IWKnights Corner for May 14, 2023

Did you know this about the IW Knights of Columbus? 

We continue with the second part of "In the Beginning” is the title of an article recently published on the KofC.org website.  The author is Christopher M. Graney.

“SCIENCE ‘VERSUS’ RELIGION

The idea that science challenges religious ideas is a commonplace.  As Pope Benedict XVI noted in his spiritual testament, ‘Often it seems as if science … has irrefutable insights to offer that are contrary to the Catholic faith.’  However, Pope Benedict understood that the challenge is not new, and he emphasized that these seeming contradictions, viewed over the longer term, vanish with further understanding.

They even vanished in the case of Aristotle’s changeless universe, which presented a real challenge to the biblical image of creation. — Across much of Church history, theologians held that there was no contradiction between the Book of Genesis and the view that the universe had no beginning in time — because God still created, and continually creates, the universe.  Yes, there are some mental gymnastics in that, with God being outside of time, with Genesis being a metaphorical description of creation, and so on.  Of course, as Father Lemaître noted, there was no hard evidence that the universe was unchanging, no experiment that said Aristotle was right.  It’s just that Aristotle’s ideas made some sense, and he was so widely respected that theologians had to take his ideas seriously, even if they seemingly conflicted with Genesis.

A tougher problem was in the biblical description of God creating ‘the two great lights’ — the sun and moon — and the stars (Gen 1:14-16).  As early as the days of St. Augustine, in the late fourth century, astronomers concluded that even though the stars look small in the night sky, they are in fact much larger than the moon, just much more distant.  This conclusion that the moon was not so “great” involved hard evidence — careful measurements and applied geometry — and not merely a priori assumptions.

However, St. Augustine was unconcerned about this apparent conflict.  It may be true, he wrote in On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, that the stars are large, and merely ‘seem small because they have been set further away.”  But, he said, “at least grant this to our eyes … it is obvious that the sun and moon shine more brightly than the rest upon the Earth.’  St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, was not concerned either.  ‘The two lights are called great, not so much with regard to their dimensions as to their influence and power,’ he wrote in the Summa Theologica.  ‘For though the stars be of greater bulk than the moon … as far as the senses are concerned, its apparent size is greater.’  With a little of that further understanding that Pope Benedict described, namely that Genesis is not written to provide a scientific description of the physical dimensions of the moon and stars, any contradiction between Genesis and science here vanished.

(Then why did Galileo so famously run into difficulty?  His discoveries were striking, and all confirmed by church astronomers.  But his interpretation of those discoveries as supporting a moving Earth — Scripture spoke of Earth as fixed — was much less persuasive than the case for the greatness of stars.)”  More on that subject next week.

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