Gail Kineke, chair of the department of geology and geophysics. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

Four Boston College scientists who spoke on a March 11 panel agreed that science and religious faith are fully compatible, and that scientists can feel at home at a Catholic university despite suggestions to the contrary in some quarters. The discussion, which drew a crowd of about 100 students and a scattering of faculty to McGuinn 121, was sponsored by the Provost’s Committee on Catholic Intellectual Traditions. For two and a half years the committee has offered forums, lectures, and seminars to promote a more vigorous consideration of the University’s Catholic mission as it applies to faculty.

The panelists, beginning with the mathematics department chair Solomon Friedberg, called attention to affinities between science and the Jesuits; in particular Friedberg cited the 1599 Ratio Studiorum, a guidebook for Jesuit educators that, among much else, set rules for mathematics instruction, including the dictum that the instructor “spend about three-quarters of an hour of class time explaining the elements of Euclid”—advice that’s still honored at Boston College, he kidded. Panelist Michael Naughton, who chairs the physics department, pointed out, to knowing laughter from the audience, that even as the Inquisition was making life difficult for Galileo, Jesuits were teaching the great astronomer’s ideas in China, “probably unbeknownst to the pope.” The Jesuits, he continued, “have their own mind, and if they see the truth in something, they’re going to pursue it, and that’s what we do as scientists.” Gail Kineke, chair of the department of geology and geophysics, added that seismology, a subfield in her discipline, has been called “the Jesuit science”; Jesuit geologists, starting in the mid-1800s, pioneered research in earthquake risk, having set up a worldwide network of seismic monitoring stations.

Boston College, in keeping with this history, has a good record of supporting science, according to the panelists. Kineke, who said she was raised in the Catholic Church but left it years ago, admitted to having had “vague” misgivings about accepting a post at a Catholic university, but those concerns vanished when her new colleagues, including three Jesuit priests, not only welcomed her but encouraged her research. Recalling a debate on evolution that took place on campus several years back, Naughton said, “I was proud when the one defending evolution was a Jesuit priest.”

The panelists added that scientific research often overlaps with the Jesuit ethic of service to humanity. Those seismic monitoring stations, Kineke said, not only improved geologists’ knowledge of the earth’s interior structure but also warned people about imminent earthquakes. Naughton, who for the past three years has been working with colleagues to perfect a design for a cheaper, more efficient solar cell, said, “I’ve gotten positive feedback from different parts of this Uni-versity—not so much that our research might lead to some widget that makes money but that our research might lead to some widget that helps people. . . . I don’t know if that would happen if I was at State University X.”

The fourth panelist, University Provost Cutberto Garza, a specialist in infant and maternal health who has doctorates in medicine and nutrition, said a major criterion in his own choice of research projects has been their potential for improving people’s lives. “I’ve never succeeded in being motivated purely by knowledge for its own sake,” he said, and he mentioned his research for the World Health Organization that led to new international benchmarks for childhood growth.

In addition to citing some places where science meets Jesuit history and values, the panel dug into the fundamental nature of both science and religion. Each endeavor, at its core, consists of a strenuous search for truth, they said, but while scientists arrive at their truths via empirical observation, religion transcends the empirical, relying in large part on things unseen. “There are multiple religions in the world right now,” as Naughton put it, “and it’s hard to do experiments to find out which one is right.” On the other hand, he said, people are welcome to “look to religion” for answers to those questions with which science is ill-equipped to deal—what existed before time began, for instance. Making much the same point, Garza argued that science, unlike religion, “was never designed to answer why; it’s designed to answer how.”

During a Q&A session, most of the questioners fretted that the typical American thinks science and religion are mutually hostile. While no panelist denied that many Americans think this way, the idea didn’t seem troubling. The perception of science and religion in eternal conflict is “a problem of semantics,” Garza said, while Friedberg guessed that it might be a “defense mechanism” for those who find science unintelligible.

The session’s final question came from a listener at the back of the room who took exception to the drift of this conversation. Science and religion are incompatible, he insisted, pointing to religion’s heavy involvement with the supernatural: The dead come back to life; the lame walk again; Jonah, swallowed by a fish, emerges days later to preach the word of God.

“I would differ with you,” Garza answered mildly. Religion and science “are different,” he said, “and the knowledge you gain from them is different, but I don’t know whether that difference automatically translates into a lack of compatibility or into conflict.”

As for the biblical account of Jonah, he said, “I wouldn’t take that very literally.”

David Reich is a writer in the Boston area.

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