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?

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