Dan Gilgoff goes sane (following the pope's example)

He writes

Four hundred years after it put Galileo under house arrest for arguing that the sun, not the Earth, is the center of the universe, the Roman Catholic Church this week sponsored a conference on the search for extraterrestrial life. At a time when the relationship between Christianity and science has been widely portrayed as an adversarial one (think Bill Maher's Religulous or the recent God & Country debate on Darwin's Origin of Species) the conference reminds us that leading authorities from both camps—like the pope and the worlds' top astronomers—believe the two need not be in conflict.