Evolution and Catholicism from an Astronomical Perspective | Prof. Jonathan Lunine

The Thomistic Institute

Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Thomism, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Catholicism, Philosophy, Christianity

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2022

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prof. Lunine's slides can be viewed here: https://tinyurl.com/4fce6w7w This lecture was given on October 6, 2022, at the University of Rochester. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Jonathan I. Lunine is The David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, His research focuses on astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In addition to his responsibilities in the classroom, he serves as Interdisciplinary Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope project and is a coinvestigator on the Juno mission currently in orbit around Jupiter. Lunine is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Dominique Cassini Medal of the European Geosciences Union. He is the author of Astrobiology: A Multidisciplinary Approach and Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World. Lunine obtained a B.S. in physics and astronomy from the University of Rochester (1980), an M.S. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology. He lives in Ithaca New York, where he is a member of St. Catherine of Siena parish. In 2016 Lunine helped to found the Society of Catholic Scientists and currently serves as its vice president.

Transcript

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0:59.4	Thank you for your generosity
1:00.7	and may God bless you
1:02.6	this Advent and Christmas season.
1:10.2	The title of this talk, I think, was inadvertently a collaborative venture between myself and the Tomistic Institute Board, or maybe I type too quickly.
1:22.2	Probably it would be better for me to have advertised this as evolution from a Catholic astronomer's perspective.
1:30.3	So I'm neither a biologist nor a theologian nor an anthropologist.
1:37.3	And many decades ago, a very distinguished professor here at Rochester, Hugh Van Horn, an astronomer, who became my senior
1:47.0	thesis advisor, cautioned me that astronomers love to think that they're anthropologists,
1:54.1	as well as rocket engineers. So I've fallen into that trap many times.
2:01.6	Nonetheless, I put this talk together for the Thomistic Institute because I find that perhaps outside of the student environment, but even inside of the student environment,
2:14.6	among Catholics, there's a concern that somehow evolution and Catholicism are incompatible
	...

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