The Catholic Curch And Science - Proposed FAQ (long)

A while back, I got involved in one of the regular debates here on the
relationship between the Catholic Church and Science. Due to what I regarded
as a wide misunderstanding of the Church's attititude, I suggested that a
FAQ for TO might be appropriate and this was promptly kicked back to me -
"Why don't you do it then!" :)

My first attempt at this is given below for debate and discussion.

I would ask only that people debate this in a serious way, that hopefully we
can avoid the slanging matches that inevitably seem to arise with this topic
and maybe tease out an appropriate agreement on the accuracy or otherwise of
what I have said..

Also, I'd appreciate opinions on whether this really is an appropriate
subject for a TO FAQ and whether I've gone about it in the right way; also,
if we do end up with some form of consensus, how do I go about submitting it
as a FAQ?.

------------------------------------

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SCIENCE.

(Note: I should point out that this article has been written specifically in
regard to the Church's attitude to scientific matters - areas like the
Church's involvement in war and politics, its teachings on issues like
contraception and the use of embryos for stem cell research and the Church's
abysmal record on child abuse are outside the realms of science and are
therefore not considered here.)

Introduction
----------------
It is often argued that the Catholic Church is anti-science in general and
anti-evolution in particular.

When people who make this accusation are challenged to give examples of the
Church being anti-science, they invariably bring up Galileo. As Cardinal
Newman once observed, people doing this completely miss out the irony in the
fact that they have to go back over 400 years to find a single example to
support their argument.

They also often show a complete lack of knowledge of what actually caused
the problems between Galileo and the Church which is typical of the total
lack of public knowledge of how much the Catholic Church has directly
contributed to the development of modern science. Before discussing the
attitude of the present day Church to science, it is worthwhile to look back
through history to track the ongoing nature of the relationship between the
Church and science.


The Early Days of the Church
---------------------------------
It is somewhat paradoxical that those Christians who attack science as evil
generally base their arguments on the inerrancy of the Bible yet, when we
study the teachings of the founder of Christianity, we find that He had
absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about science.

The teachings of Jesus Christ are entirely focused on human behaviour,
relationships and motivation. He does not anywhere refer directly to matters
that can be classed as scientific though it could be argued that when He
says in Matthew 15:11 "What goes into a man's mouth does not make him
'unclean,' but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him
'unclean.'", He is effectively saying that the relationship between man and
God is an entirely spiritual one and has nothing to do with physical things.

The first real reference to science in the Church's teachings comes in the
writings of St. Augustine who lived from 354 to 430.

It is impossible to overstate the influence of Augustine on the development
of Christian theology with many of his ideas still forming the bedrock of
modern theological thinking, not just in the Catholic Church but across
almost all the various Christian denominations; many Protestants, especially
Calvinists, consider him to be one of the theological fountainheads of
Reformation teaching on salvation and grace.

In his many writings, Augustine touched on three main areas of relating to
science[i]:

1) He specifically wrote that the Genesis account of creation is not to be
taken literally, it is allegorical:

"In all the sacred books, we should consider the eternal truths that are
taught, the facts that are narrated, the future events that are predicted,
and the precepts or counsels that are given. In the case of a narrative of
events, the question arises as to whether everything must be taken according
to the figurative sense only, or whether it must be expounded and defended
also as a faithful record of what happened. No Christian will dare say that
the narrative must not be taken in a figurative sense. For St. Paul says:
"Now all these things that happened to them were symbolic."
(Book 1, 1:1)


This is particularly relevant to science as much of the conflict between
science and religion actually boils down an insistence by fundamentalist
Christians that the Genesis account has to be taken literally and therefore
science must be wrong.

2) He wrote specifically that it is not just foolish for Christians to deny
the findings of science, that it actually endangers the credibility of
Christian teachings:

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens,
and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the
stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable
eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about
the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he
holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a
disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian,
presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these
topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing
situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh
it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is
derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred
writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose
salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected
as unlearned men."
(Book 1, 19:39)


3) In Book 4 of his treatise on Genesis, Augustine puts forward the concept
of 'rationes seminal' where he suggests that although God created all things
instantaneously, many of them were created in the form of seeds which did
not develop into living things until much later; he also suggests that Man
may not have been created directly from the 'slime of the earth' but that
God had previously placed the seeds for Man in the slime..

Although Augustine's interpretations do not fit in precisely with modern
evolutionary concepts, it does show that over 1400 years before Darwin, he
did outline a form of evolution which shares many characteristics with
modern theory.

Augustine also emphasised that he was not attempting to give a definitive
account of how the Creation took place and that any interpretation of the
Bible must take into account new knowledge:

"In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we
may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes
possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we
should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that,
if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position,
we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy
Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas
we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture."
(Book 1, 18:37)

It has been argued that Augustine was inherently opposed to science, a quote
commonly attributed to him - but never with a specific citation - is:

"There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is
the disease of curiosity ... It is this which drives us to try and discover
the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding,
which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn." [ii]

This may possibly be a reference to Augustine's Confessions 10.35.55 which
the Christian Classics Ethereal Library edition[iii] translates as:

"Thus also in the other senses, which it were long to go through. From this
disease of curiosity are all those strange sights exhibited in the theatre.
Hence men go on to search out the hidden powers of nature (which is besides
our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to
know."

This translation ties in with the overall teaching of Augustine that for
Christians, 'knowledge for knowledge's sake' is not enough, that advances in
knowledge must be reconciled with their religious beliefs and that not all
questions can be answered through human logic and scientific investigation -
that ultimately there are things we cannot grasp and we have to accept them
on faith alone.

That is the approach adopted by the Catholic Church right through to the
present time.

The Dark Ages
--------------------
"In historiography, the term Dark Ages or Dark Age most commonly refers to
the European Early Middle Ages, the period encompassing (roughly) 476 to
1000.

This concept of a dark age was created by the Italian scholar Francesco
Petrarca (Petrarch) and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of
the character of Late Latin literature. Later historians expanded the term
to include not only the lack of Latin literature, but also a lack of
contemporary written history and material cultural achievements in general.
Popular culture has further expanded on the term as a vehicle to depict the
Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and
expanding its scope. The rise of archaeology and other specialties in the
20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced
understanding of its positive developments." [iv]

In regards to science, although there were no significant developments
during this period, a number of historians have identified monasticism as an
important factor in preserving and promulgating knowledge - secular as well
as religious - that was to provide the springboard for the development of
universities[v] which in turn led to the development of modern science.

Alfred Von Harnack, for example, said of monastic education:

"They studied the songs of heathen poets and the writings of historians and
philosophers. Monasteries and monastic schools blossomed forth, and each
settlement became a center of religious life as well as of education." [vi]

According to Alexander Clarence Flick:

"They not only established schools and were the schoolmasters in them, but
also laid the foundations for the universities. They were the thinkers and
philosophers of the day and shaped the political and religious thought. To
them, both collectively and individually, was due the continuity of thought
and civilization of the ancient world with the later Middle Ages and with
the modern period.[vii]

The historian Lowrie Daly described the Church's pivotal role in the
development of universities being due to the fact that the Church was "the
only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the
preservation and cultivation of knowledge." [viii]


The Scientific Revolution
--------------------------------
The event which most historians of science call the scientific revolution
can be dated roughly as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus
Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Andreas Vesalius published his De
humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human body). As with many
historical demarcations, historians of science disagree about its
boundaries, some seeing elements contributing to the revolution as early as
the 14th century and finding its last stages in chemistry and biology in the
18th and 19th centuries. There is general agreement, however, that the
intervening period saw a fundamental transformation in scientific ideas in
physics, astronomy and biology, in institutions supporting scientific
investigation, and in the more widely held picture of the universe.[ix]

Whilst many people focus on the specifics of the 'Galileo affair' as
representing the attitude of the Church towards sciences at that time, this
is totally untrue.

Whilst the concept of a heliocentric universe had been voiced by various
philosophers and scientists from ancient times, Copernicus was initially
reluctant to publish it as a formal theory, not out of fear of censure from
the Church, but out of fear of ridicule from his colleagues. It was actually
the Church who convinced him to publish it - with particular encouragement
from the Jesuits who had a long-time interest in Astronomy - to the extent
that Copernicus dedicated his revolutionary book to the man who made this
research possible, Pope Paul III.

The fears that Copernicus had about rejection by his colleagues were
probably justified by the reaction given to Johannes Kepler when he
published his various works on laws of planetary motion seventy years later.
Initially, Kepler's work was completely ignored by leading scientists
including Galileo and Rene Descartes and many astronomers, including his own
teacher, Michael Maestlin, objected to Kepler's introduction of physics into
his astronomy. Kepler also was the subject of censure by a number of his
fellow Protestants for his heliocentric views but again, like Copernicus,
received active support from the Church in general and the Jesuits in
particular who were instrumental in having him restored to the position of
Chair of Astronomy at Graz after the archduke Ferdinand issued an edict of
banishment against Protestant preachers and professors. .

It should not be surprising that the Church had such a high level of
interest and encouragement for Astronomy - much of it was driven by the
Church's desire to derive an accurate date for Easter, the major feast in
the Church.

In his book "The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories"[x],
respected historian John L. Heilbron states that "The Roman Catholic Church
gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over
six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle
Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other,
institutions."; he goes on to give many examples of the Church's active
involvement including the specific design of several cathedrals so that they
could also function as observatories.

Galileo
----------

Why then, in view of the Church's active support for astronomy and the
theories of Copernicus and Kepler, did it run into problems with Galileo?

The answer is that the issue that the Church had with Galileo was not at all
his argument about the Earth circling the Sun. Their problem was that
Galileo insisted he was right without sufficient evidence to back up his
ideas at that stage and with no explanation for the particular problem of
the absence of observable parallex shifts in the stars' positions. Despite
this lack of proof and unanswered issues, Galileo insisted on promoting his
ideas as established fact and set out to challenge the then current
interpretation of Holy Scripture on the basis of these unproven ideas.

In 1623, Pope Urban VIII gave Galileo permission to write a work on
heliocentrism, but cautioned him not to advocate the new position, only to
present arguments for and against it. Galileo responded with the 'Dialogue
on the Two World Systems' in which he made a mockery of the Pope who had
been a long-time friend and supporter. He also alienated the Jesuits - also
his long-time supporters - with attacks on one of their astronomers.

It was those events that led to Galileo's trail and detention, not his
heliocentric ideas per se.

In regard to his trial and detention, there are also a number of widespread
fallacies that have to be corrected.

Galileo was never tortured nor is there any evidence that he was even
threatened with torture - because he gave acceptable answers to his
Inquistors, torture would not have been allowed under Church Law.

Neither was he ever imprisoned, let alone in a dungeon. After his first
appearance at the Inquisition in 1615, he received only a mild censure and
was sent on his way. Following his second appearance at the Inquisition in
1633, he was sentenced to a mild form of house arrest and was allowed to
live in the palace of Niccolini, the Tuscan ambassador to the Vatican and an
ardent supporter of Galileo.

In a letter of February 13, 1633, to the King of Tuscany, Ambassador
Niccolini described the surprisingly benign treatment accorded the
astronomer:

"The pope told me that he had shown to Galileo a favor never accorded to
another in allowing him to reside in my house instead of the [apartments] of
the Holy Office. . . . His Holiness said he could not avoid having Galileo
brought to the Holy Office for the examination and I replied that my
gratitude would be doubled if he would exempt Galileo from this appearance,
but he answered that he could not do so. . . . He concluded with the promise
to assign Galileo certain rooms which are most convenient in the Holy
Office" [xi]
..
On April 16, Niccolini mentioned,

"He has a servant and every convenience. The Reverend Commissary assigned
him the apartments of the judge of the tribunal. My own servants carry his
meals from my house." Niccolini's June 18 dispatch revealed that, "In regard
to the person of Galileo, he ought to be imprisoned for some time because he
disobeyed the orders of 1616, but the pope says that after the publication
of the sentence he will consider with me as to what can be done to afflict
him as little as possible."

Was the Church right or wrong in the way it treated Galileo? Despite two
apologies from the Church - in 1825 by Dom Olivieri, the General of the
Dominican order and commissary of the Holy Office, and again in 1989 by Pope
John Paul II - some historians argue that the Church treated him more than
fairly; the historian Giorgio de Santillana, for example, who is not
disposed toward the Church's side, writes that "we must, if anything, admire
the cautiousness and legal scruples of the Roman authorities".

It can also be argued that the Church was following the principles of the
Scientific Method so dear to many people on talkorigins - the Church did not
reject Galileo's ideas because it disputed them, it simply refused to accept
them as scientific facts until the evidence was achieved.

Post Galileo
----------------
The problems with Galileo did not in any way deter the Church from its
ongoing support for and involvement in science.

In his book "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilisation" [xii]
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. lists many examples of how members of the Church have
contributed directly to science as well as many other areas including the
arts, agriculture, technology and economics:

It turns out, for instance, that the first person to measure the rate of
acceleration of a freely falling body was Fr. Giambattista Riccioli. The man
who has been called the father of Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher
(also called "master of a hundred arts" for the breadth of his knowledge).
Fr. Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that
Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic
theory.

In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished
themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit
scientists and mathematicians.

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that
it has become known as "the Jesuit science."

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such
far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-century China in
particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge
and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe,
including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible.

When Johannes Kepler posited that planetary orbits were elliptical rather
than circular, Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini verified Kepler's
position through observations he made in the Basilica of San Petronio in the
heart of the Papal States. Cassini, incidentally, was a student of Fr.
Riccioli and Fr. Francesco Grimaldi, the great astronomer who also
discovered the diffraction of light, and even gave the phenomenon its name.

Stanley Jaki, over the course of an extraordinary scholarly career, has
developed a compelling argument that in fact it was important aspects of the
Christian worldview that accounted for why it was in the West that science
enjoyed the success it did as a self-sustaining enterprise. Non-Christian
cultures did not possess the same philosophical tools, and in fact were
burdened by conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science.
Jaki extends this thesis to seven great cultures: Arabic, Babylonian,
Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya. In these cultures, Jaki explains,
science suffered a "stillbirth"


The Church Today
-------------------------
Due mainly to changes in the Western education system, particularly in the
increased secularisation of education, the Church has played a much less
prominent role at the forefront of scientific advancement although have been
notable exceptions such as Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, the first
person to promote the Big Bang Theory in 1927.

Nevertheless, the Church continues to support scientific endeavour; one
example of this is the Church's refusal to support the Intelligent Design
movement. It is also worth noting that in the current US environment with
constant battles between the ID movement and science as to what should be
taught in schools, there has been no criticism of any kind from the
scientific community about the standard of science - including biology -
taught in Catholic run schools; indeed, there seems to be a general
acceptance that the quality of teaching is probably better than that in
public schools.

The Church, of course, has never had a problem with Evolutionary Theory -
from the writings of Augustine to the Church's total lack of opposition to
the writings of Charles Darwin, the Church has never rejected any scientific
theories that are accepted by the scientific community at large.

Recognition of the Church's attitude to science is perhaps best illustrated
by the words of Pope John Paul II when in October of 1996, he issued a
message to the Pontifical Academy of Science reaffirming the Roman Catholic
Church's long-standing position on evolution: that it does not necessarily
conflict with Christianity. [xiii]

The Church's attitude to science today is no different from what it has
always been - that the expansion of human knowledge is in itself part of God's
work. Where the Church differs from science is that it considers 'knowledge
for the sake of knowledge' is not enough on its own, that knowledge is a
means to an end with that end being an increased awareness and understanding
of God.

The Church has also made clear that whilst it will condemn the misuse of
science to try to undermine Christian belief, evidentially supported
scientific findings cannot be ignored or denied; the challenge is for those
practicing Christianity to find ways of accommodating such scientific
findings into their beliefs.






[i] Quotations from St. Augustine are taken from St. Augustine, the Literal
Meaning of Genesis. vol. 1, Ancient Christian Writers., vol. 41. Translated
and annotated by John Hammond Taylor, S.J. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.

[ii] Quoted in "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins from C. Freeman, "The
Closing of the Western Mind", London, Heinemann, 2002; in Freeman's book,
the quotation is given as an epigram with no reference to the original
source.

[iii] http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.xi.xxxv.html - thanks to
Andrew Arensburger for finding that and also to John Wilkins for pointing
out that the original Latin phrase translated into "disease of curiosity" is
"morbo cupiditatis" which is more accurately translated as "morbid
curiosity" in the Imago version of Confessions.

[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages

[v] Although universities in various forms existed in other forma in various
ancient civilisations, the first universities in Western Europe are
generally recognised as Bologna and Paris, both with their roots in monastic
schools.

[vi] Quoted in "Monasticism and Civilization" by John B. O'Connor, p90.

[vii] "The Rise of the Mediaeval Church". New York: Burt Franklin 1909

[viii] "The Medieval University", 1200-1400 New york: Sheed and Ward, 1961

[ix] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution

[x] Harvard University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-674-85433-0. (Paperback, 2001.
ISBN 0-674-00536-8

[xi] http://catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0033.html

[xii] Regnery Publishing, Inc. (May 2, 2005)

[xiii] http://www.cin.org/jp2evolu.html



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