Modern Cosmology and Life’s Meaning

  • Book chapter
  • 9 pages, 3600 words
  • Level: university

A book chapter by Fr. George Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, from the 2002 book The Cultural Values of Science, published by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.  Fr. Coyne writes:

Cosmology today is ever more human; it stimulates, provokes, ques- tions us in ways that drive us beyond science in the search for satisfaction, while at the same time scientific data furnish the stimuli. In this context the best cosmology, to its great merit, does not pretend nor presume to have the ultimate answers. It simply suggests and urges us on, well aware that not all is within its ken. Freedom to seek understanding and not dogmatism in what is understood characterize the best of cosmology. It is, in fact, a field where certainties lie always in the future; thus it is vital, dynamic and very demanding of those who seek to discover the secrets of the universe.

Click here to access this paper from the Pontifical Academy of Science.

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Coyne PAS article

 

 

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