Interdisciplinary Studies

"The scientist's condition as a sentinel in the modern world, as one who is the first to glimpse the enormous complexity together with the marvellous harmony of reality, makes him a privileged witness of the plausibility of religion, a man capable of showing how the admission of transcendence, far from harming the autonomy and the ends of research, rather stimulates it to continually surpass itself in an experience of self-transcendence which reveals the human mystery".

Pope John Paul II, 7/17/85.

While the whole nature of the Vatican Observatory is to be a bridge between science and the Catholic Church, studies involving science, philosophy, and theology have formed an explicit part of the Observatory's activity since 1987 when it organized two interdisciplinary conferences as a response to Pope John Paul II's request for something both to commemorate Sir Isaac Newton's epoch-making book, Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and to contribute to the dialogue between the two cultures. The first meeting to commemorate the Newton tercentenary was held in Cracow, May 1987, and resulted in the book, Newton and the New Direction in Science. This prepared for the second meeting, September 1987, at Castel Gandolfo, whose proceedings and a message from Pope John Paul II are given in Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding.

These beginnings led the Observatory, together with the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences of Berkeley, California, to initiate a series of five, interdisciplinary research workshops with the theme of 'Divine Action in the World'. These were by invitation only for the workshop process to be effective. The workshops in the series have each resulted in a book: Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature, Chaos and Complexity, Evolutionary and Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and the Person, Quantum Physics. Details on obtaining these and other books of the Vatican Observatory are given on the publications page. (Further information may be obtained from William Stoeger This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it">@)

Through the initiatives of individual staff members the Observatory also maintains links with other science and religion groups, e.g., the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, the Zygon Center for Religion and Science, the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology, and Cosmos and Creation. The John Templeton Foundation provides major support to and innovation in the science and religion dialog. Talks on interdisciplinary topics are frequently given and articles written by the Observatory's staff, besides their purely scientific output.