Science and Faith

From today's Office of Readings (the Vatican II Constitution Gaudium et Spes, #36) on the harmony of science, art, and faith: 

Many of our contemporaries, however, seem to be afraid that a closer relationship between religion and man’s activity will injure the autonomy of men or societies or the different sciences. If by the autonomy of earthly realities we mean that created things and even societies have their own distinctive laws and values, which must be gradually identified, used and regulated by men, this kind of autonomy is rightly demanded. Not only is it insisted on by modern man, it is also in harmony with the design of the Creator. By the very fact of creation everything is provided with its own stability, its own truth and goodness, its own laws and orderly functioning. Man must respect these, acknowledging the methods proper to each science or art. 

One should therefore deplore certain attitudes of mind which are sometimes found even among Christians because of a failure to recognize the legitimate autonomy of science. These mental attitudes have given rise to conflict and controversy and led many to assume that faith and science are mutually opposed. 

If, on the other hand, the autonomy of the temporal order is understood to mean that created things do not depend on God, and that man may use them without reference to the Creator, all who believe in God will realize how false is this teaching. For creation without the Creator fades into nothingness.

Nature and the natural order have an integrity all its own, owing to the fact that it has been endowed by its creator with its own law and order.  Thus, the appeal often made to 'natural law' to explain how humanity can live in harmony with the world around him.  If I refuse to eat nutritious food, preferring only the taste of only candy bars and soda pop, my body will break down and eventually die from the objective reality of malnutrition.  If I were to fly an airplane to 5000 feet and jump out, flapping my arms, I will fall, crashing to the earth no matter how sincere my belief that I will fly, due to the objective reality of gravity.  If one believes aging and death can be eliminated by some 'fountain of youth', nature will catch up, eventually, due to the objective reality of mortality.  We are subject to the law and order of nature, and by extension, we are thus bound by a law imposed by God... not coercively, not by imputation, but simply by the reality of our being.  After the reality of mere existence itself, cooperation with nature is the lowest level of human cooperation with the will and wisdom of God.

 

There is a virtue of studying and understanding nature's orderly functioning.  To retreat into fideism denies that there is truth in nature (e.g., if I only pray enough I won't need medical intervention for my injury, or, God created the world in seven literal days, so I don't care about what scientists say about fossils) and denies something of the reality of our created being.  (This is not to discount an appropriate role for divine, miraculous intervention into nature, but that's a topic for another discussion.)  Science and faith are not mutually opposed in this way, but are open to mutual discovery and harmonization.  This is why the Big Bang theory could be proposed first by a Catholic priest and physicist?  ...that this bishop could became the father of geology and stratigraphy--the science that explains that the layered fossil records give a chronology of life on earth? ...that this cleric could study and propose heliocentrism?  Truth does not contradict truth.  We just have to be courageous and smart enough to recognize truth in its many forms and accommodate it into our imperfect understanding of the universe when it reveals itself.

 

An opposite concern about faith and science is also true.  While we must avoid the extreme of fideism, we also cannot fall for what I'll call a natural determinism that ignores reference to the Creator.  Gaudium et Spes explains that creation 'fades into nothingness' by this error.  Perhaps we might also say 'meaninglessness'?  To propose that the universe and its order is nothing more than a product of random relationships is to say that the universe that has being and existence as we know it is no better than a possible universe that doesn't exist.  Existence and non-existence become morally, physically, existentially neutral concerns... whether 'I am' or 'I am not' doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things... ultimately, if I can propose that I actually do exist, whether I am 'good' or 'evil', 'eating' or 'eaten', in 'pleasure' or 'pain', 'male' or 'female' has no bearing on anything... it's all stupid, neutral chance.  This perspective is the appeal to pragmatism in Machiavelli, the appeal to fitness in Darwin, the appeal to power in Nietzsche, and the appeal to nothingness in Sartre.  In these four atitudes alone, we can see so much of the dehumanizing suffering and angst of the 20th century.  In its own circle of logic, a self-determining universe makes a certain amount of sense... but the Church simply asks that the thinkers of our age consider that there might be something bigger than the universe that we can see and touch and feel... that we might have the intellectual humility and honesty to consider there might be something bigger than ourselves out there that gives order and standing and meaning to 'all of this'.

 

The Church is often criticized polemically for delaying the advancement of science and holding on to the idea of the earth being at the center of the universe.  How ironic that the scientific revolution has freed the Church from this error, and now the individual, rational thinker, unable to grasp beyond the confines of the physical, sensate world... the cogito... is the one locked at the center of a much smaller, (perhaps we can even say 'pucillanimous',) universe.

-- Fr. Tom Donovan