the goal, reason is not the goal, the Church is not the goal, science is not the goal. Truth is the goal. And for those of us who believe that God is truth, then exploring the truth brings us closer to God.”
Cosmologists, he added, “are so aware of how much we do not know that there is a great openness to the need to accept a way of addressing the fundamental question from [the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz: Why is there something instead of nothing?”
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