Episode 47: Does Science Contradict Faith?

There seems to be a growing notion today, even among many of our children, that science is opposed to faith, or that science has proven there is no need for faith. This is an unfortunate misconception that needs to be addressed, and we hope to do just that.

Before we start, let us be clear about our terms.

What is science? It is an empirical method of studying the nature of material things. It develops and tests hypotheses, using appropriate investigation and experimentation, in order to discover more about the truth of the physical world within and around us. In a sense, it studies the what and how of the material world. What is this thing? What are its components? How does it work?

What about faith? According to the Catechism, “Faith… is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed.” (CCC, #150)

Pope Benedict XVI elaborated further on this when he said that “Faith is not a mere intellectual assent of the human person to specific truths about God; it is an act with which I entrust myself freely to a God who is Father and who loves me.”  (General audience, 24 October, 2012)

Venturing Deeper

In other words, faith is a personal relationship through which I embrace God, or perhaps more accurately, through which I allow God to embrace me. God who IS love and truth, who then helps me to comprehend the truth of His works as well as His plans for me and the world around me. In that sense, faith is a pursuit of the why and who.

We may ask, for example, why is there such order in the material world? Who came up with it? Who am I? Why am I here? These are questions that science cannot answer. But faith does. In this way, we can see that faith, far from being unreasonable or inferior to reason, actually goes deeper in search of the ultimate truth. It is, we can say, supra-rational. It goes above and beyond what mere reason or science can tell us. Think of the greatest thinkers of all time, like St Paul, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, and St John Paul II, just to name a few.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once said that “Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion brings things together to see what they mean.”

Similarly, Pope St John Paul II commented that “The theological teaching of the Bible, like the doctrine of the Church… does not seek so much to teach us the how of things, as rather the why of things.” (Fides et Ratio, 14 Sept 1998)

Thus, faith and science are not opposed to each other. Each complements the other in our pursuit of the truth.

They do not and cannot contradict each other. After all, truth cannot contradict truth.

If there is something that we find in science that contradicts faith, then either the scientific method used or conclusion reached is faulty, or there is a defect in the way we have understood our faith.

In fact, if we pursue science and faith rightly and with a sincere desire for the truth, we will find that the pursuit of one can and does enrich one in the pursuit of the other.

As an example, just think of the way our body works. The more we discover how it functions, the more we study it down to the microscopic and molecular level, the more we cannot help but marvel at God’s wondrous handiwork.

Intelligent Design

What is more, the study of science is based on the premise that things happen in the natural world according to a certain order, according to fixed laws that govern it — Newton’s law, Archimedes’ Principle, Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressures, and so on.

Yet, have we paused to ask ourselves how and why these laws came about? Who gave our world these laws? What, or rather Who, brought it about in the first place?

While science can tell me how things work in nature, even to the molecular and atomic levels, it cannot answer the questions we just asked. And other questions too, such as who am I, why am I here, where am I going? What constitutes a morally right action or a morally bad one? Is death the end of everything for me? What lies beyond death?

This is certainly where faith, rightly understood and applied, supra-rational as it is, comes to our aid, and gives us answers that science cannot. After all, laws of nature cannot come into being by themselves. Who could have put all these in place, in such an organised fashion, if not the One who is the source of being itself, and the cause of all the order that exists in this universe we live in?

In summary, right science and right faith are never in conflict. Pursuing one field can help us deepen our appreciation for the other, which is why there are so many great Catholic and other Christian scientists.

Think of Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Louis Pasteur, the father of modern microbiology. Think of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics. He was an Augustinian friar. Even Georges Lemaître, who proposed the Big Bang Theory that is now commonly accepted as the way our Universe began about 13.7 billion years ago. Guess what, he was a Catholic priest!

So if ever our children question us on the relationship between faith and science, we will, hopefully, be able to address their concerns and help them understand how they work with each other in leading us to the truth.

As Pope St John Paul once said, “Faith and reason are like two wings upon which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”

With this, we are ready to move on to the next question that bothers many of our children in today’s world – does God really exist? What evidence do we have for that?