Nevertheless, as it comes to science should the Church not be the foremost promotor? I mean, if God’s maximum manifistation is reallity, then should the Church not be the one that is always in search og the thruth and reality?
And she often is, although as science has gained more of a profitable aspect, it’s corporations that tend to do much of the research, as well as government. Still, you’ll find Catholic universities among the top promoters of science - and this has historically been where science has existed in the Church. It makes sense - the Ecclesial arm and the normative duties of the presbytery and episcopacy should focus on ministering to our spiritual needs, while the academic arm focuses on ministering to our mental and noological needs.
Why then is the Church so careful when it comes to new scientific discoveries?
Scientists will tell you that science merits care, especially among a generally under-educated public. How often is it that some ‘breakthrough’ is announced in health care, for example, and the public scrambles for this new treatment? The scientific method (innovated by a Catholic) calls for repeated testing to build an empirical basis.
I mean, why where Copernicus and Galileo declared herretics?
Copernicus was never declared a heretic. The Master of the Sacred Palace, Bartolomeo Spina, had planned to condemn the book for errors in 1546 but died before doing so. Note this is not the same as heresy - a “corrected” edition was approved for publication in 1620 that changed nine sentences of Copernicus’ original work (and the entire point of a heliocentric proof).
For Galileo, I think it had more to do with ego. Nominally, heliocentrism was considered heresy because it went against the prevailing notion, derived from Scripture, of a geocentric universe. Galileo was given opportunities to repent of what was then thought a heresy, and he did not. I think if he had backed down, there’d not have been such a ruling against him in 1633.
Bear in mind that heliocentrism was no longer prohibited from publication as of 1753, though the unaltered Copernican and Galilean books were still on that list until 1835.
Bear in mind that science and theology were seen as essentially one and the same until probably the early 19th centuray. Scientists such as Newton and Liebniz were also theologians (and, arguably, occultists) who did not attempt to separate scientific proof from Scripture. In college, I studied a tome from 1520 on sericulture which modeled diseases of the silkworm on the basis of a modified theory of the humours that takes inspiration from some of the Psalms!
For the reason that we no longer think of Scripture as a science textbook, I wouldn’t consider such unfortunate affairs as that of Galileo to be an indictment against the Church.
Why is stem-cell investigation wrong?
It isn’t. My mother, an MSN, worked in a transplant clinic that used adult stem cells to treat patients with otherwise incurable cancers of the blood. She told me that all the successes she’s seen in hematology or oncology have been with adult stem cells, and no therapeutically-feasible breakthroughs have come out of fetal stem cells yet.
Yes, I have heard condemnations of all stem cell research from one of the bishops in Missouri (our state), but I think that’s his own personal ignorance because as far as I know there is no moral reason to prohibit taking stem cells from a patient’s own arm to treat him or her, any more than there is reason to prohibit grafting skin from one part of a patient’s body to another to replace burned tissue.
The concern over stem-cell research is all over fetal stem cells, because it is a result of an act that destroys a human life, whether that life is already destroyed (say, in an abortion) or more heinously, is created for the purpose of destroying it to harvest stem cells. I don’t think science should be immune to moral concerns. Just because we
can do something doesn’t mean we
should do it.
