THE CATHOLIC CHURCH SAYS IT BELIEVES IN SCIENCE. ALL SCIENCE?

 

My blog this morning is a reflection on this article in National Catholic Reporter, July 3rd, 2025.  The Catholic Church believes in science. That good Christians must be anti-science is a myth.

"Science is sometimes portrayed as elitist or biased, despite its self-correcting nature, that is, science moving forward often corrects established wisdom and always must be open to new insights."

— Pontifical Academy of Sciences 

https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/catholic-church-believes-science-good-christians-must-be-anti-science-myth?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=other

Does the Catholic Church believe in social science, does it believe in the Durkheimian sociology of God? This is the key to believing in science.  Beginning in the 1840s, a Copernican revolution unfolded challenging millennia ideas about God and religion.  These ideas were as radical in departing from the views of the Church as were the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo.  Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and others established the social fact that God was a human creation, a symbol of society.  These sociologists constructed a rigorous and robust rejection of transcendental, supernatural, spiritual, and mystical explanations, and strongly rejected the idea that we could know God incontrovertibly intuitively or by way of divine revelation.  Is the Catholic Church ready to embrace this science?  Is it prepared to embrace my books on Society and the Death of God (Routledge, 1921) and Beyond New Atheism and Theism (Routledge, 1923) and the classic foundational study of the social fact of God, Durkheim's 1912 masterpiece, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life which should stand shoulder to shoulder with the great works of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DEATH AS THE REASON FOR THE DEATH OF MEANING AND VALUE

I write this just weeks away from my 84th birthday. I don’t know that I’m more aware of my coming departure from this so-called life than I was when I was ten. I was surely aware of my ultimate fate before that. My grandmother had died when I was 8, and I have a vague recollection of learning that one of my schoolmates at about that time had been struck by lightning and killed. But I was ten when my mother found me curled up in a fetal position in the bed she shared with my father crying. She asked me what was wrong and I said “I don’t want to die.” My mother’s response was curious on reflection. She was essentiallly uneducated, an immigrant from southern Italy, and an untutored Roman Catholic who had populated our Brooklyn apartment with pictures and statues of saints and had hung crosses on the walls. Thinking back, I would have thought that she would have comforted me by pointing out that when I died I would go to heaven where I would live forever with all of my family and ...
Read more

HUMAN TOUCH, HEALTH, AND VIOLENCE

I get my health care through the OneMed health care service. They send out occasional memos to members on health matters. Today they sent one out on: HUMAN TOUCH CAN IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH Marvin Gaye said it best, Sexual healing is something that's good for me. And he was right: Physical touch can make you happier, lower blood pressure, lessen anxiety, and even boost immunity. So whether you’re getting up close and personal with your summer crush or just hugging friends and family, remember that human interaction and touch are important — and good for your health. Following are excerpts from my The Treachery of Realities: Safeguarding Truth in the Age of Science Denial (Brill, 2025). If you are going to find meaning anywhere, it’s going to be in your community, in your networks. And it is going to involve sex or more generally sensual pleasures. We haven’t learned the first thing about sex. The first thing is that sex is everywhere all the time, like gravity (labelled “Sexi...
Read more

THE ALIENS AMONG US

Yes,there are aliens who walk among us. But you wont find them at Area 51, or in secret UFO files at the Pentagon. You can find them in the Lousiana governor's office, the office of the Dean of Social Science at Harvard, and in Washington, D.C. where they boldly walk the corridors of the Congress and the Supreme Court. Louisiana classrooms now required by law to display the Ten Commandments,Stephanie Gallman and Dianne Gallagher, CNN: Wed June 19, 2024 Louisiana public schools are now required to display the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, after Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the requirement into law Wednesday. A Harvard Dean Causes Firestorm With Call To Limit Faculty Speech, Michael T. Nietzel, June 19, 2024 Lawrence D. Bobo, Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, wrote an op-ed in the June 15th Harvard Crimson, in which he asked: “Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member ...
Read more