JOURNEYING WITH YOUTH
By Fr Chris Middleton SJ, Rector, Xavier College Kew
National Science Week ends today. Whether it be the challenges around the environment, pollution, energy and sustainability, or the ever-growing impact of technology in our lives, science, in its broadest sense, is integral to the world we live in. Science Week, perhaps ironically, comes just after the 80th anniversaries of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 respectively.
In remembering these events we reflect not only on the destructiveness of war but also on the high stakes that the use of science can have. In 1946, Albert Einstein wrote of his fear about the way science could be used to increase our capacity to destroy: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe”.
The dropping of the A-bomb is a reminder that the progress in knowledge is not a panacea for the human condition, and that the moral and spiritual dimension of the human requires constant attention. Challenges around the environment, pollution, energy and sustainability also throw up immense challenges for us. Social media highlights the significance of technology in our lives, and how it is so tied to our ability to communicate and recreate. The world of AI will also throw up numerous challenges for the workplace and so many other areas of life, challenges that can’t be reduced simply to the scientific or economic imperatives.
It has been my practice to write in conjunction with National Science Week about faith and science (and by extension faith and reason), and to reflect on the contribution of the Church to scientific progress. I do so because for many students, even at a young age, the relationship of faith to science is a real credibility test, and because, to be blunt, there is often invincible ignorance about the legacy of the Church in the scientific field, and much of the secular world blindly assumes that faith and science are opposed.
A defining characteristic of our world is the scientific mindset. We approach our observations and understandings about the world through a scientific lens. Even though the evolution of the scientific mindset can trace many of its origins to figures in the Church, there is little doubt that many see a fundamental conflict between a scientific approach to reality and belief in God. Yet the Franciscan priest Roger Bacon (1220-1292 AD) was a pioneer of the scientific method in the history of science in Europe. In his account of the scientific method, Bacon described a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation and the need for independent verification. He recorded the way he had conducted his experiments in precise detail, perhaps with the idea that others could reproduce and independently test his results.
Many would be surprised that the Church has an Academy of Sciences, let alone what it does. The Academy originated back in 1603 as the Linceorum Academia, was reorganised in 1847 as Pontificia Academia dei Nuovi Lincei, and was reconstituted with its present name by Pope Pius XI in 1936. The work of the Academy comprises six major areas: fundamental science; science and technology of global problems; science for the problems of the developing world; scientific policy; bioethics; and epistemology. Its work is international in scope, and its membership of 80 Pontifical Academicians is worldwide and non-sectarian. About twenty of its members are Nobel laureates. The Academy hosts conferences and develops papers based on their discussions on a wide range of subjects, including robotics and artificial intelligence, sustainable food systems and the development of international standards for organ donation. They also award a prize every other year to a promising scientist under age 45.
One key point of questioning among students, or often an assumption that is made, is that there is a conflict between faith and evolution. As a Catholic and a Jesuit, though no scientist, I see absolutely no necessary contradiction between evolution and my faith. In part this stems from the influence of the Jesuit paleontologist and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, whose writing opened a connection between the science of evolution and a spirituality that believes God can be found in all things. For me, reading Teilhard on evolution, or watching a nature documentary, or considering the billions of stars that make up billions of galaxies, or pondering the ocean breaking on rocks on a beach, or reading the first two chapters of the biblical Book of Genesis, all point to the wonder of a God as the very author of life, whose creativity ultimately defies understanding, and who bestows the great gift of freedom on the universe.
Evolution, however, is a threat to some Christians because it threatens their basic understanding of their relationship with God, a relationship shaped by a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible as literally God’s Word. Catholics and many other Christians share a more complex understanding of the Bible. We see it as a library of books, with varying literary forms. Thus, the Bible needs to be read in terms of its form, as history, as theology, as poetry, as apocalyptic literature, as wisdom sayings etc. It is to be understood within the tradition of the community for which it was compiled, and we understand God to communicate through our use of the Word in prayer and worship. The Word of God is addressed to thinking beings, and our response to the Word includes our ability to reason.
The Catholic faith is primarily relational in nature, and centres on the heart and the spirit, but it is also a thinking faith. Catholic theology, traditionally, sees no fundamental conflict between faith and reason. St Anselm wrote a millennium ago “that Faith seeks understanding”. Even earlier, St Augustine wrote “I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe.” Questioning, philosophical enquiry, searching, these can all be part of our response in faith. We are not called to wipe our minds to be believers, but we give love the primacy, and at times trust in love to carry us when our understanding may fail us.
For me, therefore, there is no essential conflict between science and religion, between evolution and faith. There have been times of course when the Church has allowed itself to be fearful of scientific investigation, as happened with Galileo, or, for many Christians, with Darwin. But just as surely the Church has been patron of science through much of its history, and indeed Galileo himself came under its patronage (his major work was dedicated to the Pope). Modern science owes a great deal to the Church.
Prejudice and fear go both ways. In our secular curricula there is almost no mention of the debt owed to the Church in the quest for knowing in areas such as science. To take a few examples: Copernicus, the founder of modern astronomy, was a cleric, Gregor Mendel, who laid the foundations for modern genetics, was a Benedictine monk, and Roger Boscovich, who devised an atomic theory that was to influence John Dalton (himself a devout Quaker), was a Jesuit scientist. Blaise Pascal, a theologian, has a law in physics and a theorem in mathematics named after him. Fr Georges Lemaitre first proposed the “big bang theory”. Today, Fr Michael Heller writes on relativistic physics and noncommutative geometry.
Or it could be put another way: how many science books describe Louis Pasteur, the pioneering microbiologist, as a devout Catholic, or Georges Lemaitre, the author of the big bang theory, as a priest, or today, Francis Collins, the geneticist and leader of the Human Genome Project, as a committed Christian? Then, and now, many scientists have been able to combine deep faith with great scientific contributions, yet many continue to read only a false narrative of division and confrontation.
Jesuit education, too, has a long tradition of involvement in the sciences. For example, three of the main units in measuring electricity, ohms, volts and amps, are named after their discoverers, Georg Ohm, Alessandro Volta and Andre-Marie Ampere, all of whom worked in, or graduated from, Jesuit schools. Jesuit astronomers such as Christopher Clavius have had a major influence in this scientific discipline, and today the Jesuits still look after the Vatican observatories in Rome and at Mount Graham in Arizona. Br Guy Consolmagno SJ, the world’s pre-eminent expert on meteorites and director of the Observatory, stayed with the Xavier Jesuit community recently. Francesco Lana-Terzi SJ has a place in the history of aeronautics, while Angelo Secchi is called “the father of astrophysics”. The diffraction of light was discovered by Francesco Grimaldi SJ. There have always been Jesuit astronomers, physicists, biologists, chemists and geologists.
One of our tasks here at Xavier is to form students who will not automatically accept that to have a living faith and a scientific viewpoint is mutually exclusive. The Catholic tradition, at its best, and Jesuit education within it, have always accorded respect to scientific enquiry specifically, and the intellectual enterprise more widely, as a gift from God.
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