Science and Faith

While on a lecture tour in Australia a few years ago, I had the pleasure of being a guest at the home of Sir Peter Lawler, former ambassador to the Vatican from Ireland. His position of diplomatic privilege had allowed him, upon occasion, to interact on personal terms with Pope John Paul II.



One statement in particular that the Holy Father conveyed to him stood out in Sir Peter’s mind: “The pope said to me with considerable earnestness,” my genial host informed me, “don’t make an idol of science.”

Pope John Paul II has a way of being able to communicate to the whole world, even when speaking to a single person. His warning has a firm foundation. Society makes an idol of science whenever it teaches that science is not only our highest source of truth, but also its only source. “We now live,” as playwright Arthur Miller has expressed it, “in an air-conditioned nightmare.” “Why,” the existentialist Albert Camus asked, “has the Enlightenment led to the Blackout?” We are strong in the face of things, but neglectful of persons; technologically sophisticated, but morally adolescent.

In June 1980, in his address at United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the pope stated that “Men and women of science will truly aid humanity only if they preserve the sense of the transcendence of the human person over the world, and of God over the human person.” We find in this brief sentence not only an affirmation of the Holy Father’s respect for science and regard for humanity, but his recognition that the former can serve the latter only if it does not absorb it into itself. Science should serve humanity, not dominate it.

The Catholic Church is not against science. What it is against is turning science into an idol, and consequently using science as a way of oppressing humanity and opposing the unique and transcendent value of the human person.

A synonym for the Age of Science is the Age of Anxiety. Under the weight of science, the world has experienced the diminishment of man. In filling his head with facts, man has bled his life of wisdom. Edna St. Vincent Millay made note of this phenomenon several decades ago when she made the following comment:

Upon this gifted age,

in its dark hour,

Rains from the sky

a meteoric shower

Of facts…they lie

unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough

to leech us of our ill

Is daily spun,

but there exists no loom

To weave it into fabric.

The pope understands the importance of this “loom” which integrates knowledge in the context of wisdom. He does not use the word “loom.” Rather, he refers to it as the “heart of the Church.” He begins his statement on higher education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, by reminding us that, historically, it was from the “heart of the Church” that Catholic education was born.

The mind separates through analysis and the heart integrates through comprehension. When science becomes an idol, the world becomes fractionalized. Science and faith, mind and body, facts and values, reason and emotion become alienated from each other. Cartesian dualism becomes triumphant and the “heart of the Church” lies dormant.

Neurological researcher Antonio Damasio, for one, believes he has found scientific evidence that refutes this dichotomy. In his intriguing study, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Brain, Damasio states: “Emotion may well be the support system without which the edifice of reason cannot function properly and may even collapse.”

Science does not validate its own initial assumptions. It does not explain, scientifically, how the cosmos got to be intelligible in the first place. It does not explain the natural affinity that exists between microcosm man and macrocosm world. Yet it cannot proceed without an abiding faith that the world is intelligible and orderly, and that man is a knower of reality and not merely a thinker of thoughts.

Albert Einstein once remarked in words that have an unmistakable Augustinian ring: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Science begins only after it has unscientifically accepted the miracle of the intelligible cosmos and its inherent implication of a transcendent force or Designer that lies beyond the stars. For this reason, Arthur Koestler has described scientists as Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity, an image which has an irresistible affinity with that of Catholic philosophers as Peeping Thomists at the window of the Eternal Law.

As we go forward in this new millennium, let us make this temporal journey with the abiding hope that the spiritual values which the idolization of science has suppressed for too long will re-emerge healthy.

Dr. DeMarco is a professor of philosophy at St. Jerome’s College in Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of The Many Faces of Virtue and The Heart of Virtue

This article originally appeared in Lay Witness, a publication of Catholics United for the Faith, Inc., and is used by permission. Join Catholics United for the Faith and enjoy the many benefits of membership.

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Dr. Donald DeMarco is Professor Emeritus, St. Jerome’s University and Adjunct Professor at Holy Apostles College.  He is is the author of forty-two books and a former corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy of Life.  Some of his latest books, The 12 Supporting Pillars of the Culture of Life and Why They Are Crumbling, and Glimmers of Hope in a Darkening World, Restoring Philosophy and Returning to Common Sense and Let Us not Despair are posted on amazon.com.  He and his wife, Mary, have 5 children and 13 grandchildren.  

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