The Challenges and Opportunities of Faith and Science Issues in University Pastoral Care

DEPARTMENT OR OFFICE TITLEEDIT IN TITLE MASTER (VIEW MENU)

April 22, 2023

The Challenges and Opportunities of Faith and Science Issues in University Pastoral Care

Rev. Dr Andrew Pinsent

Research DirectorIan Ramsey Centre, Faculty of Theology and ReligionUniversity of Oxford

Faith and science issues

THE CHALLENGE: New atheism and the conflict metaphor

ANSWERING THE CHALLENGE:

DISTINCTIONS: God, philosophy, religion and faith

COMPATIBILITY: Can one be a person of faith and of science?

VALUE: What does faith ‘do’ to help us understand the world?

ACTIONS: How can we help faith ‘do’ what it is meant to do?

04/22/23Contents

THE CHALLENGE: NEW ATHEISM AND THE CONFLICT METAPHOR

04/22/23

The challenge: new atheism and the conflict metaphor

The challenge at university (and in school)

From age 12 onwards, long before they can try to explain what ‘faith’ or ‘science’ mean, many students are absorbing the narrative that they are incompatible or even hostile.

This narrative is one of the key weapons of the (new) atheists, who generally argue, and want to believe, that theists are primitive, irrational and evil. The fact that sophisticated, specialist responses exist is almost irrelevant, since this narrative is communicated to intelligent non-specialists.

This problem is compounded by a general decline of philosophical thinking, even among intellectual leaders in other fields (as I discovered during a recent meeting of philosophers, theologians and leading scientists at CERN).

04/22/23


Some of the New Atheists …

“What the New Atheists share is a belief that religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.”

Hooper, Simon. "The rise of the New Atheists". CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/11/08/atheism.feature/index.html

“Militant atheists tend to make one or both of two claims that moderate atheists do not. The first is that religion is demonstrably false or nonsense, and the second is that it is usually or always harmful.”

Julian Baggini. Atheism. 2003. Page 150.

… and some of the Old Atheists

“The State recognises no religion, and supports and carries out atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in people.”Article 37, The Constitution of People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, Approved 28 December 1976

A membership card of the “Society of the Godless” or “League of the Militant Godless” (left) and its magazine, Bezbozhnik (“The Godless”), published 1922 – 1941 (centre). This issue from 1929 shows Jesus being dumped from a wheelbarrow by an industrial

worker. On the right is the dynamiting in 1931 of the largest Orthodox church ever built, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. The re-built cathedral was consecrated 19 August 2000.

Examples of books answering the ‘New

Atheists’

An example of the effects on social policy

Brian Iddon, the MP for Bolton South East, made the following contribution to a debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill:

“… Throughout time, there has been a conflict between religion and science. We should remember Galileo, for example. It seems almost impossible to believe today, but Harvey's description of the circulation of the blood and the heart's role in it met large objections in his day.”

… We hope that by taking the nuclei out of a skin cell or other cell of sufferers of these diseases and creating admixed human embryos, which the bill deals with, scientists will be able to find out how those diseases develop, with the ultimate goal of stopping them developing at all in every individual who might otherwise have acquired them.”

Manchester Evening News BlogsPosted by David Ottewell on May 13, 2008 11:50 AM

The Palace of Westminster, where the Embryology Bill was debated 12th May.The building was designed by Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin. Pugin was a Catholic convert whose Gothic style was inspired by medieval Catholic architecture.The very building where legislation now contravenes natural law is a building inspired by Catholic civilization.

Answering the challenge: basic facts, philosophy and theology In the remainder of this talk, I want to present examples of the

kinds of arguments that I give to students during their last four years of school and at university level at Oxford and elsewhere.

In my experience, even hostile students enjoy these talks and arguing through these issues with me. Students who have (or who are open to) faith gain greatly in confidence, not only from acquiring basic facts and training, but from seeing that faith continues to be intellectually respectable today.

More ambitiously, I do not just argue that faith is compatible with science. I propose that much of what we most value about our civilisation, including science, are direct or indirect fruits of faith. Such fruits may ultimately die in the absence of faith.

04/22/23


DISTINCTIONS: GOD, PHILOSOPHY, FAITH AND SCIENCE

04/22/23Distinctions: God, philosophy, religion and faith

Basic theism (natural knowledge of God) in contemporary secular society Belief that there is a God is not unique to those who are

‘religious,’ cf. philosophical arguments of Plato, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Aristotle, Newton, Descartes, Kant etc.

This fact is obscured in contemporary culture. Classical, medieval and early modern natural philosophy often culminated in inferences to a first cause or God. By contrast, so-called ‘naturalism’ today excludes God a priori.

So it is helpful to teach or remind students of those inferences that begin from a philosophical examination of the natural world and end in the conclusion of a first cause or God.

04/22/23

Distinctions: God, philosophy, religion and faith

Proofs for God’s existence

Cosmological (first efficient cause/ mover) Teleological (design/goals in nature) From degree (proof of ‘maximal being’) Ontological (‘being greater than which cannot be conceived’) Anthropic (unlikelihood of our existence) Moral (existence of objective morality) Transcendental (non-sense without God)

04/22/23

Contrary to popular belief, many of these arguments are still ‘in play’ in contemporary philosophy, that is, they have new formulations and influential advocates.

Attempts to invalidate these arguments usually try to show that God is not the only solution, not that God is not a solution. Furthermore, any objections to any proof of God existence can, at

best, show that the proof is not valid rather than that God does not exist.


Sometimes the structures found in nature witness to an supra-human order that simply evokes belief in a divine mind and handiwork without any formal proof. This is the view of St Augustine when he wrote, “All respond: ‘See, we are beautiful’. Their beauty is a confession.” St Augustine, Sermon 241 (ccc. 32)

The Infinitely Complex Mandelbrot Set,

revealed from 1978 by means of computers

Why ‘God’ is practically unavoidable in the search for wisdom: the ‘cause funnel’

04/22/23

Many particular things which are easy to know about

A small number of universal causes that are hard to discover

Towards knowledge of ‘first’ causes. The more remote andand powerful causes tend to be smaller in number, not links in an endless chain


Number of known compounds:

Very large:> 30 million

Number of elements:

c. 118

Number of elementary particles12 (+ force carriers; Higgs)

Why ‘God’ is practically unavoidable in the search for wisdom: the ‘cause funnel’

04/22/23

Particular human actions (waking up, washing, eating, lunch with friends, going to

college etc.)

Flourishing of body, society and

mind

Many particular things which are easy to know about

A small number of universal causes that are hard to discover

Happiness


Towards knowledge of ‘first’ causes. The more remote andand powerful causes tend to be smaller in number, not links in an endless chain

Why ‘God’ is practically unavoidable in the search for wisdom: the ‘first cause’

04/22/23

Cosmological proofs infer a ‘First Cause,’ an ‘Uncaused Cause’ that causes everything else in

the cosmos: this conclusion is hard to avoid without denying our ability to trust causes

remote from experience (cf. Hume), which also undermines science. The real challenge is to

know what God is, not whether God is.

Atheism usually offers substitutes, i.e. an alternative ‘god’ in all but name


Some opponents of the cosmological proof claim that the

causal chain could be circular, avoiding the need to begin with a First Cause ...

... but closed systems of causes tend to decay, like a clock running down, and a circle of causes

is not itself self-causing, so a further causal agent is still required.

A chain of causes, no matter how long, needs a

first cause, even if this foundation is remote from

what is directly perceptible.

Why ‘God’ is practically unavoidable in the search for wisdom: the ‘first cause’

Millions of flowers on the earth tell us his love. Blue waves of the ocean sing of his work. He is the creator of happiness to grow the garden of Ju-che.Long live, long live, General Kim Jong-Il !

An English translation of the second verse of the (former) national anthem of North Korea

The North Korean national anthem

The Juche (‘joo-cheh’) Idea is the official state ideology of North Korea and its political system. The core principle of the Juche ideology since the 1970s has been that 'man is the master of everything and decides everything'.

Importance of basic philosophical training Showing inferences to God’s existence through philosophy is important in itself.

Philosophy more generally helps to neutralise many other perceived faith and science conflicts.

For example, a brief examination of what is meant by modern ‘science’ shows that it deals, for the most part, with laws of regular quantitative phenomena and can say little, by itself, even about essences of natural things. Even “Is Pluto a planet?” cannot be answered by experiments alone. So science, though valuable, is also inherently limited.

A brief examination of what is meant by ‘cause’ also shows that things usually have more than one type of cause, e.g. material and formal. Such clarifications for students help open the door to understanding the notion of immaterial causation, e.g. the soul being the ‘form’ of the body, cf. Aquinas, ST I, q.76 a.1.

04/22/23


Theism and faith Belief in God’s existence and religion overlap but are not

identical. Besides facts or inferences about the world, religion typically involves worship, traditions, ritual and other elements.

The conception of ‘God’ and the relationship with God vary considerably, e.g. Islam (mainly third-personal); Christianity and ‘narrative Judaism’ (mainly second-personal) and Buddhism (‘no-personal,’ i.e. no personal God or relation).

The remainder of this talk focuses on ‘faith,’ the root virtue of a second-person relation to God by grace (divine adoption).

04/22/23

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you! ...You were with me and I was not with you ... You called and cried to me and broke open my deafness: and

you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness: you breathed fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for you: I tasted you, and now

hunger and thirst for you: you touched me, and I have burned for your peace.”Augustine, Confessions 10.27.38. Translation from The Divine Office: The Liturgy of the Hours According to the Roman Rite (London: Collins, 1974),

225*


FAITH AND SCIENCE:ARE THEY COMPATIBLE?

04/22/23Faith and science:are they compatible?

Mgr Georges Lemaître, Father of the Big Bang

04/22/23

Mgr Georges Lemaître (d. 1966), a Belgian Catholic priest, proposed what became known as the ‘Big Bang’ theory of the origin of the Universe, deriving what became known as ‘Hubble's

Law’ in a paper in 1927, two years before Edwin Hubble confirmed the expansion of the universe. He also proposed the way in which the theory might be tested by searching for

radiation from the Big Bang. He died on shortly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, proof of his intuitions about the birth of the Universe.

Faith and science:are they compatible?

Fr Lemaître was honoured by the Church: he was made president of the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1936 and a Monsignor in 1960.By contrast, as late as 1948, astronomers in the Soviet Union, a state constituted officially on the basis of an atheist Marxist system, were urged to oppose the Big Bang theory as ‘promoting clericalism’ (cf. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 262).

Mgr Gregor Mendel, Father of Modern Genetics

04/22/23

Gregor Mendel (d. 1884) was an Austrian Augustinian priest and scientist often called the ‘father of genetics’ for his study of the inheritance of traits in peas (between 1856 and 1863

Mendel cultivated and tested c. 29,000 pea plants). Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, later named after him. Mendel's paper was published in 1866 in

Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn, but largely ignored for nearly half a century. The rediscovery of Mendel’s work prompted the foundation of genetics.


Fr Angelo Secchi, Father of Astrophysics

04/22/23

Fr. Angelo Secchi (d. 1878), S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory, made the first spectroscopic survey of the heavens, classifying stars by four spectral types. He also studied sunspots, solar prominences, photographed solar corona during the eclipse of 1860, invented the heliospectroscope, star spectroscope, telespectroscope and meteorograph. He also studied

double stars, weather forecasting and terrestrial magnetism. He is considered to be the father of the ‘spectral classification of stars,’ leading to an understanding of their physics and evolution.


Fr Nicholas Steno, Father of Stratigraphy

04/22/23

Nicolas Steno (d. 1686) was the founder of stratigraphy, the interpretation of rock strata. He is credited with the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality, and the principle of lateral continuity, which are the building blocks for the interpretation of the natural history of rocks and the development of geology. Note that a Catholic layman, Georg Pawer (d. 1555)

earned the title ‘father of mineralogy’ for his great work On the Nature of Metals.


Fr Boscovich S.J., Father of Field Theory

04/22/23

Fr. Boscovich’s Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis (1758) developed a theory of matter as consisting of many dimensionless points, with the mutual attraction of any pair of points being some general function of the distance between them, represented by an oscillatory curve. Field theory are now fundamental to modern physics. Einstein’s efforts in 1919 to create a unified theory of physics was based upon extending Newtonian theory along the lines of Boscovich,

who was also an early advocate of atomic theory. Yet few textbooks mention him today.


Fr René Hauy, Father of Crystallography

04/22/23

René Haüy (d. 1822) was ordained a priest and had a strong amateur interest in science. Examining the fragments of a calcareous spar, he was led to make experiments which resulted

in the statement of the geometrical law of crystallization associated with his name. Haüy is also known for the observations he made in pyroelectricity. His brother was Valentin Haüy, the

founder of the first school for the blind, its most famous student being Louis Braille.


Fr Nicholas Callan, Pioneer in Electronics

04/22/23

The induction coil was invented by priest and scientist Fr. Nicholas Callan in 1836 at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, inspired by the work of Michael Faraday. Fr Callan. An induction coil produces an intermittent high-voltage alternating current from a low-voltage direct current supply. It is one of the foundations of modern electronic technology. Induction coils were used

to provide high voltage for early gas discharge and Crookes tubes and for X-ray research.

Fr. Callan also invented the ‘Maynooth Battery' in 1854, using inexpensive cast-iron instead of platinum or carbon. He built the world’s largest battery at that time, and discovered an early

form of galvanisation to protect iron from rusting.


Women as Early Scientists in Catholic Italy

04/22/23

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (d. 1799) was one of a number of remarkable women scientists associated with the University of Bologna in the 18th century. Others include Laura Bassi (d.

1778), Anna Morandi Manzolina (d. 1774), and Maria Dalle Donne (d. 1842). Agnesi is credited with writing the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus.

In 1750, Maria Agnesi was appointed by Pope Benedict XIV to the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at Bologna. After the death of her father in 1752 she gave herself to the

study of theology, the care of the poor, homeless, and sick. She eventually joined a religious order in Milan. To put this achievement in perspective, Winifred Merrill was the first woman to

be awarded a PhD in mathematics in the United States – in 1886.


La versiera di Agnesi, which means ‘the curve of Agnesi’, read by Cambridge professor John Colson as ‘l'avversiera di Agnesi’, where ‘avversiera’ means ‘witch’. The mistranslation stuck.

Geographical ExplorationMarco Polo: c. 1254 –1324, 24 year exploration of

Asia covering 15,000 milesPrince Henry the Navigator, 1394 – 1460: Azores,

West Coast of Africa.Bartolomeu Dias, 1488: southern tip of Africa.

Christopher Columbus, 1492: AmericaMagellan's expedition of 1519–1522: first

crossing of Pacific; first global circumnavigation.____________________________

Catholic Explorers also founded and named vast numbers of countries and cities, such as San Francisco (St Francis) and São Paulo (St Paul)

Fr Matteo Ricci, SJ, 1552 – 1610

The First Scientific Maps:Diogo Ribeiro’s version of

the Padrón real (1529)

World exploration and the first scientific maps

The Gregorian Calendar from 1582

04/22/23

Detail of the tomb of Pope Gregory XIII celebrating the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar, on 24 February 1582. The Gregorian Calendar with its leap years is now used almost all countries worldwide. Much of the work was done by Aloysius Lilius and Fr Christopher

Clavius SJ, drawing from measurements using meridian lines in Italian basilicas.


Is atheism genuinely the friend of science?

04/22/23


Examples of the persecution of intellectuals in the atheist regimes of the twentieth century, especially in the USSR and Communist China: Nikolai Vavilov, who was murdered; Andrei Sakharov, who endured internal exile; and the Chinese 'Cultural Revolution,' during which

intellectuals of all kinds were denigrated and persecuted as enemies of the people.

Faith and science: are they compatible?

Most of the time, modern science deals with matters that are not directly connected with faith at all, often involving measurements, laws and quantities.

What should be clear from these examples is that there are no grounds for supposing a naïve hostility to exist between faith and science, or that being a person of faith precludes fruitfulness in science and intellectual life at the highest levels.

But is there a stronger causal connection between faith and fruitfulness in science? Is the weak conclusion the best that we can offer: that faith and science are not incompatible .... ?

04/22/23


VALUE: WHAT DOES FAITH ‘DO’ FOR SCIENCE?

04/22/23What does faith ‘do’ for science?

What does faith ‘do’ for science?

Faith does not oppose science, but why should the practitioner of science care about faith at all?

Faith does not teach us about mathematical laws and teaches us very few facts about the world that we cannot find out by other means. Except rarely, faith does not produce falsifiable predictions. So what does faith ‘do’? What is its value?

I propose that faith adds value in at least two ways: first, by shaping the cultural setting within which science is carried out (sitz im leben); second, by shaping of our contextual or gestalt perception of the world, an influence revealed especially in art.

04/22/23


Faith forms culture: philosophy

04/22/23

Principles adopted, introduced or transfigured by Catholic intellectual life:THE PERSONSUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENTFREE WILL AND INTELLECTVIRTUE ETHICS UNIFIED BY CARITAS (LOVE)SECONDARY CAUSATIONTHE FOUR CAUSESCRITICAL REALISMMATTER AS GOOD, NOT EVILOBJECTIVE AND NATURAL LAWIMMORTALITY OF THE SOULNATURE AND SUPERNATURAL GRACESECOND-PERSON RELATEDNESS TO GODPRINCIPLE OF NON-CONTRADICTION

St Thomas Aquinas O.P.1225-1274


Faith forms culture: time, history, records, progressive ‘evolution’

04/22/23

The standard worldwide system for counting the days of the year, the Gregorian Calendar,

1582, named after Pope Gregory XIII.

600 400 200 200 600

BC AD0

History as progression centered on Christ rather than an endless repetition

Giovanni De Dondi's astronomical clock, the Astrarium, built 1364,

Padua, Italy

400

St Bede the Venerable (623/4 – 725). Father

of English History

Escarpement: used in cathedral clocks,

monasteries and town halls by c. 1200.

CHRIST


Faith forming culture: education

04/22/23

There were over 50 universities in Catholic Europe by the time of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. These universities included Bologna (1088); Paris (c. 1150); Oxford (1167); Salerno (1173); Vicenza (1204); Cambridge (1209); Salamanca (1218-1219); Padua (1222) and Naples (1224).

Monasteries, where manuscripts were copied, developed and preserved for centuries, helped save civilisation after the barbarian invasions of the fifth century. These orders taught Europe to read again.

Lindisfarne Priory (f. 635), famous for Lindisfarne Gospels. Like other

monasteries in England, Lindisfarne was destroyed by Henry VIII.

Roughly 10% of children in England today are educated in Catholic schools, and these

schools tend to be oversubscribed.

Across the world, Church schools educate nearly 50 million students worldwide and

provide much of the education in many developing countries.

King’s School Canterbury,

possibly founded by St Augustine in

597, the world’s oldest extent school


Faith forming culture: morality

04/22/23

Object

God

O

G

P

A person with the Gifts

of the Spirit

Freely loving with God what God loves, informed by good teaching, culminating in divine friendship: this second-person relationship underpins the humility, trust,

truthfulness and modes of teaching upon which much intellectual progress depends.

NOT divine puppetry

NOT simply following divine instructions (although these are important)


Faith forming culture: law

04/22/23

From the 12th century, Catholic scholars such as Gratian drew together the terms of Revelation, Roman Law (esp. the Christian emperor Justinian), together with Visigothic, Saxon, and Celtic legal elements, with Greek philosophical dialectic. The result effectively created the ‘science of law,’ jurisprudence, and a wide range of concepts we still use today, such as:AGENCY OR REPRESENTATION‘SOCIETAS’ (‘PARTNERSHIP’) AND ‘UNIVERSITAS’NATURAL AND POSITIVE LAWTHEORY OF CONTRACTSLAW AS A UNIFIED SYSTEMFIDUCIARY TRUSTLEGAL SCHOLARSHIP AS A PROFESSIONOBJECTIVE LAW, WHICH EVEN THE MOST POWERFUL RULERS CANNOT CONTRAVENE


Faith forming culture: society

04/22/23

St Ambrose confronting Theodosius, c. 390.

Modern principles derived from Catholic Social Teaching include: subsidiarity (Fr Oswald von Nell-Breuning; Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum), developed by Belloc and others into distributivism.

Catholic social teaching envisages society as a garden rather than a machine, in contrast to much modern political philosophy (e.g. Rousseau)

The distinct powers of the state and Church defend society, teaching and sacraments, but the fruitfulness of the ‘garden’ arises from divine inspiration and personal initiative at a local level.

A healthy Catholic society has many diverse institutions: for example, families, parishes,

religious orders, guilds, distinct national identities, and is

culturally diverse, e.g. Italian city states, Spain.


April 22, 2023Van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece or The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, completed in 1432

1432 Faith forms gestalt perception

April 22, 2023Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of St Jerome, completed in 1524

1524

April 22, 2023Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, completed in 1569

1569

April 22, 2023Constable, The Haywain, completed in 1821

1821

April 22, 2023Vincent van Gogh, Wheat field with Crows, completed in 1890

1890

April 22, 2023Jackson Pollock, Enchanted Forest, completed in 1947

1947

April 22, 2023London Riots, 2011

2011

April 22, 2023

Source: McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, Yale 2009

The chaos from right-brain impairment


Faith shapes our cognition, insofar as it leads us to expect to find order in nature. Faith also shapes our will to discover new things in the hope of relating to God second-personally and not simply ending in chaos and annihilation. Which of the visions below is most likely to nurture science in the longer term?

Faith, hope and discovery

04/22/23


Conclusion: how faith ‘adds value’ The fruitfulness of faith for science generally is not usually in

terms of additional facts but the gestalt or background context within which facts are ordered and understood.

In other words, faith helps form ‘right-brain’ cognition of the world, a framework within which facts and reasoning (‘left-brain’) can be organised and make sense.

Faith also shapes the institutions that in turn help underpin intellectual progress, e.g. philosophy, the progressive view of time, education, morals, law, society and hope.

The lesson from art since the sixteenth century rejection of the life of faith in much of Europe is that our perception of nature gradually disintegrates. Science may not be immune from this decay, even while we continue to accumulate new facts.

04/22/23


HOW DO WE HELP FAITH TO ‘DO’ WHAT IT IS MEANT TO DO?

04/22/23

How do we help faith to ‘do’ what it is meant to do?

What would help?

To draw on two thousand years of faith-formed genius to communicate that belief in God and a life of faith is intellectually respectable and exciting.

To impart some basic historical facts more clearly and consistently to students to inoculate against falsehoods.

To show the value of faith in shaping our world, especially via ‘organic apologetics’: roots (history and origins of our civilisation) and fruits.

04/22/23

“You will know them by their fruits.” Matthew 7:16


What would help? Faith helps form understanding, a mainly right-brain cognitive

operation (seeing the whole or ‘big picture’, cf. the ‘Eureka!’ of Archimedes). Right-brain cognition is imparted principally by images and narratives that evoke embodied experience to enable metaphoric understanding (words to life).

We need to know the parables of Christ; the key narratives of the Old Testament (inc. the ‘spiritual sense’ of these narratives – e.g. Exodus as the story of a soul); the heroic figures of Christian history, especially certain saints; the story of our civilisation in a Christian key, Christian literature (e.g. Lewis, Chesterton etc.) and good films.

The experience of Christian art and its interpretations, providing cognition by means of both halves of the brain.

04/22/23


Resources to help (but we need more)

04/22/23


... and a little humour helps...

04/22/23


What do YOU think? Do you agree or disagree? What else do we need? I open the floor to you ....

04/22/23


The Challenges and Opportunities of Faith and Science Issues in University Pastoral Care

Documents

Transcript of The Challenges and Opportunities of Faith and Science Issues in University Pastoral Care