John Farrell has a good, thoughtful blog post on the Roman Catholic church’s failure to engage properly with current scientific topics, in spite of having a well-funded Academy of Sciences.

I doubt things could be much different. Real first-rank success in science comes from people of a certain temperament, and it’s not the sort of temperament that is attracted to a religious career. The converse is true, too.

Science is epistemologically rich but ethically empty. It can uncover lots of true facts about the world, but has nothing to tell us about how we should live. Religion is ethically rich, with lots to tell us about how we should live; but it is epistemologically empty, unless you count mystical experience as a type of knowledge. Any person is attracted to the one point of view or the other; but it’s a rare oddity who has a strong attraction to both ways of looking at things; and this is probably truer now than it was in Lemaitre’s time.