Over at The Catholic Thing, George Sims Johnston asks, “Are Catholics Creationists?“:
“Catholics should take their cue from the Magisterium: Welcome the genuine discoveries of modern science while casting a skeptical eye on evolutionary “science” that for philosophical reasons dispenses with a Creator and treats man as a thing. At the same time, Christians who insist on explaining the universe in terms of ancient Hebrew cosmology are going to have a difficult time engaging the modern world.”
In Friday’s edition of The Catholic Thing, John O’Callaghan writes :
“A favorite tactic of people of faith and scientists alike to eliminate apparent conflicts between faith and science is an epistemological solution – science knows facts and truth, faith involves feeling and a kind of emotional response to the transcendent, where the transcendent is understood to be noumenal, beyond the realm of fact and truth. That solution is nonsense. It misunderstands both Catholic faith and natural science. Scientists often experience a kind of awe and wonder at the intelligibility of what they study, an intelligible reality that transcends them. And Catholics make claims of fact when they speak of God, claims that exclude their contradictory opposites as false. The divine transcends the natural; it does not transcend the factual and the true.”
Recently, Jimmy Akin ran a series of posts examining the Church position on the age of the world. Ultimately, it boiled down to this:
[B]oth positions are compatible with the Catholic faith. You can be a good Catholic and hold that the universe is thousands or millions or billions or trillions or quadrillions or other numbers of years old. The Church does not teach any particular age or age-range for the earth or the cosmos. You can follow the evidence where you think it leads.
As far as the Church is concerned, the question of the age of the world, and the universe, is a scientific question, to be determined by scientific inquiry. The Catholic Church does not teach that the age of the universe has been revealed by revelation or can be found by counting genealogies in the Bible.
What I would like to do now is examine the scientific evidence for the age of the universe and see what it indicates.
But before we do that, there’s one principle to examine first: that is, the idea that multiple lines of evidence pointing to the same conclusion are stronger evidence than a single line of evidence, and more importantly, that a possible, but unlikely, interpretation of one single line of evidence is difficult to maintain when multiple lines point to the opposite conclusion.
In other words, when many analyses, of many sets of data, all point to the same conclusion, unlikely controversions of a single line of that data are not entirely convincing. This seems to be the problem with many of the interpretations of the data pointing to the age of the universe — interpreters who desire a particular result come up with an explanation of a few sets of data that support that result, and don’t look at the “big picture.”
In the upcoming series of posts, we will look at the various lines of evidence which indicate the age of the world and of the universe, and see what the “big picture” these various lines indicate looks like.
Stay tuned…
Philosophical arguments demonstrate that the Uncaused Cause, the origin of all that is, must be essentially simple. Christianity explicitly teaches that God has this attribute of ultimate simplicity. For our scientific purposes, the necessity of essential simplicity in the First Cause is certainly the clearest way to demonstrate the universe’s incapability of causing itself, but it’s still a profound doctrine which is worthy of sustained thought. Edward Feser provides some at his blog:
“This doctrine is absolutely central to the classical theistic tradition, and has been defended by thinkers as diverse as St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes, to name just a few. It is affirmed in such councils of the Roman Catholic Church as the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and Vatican I (1869-70) – which means that it is de fide, an absolutely binding, infallible, irreformable teaching of the Church, denial of which amounts to heresy. Divine simplicity is generally understood to follow from the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of God as pure actuality. For something composed of parts presupposes the combination of those parts and thus a reduction of potentiality to actuality; and a purely actual being has no potentiality to actualize.”
Compounds derived from aborted tissues are used in cosmetics. It sounds like a campy sci-fi B-movie, right? Sadly, it’s not. The cosmetic company, Neocutis, has acknowledged that proteins derived from aborted fetal tissue is a component of their rejuvenating products.
We used to think this stuff was only in dystopian stories of the future. I used to think this movie was just silly, sci-fi schlock. But now a civilization uses the remains of its murdered children to improve, of all things, under-eye wrinkles. I’m not one to get unduly alarmed with apocalyptic predictions, but when children are used as cosmetics, can justice be far behind?
“The worshipers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a matured and polished civiliation, abounding in refinements and luxuries.”
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
… Carl Olson takes on his latest screed over at InsightScoop.
“It is my hope that the wonder and exaltation which are meant to be the fruits of this International Year of Astronomy will lead beyond the contemplation of the marvels of creation to the contemplation of the Creator, and of that Love which is the underlying motive of his creation — the Love which, in the words of Dante Alighieri, “moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradiso XXXIII, 145).”
Read the Pope’s whole address here.
It is interesting to note that those who are the most atheistic promoters of science (Sagan, Dawkins, etc.) usually invoke the sense of awe and wonder that most men feel when they look at the natural universe as a replacement for the religious impulse; indeed, they often talk as if the religious is the direct enemy of that wonder that, I have no doubt, they have experienced and which has motivated their love for science. However, not only is it not the case that religion destroys the sublimity of science, in fact the awe we feel at the universe can be maintained only in a religious context — it is atheism that ultimately eviscerates wonder and awe by maintaining that they are, in fact, nothing more than a particular set of chemical reactions in our heads. Their sense of awe is truncated, unrequited. It leaves off just at the point where it could begin to have meaning. It denies the only thing that could give it real existence, for they cannot seem to grasp the pathetic absurdity of maintaining that there is value in believing that value, meaning, nobility and wonder are just one arrangement of atoms reacting to another.
“For the first thing the casual critic will say is “What nonsense all this is; do you mean that a poet cannot be thankful for grass and wild flowers without connecting it with theology; let alone your theology?” To which I answer , “Yes; I mean he cannot do it without connecting it with theology, unless he can do it without connecting it with thought. If he can manage to be thankful when there is nobody to be thankful to, and no good intentions to be thankful for, then he is simply taking refuge in being thoughtless in order to avoid being thankless.”
G. K. Chesterton
National Geographic reports:
“The most distant object yet spied in the universe is the remnant of a star about 13 billion light-years from Earth that sheds new light on the earliest days of the universe. Two different teams of astronomers studied a brief but powerful flash of light, called a gamma-ray burst, from the star explosion.
Because of the time it takes for light to travel such distances, scientists think the exploded star must have been born about 600 million years after the big bang, when the universe was just 4 percent of its current age.”
The current issue of Touchstone magazine is focused on discussions of evolution and Darwinism. Available on the website are these three articles:
Charles Darwin, M.D.
Patrick C. BeemanA Better Solution
Denyse O’LearyMy Life With Darwin
Martha Hutchens
“To render the number [of galaxies in the universe] more comprehensible, let’s think of the population of the world, which is about 6.5 billion. If we divide the number of galaxies in the universe by the number of people in the world, each of us could have 15 galaxies, each galaxy containing from millions to hundreds of billions of stars.”
Fr. Gabriel Funes, S.J. Director of the Vatican Observatory,
in The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican
Why the internet is good for your mind….
… and why the internet is bad for your mind.
I think both aspects of the internet are true. The less effort we have to make to read and write, and the ephemeral nature of communication on television and the internet, can combine to make very bad mental habits; but the ability to instantly engage with other minds, even expert minds, on issues surely must be useful. Likewise, having the ocean of garbage-information that is much of the Web at your fingertips is dangerous and distracting, but the ability to find truly useful information and resources instantly is also very beneficial.
In the end, using modern information technologies well requires discipline and virtue — and not just the kind of virtue that avoids “naughty sites”, but even more so the kind of detached virtue that doesn’t become addicted to checking e-mails every fifteen minutes.
(I will add, though, that Twitter is one new technology in which I can find no redeeming value whatsoever.)
What do you think?
The Orionids meteor shower is expected to peak tonight. This October shower consists of fragments of Halley’s Comet, and although this shower is not usually the strongest of the year, it does seem to vary on a twelve-year cycle, and 2009 is predicted to be a peak. Sky and Telescope reports here. Unfortunately, the skies along the Front Range are overcast and we’re expecting rain and snow tonight, so you will all have to toast the falling stars for me.
The recent appointment of NIH director and Human Genome Project pioneer Francis Collins to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences might seem fitting in some ways, and puzzling in others. Fitting, because Collins is an outspoken advocate of the compatibility of science and faith, and puzzling because Collins’ ethical views are at odds in some areas with the Church. Mary Meets Dolly explains the seeming discrepancy:
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is a body that is charged with giving the Vatican the most up to date, most scientifically accurate information regardless of religious (or non-religious) affiliation. It was established by Pope Pius XI in 1936 to promote the sciences and its members are some of the most heavy-hitting, Nobel-prize winning scientists of the 20th century, many of whom probably disagree with the Church on a great many things.
The DNA in your cells is approximately 2 meters long, if stretched out on end. Nevertheless it can still fit into the nucleus of a cell too small to see with the naked eye. How is this much DNA packed into so small a space? The answer is very precise, fractal folding:
Applying the method to human cells, the researchers found that the genome has a highly organized structure. Small pieces of DNA fold into globs, and those globs fold into larger globs and so on. The researchers report that this “globule of globules of globules” is fractal, meaning it is organized in such a way that it has the same pattern no matter how far you zoom in.
Read here from ScienceNews.
The truth is that the enemies of Christianity, the men who started with a prejudice against religion long before they had studied any science, tried to stretch these very thin and stringy theories, or rather hypotheses, of the nineteenth-century biologists, and make them impinge somehow on Christian philosophy; drawing all sorts of philosophical morals from them which the biological suggestions did not really support, even if they had been true.
G. K. Chesterton
Alumni Protecting Notre Dame's Catholic Identity
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