Lumen Fidei: Remounting My Hobby Horse

Last updated on: December 23, 2014 at 5:40 pm by willduquette

Lumen Fidei: Remounting My Hobby Horse 2014-12-23T17:40:11-05:00 willduquette

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One of my hobby horses is the relationship between faith and reason in general, and between faith and science in particular. God is truth; the cosmos (the universe, the multiverse, the succession of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, or whatever else it turns out to be in its entirety) is God’s creation; God’s revelation and our observations of objective reality cannot, in the end, be in conflict. Our scientific theories are not perfect; there is always the possibility of going deeper, of understanding better, of explaining more, as Einstein explained more about the motion of bodies and the nature of matter and energy than Newton did. But any apparent conflict between faith and science is usually down to at least one of the following two causes: willful obscurantism on the part of the man of faith, or philosophical and theological overreach on the part of the man of science. And, of course, dollops of human intransigence, orneriness, general cussedness, bad manners, and sin. (A lot of Galileo’s trouble stemmed from his abrasive personality.)

In paragraph 34 of Lumen Fidei (yes, this is my third post on paragraph 34 of Lumen Fidei), Pope Francis emphasizes this.

Nor is the light of faith, joined to the truth of love, extraneous to the material world, for love is always lived out in body and spirit; the light of faith is an incarnate light radiating from the luminous life of Jesus. It also illumines the material world, trusts its inherent order and knows that it calls us to an ever widening path of harmony and understanding.

(My emphasis.) Read that again: faith “illumines the material world, trusts its inherent order, and knows that it calls us to an ever widening path of harmony and understanding.” There is an order in the material world, an order we can count on. Objective reality exists, and is worth of study, indeed, it calls us to study it. We truly can know it, and can trust in that. (So much for those who give epistemology priority over metaphysics.)

And therefore,

The gaze of science thus benefits from faith: faith encourages the scientist to remain constantly open to reality in all its inexhaustible richness. Faith awakens the critical sense by preventing research from being satisfied with its own formulae and helps it to realize that nature is always greater. By stimulating wonder before the profound mystery of creation, faith broadens the horizons of reason to shed greater light on the world which discloses itself to scientific investigation.

Science is not an un-Christian act; science is, in fact, a deeply Christian act.

It’s well known that the world of Islam had quite an intellectual tradition going in the early Medieval period, what with Averroes and company. But about that time, the thinkers of Islam adopted a voluntaristic view of God: the universe works the way it does simply and only because God wills that it should, and not because of any innate order of its own. If God should change His mind, everything might be different. Christian theologians of the day rejected that voluntaristic view; per Thomas Aquinas, the universe works the way it does because it has its own innate order, its own innate logic. It is given this order by God, this is true; but you can study this order directly. It is there, and it is not arbitrary. And in studying it, you are not presumptuously seeking things to deep for you; rather, you are honoring God, and giving glory to His creation.

And so, science.

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