SUNDAYS SERMON

“The overwhelming majority of scientist throughout centuries in which the scientific process was developed were religious, and contradicts the modern misconception that ignores the evidence that Christianity had been dogmatically opposed to science.” —Vox Day

“The scientific ‘project’, even the scientific method itself, is an invention of the Catholic Church, during the Middle Ages, and included such notable science promoters and pious figures (who found the practice of science a form of religious devotion and not a way of rebelling against its constants as mistakenly portrayed) as Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Petrus Peregrinus, Witelo of Silesia, Johannes de Scartobosco and William of Ockham. Even the very idea of the university was invented during this period, and it came straight from Catholic monasticism.” -- Scott Locklin

"I can certainly hope and even expect to convince any rational person that atheism is no longer an option for those wishing to be regarded as intellectually honest. It is simply that there are certain things about our universe—and about our planet—that seem to be so extremely perfectly calibrated that they can hardly be coincidental. If these things were even slightly different, life would not even be possible. One classic example has to do with the size of Earth, which just happens to be exactly what it needs to be in order for life to exist here. The overwhelming impression is that the burgeoning welter of perfect coincidences has mounted to a level impossibly beyond anything we can put down to coincidence, so that even the most hostile atheist must at least wonder whether it is all precisely as it is precisely because it was intentionally designed to be that way. The false idea that faith and science are incompatible stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of both faith and science The well-known story of Copernicus and Galileo as scientists at war with the Church is false. Many of the greatest scientists in history were deeply committed to the Christian faith, and not only saw their faith as compatible with science, but as inextricably intertwined with it. Science as we today know it arose precisely because of Christian faith—not in spite of it...Instead of finding rational and data driven information to support atheism, it instead relies on bluster and rage to support its points. Try to read Hitchens’s book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything I found that I couldn’t make any real sense of what I was discovering. I don’t mean I didn’t understand the meaning of the sentences; that I understood all too well. What I couldn’t make head or tail of was how much a popular book by someone so previously brilliant could be so aggressively—I thought even ambitiously—awful. I didn’t need to wonder too hard how the book could have been popular, because what it did very well—via unconnected anecdotes and mean-spirited hyperbole and witticisms—was confirm and further inflame only the deep emotional animus many readers felt toward ‘religion’ of some kind, or any kind at all.But since atheists loudly ally themselves with reason and rationality, how can we shrink from asking them to defend their positions reasonably and rationally? We must hear how it can be that atheists maintain we are merely material beings with no transcendent value, but blanch and sputter when it is pointed out that this is what Hitler and the National Socialists believed—and carried out with typical and tragic German efficiency...At a time when secularism appears to dominate our culture, hatred for the Judeo-Christian ethic is advocated, and the belief in God is ridiculed, there's hope that belief in God will be resurrected and that atheism is dying a slow death. Somehow—in God’s impossible economy—everything is connected. Somehow. Through him. And because the good and beauty and truth in each thing points to him, it reflects off him and points back to every other good and beautiful and true thing that exists."--Eric Metaxas

Moral truth is the point of all major religions so as to live lives with sensibilities conditioned by a potent sense of subordination to a reality we have not chosen and to powers greater than ourselves. The reality of this world is constituted by the mechanism of matter and the autonomy of rational creatures. Faith, grace, or some moral or aesthetic insight is needed to see behind those mechanisms of nature.

Central to all major religions is love and moral order, the same ingredients essential for human life in complex societies. That should come as no surprise since mankind’s intellectual bank has known for ages that: “When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem” —Irving Babbitt. Therefore "Politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive” as Ronald Reagan said. The fundamental elements common to both religion and society are what comprise a significant amount of what’s known as culture. Culture must therefore be understood in order to understand religion. And to understand culture, we employ the human intellect, since culture would be impossible without it. Moving several steps ahead in the logic flow means that biology, genetics, anthropology, evolutionary theory, in other words-science (when properly appearing includes fact/logic/reason) is necessary in order to understand religion, vis-a-vie the human intellect. All of which taken as a whole means that there is more to religion. More than the mere fact that since knowledge is limited and that we believe that there exists an unlimited knowledge. The implication points to an infinite being. Science therefore is complimentary to valid religion, not in conflict with it.

Science is the result of human action. Human action is based on one’s beliefs. One’s beliefs are shaped by one’s worldview. One’s worldview is influenced by one’s ideologies, or as Richard Weaver said: “Ideas have consequences.” And one’s ideologies are shaped by philosophy. To believe that scientists are not influenced by nor should not be accountable to the controlling effects of philosophers, moralists, theologians and politicians is something only the beguiled would believe. To do so would place science, whose overriding goal is the conquest of the blind forces of nature, a blind force itself, beyond human control. In fact the pursuit of science necessarily takes for granted an assortment of facts that are the province of philosophy. And the philosophia perennis, which constitutes the philosophical legacy of the Catholic Church, is in fact what the scientific approach in the secular world has come to depend on. If truth were inaccessible to humans, then science would make no sense. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (#159) even explicitly states: “There can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals himself in faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny Himself, nor can truth contradict truth.”

Christianity attempts to weave the religious experience and the intellectual journey into a single seamless whole. In substance, Catholicism promotes the ability to use reason in order to discover the world, precisely because God made a rational world in which science has a chance of discovering. Pope Leo even put the Church on record saying that scientists could establish certain truths about the material world with “irrefutable evidence,” recognizing what Ralph W. Emerson said: “The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide.” Thomas Aquinas, elaborating on this from a Catholic point of view, saw that no specific explanation should be held so rigidly that one would presume to maintain that explanation if it can be provided with certainty to be false. And certainty often relies on probability. By performing tests of validity, probability can be determined and used to make predictions. The more specific the prediction, and the more accurate it is, and the more value the certainty has. That model of reasoning is broad enough to accommodate strict reasoning and intuition as a reliable foundation for truth since it is not dependent upon any specific experience or mind. For St. Thomas expressed that salient realization, that real is just that, real. Being is being, things exist. For Thomas knew that we are not just Aristotelian animals endowed with reason but beings in the image of the deity, which makes sense of our self-experience and existing. Metaphysics under that guidance and influence is then invigorated and purified. A decision made with such consists of the intellectual virtue called wisdom.

“Science offers a surer path to God than religion."--Paul Davies

Supplemental Info:
https://spectator.org/destroyers-of-tradition/

https://spectator.org/conservatives-seek-to-reconquer-mainline-churches/

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SUNDAYS SERMON

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