Fr Georges Lemaitre who first proposed the theory of the big bang, with Albert Einstein
A comment on the post The Lord of DNA (and everything else) deserves a post to itself because it highlights a common misunderstanding:
I'm never sure how to respond to students (such as a lad in my A level class) who claim that people had religion in the past because they didn't have science. ;)Two recommendations: 1. the magazine and pamphlets of the Faith Movement, especially the "Reasons for Believing" series "Can we believe that God exists?" and "What makes man unique?" 2. The excellent pamphlet by Frs Marcus Holden and Andrew Pinsent "Apologia" published by the CTS.
Science developed within the Christian culture of the middle ages precisely because Christian philosophy admitted the importance of secondary causes and therefore thought the world worth studying. As the Apologia pamphlet demonstrates, many of the great advances in science were brought about by people with strong Christian faith and in some cases Catholic priests.
Science is not a replacement for religious faith, it is a further reason to wonder at the greatness of the Creator. In fact, as post-modernism grows in influence, seeing science as just another of the myths that we live by, it is likely that real research, based on an objective understanding of the world, will become less popular. We already see this in the utilitarian approach to science teaching in schools.
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Also a recent book on the Church and the History of Science. I was leafing through it the other day but forget the title.
This idea comes from the mistaken notion that the purpose of religion is to explain the natural world. I'm a middle school Language Arts teacher and this comes straight out if our mythology curriculum. We explain that myths arose to explain natural phenomenon that we have scientific explanations for today. For example, we understand the water cycle but in the past, in order to make sense if their world societies developed stories about a great rain maker in the sky. This explanation sells even paganism short, completely ignoring spiritual needs, but an anthropological discussion about that is just not going to happen in any middle school English classroom. I supplement the lesson by talking about the universal truth underlying the myths we read, which is why they at still relevant, even though they are part of a dead religious system. Christian and Muslim students get very confused because they don't understand how I can be a Christian and find any value in this unit of study. I never thought about what the aetheists were taking away from it.
The example I use amongst my friends when they try to argue that science and religion are impossible to reconcile is simply a list of all the Nobel prize winners who have been members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Illustrates how men like Rutherford, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, etc. regard it as an honour to be involved in an organisation specifically set up to "further the sciences" by the Holy See.
When talking to my friends who often believe the whole science vs religion nonsense, I tend to simply use the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: an organisation set up by the Holy See simply to promote science. The Church isn't afraid of it, and men like Rutherford, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, etc. weren't afraid of being given honours by the Holy See.
Lewis (and perhaps Chesterton) pointed out that the "ancient" people (like the Jews of Jesus' day) did have a conception of science and the laws of nature, or else they would not have recognized Jesus' conception and miracles as being, well, miraculous.
Lewis mentions this in several of his essays in "God in the Dock".
In my opinion, the idea that "science has replaced religion" is the single greatest (secular) heresy of the modern age. It also has a strong flavour of "the serpent beguiling us."
Look at all the aggressive atheist comments on blogs and a goodly percentage boil down to the ludicrous notion that "science has disproved the Bible because the Genesis account of creation has been disproved by the Big Bang theory."
I have been explaining to my teenage son that this is a completely false dichotomy, and there's no better place to start than that great photo of Fr. Lemaitre standing next to Einstein.
I love this quote from Fr Lemaitre: 'There were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both.'
That science developed and only flourished within the Catholic cultural matrix is, in my opinion, best expressed in the writings/books of the great Hungarian priest Fr. Stanley Jaki. Highly recommended.
Of course, Fr Gregor Mendel, "the father of genetics", should not be forgotten either, despite the all-consuming focus on Darwin by those who want an "atheist" hero (even Darwin was far from being an ardent atheist himself).
The pope Joannes Paulus II wrote an encyclical, whose title is Fides and Ratio, Latin words to mean faith and reason. In that superb encyclical that great pope explained that faith and reason are not antithetical. They are like two wings. We have to use both so as a bird does by its wings.
The same can be said with regard to science and faith. If the scientist uses faith, he can go further in his research, otherwise it is precluded to him a field of human mind which goes beyond the mere use of intellect.
The Catholic Church has been depicted as obscurantist, but it is not like that. The first University was just Catholic and it was erected in the city of Bologna, in Italy, around the year 1000.
I want to emphasize that it is reductive to consider faith as a synonymous of confidence. In fact faith is much wider. Faith implies reason, will and love. That of Abraham was not just blind confidence, for he knew that God would not forsake him and at the right moment He would intervene to spare the life of his son Isaac.
Ettore Grillo author of The Vibrations of Words
www.amazon.com/author/ettoregrillo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAotfnxdE10
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