timeimmortal

Italian political leaders have expressed their dismay that a noisy protest at La Sapienza university in Rome prompted Pope Benedict XVI to cancel his planned appearance there.

Italian president Giorgio Napolitano released a statement condemning the “inadmissible intolerance” shown by the campus protestors, who had planned to greet the Pope with loud rock music, anti-clerical posters, and parades of militant homosexuals. Prime Minister Romano Prodi said that the protests had “provoke unacceptable tensions and created a climate that does not honor Italy’s traditions of civility and tolerance.”

Rome’s Mayor Walter Veltroni added his perspective that the Pope’s appearance on campus would have been “another great opportunity for the city of Rome to show itself as the center of civil dialogue.” While intellectual debates are welcome, he said, the “intolerant behavior” of a minority at La Sapienza was “bad for democracy and liberty.” The former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, went further, saying that the incident was “humiliating” and a “shameful day” for Italy.

Pope Benedict withdrew from his scheduled appearance on January 17 after a group of about 100 leftist students occupied to office of Dr. Renato Guarini, the dean of La Sapienza, demanding a withdrawal of the invitation extended to the Pontiff. Earlier a group of 67 professors– a small minority of the faculty– had signed a statement charging that a papal appearance would be inappropriate because, they said, the Pope is hostile to science.

What is it about left-wing students that makes so many of them act like arrogant brats?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of freedom of expression…but that’s where I part company, and cannot agree, with the arrogance of these students. Ultimately, they were denying someone else (the Pope, in this case) his legitimate right to freedom of expression by their actions, and what’s more were distorting facts in order to advance what appears, on its face, to be a secularist agenda that seeks to drive an unnecessary wedge between science and religion. The actions of the students were an act of freedom of expression as much as they were an act of censorship.

The Pope is called, above, “hostile to science”. The reason for this charge stems from a comment that Joseph Ratzinger made in 1990, in which he quoted Paul Feyerabend’s statement that the Church’s handling of the Galileo affair had been “rational and just”. Feyerabend was very critical of naive falsificationism, and one of his more oblique examples in defence of his critiques was that of Galileo (his argument was that in Galileo’s time, optical theory was unable to explain some phenomena that could be observed by telescope (this is true: think, for example, of the convoluted explanations that were concocted for explaining the reason why Mars appears to loop backward on itself in its orbit, when observed from Earth) — the conclusions drawn by astronomers were, therefore, based at least in part on “ad hoc” assumptions. In the specific case of Galileo, the “ad hoc” assumption made was a rejection of the Aristotelian notion that the stationary nature of the Earth could be observed by the fact that objects fell in a straight line toward its surface. Theories of gravity, which would fully explain away Aristotelian assumptions, did not emerge until about a century later.

All of which, Feyerabend concluded, meant that in a certain sense, the actions of the Church at the time were justified — while later theories would prove Galileo right, at the time all that Galileo had to go on was a guess, an assumption, and the Church was not willing to stake what were, in its view, the serious theological implications of heliocentrism on a guess. Of course, heliocentrism was eventually shown to be no serious theological issue at all…but I’m not sure that anyone living almost 400 years ago could be faulted for not having the same level of education — nor could the world at large 400 years ago be faulted for not having had the advantage of as many scientific discoveries — as we in this modern era possess.

(And at any rate, in 1992, the Pope at the time (Pope John Paul II, not Benedict XVI), articulated the Church’s regret for the way the Galileo affair was handled, and issued a formal apology on behalf of the entire Church.)

Now, interestingly, let’s compare here. This is not the first time, incidentally, where Joseph Ratzinger has quoted the writings of another philosopher and had his citation misinterpreted as his own opinion (for example, consider the Regensberg lecture). But I think it’s nevertheless worth observing that at the time the statement was made, Joseph Ratzinger was merely a cardinal — no utterance from him carried the weight of law or doctrine within the Catholic Church. Indeed, two years later, a statement that did carry the full weight of infalibility was uttered, and that statement (from the Pope of the day, not from a cardinal) came down on the side of Galileo. That is the official Church teaching on the matter, and Joseph Ratzinger — as Benedict XVI — must uphold that teaching.

To call the man hostile to science is, at best then, specious and misleading. At worst, it’s an outright lie.

But then…when did left-wing secularists ever let truth get in the way of the Very Important Statement [tm] they are trying to make?

Not only are the actions of the students and faculty that engaged in militant actions to block the Pope speaking an affront to freedom of expression, but they are also a lie and a travesty, and promote a false dichotomy between science and Religion. As
has been previously discussed, that is not the Catholic view of the relationship between science and faith. And to call the #2 man in charge of such a church “hostile to science” is very far from the truth. The actions of the students and faculty were the height of intolerance, and should be condemned as such.

Something for my misguided atheistic readers to consider.

During the year just past, much attention was paid to a spate of atheist tracts, notably Sam Harris‘ Letter to a Christian Nation, Christopher Hitchens‘ God Is Not Great, and Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion. Less attention was paid to a spate of books by scientists who happen also to be believers - biologist Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution and Christian Faith, astronomer Owen Gingerich’s , and geneticist Francis Collins‘ The Language of God.

Though the media buzz has tended to focus on the science-vs.-religion angle, it is worth noting that only four of the aforementioned books are by scientists and three of those argue against such a conflict. That said, it is also worth noting that none of the books is by a theologian, and Dawkins’ book suffers - as does Hitchens’ - not only from a relentlessly hectoring tone, but also from a tenuous understanding of both Philosophy and Theology. (In fairness, Dawkins seems to have read the Bible pretty thoroughly and is openly appreciative of the Authorized Version’s glorious language and literary significance.)

Christoph Schönborn’s Chance or Purpose offers a look from the theologian’s side. Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, studied theology under Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Together, they edited the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Schönborn’s new book may be said to have evolved out of an article of his that appeared in the New York Times in July 2005 headlined “Finding God in Nature,” in which the cardinal seemed to place Catholic doctrine uncomfortably in alignment with intelligent design theory.

In his book, however, he goes out of his way repeatedly to differentiate between evolution as the best scientific explanation we have of how species come about and evolution as an ideology maintaining that natural selection has rendered all religious faith untenable.

In doing so, he says a number of quite interesting things, among them this: “. . . nowadays, whenever people talk about ‘design’ and a ‘designer,’ they automatically think of a ‘divine engineer,’ a kind of omniscient technician. . . . Here, in my view, lies the most profound cause of many misunderstandings - even on the part of the ‘intelligent design’ school in the U.S.A. God is no clockmaker; he is not a constructor of machines, but a Creator of natures.”

Schönborn does not regard “the methodical exclusion of divine involvement” - sometimes called “methodological atheism” - as amounting necessarily to a denial of God’s existence. It is, rather, “a straightforward method of science [which] cannot assume the existence of a ‘clockmaker’ who intervenes. [It] is looking for mechanisms and sets of conditions that can explain the way things happen.”

What the theologian’s perspective contributes most to this debate is that the term God, as theologians understand it, simply cannot be an object of scientific inquiry: God “is not just one cause among others. . . . He does not shape something that already exists. . . . [His] act of creation is not in time. . . .”

I think a lot of atheists make the — pardon me — dumb-ass mistake of assuming that the Universe is, for lack of a better term, a superset, with all things — including any notion of God they are willing to acknowledge — being subsets thereof. Everything has to be either empirically quantifiable or, at least, logically falsifiable according to the normal rules of the Universe and the workings of the human brain for it to exist, or for any discussion of its existence to have “meaning”.

Such an argumentative and analytical framework is unable to contemplate that the Universe itself might not be the superset, so to speak, but rather a large subset of something even bigger. The notion of a God that is external to nature, above creation, is an alien one, and dismissed out of hand anyhow because in such a case one could not hope to demonstrate God empirically or demonstrate that the idea of God can be adequately falsified.

Of course, it is incorrect for them to think that way — one needs not even launch into a convoluted example to demonstrate that. It’s easy to see how if we dismiss from consideration everything that cannot be revealed directly through the natural environment, we would of course fail to notice things external to that, and in fact cannot comment at all on whether or not such things exist.

More importantly, though, whether or not one believes in God is immaterial to one’s ability to conduct good science, and to accept the validity of scientific theory. It’s entirely possible for me, as a Christian, to accept the theory of evolution and the various evidences presented in support of it (and, in fact, I do accept it). It’s entirely possible for me to likewise believe that God is the author of all Creation. Like an artist and his brush, the two beliefs are not incompatible, but are actually compatible and to be expected. God is the artist behind Creation; evolution is the brush with which He painted mankind into being.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Mark Shea)