Guy Consolmagno Quotes & Sayings

A scientist works largely by intuition. Given enough experience, a scientist examining a problem can leap to an intuition as to what the solution 'should look like.' ... Science is ultimately based on insight, not logic. — Guy Consolmagno

Studying the universe engages us in something bigger than ourselves. Science tries to describe, in terms we can only grasp intuitively, things that are beyond our intuition ... all we can hope for is that our physical descriptions, like a song or a good painting, are a faithful evocation of some ineffable truth. — Guy Consolmagno

Few of us have the power to heal broken legs, but we all have the power to forgive our neighbor. Yet how often do we do so? — Guy Consolmagno

For what it's worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments. — Guy Consolmagno

true art, be it painting or novel or drama or music, selects and arranges. — Guy Consolmagno

Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do. — Guy Consolmagno

he is able to appear inside locked rooms and come and go in ways an ordinary body could not do. — Guy Consolmagno

Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist. — Guy Consolmagno

Except they kept asking me questions like 'What is your biggest source of conflict about the Pope?' Or 'Has the Pope ever tried to suppress your scientific work?' Completely out of left field!
"They didn't want to hear me tell them how much Pope Benedict supported the Vatican Observatory and its scientific work. So, finally, frustrated that they weren't getting the story they wanted out of me, one of them asked, 'Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?'
"What did you answer?"
"Only if she asks!"
"I love it! How did they react?"
"They all got a good laugh, which is what I intended. And then, the next day, they all ran my joke as if it were a straight story, as if I had made some sort of official Vatican pronouncement about aliens. — Guy Consolmagno

Everyone has a religion, whether they admit it or not. For some it's Catholicism; for others, Vegetarianism or Elvis or Linux/Macintosh/Windows. — Guy Consolmagno

Intelligent Design has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning. — Guy Consolmagno

Nothing within the universe itself can exist to explain the fact that it exists. — Guy Consolmagno

But I want more. I want reasons to have faith in my faith, to have a reasonable confidence that there is actually truth in what my religion teaches me about God and my relation to God. And that faith has to be based on something within myself that I already trust: it has to be consonant with my experience of the universe and my abilities to reason about that universe. — Guy Consolmagno

One of the more popular activities was "Talk-O-Matic". Five people at a time could write messages, and read each other's messages, on the same screen. Today, Internet chat rooms work on the same principle. One of the remarkable new features of this page was that you could log in with an invented name, and pretend you were anyone you wanted - any name, any age, any gender. One favorite trick was to log in using the name of someone else already logged into the page, simply to confuse everyone else. — Guy Consolmagno