Friday, February 17th, & Saturday February 18th 2012

Romans 8:19

Every religious person must at some point resolve the problem of the relationship between religion and science. When the Bible was written, there was no difference between works of science and works of faith.

The Bible is a work that captures all the wisdom people possessed almost 4,000 years ago. At that time, the biblical view of the structure of the world imagined a flat earth supported by pillars that extended through water to a firm foundation. Over the earth was a clear dome with gates in it that separated the waters that were over the earth from the waters that were under the earth. This is not true.

So what are we religious people to do about that? One answer is to throw out everything the Bible has to say about everything. For me, this is ridiculous. The moral teachings of the Bible about the sanctity of life and about not murdering or stealing and about giving to the poor and about forgiveness are as valid today as they were four millennia ago.

The late paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould called science and religion, “Non-over-lapping magisterial.”

He said, “Science tells us how the heavens look and religion tells us how to get to heaven.” These are two separate and non-overlapping of domains of human thought and they ought not to be in conflict.

Sometimes, people of faith who claim that religious people must believe that biblical science is true breach the boundary. In my view, they make religion impossible for thinking people to endorse.

On the other hand, there are scientists who breach the boundary by claiming that morality is just the result of genetic evolution. They make our sanctity and human uniqueness evaporate in a purely materialistic world.

The right path is to be open to science and to be vigilant about the boundary between science and our life of virtue and faith.

If God did not want this, God would not have given us brains. Somewhere between scientific curiosity and spiritual kindness there is a life to live and a world to both admire and heal.

Marc Gellman, The God squad.

Comment:
Theology is the union of faith and reason or as St. Anslem said: it is “faith seeking understanding.” Rabbi Gellman is to be complemented for seeking a balance between faith and scientific knowledge which reveals the facts about the natural world.

Fr. Hugh Duffy