The Collect for St. Albert the Great is one of my favorites. I preached on it at Mass this morning.
As it comes to us in our current English translation:
God our Father,
you endowed Saint Albert with the talent
of combining (componenda) human wisdom with divine faith.
Keep us true to his teachings
that the advance of human knowledge
may deepen our knowledge and love of you.
Grant this through...
This is something of a shift from the same prayer as it was prior to the reform of the liturgy. As it appears in the 1962 Missale Romanum:
Deus, qui beatum Albertum, pontificem tuum atque Doctorem,in humana sapientia divinae fidei subiicienda magnum efficisti: da nobis, quaesumus; ita eius magisterii inhaerere vestigiis, ut luce perfecta fruamur in caelis. Per Dominum...
God, who made St. Albert, your bishop and doctor, great in subjecting human wisdom to divine faith, grant us, we ask, that by holding fast to to the teaching he has left, we might enjoy perfect light in heaven. Through our Lord...
So, good old St. Albert, who used to subject human wisdom to divine faith, now only combines the two. Thus is revealed the uneasy relationship between the sciences and the Science for people of our time. So often I hear something like, 'There is no conflict between faith and reason, between theology and the natural sciences, because they ask different questions.'
No. It's true that they ask different sorts of questions, but this approach is finally inadequate because it suggests that there are different fields of knowledge, whereas there are only really different aspects of the one Truth to be known. It's true that there is no conflict between theology and the other sciences, but it is rather because all human questions and every inquiry of the human mind have God as an ultimate end. (Or, as we late moderns would say, 'horizon.') God, after, all, is the originary Principle from which everything is, as well as the Principle of and Ground of all knowing.
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
November 15, 2010
February 23, 2009
Book Review: Why God Won't Go Away
I had read of it on several occasions, so I was glad to come across a copy of Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg, MD with Eugene D'Aquili, MD, PhD, and Vince Rause.
On the one hand, this is a very interesting book, and I recommend it to everyone who thinks they might be interested in the topic, as well as to anyone who is serious about prayer and meditation. On the other hand, I had some problems with it. The book is brilliant when the authors are writing as scientists, but falls apart when they try to write as theologians.
Newberg and D'Aquili report on their experiments studying the brains of people engaged in the religious behaviors of prayer and meditation. They discover that these practices do make a difference for the brain, and go on to conclude that the human brain is "wired" for what we religious folks would call spiritual experiences. The go on to show how such experiences of what they call "Absolute Unitary Being" are actually healthy and adaptive, and how they are distinguished from the religiously oriented delusions of the mentally ill. Thus the authors discount the scientific prejudice that dismisses religious behavior as delusional or maladaptive. They even propose scenarios for the origins of mythology and religion in light of their findings.
The great conclusion of the book is to say that the experience of what we would call "God" is just as real for the brain--and, by extension, the self-conscious mind that derives from it (in the authors' assumption)--as any experience of the material world. They are to be commended eternally on their repeated caveat that this doesn't say anything about the existence of God one way or the other.
This whole discussion is very interesting. Again, it's worth the read, which is consistently accessible to the lay reader.
My only issue with the book comes when the authors move into what I would call a theological reflection. In this, particularly in the final chapter, they take up what I think is one of the great errors of our time. The book suggests that whatever it is we human beings experience in prayer, meditation, and religious ritual, this "Absolute Unitary Being" as they call it, is the referent for "God." They then arrive at the commonly stated theology of religions which states that all religions reach out to this one mystery, experience it, and then try to describe it with different sorts of inadequacy. This is the "many paths" to one spiritual something-or-other kind of thinking that one often encounters.
I have written about this before, and I have even heard this "theology of religions" from Catholic teachers and preachers. Indeed, in some ways I think this is the operative super-theology of many people, religious and otherwise. But I believe it to be a grave error. Even when we bracket off its incompatibility with the data of divine revelation, this meta-theology fails on at least a couple of counts.
First, it suggests that God is utterly unknowable. But God is not strictly unknowable, but cannot be comprehended. This is a very different thing. Faith and religion present a God who, in fact, desires to be known and revealed. To present God as a mystery that is utterly unknowable in itself, toward which any number of "religions" reach out in vain, is to invent a neo-gnosticism that is comfortable and tolerant but ultimately says nothing. (And this is precisely why it is comfortable and tolerant, and fulfills the "pastoral" need of some to appear tolerant and feel comfortable.)
Second, this framework suggests a genus called "religion" into which many different human behaviors and phenomena have to be indiscriminately stuffed. So very different things like Christianity, Hinduism, transcendental meditation, neo-paganism and who knows what else end up lumped together as one sort of thing called "religion." Of course there is a sense in which Islam and Judaism are the same sort of thing, but this not the same sense in which Christianity and Buddhism are the same sort of thing, etc. As Professor Woody used to rant at us in the college philosophy seminar: "Yes, there 'is a sense.' There 'is a sense' in which a bear and a pig are the same thing, but the point of philosophy is for you to tell me what that sense is, not to tell me that there 'is a sense.'
Ranting aside, the authors are to be forgiven on this point. They are scientists, not theologians. Again, when they write as scientists they do so with great objectivity on a topic for which feelings and prejudices run pretty high. If you pray or care about religion, check out the book.
On the one hand, this is a very interesting book, and I recommend it to everyone who thinks they might be interested in the topic, as well as to anyone who is serious about prayer and meditation. On the other hand, I had some problems with it. The book is brilliant when the authors are writing as scientists, but falls apart when they try to write as theologians.
Newberg and D'Aquili report on their experiments studying the brains of people engaged in the religious behaviors of prayer and meditation. They discover that these practices do make a difference for the brain, and go on to conclude that the human brain is "wired" for what we religious folks would call spiritual experiences. The go on to show how such experiences of what they call "Absolute Unitary Being" are actually healthy and adaptive, and how they are distinguished from the religiously oriented delusions of the mentally ill. Thus the authors discount the scientific prejudice that dismisses religious behavior as delusional or maladaptive. They even propose scenarios for the origins of mythology and religion in light of their findings.
The great conclusion of the book is to say that the experience of what we would call "God" is just as real for the brain--and, by extension, the self-conscious mind that derives from it (in the authors' assumption)--as any experience of the material world. They are to be commended eternally on their repeated caveat that this doesn't say anything about the existence of God one way or the other.
This whole discussion is very interesting. Again, it's worth the read, which is consistently accessible to the lay reader.
My only issue with the book comes when the authors move into what I would call a theological reflection. In this, particularly in the final chapter, they take up what I think is one of the great errors of our time. The book suggests that whatever it is we human beings experience in prayer, meditation, and religious ritual, this "Absolute Unitary Being" as they call it, is the referent for "God." They then arrive at the commonly stated theology of religions which states that all religions reach out to this one mystery, experience it, and then try to describe it with different sorts of inadequacy. This is the "many paths" to one spiritual something-or-other kind of thinking that one often encounters.
I have written about this before, and I have even heard this "theology of religions" from Catholic teachers and preachers. Indeed, in some ways I think this is the operative super-theology of many people, religious and otherwise. But I believe it to be a grave error. Even when we bracket off its incompatibility with the data of divine revelation, this meta-theology fails on at least a couple of counts.
First, it suggests that God is utterly unknowable. But God is not strictly unknowable, but cannot be comprehended. This is a very different thing. Faith and religion present a God who, in fact, desires to be known and revealed. To present God as a mystery that is utterly unknowable in itself, toward which any number of "religions" reach out in vain, is to invent a neo-gnosticism that is comfortable and tolerant but ultimately says nothing. (And this is precisely why it is comfortable and tolerant, and fulfills the "pastoral" need of some to appear tolerant and feel comfortable.)
Second, this framework suggests a genus called "religion" into which many different human behaviors and phenomena have to be indiscriminately stuffed. So very different things like Christianity, Hinduism, transcendental meditation, neo-paganism and who knows what else end up lumped together as one sort of thing called "religion." Of course there is a sense in which Islam and Judaism are the same sort of thing, but this not the same sense in which Christianity and Buddhism are the same sort of thing, etc. As Professor Woody used to rant at us in the college philosophy seminar: "Yes, there 'is a sense.' There 'is a sense' in which a bear and a pig are the same thing, but the point of philosophy is for you to tell me what that sense is, not to tell me that there 'is a sense.'
Ranting aside, the authors are to be forgiven on this point. They are scientists, not theologians. Again, when they write as scientists they do so with great objectivity on a topic for which feelings and prejudices run pretty high. If you pray or care about religion, check out the book.
October 16, 2008
Teaching Subversion
This morning I was over at our grade school recruiting altar servers. When I went into the 6th grade, they were studying light. So I had to ask the kids: "Spiritual light or physical light?"
"Physical light," responded their teacher. So I went on to ask them,
"Is light a wave or a particle?" A lot of umms and half-raised hands followed. So I continued,
"Maybe light is a partic-ular kind of wave. How about that?"
Then there were a lot of "whoas" and cries of "that's neat!"
But then I had to say, "Children, many times in life people will try to tell you things, and a lot of things they say will sound neat and clever. But like what I just said to you, these things often don't have any meaning. The truth is that I'm good at playing with words but I don't know the first thing about the wave-particle duality. So, be suspicious. Now, who wants to be an altar server?"
"Physical light," responded their teacher. So I went on to ask them,
"Is light a wave or a particle?" A lot of umms and half-raised hands followed. So I continued,
"Maybe light is a partic-ular kind of wave. How about that?"
Then there were a lot of "whoas" and cries of "that's neat!"
But then I had to say, "Children, many times in life people will try to tell you things, and a lot of things they say will sound neat and clever. But like what I just said to you, these things often don't have any meaning. The truth is that I'm good at playing with words but I don't know the first thing about the wave-particle duality. So, be suspicious. Now, who wants to be an altar server?"
July 15, 2008
St. Bonaventure's Perfect Science
Today is the feast of St. Bonaventure, the great doctor of the Franciscan family. In his honor I preached on a line from his Breviloquium, which is a kind of short summa of theology.
The Seraphic Doctor writes:
It seems to me that this is a good meditation for us late modern people who live in a world so dominated by the power of natural science and human technology. As amazing as these human efforts and understandings are, they do not approach the questions asked and resolved by the first of the sciences, theology. Theology, after all, is the scientific reflection on divine revelation.
Here we have to struggle against two contemporary tendencies: scientism on the one hand and so-called fundamentalism on the other.
On the one hand we must live and preach against the error that natural science and human effort has priority over the truths of revelation and Sacred Scripture. Too often we give in to the "God of the gaps" model in which God is only left in charge of those areas of understanding that have not yet been explained by natural science.
On the other hand, we must also struggle against those of our brothers and sisters of faith who deny the rightful place of natural science and understanding. We believe that the cosmos was created through the Word of God, the logos as John the Evangelist puts it, and that this same Word or Wisdom of God became human as Jesus Christ the Lord. Therefore the natural world is a revelation of God in continuity with the revelations of Sacred Scripture and the Incarnation. So to understand the mysteries of the natural world is to reveal something of the mind, Word, or Wisdom of God. Those who deny, in favor of a very narrow "understanding" of the Scriptures, this full sense of the contuition of the human mind with the Wisdom of God in understanding the natural world do God's own revelatory intentions a grand disservice.
Pray for us, St. Bonaventure!
The Seraphic Doctor writes:
And so theology is the only perfect science, for it begins at the beginning which is the first Principle, and proceeds to the end, which is the final wages paid; it begins with the summit, which is God most high, the Creator of all, and reaches even to the abyss, which is the torment of hell. Breviloquium I:1:2.
It seems to me that this is a good meditation for us late modern people who live in a world so dominated by the power of natural science and human technology. As amazing as these human efforts and understandings are, they do not approach the questions asked and resolved by the first of the sciences, theology. Theology, after all, is the scientific reflection on divine revelation.
Here we have to struggle against two contemporary tendencies: scientism on the one hand and so-called fundamentalism on the other.
On the one hand we must live and preach against the error that natural science and human effort has priority over the truths of revelation and Sacred Scripture. Too often we give in to the "God of the gaps" model in which God is only left in charge of those areas of understanding that have not yet been explained by natural science.
On the other hand, we must also struggle against those of our brothers and sisters of faith who deny the rightful place of natural science and understanding. We believe that the cosmos was created through the Word of God, the logos as John the Evangelist puts it, and that this same Word or Wisdom of God became human as Jesus Christ the Lord. Therefore the natural world is a revelation of God in continuity with the revelations of Sacred Scripture and the Incarnation. So to understand the mysteries of the natural world is to reveal something of the mind, Word, or Wisdom of God. Those who deny, in favor of a very narrow "understanding" of the Scriptures, this full sense of the contuition of the human mind with the Wisdom of God in understanding the natural world do God's own revelatory intentions a grand disservice.
Pray for us, St. Bonaventure!
November 15, 2007
Albertus Magnus
The collect for the feast of St. Albert is one of those that gets me every year:
It's a good prayer for a world in which reason and science seem to be in competition with faith and religion. It asks to instead seek the divine wisdom which makes these complementary modes of human knowing.
We must avoid the two cheap roads the world offers us in this quandary. On the one hand we must not become fundamentalists who ignore that the world was created through the Word of God, thus forgetting that the empirical knowledge of creation can yield divine wisdom. On the other hand, we must not embrace "intelligent design," which is a subtle way to sell out our faith and embrace empirical categories as the normative means of human knowing.
God, who made blessed bishop Albert combine human wisdom with divine faith, grant us who receive his doctrine, that we might, by the progress of science, come to a more profound knowledge and love of You.
It's a good prayer for a world in which reason and science seem to be in competition with faith and religion. It asks to instead seek the divine wisdom which makes these complementary modes of human knowing.
We must avoid the two cheap roads the world offers us in this quandary. On the one hand we must not become fundamentalists who ignore that the world was created through the Word of God, thus forgetting that the empirical knowledge of creation can yield divine wisdom. On the other hand, we must not embrace "intelligent design," which is a subtle way to sell out our faith and embrace empirical categories as the normative means of human knowing.
March 22, 2007
Seduction
I have been reading Tobias Dantzig's Number, which I picked up because I thought it was funny how it had an endorsement on the cover from none other than Albert Einstein: "This is beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands."
I'm up to the section on Pythagoras and his eponymous theorem: in any right triangle in which the legs of the right angle are a and b, and the remaining side is c, then the square of c equals the sum of the squares of a and b. We all remember that one from school. Dantzig says that Pythagoras was so overwhelmed by the elegance of this that he went and sacrificed an ox to the gods.
But it turned out to lead to something worse: the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the sides. A square is just 2 right triangles slapped together, right? So given a unit square, that is, in which the length of the sides is 1, then, according to the Pythagorean theorem, the diagonal has the length of the square root of 2. And the square root of 2 is a very inelegant number indeed. This was very troubling to the Pythagoreans, who wanted everything to be beautiful and perfect. Legend has it that the one who discovered this problem was eventually assassinated.
Dantzig writes of what ensued:
The beauty of spiritual realities is seductive. But if we just worship the beauty, and not the Spirit, the messiness of life and the complexities that are beyond us will always leave us frustrated.
I'm up to the section on Pythagoras and his eponymous theorem: in any right triangle in which the legs of the right angle are a and b, and the remaining side is c, then the square of c equals the sum of the squares of a and b. We all remember that one from school. Dantzig says that Pythagoras was so overwhelmed by the elegance of this that he went and sacrificed an ox to the gods.
But it turned out to lead to something worse: the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the sides. A square is just 2 right triangles slapped together, right? So given a unit square, that is, in which the length of the sides is 1, then, according to the Pythagorean theorem, the diagonal has the length of the square root of 2. And the square root of 2 is a very inelegant number indeed. This was very troubling to the Pythagoreans, who wanted everything to be beautiful and perfect. Legend has it that the one who discovered this problem was eventually assassinated.
Dantzig writes of what ensued:
Less than a century passed, and the Pythagorean secret became the property of all thinking men. The unutterable had been spoken, the unthinkable clothed in words, the unrevealable presented to the eyes of the uninitiated. Man had tasted of the forbidden fruit of knowledge and was condemned to be banished forever from the Pythagorean number paradise.
The beauty of spiritual realities is seductive. But if we just worship the beauty, and not the Spirit, the messiness of life and the complexities that are beyond us will always leave us frustrated.
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