Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno has been named the new director of the Vatican Observatory. Brother Guy is a popular writer as well as a working astronomer. See his article “Astronomy, God, and the Search for Elegance,” a piece about the place of faith in science, which concludes:
God gives us any number of roadmaps to help us find the way. One is the ability to know what it is we don’t know; to realize that we always have more to be learned. That is the key and the essence of true science. Another is the confidence that, with God’s gifts and God’s help, we actually can learn. And another, most surprising aid we get, the compass that directs our intuition, is this yearning for truth, for beauty, for elegance, that directs our souls and needs to be nourished in every aspect of our human lives.
The equations that describe the colours of a sunrise are remarkable for being, in their own way, every bit as beautiful as the sunrise themselves. God wants to share the sunrise with us; that’s why He gave us eyes.