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By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Engineers, scientists, and
computer whizzes study or manipulate nature and machines to find sound,
logical solutions to nagging questions and everyday problems.
But if hard empirical evidence is what makes a techie brain tick, then
how is he or she able to justify or believe in something as scientifically
unprovable as God or as mind-boggling as transubstantiation?
Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, a self-described techie and Vatican astronomer,
argues in a new book that a nerd is not necessarily a nihilist, and geeks
can and do believe in God.
In “God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense
of Religion,” he shows that atheism is actually very rare among
men and women scientists.
Two years ago, Brother Consolmagno bade a temporary farewell to his telescopes
and went from gazing at the heavens to peering into fellow techies’
hearts and souls.
“The techies, they’re my tribe. I’m one of them and
I want us to be better understood by the Church,” the planetary
scientist explained.
The discoveries he made from a two-month journey traveling up and down
U.S. Highway 101 in California’s Silicon Valley became the core
of his new book.
He interviewed 100 “hard-nosed, rational, dyed-in-the-wool techies”
and asked them the reasons they went to church, what they did and didn’t
get out of church, and why they belonged to one faith community and not
another.
He said the answers were as varied as one would find in the general population,
but that several unique characteristics stuck out.
For example, skeptics weren’t saying, “Prove to me God exists,”
but had more pragmatic concerns like “whether he exists or not,
why should I believe? Why should I care and what does it get me?”
Also, people in the world of science tend to be “rule followers”
and see the church as a book of rules, he said.
In fact, “a very common fallacy” among techies, he said, is
believing salvation is the result of following the rules.
In their work world, techies see that “if I follow the rules then
the program should run, but religion doesn’t work that way,”
said Brother Consolmagno.
The Vatican astronomer said the biggest surprise to come out of his research
was that, for techies in general, the biggest motivation to belong to
a church was the search for community.
Being part of a community was really important, he said, “in part
because community is something a lot of them didn’t have growing
up; when you’re the geek nobody likes you. But also because techies
work better in community, because most scientists and engineers do their
work as a team.”
Many in the tech world aren’t going to church to find the truth,
he said, “because by the time you’re in your 30s or 40s you’ve
pretty much decided what the truth is. The reason they go to church is
for tech support; it’s once-a-week scheduled maintenance,”
he said.
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