| The recognition that a scientific theory is not properly regarded as a truth allows one to see that the Catholic Church is not opposed to science. Galileo would have avoided a confrontation with the Church if he had recognised, as modern philosophers of science recognise, that Copernicanism, like any scientific theory, can be proved false but not proved true. My thinking on the relationship between Catholic doctrine and what we usually call "science" has developed over the years. |
| It has long been clear to me (at least since I read Galileo's Mistake by Rowland about ten years ago) that it is not possible to prove a scientific theory true. To hold that a scientific theory is something provably true is in fact Galileo's central mistake, one that he seems to have repented of toward the end of his life. However useful a scientific theory may be for engineering and however much man's ego might be stroked and stimulated by his thinking that he knows from a scientific theory what physical reality is, if civilisation continue on long enough, future observations obtained by way of technology developed on the basis of present scientific theories will rule out those same theories. It has happened before (with Newtonian mechanics, for example), and it will likely happen again. After all, the purpose of new scientific experiments is to find out what observations they will give. One often knows from the standard model what observation should result from a new experiment, but one never knows what the result will be until one actually sees the result of the new experiment. What has only recently become clear to me, however, is that there can be a conflict between the teaching of the Church and a scientific theory. For so long as I can remember, I was of the opinion that there is not even the possibility of conflict because the teachings of the Church regard only assertions that are independent of any particular scientific theory. While this is true for the most part, I have become aware of a couple of possible exceptions. What is curious is that the present standard models do not seem to conflict with Catholic doctrine, but there has been conflict in the past. In the first place, there is the age of the universe. The Church teaches that the universe has a beginning in time. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the dominant cosmological theory held that the universe is infinitely old. Any theory, scientific or not, of an infinitely old universe is in direct conflict with the teaching of the Church. Although the standard cosmological model today does not conflict with the Church's teaching on the finite age of the universe, there are popular, non-standard cosmological models that attempt to keep alive some notion of an infinitely old universe, and these do conflict with the Church's teaching. Then there is the idea of of monogenism, according to which every human being alive today descends from a single pair of human beings, whom we call Adam and Eve. There is not a conflict with the present, standard evolutionary model so long as it be consistent with the idea that every human now alive descends from the mating between a child of Adam and Eve and a physically very similar but ultimately non-human creature in the population of human-like creatures within which Adam and Eve appeared. If rationality were a dominant trait, and if it conferred a substantial improvement in an individual's chance of reproducing, then rationality would spread to the entire population within a few generations. While it is not clear that the standard evolutionary theory would necessarily conflict with the teaching of the Church on monegenism, it is possible that a particular such theory might conflict with the Church's teaching on this point. In any event, the existence of conflicts between the teaching of the Church and one or another scientific theory, whether in the past, the present, or the future, does not mean that the Church is opposed to science. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, it seems likely that there were Catholic physicists who did science in the context of a standard model that conflicts with Church doctrine. The Church, recognizing the nature of scientific theory, does not oppose such work, just as she did not oppose Galileo's work so far as he refrained from insisting on Copernicanism as truth. So long as one bears in mind that a scientific theory is just a technologically useful way of organizing the results of observations, so long as one remembers that a scientific theory is ultimately just a way of saving appearances, then there is no problem. This is what Bellarmino told Galileo at his first meeting with the Inquisition. Bellarmino's requirement is right philosophy. Where the trouble starts is in the insistence, against reason, that a scientific theory somehow represents "the truth". It may be true that a particular scientific theory (regardless of whether it be consistent with Catholic doctrine) fits the data better than any other theory so far dreamed up, but that's about as far as one can go with the truth in contemporary science. |
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