The Joy of the Truth » science and religion

YouCat and the Church Fathers

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 01:15:57 +0000

The next objection to the YouCat that I wanted to explore is that it places greater weight on modern scientific speculation than on the Church Fathers’ unanimous interpretations of the first chapters of Genesis. Again, this objection is closely related to the others. But instead of rehashing what I’ve already said about the Church and evolution, I’d like to take this opportunity to explore the role of the Church Fathers.

Now, there is no denying that the early Church Fathers are an awesome and important source of knowledge of what is believed about Christ and the Church. Their importance is mostly due to their closeness to the apostles. The Church Fathers were directly discipled by the Apostles and, unlike the Apostles, they did a lot of writing to preserve the Tradition of the Church and pass it down to future generations.

However, one thing that is often misunderstood is the role the Church Fathers play in the development of infallible doctrine. A doctrine is determined to be divinely and infallibly inspired when the Holy Spirit guides the Church to “always and everywhere” believe something. Practically speaking, this means tracing a belief back to the Apostles. The writings of the Church Fathers are valuable gifts given to the Church to help us understand how a doctrine came to us from the Apostles. That does not mean that everything the Church Fathers taught is infallible. For example, Origen taught that at the Final Judgement everyone (including the fallen angels) would be redeemed and end up in heaven. On the other hand, Augustine believed that most of humanity would be damned but a few people were saved by God’s mercy to be in heaven. Which Church Father would have the infallible statement? Even more confusing, both of these beliefs have persisted through time.

That is why our sure guide to what is infallible Tradition and how to interpret the Sacred Scriptures is the Magisterium of the Church, not the Church Fathers themselves. The Church Fathers are instructional and a great gift to the Church. But they are part of a Tradition that needs to be interpreted through the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Magisterium.

So the Church Fathers are not a special authority on the Old Testament. They do not enjoy a special infallibility. Furthermore, Darwinian evolution was not really an issue they dealt with. The question to ask of Tradition would be – has science and faith been seen as compatible or incompatible? The answer is definitely compatible. Myths to the contrary aside (Galileo is so misunderstood), the Church has always embraced science as a method of knowing God’s creation, especially of knowing how God works (while the Bible explains why). I guess another question to ask Tradition would be if Sacred Scripture has been seen as a source of scientific knowledge.

The main teaching in the YouCat in the area of evolution is that Scripture and Science deal with different realms of truth. This statement is in line with Tradition, judging from what the Church teaches about the nature of truth in Sacred Scripture.

OK, I’m not feeling that what I wrote here was quite as coherent as my previous posts. Give me your feedback! What do we need to discuss / debate / clarify?

YouCat and Progressive Creation

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 14:50:07 +0000

The next objection to the YouCat is that it “teaches that God made an incomplete world filled with defects and deformities.” Again, I am assuming a bit here in my interpretation of the objection, but I think I know where they’re coming from. By giving a nod to evolution, the YouCat seems to side with those theologians who say that the creation of the world was progressive. These theologians say that God created the world, but that he did so as a process, not immediately as it seems to happen in Genesis 1.

First of all, let’s take a look at what the YouCat says.

The creation account is not a scientific model for explaining the beginning of the world. “God created the world” is a theological statement that is concerned with the relation of the world to God. God willed the world; he sustains it and will perfect it. Being created is a lasting quality in things and an fundamental truth about them.

from article 41

The Church teaches that God’s actions are not limited to time. God Creates. The Church also teaches that human beings cooperate in the work of Creation to perfect it for human use (see Pope John Paul II’s document Laborem Exercens – on the Dignity of Human Work – as an example). So, to see Creation as a process the way evolution does just doesn’t seem contradictory to the faith. In fact, Saint Augustine wrote about the progressive nature of Creation. He uses the figure of a seed – God creates the seed, with everything in it that makes it a plant. But the plant comes into the fulness of being through a process of growth. This does not mean that God did not create the plant, or that he created the seed and then abandoned it to grow into a plant on its own. God’s act of creating the plant is continuous, but within time it takes place as a process (“The Literal Meaning of Genesis”).

Look, is the YouCat saying that a good Catholic should believe in the theory of evolution? Nowhere does it say that! What it’s saying is that the scientific theory of evolution as a way of explaining the history of the world’s genesis within time is not opposed to Catholic doctrine or theology, and neither does it disprove Catholic faith in God as the Creator.

So you may ask, why even go there? The Catechism of the Catholic Church doesn’t get enmeshed in this debate. It sticks with the theological meaning and leaves the whole evolution question alone. The fact is that are youth do go there. They are hit hard and often with the message that evolution is truth because it is science and that Genesis is myth. The distinction that the YouCat makes between the realm of science and the realm of theology is really important for young people to get. The recognition that science and faith don’t contradict each other when each is properly understood is a point that I often make with young people that I teach, and to great effect. I applaud the authors of the YouCat for recognizing the need for the Church to address evolution in a way even a science teacher can understand.

YouCat and Biblical Inerrancy

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:33:31 +0000

The first objection to the YouCat is that the “YOUCAT insinuates that The Holy Bible contains errors.”
From what I can tell, this objection stems mainly from a concern about the YouCat’s treatment of the Creation story. The concern seems to be that the YouCat gives in to modernist concessions about Evolution. Further objections state that the YouCat places more trust in modern scientific claims than in Church Fathers and Doctors.

The YouCat states that the Bible is without error in its revelation of God, but contains historical and scientific error because it was written by human beings who were immersed in a specific time and culture. There is nothing wrong in the YouCat’s description. The objection seems to be seeking a more Creationist form of literalism – a word for word interpretation of the text. There is a blatant confusion in the objection about the inerrancy of the Bible.

The Church’s unchanging doctrine is that the Bible is inerrant in its revelation of who God is, our relationship with him, and what he expects of us (morals). The Church does not doctrinally teach that the Bible is without any and all error regarding (for example) history and science. This is why biblical study is so wonderfully complex, with the different senses of scripture and various legitimate schools of exegesis.

Do you agree? I think it’s important that the people of God discuss these things!

Is the YouCat Recall Legitimate?

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:04:26 +0000

I have been touting the YouCat as the next important tool for catechesis and evangelization. It puts the faith in simple, everyday terms that young people and adults alike will find more understandable and relevant than the more formal theological language of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The purpose of the YouCat is to take advantage of the dialectic model of teaching used by other catechisms such as America’s Baltimore Catechism and the relatively recently released Compendium of the Catechism. I have said that I wish I had the YouCat when I taught in the Catholic high school.

However, not all of the news about the YouCat is good. There has been a movement to have the YouCat recalled due to doctrinal errors and ambiguities. In fact, the Italian translation was actually recalled and revised. So are there legitimate concerns about the English translation of the YouCat?

Here is what I have discovered so far. There are six major objections.

YOUCAT claims that the Bible contains errors.
YOUCAT alleges that Genesis does not give a true account of creation.
YOUCAT emphasizes modern scientific speculation over the Church Fathers’ unanimous interpretations of the first chapters of Genesis.
YOUCAT teaches that God made an incomplete world filled with defects and deformities.
YOUCAT gives confusing (some say ambiguous others say erroneous) catechesis on human sexuality and end of life issues.
YOUCAT can give the impression that modern Catholic and non-Catholic authors are more important for young people to read than the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.

These objections are lifted from http://www.dfwcatholic.org/petition-to-recall-youcat-for-doctrinal-errors14256/.html but are repeated on a number of websites in part or entire.

I’ll answer each objection in turn. But what do you think? Have you read the YouCat? Have you found anything to be ambiguous, misleading or contrary to the teachings of the Church? Let me know in the comments below!

Counting the Cost: More Babies Dead

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:06:28 +0000

Catholic voters who chose Barak Obama as president must really be kicking themselves (one would hope). While the president has done some good things so far, the death toll continues to mount. This morning President Obama overturned President Bush’s ban on using federal funding for research into embryonic stem cell research.

Once again, the great orator couches his decision in terms that make the opposition unreasonable and self-serving, stating that his decision ensures that no scientific data will be “distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda.”

President Obama further opined:

“Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources, it is also about protecting free and open inquiry,” Obama said. “It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

The problem with this line of thought is that the ban on federal funding did nothing to inhibit free and open inquiry. It simply said that federal money would not fund this particular area of scientific research for moral reasons. Taken to its logical conclusion, federal funding should be granted to groups that want to step over other moral lines as well. How can someone with the president’s policy pick and choose which moral lines can be crossed? Let’s experiment on Alzheimer’s patients in ways that will lead to their deaths. Let’s do lethal experimentation on the handicapped. After all, “It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

Let’s be clear here. First of all, stem cell research that does not destroy human embryos has developed an increasing numbers of successful treatments. Embryonic stem cell research, which has been prodigiously funded by private sources, treats none. The reason for the failure of embryonic stem cells is that they grow too fast and too unpredictably, resulting in tumors and other abnormal growths. So, why would be be pumping more federal money into research that has born no fruit? One word – money. The scientific or medical company that does develop a cure based on patented stem cell lines has legal custody of that cure. This is not true of adult stem cell developments, since the cure has its source in the patient’s own body.

So, who is serving a political agenda? Obama’s decision potentially benefits “big business” medical research companies much more than it will benefit patients, despite his propaganda about finding cures and advancing medical progress.

My fellow Catholics, what price will we pay for our socially liberal administration that has so far shown no signs of decreasing the body count on the war, but every sign of increasing the body count of our innocent unborn?
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The Dark Side of Science as Religion

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:50:45 +0000

A dark side can be found for anything. Certainly the Catholic Church has had its dark moments. After all, it is full of sinners. However, one can convincingly make the argument that the dark side of Catholicism is not due to its doctrine, but due to the failure of people to live up to its doctrine. When science attempts to replace religion as the source of meaning in life, the dark side becomes inherent in its doctrine. After all, for a naturalist the purpose of life stops at the propagation of the species. Naturalists are confronted with personal angst when they face death. Neither are platitudes absent from such a worldview. Telling a widow that her husband will “live in on our memories” is nothing short of a naturalist platitude. There is no afterlife, but our individual lives continue in the memories of others and in the genes we managed to hand down to the next generation. What true value can an individual life have in such a philosophy?

A scientific religion would probably have few mystics. However, one who might qualify for the role would be H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s modern Gothic horror fiction carries a single message – the universe is brutally apathetic about the individual person. His horror is often grounded in secular evolutionary philosophies – the monsters in one story turn out to be de-evolved human beings. Supernatural elements tend to be alien or demonic forces, with no recourse to supernatural Goodness in sight. Horrors go on under the surface of human awareness all the time, and the universe doesn’t care.

One story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” begins with a doctrinal statement about Truth.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

In Catholic thought, the disassociation of elements of truth leads to error. We do not read the Bible as a collection of proof texts (that is why most Catholics do not memorize chapter and verse), but as a whole. We do not support science separated from philosophy, theology and divine Wisdom. The totality of Truth leads to He who is Truth, Goodness and Beauty Himself.

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A Reading from the Gospel According to Hawking . . .

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:26:57 +0000

When we falsely divide the Truth, we are often left with the ridiculous. Science has held a place of pride in Catholic thought as a quest to understand God’s Creation. Science has always been seen as compatible with philosophy and theology. Reason and science are used to show that belief in God is reasonable. A belief in a God of order and Truth fuels the scientific belief that the world is knowable and worth knowing. Philosophy fills in with reason the areas of worldly knowledge that science cannot know (for example, “What is love?”). Theology elevates philosophy and science beyond the pragmatic, utilitarians uses (the mistaken equivalence of science and technology). These three methods of finding truth – science, philosophy, and theology – complement each other and support each other in the Catholic mindset (and are perfected by Wisdom, intimate knowledge of the Persons of the Trinity). To separate them would be to weaken them.

But they have been separated, and they have been damaged. The French “Enlightenment” tore science away from religion and set it in opposition to faith. Since then, we have gotten to the point where philosophy barely exists as a true discipline in our culture. Theology has become secularized and humanized. Science as become the utilitarian development of technology. Attempts to reunite them in their weakened state may seem like a unique, cutting-edge thought experiment. The truth is, they should never have been separated in the first place.

Because science seems to be opposed to faith, many “scientists” now assume that faith is nothing more than unfounded superstition. While there is some recognition that religion fulfills a psychological needs for dealing with things like morality and death, for the most part this population of “scientists” would prefer to see religion die.

One current of thought even wonders if science could fulfill these psychological needs without superstition and therefore replace religion.

The article “Artist Builds Temple of Science” on the Wired Science blog tells of a thought experiment to create a “scientific religion.”

At a time when the gulf between religion and science is growing ever greater, an artist has erected a temple for scientific worship.

Jonathon Keats, designer of the petri dish God, built The Atheon to get people thinking about what a scientific religion (or religious science?) would look and feel like.

Keats’ conception of that idea took shape as a two-story building complete with stained-glass windows patterned after cosmic microwave background radiation and a liturgy based on the sounds of the Big Bang. The Atheon opened Sept. 27 at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California.

But, could science replace religion?

Asking if science can replace religion is like asking if the windshield could replace the car. True religion is an attempt to know all Truth. It uses science as one tool among many to understand Creation and the God who made it.

In his interview with Wired Science, John Keats explains,

I heard about the Beyond Belief conference in 2006. Richard Dawkins was there, and Steven Weinberg, and Neil Degrasse Tyson. They were trying to figure out what science might do to provide an alternative to religion. There wasn’t a consensus, but there was momentum towards the idea that science could do everything religion could, that it could be everything religion had been.

Of course, what they mean by “science could do everything that religion could” is that science could easily play the role of religion as they see it — an eviscerated social construction with a narrative full of platitudes to explain inexplicable things like the meaning of life in the face of death. They do not mean “religion” as an encounter with the living God.

To Keats’ credit, he does at least acknowledge the limitations of science, and he recognizes that the separation between science and religion is unnecessary.

I’m deeply sympathetic to both sides of a schism that doesn’t need to be. I hope it doesn’t widen to such a degree that we become, in intellectual terms, two different species.

When asked by Wired Science about the role religion plays in morality, Keats responds,

Maybe the first thing science can do is recognize that, parse it, and be scientific in terms of asking good questions. Why do we believe the things we do morally, or that guide us and give us comfort?

What Keats and his ilk will discover from such as “scientific” journey into morality is what Catholics call the natural law. You see, Keats is not doing anything original here. Like a young adult who cannot wait to get “out on his own” in college, to break away from his parents, only to find that he has adopted his parents’ ideals and thought processes despite himself, scientists are now “discovering” truths that have long been part of the Catholic intellectual tradition. Keats believes that science can put human beings in touch with mystery, if only it would reject the erroneous assumption that it can know all things. The Catholic Church has always seen science as part of an integrated quest to explore the mysteries of the world could draw us more deeply into the Mystery of God.

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The Joy of the Truth » science and religion

YouCat and the Church Fathers

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Is the YouCat Recall Legitimate?

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A Reading from the Gospel According to Hawking . . .

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