FLAME TEEN HANDOUT Week 18 Religion and Science What you believe How do you define religion? What is religion to you? How do you define science? What have you heard about religion and science? Do you think the two can go together? What do you think the Catholic Church believes about science? What does the media say about the relationship between religion and science? What do your friends or classmates who are not religious say about what you believe in relation to science? Have you ever had someone question your beliefs with science as their argument? What did that conversation look like? Where do you see these two concepts in your life? Where I see science: Where I see them both: Where I see religion: What is science to you? 1 P a g e
So, what DOES the Catholic Church believe? Is there a contradiction between faith and science? We find our answer in YouCat, a Catholic resource for teens to help us understand our faith and the Catechism in more down-to-earth language. It was written in 2010 and published by the Catholic Church. There is no insoluble contradiction between faith and science, because there cannot be two kinds of truth. There is not one truth of faith that is in competition with another truth of science. There is only one truth, to which both faith and scientific reason refer. God intended reason, with which we can recognize the rational structures of the world, just as He intended faith. That is why the Christian faith demands and promotes the natural sciences. Faith exists so that we might know things that are not apparent to reason yet are real above and beyond reason. Faith reminds science that it is supposed to serve creation and not set itself up in place of God. Science must respect human dignity instead of violating it. Okay. So you read this through once. Read it again. The language gets a little technical. Read it slowly. Underline something that stands out to you. When you re ready, discuss these questions: What did you underline? What stood out to you? Did anything surprise you? What is the Catholic Church saying about the relationship between religion and science? What is the Catholic Church saying about the purpose or the role of science? Does this contradict what you ve learned in the past? Key Religion and science CAN coexist Examine your own thinking. What do you believe? The Catholic Church does not denounce science and accepts scientific discoveries. There have been a TON of Christian scientists, and there are still a good percentage today. 2 P a g e
What do you think? What do religion and science say about certain topics? What do you think about those same topics? Talk about the ideas in the chart below as a group, filling out the Science and Religion columns. Then take a few moments on your own to fill out the Me column with what you believe. Origin of Man Science Religion Me Meaning of Life Calculus Morality Destiny Chemistry Afterlife 3 P a g e
"Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. How did the universe evolve to the form that we see? But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. Why is there a universe at all? These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with." -Brian Greene, a world-renowned physicist and author of The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality 4 P a g e Science vs. Faith: A Contradiction? By Mark Hart and Todd Lemieux There are a lot of questions that science cannot and will not answer. One of those questions is why? Why did God create human beings? Why do human beings search for something bigger than themselves? Where is the human consciousness? Where is the human soul? How do we know that these two things exist? Why do human beings love? Why do human beings sacrifice themselves, even their lives, for others? Why do we think that certain things are always good and certain things are always bad? When we eliminate the study of God from our lives and restrict ourselves to scientific explanations, we are not liberating ourselves, making ourselves freer and smarter. We are restricting ourselves more ignorant. There is certainly a lot of be learned from the sciences. All of them. Since God create everything, we have nothing to fear from science. Science offers us an explanation of how God accomplished what He did, but we cannot forget that the science cannot tell us everything in the same way that a sculpture cannot tell us everything about the sculptor. Science cannot tell us what is beautiful. Science cannot tell us what is good. Science cannot tell us what is truth. It looks like we need faith after all. As a group, talk about these questions: What are your thoughts on the passage? What are the authors saying about the analogy of the sculptor? How does this relate to God? Do you think we have anything to fear from science? Do you think we have anything to fear from Christianity? The authors mention some why questions they have. What questions do
Let s call in some expert opinions Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish. Pope John Paul II The truth of creation and the theory of evolution do not represent two different realities, he wrote, as is often portrayed by the perception that faith and science operate in mutually exclusive spheres. Pope Benedict instead called creation and evolution complementary realities in that they are different, but they go together. The theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not a magician with a magic wand, Pope Francis has declared. Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the pseudo theories of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator arguing instead that they require it. When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so, Francis said. The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve. 5 P a g e
In the beginning According to Catholic teaching, we do not have to denounce the theory evolution completely. A Christian can accept the theory of evolution as a helpful explanatory model, provided he does not fall into the heresy of evolutionism, which views man as the random product of biological processes. One of the ideas of evolution is that over time, mutations happen by chance that lead to new species or different aspects of them. Catholic teaching says, however, that this cannot be the case. We believe that God, not chance, is the cause of the world. The changes in the world are not aimless, but rather they exist because of God s will. We as Catholics can accept the changes in the world and accept that science has proven that species transform over time, but the cause of these changes is not random. God is the force behind any evolving that may take place. On the other hand, Catholic teaching tells us that creationism can also be misinterpreted. Creationists naively take biblical data literally (for example, to calculate the world s age, they cite the six days of work in Genesis 1). So, we don t have to take what is written in the Bible literally in this case? Why then does Genesis say the world was created in six days? According to our teaching, the symbol of the work week, which is crowned by a day of rest (Genesis 1:1-2:3), is an expression of how good, beautiful, and wisely ordered creation is. In other words, it probably didn t take only six days, but these days are a good way to break down time in a way that is easier for us to comprehend. Time can be a tricky thing to grasp! As a class, read Genesis 1:1-2:3 Discussion questions: ((There are no wrong answers)) How do you interpret what is said in Genesis? How do you think Genesis 1 conflicts with evolution? How do you interpret the days that are discussed? Do you believe in evolution, creationism, or a combination of the two? 6 P a g e
We look again at YouCat for some FAQs: Does science make the Creator superfluous? No. The sentence God created the world is not an outmoded scientific statement. We are dealing here with a theo-logical statement, therefore a statement about the divine meaning (theos = God, logos = meaning) and origin of things. The creation account is not a scientific model for explaining the beginning of the world. God created the world is a theological statement that is concerned with the relation of the world to God. God willed the world; he sustains it and will perfect it. Being created is a lasting quality in things and a fundamental truth about them. Can someone accept the theory of evolution and still believe in the Creator? Yes. Although it is a different kind of knowledge, faith is open to the findings and hypotheses of the sciences. Theology has no scientific competence, and natural science has no theological competence. Natural science cannot dogmatically rule out the possibility that there are purposeful processes in creation; conversely, faith cannot define specifically how these processes take place in the course of nature s development. A Christian can accept the theory of evolution as a helpful explanatory model, provided he does not fall into the heresy of evolutionism, which views man as the random product of biological processes. EVOLUTION presupposes the existence of something that can develop. The theory says nothing about where this something came from. Furthermore, questions about the being, essence, dignity, mission, meaning, and wherefore of the world and man cannot be answered in biological terms. Just as evolutionism oversteps a boundary on the one side, so does CREATIONISM on the other. Creationists naïvely take biblical data literally (for example, to calculate the earth s age, they cite the six days of work in Genesis 1). Is the world a product of chance? No. God, not chance, is the cause of the world. Neither in its origin nor with respect to its intrinsic order and purposefulness is it the product of factors working aimlessly. Christians believe that they can read God s handwriting in his creation. To scientists who talk about the whole world as a random, meaningless, and aimless process, Pope John Paul II pointed out in reply in 1985, Given a universe in which there is such a complex organization of its elements and such a wonderful purposefulness in its life, talking about chance would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact it would be tantamount to accepting effects without cause. It would be an abdication of human reason, which in this way would be refusing to think and to search for a solution to problems. 7 P a g e
Who created the world? God alone, who is beyond time and space, created the world out of nothing and called all things into being. Everything that exists depends on God and continues in being only because God wills it to be. The creation of the world is, so to speak, a community project of the Trinitarian God. The Father is the Creator, the Almighty. The Son is the meaning and heart of the world: All things were created through him and for him (Col 1:16). We find out what the world is good for only when we come to know Christ and understand that the world is heading for a destination: the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Lord. The Holy Spirit holds everything together; he is the one that gives life (Jn 6:63). Do natural laws and natural systems come from God also? Yes. The laws of nature and natural systems are also part of God s creation. Man is not a blank slate. He is shaped by the order and the natural laws that God has inscribed in his creation. A Christian does not simply do whatever he wants. He knows that he harms himself and damages his environment when he denies natural laws, uses things in ways contrary to their intrinsic order, and tries to be wiser than God, who created them. It demands too much of a person when he tries to design himself from start to finish. Why does the Book of Genesis depict creation as the work of six days? The symbol of the work week, which is crowned by a day of rest (Gen 1:1-2:3), is an expression of how good, beautiful, and wisely ordered creation is. From the symbolism of the work of six days we can derive important principles: (1) Nothing exists that was not called into being by the Creator. (2) Everything that exists is good in its own way. (3) Something that has become bad still has a good core. (4) Created beings and things are interrelated and interdependent. (5) Creation in its order and harmony reflects the surpassing goodness and beauty of God. (6) In creation there is an order of complexity: man is superior to an animal, an animal is superior to a plant, a plant is superior to inanimate matter. (7) Creation is heading for the great celebration when Christ will bring the world home and God will be everything to everyone. I Learned Statements complete at least two of the sentences below I discovered... I learned I was reminded that... The question I have is.. I was surprised by... 8 P a g e