Are Faith and Science opposed?
Outline
• Are science and religion opposed • The Catholic Church and Science • How Christian Theology gave rise to Science • The University • Examples of Catholic Scientist
Ways in which science and religion serve as allies in the quest for truth
Religion furnishes the conceptual framework in which science can flourish
• In contrast to pantheistic or animistic religions, Christianity does not view the world as divine or as indwelt by spirits, but rather as the natural product of a transcendent Creator who designed and brought it into being. Thus, the world is a rational place which is open to exploration and discovery. • Furthermore, the whole scientific enterprise is based on certain assumptions which cannot be proved scientifically, but which are guaranteed by the Christian world view; • the laws of logic • the orderly nature of the external world • the reliability of our cognitive faculties in knowing the world • and the objectivity of the moral values used in science
Religion furnishes the conceptual framework in which science can flourish
• Science could not even exist without these assumptions, and yet these assumptions cannot be proved scientifically. They are philosophical assumptions which, interestingly, are part and parcel of a Christian world view.
• Thus, religion is relevant to science in that it can furnish a conceptual framework in which science can exist. More than that, the Christian religion historically did furnish the conceptual framework in which modern science was born and nurtured.
Science can both falsify and verify claims of religion
• When religions make claims about the natural world, they intersect the domain of science and are, in effect, making predictions which scientific investigation can either verify or falsify. • Eastern religions like Taoism and certain forms of Hinduism teach that the world is divine and therefore eternal. • [The scientist] has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. - Robert Jastrow (head of NASA’s Goddard Institute)
Science encounters metaphysical problems which religion can help to solve
• Science has an insatiable thirst for explanation. But eventually, science reaches the limits of its explanatory ability. • For example, in explaining why various things in the universe exist, science ultimately confronts the question of why the universe itself exists. • The person who believes in God has the resources to slake science’s thirst for ultimate explanation. We can present this reasoning in the form of a simple argument: 1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence (either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause). 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. 3. The universe exists. 4. Therefore the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.
Religion can augment the explanatory power of science
• Random mutation and natural selection have trouble accounting for the origin of irreducibly complex systems. • There is no understanding within the neo-Darwinian synthesis of how such irreducibly complex systems like cilia or protein transport systems can evolve by random mutation and natural selection • The gradual evolution of biological complexity is better explained if there exists an intelligent cause behind the process rather than just the blind mechanisms alone.
Science can establish the truth of a premise in an argument for a conclusion having religious significance
• The First Cause Argument 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
• Premise (2) is a religiously neutral statement which can be found in almost any text on astronomy and astrophysics.
The Catholic Church and Science “The universal intelligibility of nature, which is the presupposition of all science, can only be explained through recourse to an infinite and creative mind which has thought the world into being. No scientist could even begin to work unless and until he assumed that the aspect of nature he was investigating was knowable, intelligible, marked by form. But this fundamentally mystical assumption rests upon the conviction that whatever he comes to know through his scientific work is simply an act of re-thinking or re-cognizing what a far greater mind has already conceived.� - Joseph Ratzinger (Introduction to Christianity)
Christian theology gave rise to science • Theology, the study of doctrine derived from Divine Revelation, informed man that he was created by God, in the image and likeness of God with an intellect and a will. • Man was created to learn, to seek the truth, and he was able to recognize truth if it was demonstrated with certainty. • He also knew from Divine Revelation that the universe was created by God with order, he expected to be able to study that order and discover it.
Christian theology gave rise to science • He also knew from Divine Revelation that the universe had an absolute beginning and everything in it was moving toward an absolute end. • Thus, he believed that matter and motion could be observed and measured.
The University
• Universities began in the Middle Ages and were started by the Catholic Church often in cooperation with civil authority. • The dialectical method (Aristotelian systematic logic) was applied to theological questions and developed into Scholasticism.
• All sorts of questions were examined with utmost subtlety and logical rigor. • A school in Bologna became the first university (1088 A.D.) It was famous as a school of arts and legal science.
The University
• Teachers of the same subject formed smaller groups, “faculties” designating a discipline or branch of knowledge. • The faculties were organized to deal with the sciences and the work of teaching. • The faculty of philosophy included everything that did not belong to theology, medicine, or law. • The spirit was one of co-operation. The university represented teacher and student united, disciplines united, all in a search for truth
The University
• Pope Innocent IV (1243–54) described the universities as "rivers of science which water and make fertile the soil of the universal Church," • Pope Alexander IV (1254–61) called universities "lanterns shining in the house of God." • There were over 50 universities in Catholic Europe by the time of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. These universities included Bologna (1088); Paris (c. 1150); Oxford (1167); Salerno (1173); Vicenza (1204); Cambridge (1209); Salamanca (12181219); Padua (1222) and Naples (1224).
Faith forming understanding: via philosophy
• Principles adopted, introduced or transfigured by Catholic intellectual life: • The Person • Substance and Accident • Free will and Intellect • Virtue ethics unified by love • Secondary causation • The four causes • Critical realism • Matter as good, not evil • Objective and Natural Law • Immortality of the soul • Principle of non-contradiction
Faith forming understanding: via law
• From the 12th century, Catholic scholars such as Gratian drew together the terms of Revelation, Roman Law, Visigothic, Saxon, and Celtic legal elements with Greek philosophical dialectic. The result effectively created the ‘science of law,’ jurisprudence, and a wide range of concepts we still use today, such as: • Agency or Representation • Natural and Positive Law • Theory of Contracts • Law as a unified system • Fiduciary trust • Legal scholarship as a profession • Objective Law, which even the most powerful ruler cannot contravene
Catholic Religious who were scientist
If the Catholic Church is against science why are some 35 craters on the moon named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians?
The Jesuits
• By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes. • They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings. • They theorized about the circulation of the blood, the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wavelike nature of light. • Seismology has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Fr. J.B. Macelwane, who wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America, in 1936.
Conclusion
• Einstein • “everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a Spirit vastly superior to that of man.” • “…science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
www.catholicfidelity.com