According to the magazine, Nature, most leading scientists reject God. That is their choice. However, by making this choice, the relationship between the observer and things he observes changes. A bias is introduced.
Currently, this bias manifests itself as scientific information which is known with a relatively high degree of certainty and information that is not known. God is excluded since God, it is claimed, cannot be detected. Therefore, aside from assigning explanations to physical evidence, science develops what it calls evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. These two approaches deal with man’s actions and reactions in response to his environment through sensory (name removed by moderator)ut, and to man’s preprogrammed genetic functions. It places the mind of man in a predetermined set of behaviors guided solely by his genes with secondary (name removed by moderator)ut from his environment. Man’s only goal is to survive, reproduce, protect his family or tribe and die. Whatever occurs in the meantime that would fall under other categories like ‘leisure activities’ are purely genetically based. They are adaptive in some way, but in a way that science has not yet fully figured out.
And that is the faith statement: science will find an answer. Currently, the answer appears to be purely genetic. In fact, genes are described as choosing, not us, or our mental idea of ourselves. Individual existence is rendered somewhat incorrect, since it was our genes alone who raised us from a primitive to a “modern,” or so it is assumed, level.
A man by the name of Ray Kurzweil has written a book about being post-human. The idea is simple but difficult to execute. Man will create a synthetic version of himself. The brain will be like our own but it would have learning capabilities far beyond our own. It could be eternal, able to be upgraded, and placed into any type of body. An old SF idea. This device would never be human, but there is speculation that ‘spiritual machines’ could be made. And what exactly, would make these devices spiritual? How does that concern ‘science’?
Since the Fall, man was told, “ye shall be as gods.” And I suspect that this is part of the motivation. After all, it has been said that religion was just something our genes created so that we could muddle through until we reached a future where we could genetically modify ourselves, eliminate disease, and perhaps live for a very long time; also old SF ideas.
Now we look at the idea of evolution from the Catholic perspective. There is no longer two realities, one scientific and one spiritual, but only one. This integrated view acknowledges some type of physical development of the human being in the past but assigns all changes to divine providence. Since this information is forbidden by science to cross into the scientific realm, Pope Benedict has clearly stated that the answer must be found outside of it. The Church teaches that God is the first cause, and that nothing causes itself to come into existence on its own. Further, that random mutation and natural selection by themselves are insufficient, and the rational mind behind creation, identified as God by him, is the motivating force. God infallibly allowed life to unfold by His will. And therein lies the problem with textbook evolution as currently taught. Using chance and natural selection alone, we could have all ended up looking like upright chinchillas or humanoid butterflies.
And the current problem arises from scientists writing books like The God Delusion. The idea is that we are just the product of a cold, uncaring universe that did not have us in mind. A cosmic construction of purely non-God, natural forces.
The Church teaches there were two individuals who freely sinned. Then, Jesus Christ was born, and here we are. Miracles still happen. Saints need two miracles, thoroughly investigated by the Church and secular experts, to become saints. This is ongoing and will not stop. Jesus Christ existed in real time as a real man and as God. Science cannot address this but… It does. It tells us one year that a stone box was found that contains his remains, another time, it tells us Exodus never happened, and then it tells us that the plagues brought against Egypt by God through Moses can all be explained away by ‘natural’ events. This cannot be ignored. Cardinal Schoenborn is warning Catholics that science is overstepping its own boundaries. We need to heed that warning.
God bless,
Ed
