what I learned today

I met with Rev. Ernan McMullin. Wow. It's difficult to even attempt to describe what we talked about...or I should say what he talked about and I attempted to absorb. Have you ever been around someone who was so full of...I dunno...knowledge/wisdom/experience that you were just awed? That was me with Father McMullin. But the supercool part was that the "awed" I felt wasn't just the "wow-he's-important" like you might feel around the President or the "wow-he's-smart" like you feel around any given professor or scientist or philosopher. It was more than that. It might be something like you'd feel if you had met C.S. Lewis or Mother Theresa or Thomas Merton or Pope John Paul II; an awe that comes not out of their impressiveness or stature or persona or smarts but out of your lack. My description is inadequate...all I can say is that I was humbled. And, of course, I was drawn into discussion--though I didn't have much to contribute--about two of my favorite (somewhat unrelated) topics: Ireland and religion and science--logical topics to bring up if you're an Irish Catholic priest who studied physics in the 1950s, started the HPS program at ND, and lectures on these things all around the world. Currently irking Father McMullin is the controversy over a particular op-ed piece run in a recent New York Times (July 7th). Christoph Schönborn, an Austrian cardinal, published an article that purportedly "redefines" the Catholic Church's position on evolution. I put redefine in quotes because it contradicts an official papal statement made by Pope John Paul II in 1996--a statement that interestingly enough the Cardinal did not mention explicitly--which states,

In his encyclical "Humani Generis" (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation, on condition that one did not lose sight of several indisputable points.

One of the main indisputable points John Paul was referring to is that, when understood in their fullness, the study of Scripture and the study of Nature (the "Two Books" idea) cannot contradict themselves, for they are both revelations given to people by God. That being the case, we are up against what appears to be a problem: doesn't materialist science embodied in evolution directly contradict Scripture? And if so, shouldn't the more recent of the two sources (science) be thrown out on this issue? As Father McMullin put it, the problem begins when science makes metaphysical claims--when science says "we can only see the natural/material, therefore that is all that exists." This is insufficient logic, however. We can say instead that science is limited and that there is something beyond science which gives us access to the "evidence of things not seen," as Paul said. But it would be a mistake, thinks Father McMullin and others, to scrap the theories of biology, geology, astronomy, and other "history based" disciplines (theory understood here to mean "well reasoned, empirically supported, epistemological claim about the observable world") while retaining those of physics and chemistry. Actually, Father McMullin went one better; it's not just that science and religion are non-contradictory: he thinks that it is a secularizing influence in American Christianity (including both Catholic and Protestant versions) that ties scientific evidence so closely with faith. In other words, it is only because we feel that we must have visual/empirical evidence in order to believe that American Christians fight so staunchly against the claims of evolutionary sciences. Up against our need for evidence we have the simple words of Jesus to Thomas (and us, by extension), "Blessed are those who have not seen and still believe!" BTW, for a different, and much less religiously focused rebuttal of Schonborn's claims, take a look at this.