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Faith and Science a Catholic Perspective

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Faith and Science a Catholic Perspective SCIENCE and RELIGION A CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE Fr. James Glass Catholic Chaplain, College of William and Mary The Christopher Wren Association October 19, 2017 “GOD IS A HYPOTHESIS THAT WE NO LONGER NEED” • The French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1847) was discussing celestial mechanics with Napoleon when the emperor asked: “Where is God in all this?” • Laplace is purported to have said: “I had no need of that hypothesis” (1802) • This sums up the modern view of many thinkers…due to the advances of science, God is “a hypothesis that we no longer need.” THE NEW ATHEISTS • Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion (2006) • Christopher Hitchens: God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) • Bill Maher’s movie “Religulous.” (2008) • Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow: The Grand Design (2012) Why there almost certainly is no God • At the end of chapter 4, Dawkins sums up his argument and states, "The temptation [to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself] is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable" The Infinite Regress Problem A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!" The Blind Watchmaker • The biologist Richard Dawkins, referring to William Paley’s “watch argument”, call the universe a “Blind Watchmaker.”…Paley finds a “watch,” and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of an explanation than the watches themselves?” -- Stephen Barr Religious Demographics W&M New Students Fall 2017 • 818 out of 1729, or 47%, of new students responded to the survey. (53% =“nones”) • 165 out of 818, or 20%, of Respondents are one of the below: – Agnostic – 66 8.1% – Atheist – 54 6.6% – Other – 4 0.5% – Undeclared – 30 3.7% – Unknown – 11 1.3% • Largest faith respondent communities – Catholic – 252 30.8% – Baptist – 59 7.2% – Presbyterian – 51 6.2% – Non-denominational – 49 6.0% – Anglican/Episcopal – 40 4.9% – Methodist/Wesleyan – 32 3.9% – Jewish – 27 3.3% – Lutheran - 19 2.3% – Muslim – 18 2.2% – Hindu – 14 1.7% SCIENTISM The enemy of faith is not science. The enemy of faith is scientism. • “Science…is the only source of real knowledge.” MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson. • Scientism would reduce all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge: “There is nothing that can be known about anything if it cannot be measured and quantified.” SCIENTISM • Scientism is a philosophical position, it is not science. A scientism which denies the existence of spiritual realities, or is purely materialistic, of course is in opposed to religion. But science can say nothing about the realities it cannot see. FIDEISM • The enemy of science is not faith, it is Fideism. • Fideism is a theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths. Faith and Science • “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.” CCC 159 Faith and Science • “Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.” ---CCC 159 Origins • The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers. ---CCC283 Questions of Meaning • The great interest accorded to these studies is strongly stimulated by a question of another order, which goes beyond the proper domain of the natural sciences. It is not only a question of knowing when and how the universe arose physically, or when man appeared, but rather of discovering the meaning of such an origin: is the universe governed by chance, blind fate, anonymous necessity, or by a transcendent, intelligent and good Being called “God”? And if the world does come from God’s wisdom and goodness, why is there evil? Where does it come from? Who is responsible for it? Is there any liberation from it? --CCC284 CAN SCIENCE EXPLAIN EVERYTHING? • Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? (Martin Heidegger) • Where do the laws of physics come from? • What is the purpose of the universe? • What is the purpose of Man? • What is love? • What is the mind? • Do human beings have free will? (or are we deterministic?) • What values should I live by? • What is beauty? • Where does music come from? • What is good and evil? • What should I do after I graduate? • Who should I vote for in the upcoming election? Proofs for the Existence of God Pope Pius X • ...God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world (cf. Rom. 1:20), that is, from the visible works of creation, as a cause from its effects, and that, therefore, his existence can also be demonstrated... Faith and Reason • Pope John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio also affirms that God's existence is in fact demonstrable by reason, and that attempts to reason otherwise are the results of sin. In the encyclical, John Paul II warned against "a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God." The Definition of “God” • Thomas Aquinas: God is not the Supreme Being. • God is not “Ens Summum” (The Highest or Supreme Being) • God is “Ipsum Esse Subsistens” (The sheer act of existence itself). • God is NOT ‘a being’ God is simply ‘to be’. • God is NOT one cause among causes. • God is NOT one being among other beings. • God says to Moses: “I AM THAT I AM” • God is love, God is Spirit Thomas Aquinas The Five Ways • The most famous of all arguments for the existence of God are the "five ways" of Saint Thomas Aquinas. • Nothing just is without a reason why it is. Everything that is has some adequate or sufficient reason why it is. • Philosophers call this the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The Argument of the Unmoved Mover • In the world we can see that at least some things are changing. Whatever is changing is being changed by something else. If that by which it is changing is itself changed, then it too is being changed by something else. But this chain cannot be infinitely long, so there must be something that causes change without itself changing. This everyone understands to be God. Explanation • Aquinas uses the term "motion" in his argument, but by this he understands any kind of change, more specifically a transit from potentiality to actuality. • When Aquinas argues that a causal chain cannot be infinitely long, he does not have in mind a chain where each element is a prior event that causes the next event; in other words, he is not arguing for a first event in a sequence. Rather, his argument is that a chain of concurrent effects must be rooted ultimately in a cause capable of generating these effects, and hence for a cause that is first in the hierarchical sense, not the temporal sense The Argument of the First Cause • In the world we can see that things are caused. But it is not possible for something to be the cause of itself, because this would entail that it exists prior to itself, which is a contradiction. If that by which it is caused is itself caused, then it too must have a cause. But this cannot be an infinitely long chain, so therefore there must be a cause which is not itself caused by anything further. This everyone understands to be God. Explanation • As in the First Way, the causes Aquinas has in mind are not sequential events, but rather simultaneously existing dependency relationships.
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