Hal G. P. Colebatch, Ben Stein, the Catholic Church, Coyne, science and god gone missing

(Above: Ben Stein, the friendly dog loving face that greets you at the door of the American Spectator, begging for donations. Sadly you won't be able to click here and donate via this image. What, you think I want you giving money to the American Spectator? Oy vey).

It will come as a great relief for true believers to learn that the Catholic church is at the forefront of progressive science.

Which I guess is how Hal G. P. Colebatch can write The Pope and the Astronauts without once mentioning the ongoing controversy involving embryonic stem cell research.

As for the messy business of Galileo?

Modern astronomy may be said to have begun with Copernicus, a Catholic priest, who dedicated his 1543 work, On the Orbits of Heavenly Bodies, to the Pope of the day. Galileo might have avoided trouble as easily as Copernicus did if he had shown a little more diplomatic skill and common sense, for example if he had refrained from mocking a Pope who had befriended and honored him.

Right, right, it's all Galileo's fault.

That'd be why the Church was so accepting of Charles Darwin's theories in the nineteenth century:

Conceding that the Church had been hostile to Darwin because his theory appeared to conflict with the account of creation in Genesis, Archbishop Ravasi argued yesterday that biological evolution and the Christian view of Creation were complementary.

Darwin’s theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, Monsignor Ravasi insisted. His rehabilitation had begun as long ago as 1950, when Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans. In 1996 John Paul II said that it was “more than a hypothesis”.

(source Times Online Vatican buries the hatchet with Charles Darwin).

Rehabilitation as long ago as 1950 for a work published in 1859.

But when you're busy writing hagiography, where's the harm in a little air brushing, a little photoshopping, a little omission here and there? I'm told it works wonders for female breasts and messy hair in odd places in men's magazines.

For the purpose of Colebatch's piece, you see, is to celebrate the Catholic church's pivotal role in science.

For a start, Pope Paul VI celebrated the moon landing, and the early church helped lift astronomy out of astrology.

He (Paul VI) said he prayed that the knowledge of the Creation would continue to grow and would enable God's power, infinity and perfection to be seen more clearly.

In a number of audiences and addresses earlier in the same year he had emphasized that the Catholic Church applauded the accomplishments of science, technology, and human ingenuity. He also made the point that science must also be applied to solving problems on Earth.

There's just one problem with this approach. What happens when the knowledge of the creation suggests god had nothing to do with it, and might not even exist?

That was one of the problems with Darwin. While at the time you could recite any number of sophisticated Catholics who understood that the book of Genesis was just myth-making (of a solid literary kind, up there with Homer), there's also been any number of believers anxious to take the word of god literally. Some used to reside in the Catholic church, though latterly the home of such loons has tended to be evangelical protestant fundamentalism.

Even so, as recently as 2005, you could find the likes of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn arguing for intelligent design in Finding Design in Nature, published in the New York Times.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

Now the best thing about the Catholic church is that it's a broad church, and there are much smarter cookies on the plate than this particular Viennese cardinal. If you want a response to Schönborn, you have to look no further than the director of the Vatican observatory, Father George V. Coyne, SJ in a talk on the subject which you can read here.

Even so, it's been a painful, slow rearguard action by some conservative elements within the Catholic church as they come to new understandings of the world, and some never make the leap, or don't want to - as in this reaction to Coyne's talk:

From our catholic faith we believe in miracles; for example the resurrection of our Lord, or the turning of water into wine by our Lord. These miracles do not simply happen in a 'theological world' different to reality - they happen in reality, and have an effect on reality. We, as the Church, must believe in these miracles. Now if we ignore the possibility of miracles from our scientific data, we are essentially doing a kind of biased science, not true science. We can therefore not separate science from our catholic faith.

Imagine trying to separate the world of fashion from religion; you would then possibly turn out some very immoral fashions; or imagine trying to separate religion from medicine; you would then possibly turn out some rather immoral medical practices. Religion has an impact on everything, and I think it is immoral to try to live otherwise - I believe science has become something of a false god, and I don't think trying to separate science in the way that you seem to propose helps.

What Colebatch offers up as a column is a nice tidy set of anecdotes about the way people within the church have made scientific discoveries or have favored science (why one priest, the self-same George Coyne, applied for astronaut training in the sixties, and Zucchi invented the reflecting telescope, and Georges Lemaître proposed the big bang theory, and he was a Belgian priest).

But these homilies ignore the many tensions between the Catholic church and the current theories and implications of science, never mind the many instances of conflict in the past where the Inquisition was sometimes used to sort out a few scientific theories - a more practical deployment of a bunsen burner could for example produce a very nice example of crystalline recantation.

That aside, what better current witness than Cardinal Christoph Schönborn:

The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe."

Furthermore, according to the commission, "An unguided evolutionary process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply cannot exist."

Indeed, in the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict proclaimed: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."

Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the "death of God" that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers.

Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.

Contrast that with Coyne's sophisticated understanding of the implications of science:

We can only come to know God by analogy. The universe as we know it today through science is one way to derive analogical knowledge of God. For those who believe modern science does say something to us about God, it provides a challenge, an enriching challenge, to traditional beliefs about God. God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world which reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution. He does not intervene, but rather allows, participates, loves. Is such thinking adequate to preserve the special character attributed by religious thought to the emergence not only of life but also of spirit, while avoiding a crude creationism? Only a protracted dialogue will tell.

Suddenly a belief in god begins to sound like theism rather than the full panoply of Catholicism known and loved over the generations. Perhaps best summarised by another response to Coyne's talk:

Genesis 1:27, "So God made man in his own image".
Genesis 2:7, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground."
Genesis 2:21-22, "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, …the Lord had taken from man, made he a woman, & brought her unto the man".
From the above verses, it is obvious that God formed man/woman from dust instead of transforming apes to human beings.

Gee, it seems like American fundamentalists read Catholic texts online.

Well should we ever get to Mars, and/or discover strange new life forms lurking somewhere - perhaps in caves or below the surface - what fun there'll be then as the church adjusts the bible to the discovery. (Yes, this site is a firm supporter of the campaign to get to Mars, the sooner the better).

Sadly there are more things dreamed of in the universe than could be imagined by the minds of the authors penning the bible, or even in the mind of Christ, who for all his miraculous powers and his connectivity to an all seeing all knowing god, nonetheless lacked the benefit of time travel when it came to predicting or seeing how things might turn out.

The trip to the moon was a wondrous thing, but the mapping of human DNA is a much more challenging thing, especially when it gets tangled up with evolution. And as science continues to chart the real world, the space for religion and god will continue to be whittled away. So it goes.

And nothing Colebatch writes in his glowing piece of hagiography celebrating the church's role in science will change that reality. Anecdotes about individuals don't amount to a hill of beans up against a history fraught with dialectical tensions.

Oh alright, one last word from Ben Stein, the cheerful face that appears on the pop up begging for alms for The American Spectator, home to Mr. Colebatch:

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.
Crouch: That’s right.
Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.
Crouch: Good word, good word.

Science leads you to Auschwitz? Well sure, and arbeit macht frei. Say no more American Spectator, my cash remains firmly in my purse.