Comment by ryandv
1 month ago
It's a modern rhetorical fallacy that science is directly antithetical to religion, when many of history's greatest scientists were themselves "spiritual" in some way (though that degree of spirituality may have ranged from near-atheistic scientific pantheism a la Einstein and Sagan, to members of the clergy). I am glad there are still numerous counterexamples of those with firm educations in hard STEM fields that still contemplate the divine.
Probably two modern developments presaged this viewpoint: the laughable apologetics of the Creationists, which have already been refuted ad nauseam by the New Atheists; and semantic drift and inaccurate (or even lacking) definitions for the word "god," which is probably better understood in modern English as "mind" or "mental construct" or "the abstract" (as contrasted with the "concrete" or physical body a la Descartes, in a similar fashion to the distinction between the rarefied air of mathematical models, and the hard reality of physical law).
It's easy to chastise an ideology when you misunderstand some of its most basic terminology, as has been done with words like "god" or "spirituality."
Ironically I often find it is people who are not educated in STEM that cleave most vociferously to the point of view that religion and science are fundamentally irreconcilable.
The Catholic church has embraced science. It even accepts evolution and the big bang theory (as in: accepts it as a possibility, doesn't disavow it)
In general terms, whatever the subject, you can bet the Catholic Church has people that have thought deeply about it.
Doesn’t you have to agree with them, but it’s a far cry from the kind of anti-intellectualism so beloved of the “evangelical” churches.
Well, to be fair "thought deeply" might mean "engaged in a scholasticism-tier effort of apologetics to argue a position it held to be true a priori"...
>It even accepts evolution and the big bang theory
There's no need for "even" in the sentence. Georges Lemaître who was the originator of the big bang theory was a literal catholic priest and theoretical physicist, and funnily enough the theory was originally accused of bringing religious bias into physics.
Likewise prominent Catholics who were Darwin's contemporaries like John Henry Newman had no issue with evolution back then either. The Church fathers never read the bible like a positivist text. (this is a very 20th century fundamentalist invention)
True, but in online discussion about religion, Genesis (aka the big bang and evolution) is often the most contended point, even for those who don't have a literal view of the Bible. the discovery of chemical elements or the proof of Fermat's theorem is also scientific, but has another weight than the aforementioned two. Hence "even."
The joke was of all the jobs a person might get after attaining a mathematics degree, "pope" usually isn't on the list.
I’ve seen Americans in Westminster Abbey puzzled and faintly outraged that Charles Darwin is buried there. It’s true that later in life he moved away from his faith, but did so privately and even then his main issue was the problem of suffering.