Our daughter, Felicity, is starting Year 9. She is really good at science and wants to be an engineer. Getting her to Mass hasn’t been easy for a while. Last Sunday she told us she is never going again and refuses to be confirmed. She asked how we could possibly believe in “those religious myths”, when science has disproved it all. We don’t think Felicity is right, but don’t know what to say to her.
It’s important to take Felicity’s concerns seriously. Encourage her love of science; help her see that science and the Catholic faith are complementary. Point out the number of Catholic scientists. Ampère, from whom we get the word “amp”, was one of the fathers of the study of electromagnetism. Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian friar and abbot. Fr Georges Lemaître, often credited with first proposing the theory of the Big Bang, was a Catholic priest and a professor of astrophysics. There’s even a law of physics (half) named after him: the Hubble-Lemaître law.
It’s not just Catholics, either. John Polkinghorne was an astrophysicist who was also an Anglican clergyman. Francis Collins was the director of the Human Genome Project. Collins argues that, in the light of science, it is atheism, not Christianity, that is the “least rational” worldview.
These big names ought to make her doubt that science has disproved “those religious myths”. However, she is unlikely to accept the Christian faith just because these scientists did. So it would be important to listen to her to find out what she means by “those religious myths” and why she thinks science has disproved them. Here are some thoughts on the arguments she might use.
She might say that as science explains the world, God is no longer necessary. For example, if complex life can be explained by evolution by natural selection, there is no need for a creator God. But this argument rests on a confusion about God. God and science are not in conflict. Science describes the physical universe (that’s why it’s called “physics”). It describes how the physical world changes from one state to another. In physics we look for physical explanations of physical phenomena. But if we ask why any physics exists or operates, the answer cannot come from more physics – because physics is the very thing we are trying to explain!
To explain why physics exists or operates, we have to look beyond the physics to metaphysics (meta = beyond). Why, for example, do laws of physics exist? We cannot answer this with another law of physics. We have to look outside the physical universe for an explanation, and that is where God is.
So, far from being in conflict with science, God is the reason why there is any science. Darwin said: “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist.” St John Henry Newman pointed out that evolution adds to the grandeur of God’s creation, writing: “Mr Darwin’s theory need not be atheistical… it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and Skill.” After all, what requires greater creative wisdom: God specially creating each creature by miracle, or God creating the universe so perfectly that it would, in time, by the natural powers He had given it at the moment of the Big Bang, result in the wondrous variety of forms of life we see today?
Another conflict your daughter might have is the idea that science shows miracles are impossible. This too is confused. Science simply shows what the universe normally does. Science can tell us nothing about what the universe might do if God causes it to behave differently. You don’t need science to tell us that it is impossible for a man naturally to rise from the dead – the fact that it cannot happen naturally is what makes it a miracle! A miracle is just God, the creator of the universe, causing the universe to behave differently from usual. And since God is the reason for its usual behaviour, there is no reason why he should not, on occasion, make it behave differently.
Many young people think a conflict is to be found by saying that science shows the biblical stories are not true but are myths. If “myth” is taken to mean a story that did not happen in the way in which it is described, then on this (inadequate) definition, the six-day creation story in Genesis 1 is clearly mythical. You don’t need science to tell you that – just examine the text. Genesis contains two creation stories and since they contradict each other, they don’t seem to be there to describe the events of creation, but rather to explore the meaning of creation. The Church has never required the faithful to take Genesis 1 as a literal scientific description, although it does teach profound truths. From ancient times, the likes of St Augustine warn us not to interpret the text in that way. Since Genesis is not meant to be taken as a scientific description of the events of creation, science cannot “disprove it”.
Respectfully, explain to Felicity that the alleged conflict between science and the faith rests on a series of confusions. Despite the popularity of the science vs religion conflict, it’s not an intellectually credible position. Her worries cannot justify her absence from Mass.
Do give her space, though, to work through her difficulties before she is confirmed.
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