When you begin to understand the promise of stem cell treatments when it comes to treating these diseases, along with maladies such as cancer in all its terrible varieties and autoimmune illnesses such as multiple sclerosis and lupus, and further recognize the trillions of dollars that can be saved in our health care system by pursuing stem cell research and development, this public misunderstanding becomes all the more tragic.

But this may all be about to change.

That change is coming, in no small measure, as a direct result of a remarkable event that occurred at the Vatican in early November of this year where a conference, co- hosted by the Catholic Church and NeoStem (a publically held company on whose board of directors I am proud to serve) was convened and included prominent scientists, ethicists, business and religious leaders from around the world who gathered for the first ever international conference on “adult” stem cell research.

It was clear from the outset that this event would mark a turning point in the ethical considerations of stem cell development when Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture opened the conference with a declaration that the Catholic Church enthusiastically supports scientific research on adult stem cells along with the exploration of the cultural, ethical, and human implications of their use.

Read here.

One skeptical line of argument with respect to the existence of God goes like this: if God has effects on nature, then he can be known through those effects, and thus known through science. This is an older and wider use of the term “science” – the knowledge of things from their effects. Used in this way, God is indeed an object of science, and God can be known from His effects on nature.

However, it must be remembered that God is not a material object within the physical universe. This limits the ways that he can be known. Things are known in different ways in accordance with their nature. In other words, our way of finding something has to be in keeping with the nature of what it is we want to find. The population of animals in a field is determined by seeing the animals, not by measuring light from a distant supernova. The reactivity of compound is measured by testing it in the lab, not by reading a seismometer sitting on a fault line. When experimenting with a scientific entity, we have to look for kinds of evidence that match the question we’re asking.

Modern science studies natural, physical things and detects them in the specific physical ways suited to such objects. God’s existence, however, is not testable in the same way that we test for particular physical things in nature. God is not a physical object. God does not emit a particular kind of electromagnetic wave that we can detect. God does not have certain dimensions or a density we can measure with a scale or a ruler. He does not have a tendency to catalyze a particular kind of chemical reaction, or to cause a particular kind of cell to grow. Observing for specific kinds of physical, scientific objects requires the use of  appropriate  physical, scientific tests. Testing for God requires an equally appropriate test — one that is sensitive to God’s transcendent nature. In other words, we test things by predicting their effects and then using an appropriate method to see whether those effects exist. If they do, our hypothesis is confirmed. If not, our hypothesis is unsupported.

Now the effect that is produced by God is … everything. And since everything clearly exists, so too does God.

In this form the argument of course seems silly, but it illustrates the point: the problem isn’t a lack of evidence for God. The effect that God produces is everything. The evidence of this effect is quite literally everywhere, all around us, all the time. The problem isn’t in finding the evidence, it’s in showing that the evidence we already have in hand is in fact evidence for God. The problem is in thinking clearly about what this evidence means.

Thinking about “the existence of everything” is philosophy — in particular, it is metaphysics or ontology. Understanding how the totality of reality and existence provide the arguments for God means looking at philosophy, not performing new scientific experiments. The evidence of the experiments is already in, and has been in for as long as the human mind has been around to think about it. We already have the results. The important task now is interpreting what the results mean.

“Mathematics, and the sciences that employ mathematical tools, bring us to a fine field of truth, and we should be grateful for that truth.  Without it we could not live in the comfort that we have wrung from our domination of the natural world.  We would be bound in our travels to the legs of horses, or the winds at sea.  We could not fly.  And yet – to quote that young philosopher Francis Marion Tarwater in Flannery O’Connor’s story, “Buzzards can fly.”  A physicist can tell me how a winged object can stay in the air.  But he cannot, insofar as he is a physicist alone or even a biologist alone and not also a man like all other men, tell me about the beauty or the nobility of the buzzard, much less about the beauty or nobility of Francis Marion Tarwater.”

Read here.

Woods Hole Research Center has released an interesting new zoomable, pannable map of above-ground woody biomass – in essence, a map of the density of trees and shrubs — for the continental US. You can see the map here, enlarge it to full-screen, and explore how the landscape around your home compares to the rest of the country.

A new study of supernovas in distant galaxies, however, has detected a much slower flow than that found in the previous studies. The new study does also show a one-way flow, but it is in a slightly different direction and is much slower than the earlier measurements of flow. The new flow is more easily explained by in-universe causes, such as large galaxy clusters, and so does not necessarily suport the extra-universal explanations of the earlier dark flow measurements.

The result, as so often happens in science, is that it’s become clear that more data is needed. The earlier measurements call for an explanation, and seemingly point outside the known universe. The new results are interesting, but more mundane. It remains to be seen how the two can be reconciled. In the meantime, multiverse theories still await empirical evidence…

Read more about this story from National Geographic.

While priests are dedicated to theology as the “queen of sciences,” some of them have contributed to the material sciences as well. Some days ago Google rightly honored Nicholas Steno whose research in stratigraphy earned him the sobriquet “Father of Geology.” Google did not mention that he was a convert to Catholicism in 1667 and only ceased his research due to pastoral obligations when he became a bishop in 1677. His scientific achievements were not as important as his heroic virtue, for which Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1988.

Read here.

“Thirty-nine years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Roe v. Wade, that the laws outlawing abortion in Texas were unconstitutional because a woman had a right to privacy, guaranteed by the Constitution.  Suddenly, the unborn had no legal protection in the United States.  But Roe v. Wade did not just deny legal protection to the unborn, it catapulted the United States toward all manner of unethical biotechnology.”

Read at Mary Meets Dolly.

Pope Benedict XVI launched a new foundation at the Vatican aimed at building a “philosophical bridge” between science and theology.

“I don’t think most people necessarily see science and faith as being opposed but I do think there is confusion as to where to put faith and where to put science in their life,” said executive director Father Tomasz Trafny.

“So the question for us is how to offer a coherent vision of society, culture and the human being to people who would like to understand where to put these dimensions – the spiritual and religious and the scientific,” he told CNA on Jan. 19.

The Science and Faith Foundation will be headquartered at the Holy See under the leadership of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

The new foundation builds on the work of the STOQ project – Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest – which was created by Pope John Paul II in 2003. For the past 9 years it has promoted a dialogue between theology, philosophy and the sciences working in collaboration with the Pontifical Council for Culture and Rome’s pontifical universities.

Their stated aim is to explore “the possibility of being believers at the dawn of the Third Millennium without renouncing scientific progress.”

Read here.