In the past few weeks we've had interesting conversations with our friends Angelo Nwigwe (about preparing to be fathers), Nathan Crankfield (about men being providers) and Wayne Ottenbreit (about divorce and dealing with this societal plague). Check out the episodes if you haven't already!
This week we'll be chatting with our friend Nathan Pinto about discerning the priesthood (and entering the seminary) and then discerning out of the seminary for the world of start-ups, and the following week we'll be welcoming the new academic year with an episode on the new Catholic university based in Rome aiming to form saints, scholars and scientists: Catholic Institute of Technology. For that conversation we're joined by Dr. Jeff Kleck who is the dean of academics and the chairman of entrepreneurship and technology commercialization with CatholicTech. But that's not all Dr. Kleck stays busy with, given he is a leader in the fields of software, information technology, medical technology, nuclear technologies, and defense technologies and that he is also an established Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur. Dr. Kleck holds both a bachelor of science and a master of science in nuclear engineering, a master of science in engineering management, and a PhD in biomedical physics and he is a Senior Advisor with the US Department of Defense as well as a professor at Stanford University. You're going to want to tune in for that episode!
Our chat with Dr. Kleck (who is a Catholic and a scientist) and other recent conversations we've had with experts in the field of AI (all of whom are Catholics and scientists) has me thinking a lot about what I used to believe (and many people today believe) is a conflict between the Christian faith and science. So, I thought I'd do a blog post on the nonsensical idea that science and faith are in conflict which is, sadly, propagated by those within universities in the West as these institutions become ever less committed to seeking the truth and ever more committed to existing as cesspools of progressive, woke, anti-rational and anti-scientific "learning". I will mention four things on this topic.
First, the Catholic Church's assertion that truth exists and can be known (albeit not easily or rapidly oftentimes) resulted in the emergence of what we know today as "science". Science is nonsense without a Creator behind an intelligible and knowable universe. If the universe were not created by an intelligence (i.e., God) then it was randomly/accidentally "created" by non-intelligence which is meaningless, and if it is meaningless and random then studying it is equally meaningless and random because you can't know anything. Knowledge of anything presupposes you can trust it not to randomly change or cease but you can't trust things to not randomly change or cease if the universe is random. Science is possible because God exists and if God doesn't exist then "science" is nonsense. Listening to militant atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins try to justify their belief in nothing for long enough makes this all too clear (see a prior blog entry on him here). And where do ~99% of the world's scientists train to become scientists? Universities.
Second, the Catholic Church created and fostered universities. Look into why and where the world's oldest universities (Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.) were founded as evidence of this fact. The University of Oxford, which is the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the most prestigious university on earth, began as a Catholic center of education. In the 8th century the first abbey was built in Oxford (St. Frideswide) and so began a long tradition of religious scholarship in the city. University Church of St. Mary the Virgin (or, the church that preceded it, technically) in Oxford was established in Anglo-Saxon times and in the early days of the University of Oxford the church was adopted as the university's first building, and for hundreds of years Christians (all of them were Catholic, of course) learned and were awarded degrees in the church. My brother recently concluded his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford and my nephew was baptised in University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, and my wife and I were blessed to be able to visit Oxford many times during my brother's studies and were present for my nephew's baptism. Here is a photo of my wife and I in May 2022 inside my brother's college, which happens to be named after St. Mary Magdalene and also happens to be where C. S. Lewis became a Christian and taught for thirty years.
The world has universities thanks to the Catholic Church. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't care about history or the truth.
Third, the common claim that Christianity is somehow anti-science is in fact an anti-historical lie. Ignoramuses of history will spout off about the "Galileo affair" and then when asked how the universe came to be will typically suggest "the big bang." That theory of the beginning of the universe was posited by physicist Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître. He was a Catholic priest. Other ignoramuses (I used to be one of them) of history will spout off about the theory of evolution as if this theory is anti-Christian. Are you kidding me?! (I say to myself a decade ago). Here are but a few facts in the history of the theory of evolution:
Charles Darwin published his theory in 1859;
the Catholic Church said virtually nothing about it for ~100 years;
St. John Henry Newman, perhaps the greatest theologian of the 19th century, wrote in 1874: "I see nothing in the theory of evolution inconsistent with an Almighty Creator and Protector";
The Catholic Encyclopedia was published in 1907, summarizing evolution and stating: "It is in perfect agreement with the Christian conception of the universe";
The Catholic Encyclopedia further noted that evolution had "been propounded by St. Augustine" (who happens to be my confirmation saint) who lived 354 to 430 (note also that St. Augustine didn't take the creation account in Genesis literally, nor did St. Thomas Aquinas ~800 years later);
G. K. Chesterton, maybe the most popular Catholic writer of his time, stated in 1908: "If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox";
Pope Pius XII wrote in 1950 affirming there is no conflict between evolution and faith;
Pope John Paul II stressed in 1996 that evolution was more than a hypothesis;
Pope Benedict XVI hosted in 2006 a conference on creation and evolution;
Pope Francis stated in 2014: "Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve."
I was led to believe, first growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical culture and then living as a young adult in a hedonistic agnostic culture, that Catholics specifically and Christians generally must deny the possibility of evolution outright. But Catholicism has never had an issue with Darwinian theory. Stephen M. Barr, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware and president of the Society of Catholic Scientists, says:
Public discussions of evolution and religion are often dominated by fundamentalist Christians on the one hand, who reject evolution on the basis of narrowly literalistic readings of the Bible, and militant atheists on the other hand, who draw sweeping conclusions of a philosophical character from evolutionary science…. [Evolutionary] theories pose no danger to traditional Catholic belief or orthodoxy. Catholics are therefore free to follow the evidence wherever it may lead.
I highly recommend this article from Stephen M. Barr and this article from professor Christopher Baglow on the fake conflict between science and religion. I also recommend the work of the brilliant John C. Lennox who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. He has written:
[T]he Bible is completely coherent in its explanation of why the universe is (scientifically) intelligible and why immaterial information exists. The Bible teaches that an immaterial intelligent God is ultimately responsible as Creator for the existence of both the universe and the human mind. Human beings are made in his image, the image of a rational, personal Creator, and that is why they can understand the universe, at least in part. It is therefore not surprising that there is a close link between theism and the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Fourth (and finally), the mottos of all of the world's oldest and greatest universities (including Oxford, Salamanca, Naples, Harvard, Yale, etc.) refer explicitly to:
"truth" (remember that Christ literally claimed to be "the truth", see The Gospel According to St. John 14:6); and/or
"light" (remember that Christ literally claimed to be "the light of the world", see The Gospel According to St. John 8:12); and/or
science (see the first point above).
What language are all of these mottos in? Latin.
What is the official language of the Catholic Church? Latin.
That isn't a coincidence.
So what happens when we bring these four points together? Well, the Christian religion hinges on the notion that objective truth exists and it can be known. Jesus either (objectively) rose from the dead or he did not. Objective truth makes science possible, because science is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained. If there is no such thing as objective truth then none of this is possible because no observation, experimentation or test could be verified or validated. And science, made possible by the Christian worldview grounded in the Creator of the universe (i.e., God), emerged in the centers of study (i.e., the universities) that were founded by and funded by the Catholic Church and the religious orders and communities living the Catholic faith. So science as we know it and universities as we know them exist because the Catholic Church has held and taught for ~2,000 years that truth exists and we can seek it and come to know it.
This is why the anti-scientific and anti-reason woke progressivist poisoning of universities in the West is so troubling. I see this poisoning all too frequently and I know it all too well. I am a postgraduate student at Canada's largest university, so I see the aggressive progressivism as a student. I am a sessional instructor at two other large Canadian universities (in the business faculty at one and in the medicine faculty at the other), so I see the aggressive progressivism as a teacher. All of these environments are openly hostile to my Catholic beliefs. And, per the above, all of these environments exist thanks entirely to the Catholic beliefs of Christians centuries ago. The irony of this ought not to be lost on us.
The fact that so many once-great universities training "scientists" of the future are now so far gone is a shame. But this also presents opportunities for twenty-first century Catholics, as evidenced by the story of the Catholic Institute of Technology. We hope you will tune in to check out the CatholicTech story in a couple weeks!
God bless,
Travis
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