October "Sacred Universe" Institute

Friday, October 2 - Saturday, October 3, 2009

Did we come about by chance or by necessity in the evolving universe? Did God make us? Can we conclude that there is an Intelligent Design to the universe? To what extent can the natural sciences address these questions? As to chance or necessity the first thing to be said is that the problem is not formulated correctly. It is not just a question of chance or necessity because, first of all, it is both. Furthermore, there is a third element here that is very important. It is what we might call the "fertility" of the universe. So the dance of the fertile universe is a ballet with three ballerinas: chance, necessity and fertility. What this means is that the universe is so fertile in offering the opportunity for the success of both chance and necessary processes that such a character of the universe must be included in the search for our origins in the universe. In this light Fr. Coyne will present in broad strokes what his thoughts about some of the best of our modern scientific understanding of the universe and then return to the questions above.

Saturday morning

9:00 AM -10:30

Rev. Joseph Bracken, SJ

~Theologian ~

"Does everything happen for a reason or do some things just happen?"  

In answer to this question, even people who often hold opposing views are in full agreement that everything happens for a reason or has an antecedent cause. Scientific materialists claim that there must be a natural cause for everything since “nature is all there is.”  Christian fundamentalists, on the contrary, argue that God is the reason for everything that happens; nothing happens that God does not foreknow and predetermine. Yet two early twentieth-century philosophers of science, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Sanders Peirce, argue that many things happen spontaneously for no apparent reason; the future of this world is still indeterminate and in process of evolution.  Following out this line of thought, we have a new understanding of the God-world relationship.  God’s creative activity in our lives gives us the power to make our own decisions and. in this way. to determine our relationship to God and to one another.  God’s providence consists in ordering over and over again all these fragile human decisions and the spontaneous choices of non-human creatures from moment to moment so as to make sure that our world does not collapse into chaos but instead in the end “all will be well,” as the 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich maintained. 

SATURDAY 11:00 AM - NOON

Open discussion with an astronomer and a theologian,

Fr. George Coyne and Fr. Joseph Bracken

About George Coyne. . .

George Coyne, born January 19, 1933, in Baltimore, Maryland, completed his bachelor's degree in mathematics and his licentiate in philosophy at Fordham University, New York City, in 1958. He obtained his doctorate in astronomy from Georgetown University in 1962.  In 1976 he became a senior research fellow at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) of the University of Arizona (UA) and a lecturer in the UA Department of Astronomy. The following year he served as Director of the UA's Catalina Observatory and as Associate Director of the LPL. Coyne became Director of the Vatican Observatory (VO) in 1978, and also Associate Director of the UA Steward Observatory. During 1979-80 he served as Acting Director and Head of the UA Steward Observatory and the Astronomy Department, and thereafter he continued as an adjunct professor in the UA Astronomy Department. He retired as Director of the VO in August 2006. He remains on the staff of the VO as Director Emeritus and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.

He is a member of the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America. He has been awarded the following Ph.D. degrees honoris causa: 1980, St. Peter's University, Jersey City, New Jersey, USA; 1994, Loyola University, Chicago, USA; 1995, University of Padua, Padua, Italy; 1997, Pontifical Theological Academy, Jagellonian University, Cracow; 2005 Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA; 2007 Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He was awarded the Mendel Medal by Villanova University in September 2008.

About Joseph Bracken . . .

Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., Emeritus Professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1968 and taught at Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois (1968-1974), and at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1974-1982) before becoming Chairman of the Theology Department at Xavier in 1982.    He has published 11 books and roughly 100 articles in academic journals in the general area of philosophical theology/philosophy of religion. Recent books include Christianity and Process Thought published by Templeton Foundation Press in 2006, God: Three Who Are One published by Liturgical Press  in 2008, and Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity: A New Paradigm for Religion and Science  to be published by Templeton Foundation Press in 2009.