Well, the fact that we can’t think of any such aspect of science doesn’t mean we won’t ever be able to think of it, does it? And, of course the church sees God that way but that doesn’t mean much. If some method of inquiry in the future does make a scientific examination of God possible the church will either change or become ittelevant.
I disagree. If you are told that you never are allpwed for any reason whatever to reach a particular conclusion, there is a barrier. Implicit in your claim is that we can’t see any bridge between the two and therefore there isn’t one.
There are already people who believe (and have argued on this board) that the church is already irrelevant for that very reason.
Not exactly. Implicit in the claim is the expressed belief of the church that a transcendant God simply cannot be known by any physical examination.
I have already seen proferred on this board the response to the idea that religious beliefs are simply odd firings of brain synapses that may have served some past evolutionary purpose but which are nothing more than brain farts (organized into belief systems) at this time. The response given was that such a series of brain farts might just be the way in which God let us know he was there. You are not going to find a scientific, physical explanation that will unequivocally overthrow a religious belief among those who hold the belief.
I understand your concern, but I have not seen any evidence of inquiry prohibited by the church in a very long time. (Some applied science is forbidden, such as that involving aborted fetuses, etc., but there is no directed conclusion to theoretical physical science anywhere in the Church at this time.)
Of course there will always be an element that simply will not believe any evidence that might be produced 1000 years from now but I think it’s entirely within the realm of the possible that one rational, unified system can be derived from scientific investigation and most people will agree on it.
I don’t have any concern that strictly scientific inquiry into the physical will be hampered by churches. However I do think that inquiry into the “brain farts” you mentioned above could be discouraged if not forbidden. Psychology is just barely a science at present but scientists are more and more beginning to conduct real scientific studies into brain function and that could cause gas pains in some sectors.
I’m really not sure why I’m arguing science and philosophy since I don’t have a lot of respect for philosophy or the philosophers. They have been chewing over the same thing, what does it all mean and how do we know that, for century upon century without progress. Being a materialist I’m quite sure that religion, like everything else we think, will just turn out to be chemical and electrical activity in the brain. DNA shuffling will result in some brains having such religious activity to a great extent and some to a small extent or not at all.
The details are left as an exercise for future scientific investigators.
You seem to be confused here. Catholic school steach biology scientifically, and without any religious education at all. I was entirely educated in Catholic schools from K-12 and never once did a science teacher (we didn’t have a required biology class, in 10th grade there was a general science course with about 1/4th of the class devoted the biology, another 1/4 to geology, another 1/4 to physics and etc) in explaining any scientific concept bring theology into the classroom at all. The textbook we used was one used by many public schools, the instruction given by the teacher (who was a priest) was identical to that you would find in any non-religious institution.
The religious and scientific education are quite separated in Catholic schools. However, the Church itself isn’t purely an educational institution, and in its discussion it can freely mix religion and science, without having any effect on how it teaches science or religion.
As I understand things, ,this is quite wrong, at least for the Catholic Church. They are committed to the proposition that God is something that can be known via pure reason. Unlike the “faith-alone” doctrines common in Protestantism, this puts them more in the front line of having to be consistent with evidence and science.
I was responding to this post in which it was said that the Catholic church, and not the Catholic schools, was the largest educational institution in the world. What I was saying is that the Catholic church should separate the theological from the scientific if it is claimed that they are forever and ever two separate domains.
As far as I can tell the intention of Catholic schools is to separate them although, as with most things, I suppose some school staff’s do it better than others. I do wonder what would happen if in biology class some student started arguing for Darwin’s “warm pond” origin of life.
Well, based on the Miller-Urey experiments from a bit over a decade earlier, Darwin’s Warm Pond was the explanation that was offered as having the highest probability of being the origin of physical life in both my Catholic high school and Catholic college biology courses.
Still? I know that was the view of Thomist scholasticism, but I was under the impression (see this GQ thread) that that was no longer the RCC’s official philosophy.
Of course, knowing/proving something by “pure reason” and knowing/proving something by the scientific method (entirely unknown to St. Thomas Aquinas) are not the same thing at all. Some would argue they are mutually exclusive things.
Still? I know that was the view of Thomist scholasticism, but I was under the impression (see