Robert Barron: A 'conflict' that need not exist
For the last several years, starting long before I was appointed auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, I've been posting short commentaries on YouTube. I've covered movies, music, books, cultural trends and more. But I've given special attention to New Atheism, a social and political movement that began in the early years of this century that promotes the view that religion should be actively countered. Among other videos, I've published three answers to Christopher Hitchens' book "God Is Not Great," and a rejoinder to Bill Maher's movie "Religulous."
I've received countless responses, mostly negative. I've been able to discern a few patterns.
Many respondents display what I call "scientism," the philosophical assumption that the real is reducible to what the empirical sciences can verify or describe. In reaction to my attempts to demonstrate that God must exist as the necessary precursor to the radically contingent universe, respondent after respondent says some version of this: Energy, or matter, or the Big Bang, is the ultimate cause of all things. When I counter that the Big Bang itself demonstrates that the universe in its totality is contingent and hence in need of a cause extraneous to itself, they think I'm just talking nonsense.
Again and again, my interlocutors resurrect the story of Galileo to prove that the church has always sided with obscurantism and naive biblical literalism over and against the sciences. The Catholic philosopher Robert Sokolowski has argued that the founding myth of modernity is that enlightened thought was born out of, and in opposition to, pre-scientific religion. And this is why, Sokolowski says, the conflict between religion and science must be perpetually rehearsed and revived.
But this myth is so much nonsense. Leaving aside the complexities of the Galileo story, we can see that the vast majority of the founding figures of modern science -- Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Tycho Brahe -- were devoutly religious. More to the point, two of the most important physicists of the 19th century -- Faraday and Maxwell -- were extremely pious, and the formulator of the Big Bang theory, Georges Lemaitre, was a priest.
If you want a contemporary embodiment of the coming together of science and religion, look to John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge particle physicist, Anglican priest and one of the best commentators on the noncompetitive interface between scientific and religious paths to truth.
As Polkinghorne and others have observed, the modern physical sciences were, in fact, made possible by the religious milieu out of which they emerged. It is no accident that modern science first appeared in Christian Europe, where a doctrine of creation held sway. To hold that the world is created is to accept, simultaneously, the two assumptions required for science: namely, that the universe is not divine and that it is intelligible.
If the world or nature were considered divine (as it is in many philosophies and mysticisms), then one would never allow oneself to analyze it, dissect it or perform experiments on it. But a created world, by definition, is other than God and, in that very otherness, open to inquiry.
Similarly, if the world were considered unintelligible, no science would get off the ground, because all science is based on the presumption that nature can be known. But the world, Christians agree, is thoroughly intelligible, and hence scientists have the confidence to seek, explore and experiment.
This is why thoughtful people -- Christians and atheists alike -- must battle the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion. We must continually preach, as St. John Paul II did, that faith and reason are complementary and compatible paths toward the knowledge of truth.
Robert Barron, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, wrote this for the Los Angeles Times; www.latimes.com.
This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 1:11 PM with the headline "Robert Barron: A 'conflict' that need not exist ."