McGrath Institute Blog

Editorial Note: This post is part of our #FaithAndScience series exploring the relationship between science and religion.

A scientist assesses reality through the senses, prodding here, poking there, testing everywhere. Variables are isolated, rates recorded, masses measured, and constants calculated, all to discover how to master atoms and their particles. The scientist is both an explorer in the wild hacking through frontiers and an artisan lifting a delicate veil. Omnipresent in the mysteries of science is the rational soul of the human person, the image and likeness of the triune God, uniting the spiritual and the physical, praising its Creator. The human soul with the faculties of intellect and will depends on the corporeal senses to input data, as any scientist knows, but the synthesis of that data into relationships and theories is performed in the higher thought of abstraction. In Catholic teaching, faith and reason go hand in hand.

Editorial Note: This post is part of our #FaithAndScience series exploring the relationship between science and religion. 

The fact that nature is “red in tooth and claw,” to borrow a famous line from Tennyson, can create an apparent conflict between evolution and Divine Providence. The seemingly arbitrary death and destruction that is inherent in the evolutionary process can be hard to reconcile with a providential loving God. Even a cursory glance at the evolutionary timeline indicates that our current state has been shaped by numerous violent environmental upheavals: floods, meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, plagues, famines, etc. In particular, the natural evils that humanity has dealt with during the past 300,000 years of our collective existence raise many difficult existential questions.

Editorial Note: This post is part of our #FaithAndScience series exploring the relationship between science and religion, and is adapted from the author's textbook Faith, Science, & Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge, 2nd edition (Midwest Theological Forum, 2019). 

Should the Big Bang be understood, as it is by some, as proving the existence of God and the divinely inspired truth of the Bible? The answer is no. St. John Paul II once cautioned that we should not use the Big Bang Theory in this way (Message to the Director of the Vatican Observatory,1988). In 1985, he said that “to desire a scientific proof of God would be equivalent to lowering God to the level of the beings of our world, and we would therefore be mistaken methodologically in regard to what God is. Science must recognize its limits and its inability to reach the existence of God: it can neither affirm nor deny his existence” (General Audience, July 10, 1985). We cannot find proof of God’s existence through scientific discovery. Science studies the material world, and God is not part of the material world.

Editorial Note: This post is part of our #FaithAndScience series exploring the relationship between science and religion, and is adapted from the author's textbook Faith, Science, & Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge, 2nd edition (Midwest Theological Forum, 2019). 

The Catholic Church offers an approach to the authority and truth of the Bible that does not lead to conflict between faith and science but that helps us understand the deepest meaning of the world God created. It is necessarily a “both-and” approach, one that respects the fact that Scripture contains both divine and human aspects. Let's summarize this approach briefly:

Editorial Note: This post is part of our #FaithAndScience series exploring the relationship between science and religion, and is adapted from the author's textbook Faith, Science, & Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge, 2nd edition (Midwest Theological Forum, 2019). 

What do you mean when you call God the Creator? When it comes to science and religion, this is the number one question I wish people would ask. Both skeptics and believers all assume that for God to create is half about infinite power and half about some kind of occult engineering. This is why so many believers get excited about ‘God of the Gaps’ arguments like Intelligent Design Theory, making God a ‘how’ explanation for natural phenomena that they think science can’t explain. They conceive of God as something of a hybrid who is part magician, part mechanic, and part micromanager of complex processes. The idea that love is the driving force behind the universe—its reason for being as well as its meaning, never enters their minds.