Are Science and Faith at Odds? | Aquinas 101: Science & Faith Launch Q&A

so i'm happy to be joined by uh dr karen oberg as you saw in the trailer uh dr oberg is a professor of astronomy at harvard university uh where she has a lab in astrophysics and uh is a um a real expert on planet formation and in certain way the study of the origins of planets and of the cosmos more generally father jordan schmidt is also joining us he is a professor of old testament here at the dominican house of studies our pontifical faculty and he'll be also appearing in the aquinas 101 series on science and faith and so um these are two two uh very serious experts in their own disciplines and what we're hoping is to bring them together in a conversation about science and faith precisely uh along the lines of what we'll be seeing in the uh in the aquinas 101 series so let me just uh kick it off by by asking the two of you uh first of all dr oberg curry and i i saw that you smiled when when you showed up in the animated character your animated version on the uh on the trailer um the uh the artist that we asked to draw that um i think didn't quite get your didn't quite get you but he definitely got your your hairstyle so i i hope that people will recognize that that's you um enlightening our main character uh to the symphony of faith and reason um but let me let me start with you uh dr oberg and then and then we'll we'll turn to dr schmidt or dr schmidt father dr schmidt um what is it that uh science is looking for when it is seeking out the origins of the universe what are the kinds of things that uh scientists are able to discover what kinds of things have they discovered and then i'm going to turn to father jordan and ask what is it that the bible is trying to communicate about the origins of the universe and how can we begin putting these two in conversation so dr oberg you know thank you father dominic for that question and i think to be fair to the animators in addition to getting my hairstyle right i think they also got my height right so those uh i think it was this is good uh but yes so origins of the universe or origins of the cosmos from a sort of scientific point of view so when scientists hear that question i think actually when most people hear that question they think about the big bang theory so so that's the you know the colloquial term of the our contemporary understanding of where the universe that we live in comes from so what the big bang theory boils down to is that the whole universe which is you know so immensely large uh that a little bit more than 13 billion years ago that whole visible universe could fit into something that's smaller than a nucleus of an atom which i obviously can't can't show and you had this incredibly compact incredibly hot universe that then started to rapidly expand uh and eventually developed into the universe that we see here today so when we're talking about studying the big bang or trying to elucidate what actually happened what we are talking about is trying to understand this expansion especially the very early phase how it unfolded why it unfolded the way it did um because i want to draw attention to two things that the big bang theory does not addressed i think is relevant here one is that when the big bang theory kicks in there's already something there you already have this you know very tiny universe but you do have a universe that that's already there so that's one thing that the big bang theory does not address where that came from the other thing that the big bang theory assumes uh is that you have some loss of nature loss of physics already in place there is some order already in place in this very very young universe so that is also not something that is explained by the big bang theory but rather something that is given together with this this existence of the of the universe to start with so so two things that are i think when we think about the ordinance of the universe you know it's just curious people there are many things that the big bang theory helps us understand these two things that stands outside of this the scientific theory itself thanks very much dr roberg father jordan um why don't we turn to you what is it that the bible is trying to communicate about the origins of the cosmos yeah well i think one of the within the american context in particular when we hear this question our minds oftentimes go to the fight uh between evolution and the biblical accounts of creation or this is at least um one of the accidents of where we are for various reasons but um one of the i would say the things that people sometimes would miss about the biblical account of creation uh in all of the ways that it is presented not just in genesis one to two but also in the psalms uh and in the wisdom literature is that uh this ultimately has as its origin uh god like this is the ultimate origin of of reality of all things and there is a desire to express this in terms of um something that goes beyond human perception so it's not uh a a verifiable type of reality that god is the ultimate origin of all order of everything that exists and then to answer your question somewhat negatively is is to say that the biblical accounts of creation are not in fact so concerned to communicate precisely the process by which the cosmos came to be um even though genesis 1 is structured on a seven-day order of creation that's not really the author's point it's not to suggest that there were these things that were created before those um but rather to suggest that this is all created in good order in a structured manner and that that itself points to the justice and the the goodness of the one who brought this all into being so um the biblical view of creation god's act of creation is always that creation is pointing back to god and that god is in fact the one above anything else uh to whom this everything that is this reality is attributable and can be and that we can know something about him uh in this very act of creation that's great thanks father jordan uh well we have we have a huge number of questions that are coming in from our from our viewers on youtube on zoom on facebook and so uh i'm just gonna jump in and throw some uh out at the two of you and we can just see where that conversation goes for us and what i'm hoping is that this will not just be a quick q a but actually also a conversation between us um because i think that's one of the things that we're aiming at in this in this series is uh is a real dialogue from different disciplines that are genuinely different or distinct but that are aiming at the truth so um one of the questions that we've gotten from one of our viewers and i don't have a name here is could you discuss the difference in the kind of certainty that you get between philosophical conclusions uh and scientific conclusions and then also we could add uh the certainty that you get from a uh conclusion that we draw from sacred scripture um so that that's not in the question but maybe we could add that uh father jordan but maybe dr dr ober would you like to uh take first swing at that i will though i am hoping that then one of the good potters will follow up if you have more of a philosophical training than i do so this is really more of a philosophy of science or kind of question rather than one for a scientific practitioner but but i think uh maybe what the what the person is asking this question is getting at that when we apply the scientific method uh so our contemporary understanding of what we are doing is we are presenting an idea uh i've come up with an idea of how the word works and then we try to test it against reality so that that's that's fundamentally what we do within the scientific method now what you can't prove is that you want even if you have a great theory like let's say something like general relativity one of the most successful scientific ideas of the 20th century has been tested in tons of different environments the equations seem to hold however of an extreme environment that we tested in but what you can't guarantee is that there won't be some future time when you won't find some super weird part of the universe where this uh what we think of as the law of nature doesn't doesn't work or doesn't apply so in that sense all scientific theories are somewhat provisional now when we say that i think some people get the idea that because we acknowledge i think it's uh that we can't be 100 certain um that they are therefore sort of mere theories as we colloquially use theory and that's not really right either so when we present the scientific theory or even and all natured of physics love chemistry it is really the best explanation that we have come up with using a combination of reason and experimentation to describe nature and some of these theories um like even like the theory of gravity with dates back to newton um has been developed over time but the fundamentals have still been holding up for hundreds of years and at that point you're pretty certain that even if you find something in the future that sort of changes some of the details that the fundamental idea is actually a true description uh of um of the universe around us or you would have started to see some some some tests uh failing um so that was uh i know i will send it back to your father dominic for the continuation of the question and then how that compares with philosophical or theological truths yeah that's a that's a great explanation dr oberg what about uh you father schmidt as far as the certainty um of uh what we can know about scripture so i would i would immediately tend to um think about this in terms of the certainty of the the principles or the the things that we can know about scripture and what we do when we examine scripture as a discipline um which is we can treat it as a um an artifact or a data set uh so we get theories about what life must have been like or what this or that human author might be trying to communicate and in a similar way you make a provisional theory and then see if it obtains by the best uh you know methods of textual criticism of learning a bunch of dead ancient languages of playing in the dirt in the middle east you know digging stuff up uh we learn a lot about this set of literature and what these people believed and what they are trying to communicate through this set of writings so we can know quite a bit about that but at the end of the day of course it comes down to whether or not we believe that this human author was in fact moved by the holy spirit to write these things down in the first place and so this is where it becomes quite important to understand and to do this work so that we understand what it is that this human author through the power of the holy spirit was intending to communicate for our salvation um that it didn't have to do with uh the fact that the sky is in fact a solid upside down bowl uh which is what the hebrew seems to suggest uh because this was the best cosmology that they might have had at the time it's it's not got to do with that but rather that again it's god who created that and who is the origin of that so the the deeper truth or the the the overall uh meaning of this creation narrative certainly we we can have certainty in that uh inasmuch as we can have certainty in uh faith in in knowing god and this kind of rebounds then into the philosophical question of how we can know god exists which would be more of your forte if i'm not mistaken well if i if i was going to give just a very quick uh a very quick answer about you know the philosophical certitude i mean i think aquinas certainly would hold aristotle would hold and and many you know most most people when you you know if you work through it with them would hold that there are some some truths that we can discover just with the use of reason with the use of our minds that must be necessarily true um and so we could start with uh you know the first principles uh you know the various first principles about say the principle of non-contradiction the thing cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same respect our minds immediately grasp uh that that is true and once you have that as a kind of given um then you can come to to make further arguments and so we could certainly you know most people would have no problem accepting that there are mathematical truths which we can be certain uh that they are that they are true so two plus two is four uh and there are other truths as we work work that out that we can we can come to with a kind of necessary uh conclusion that is we can be certain uh that we're we've got real knowledge and and certainly if you understand how logic works you know that if you have true premises and you follow a proper logical form then you get a conclusion which can uh give you a certain certainly true thing assuming that the premises are true and uh so there's all kinds of things like that among them i mean aquinas puts together even a proof for the existence of god um some of that is based on for example the idea of causality and having a necessary being versus a dependent being and that everything needs to have some cause behind it that's another uh principle that of course scientists take for granted and kind of undergirds everything that they do that we live in an ordered world where we can see cause and effect and where we find an effect then we we know that there must be a cause uh of that effect and we then we do some research to try and figure out what that is and in a certain way that's um that's one of the versions of aquinas's argument for the existence of god is that there must in the end be some some absolute cause of all the changeable causes and all the changeable effects that we see in the world okay we've got lots of other questions so i want to move on here's a question maybe that i can throw first to to dr schmidt uh sorry father schmidt who is also a doctor um and then we'll we'll turn to dr ober uh dna research this is from john crawford who's the ti chapter president at the university of illinois urbana champaign and they're having a watch party so a shout out to everybody there at the ti chapter there so i assume this question is coming from their group dna research has found that the biological eve that is a kind of first human uh was probably around 180 000 years ago how would this fit in with the lineage of jesus that we find recounted in the gospels uh since there would not be enough generations listed in that genealogy to span that immense time frame right so this goes to um essentially part of the literary nature of the bible which is to um in the evangelist matthew is is very careful to uh structure that um lineage in uh equal epochs and and text critics have pointed out that if you count them up especially in certain manuscripts that uh even though it says 14 generations there's not actually 14 generations i forget which one that's in but the point of doing that is to um look at the uh is to present this as a the completeness of all time so uh that there is there are rather three uh different epochs of history that is from creation until the establishment of the monarchy uh then the establishment of the monarchy uh until the exile and then the exile to the po so they thought of that they being the ancient jewish people thought of these as as these three major epochs of history uh that that everything from the very first moment of god's creation all the way up until the present moment that this this is actually israel's history so it's not the history of the cosmos in a disinterested way in genesis 1 but that's actually the first moment of israel's history uh and this is jesus christ then as the source or the summit rather of all history of the entire three epochs coming at this point in time to save uh israel but then all of humanity through israel yeah that's a great answer and i i i mean i just would add to that uh point that is implicit in what you said which is that to assume that we can identify like a biological first human uh using dna research um okay we may be able to do that in some according to some scientific criterion it does not follow that that's who uh this scriptural uh account is referring to when we're talking about our first parents who sinned and got us into the situation that we're in so um it to to immediately identify those things uh raises lots of questions and actually we had our own um we had a a uh an excellent presentation on this at one of our to mystic circles conferences just recently by father simon gaine and dominican who is now professor at the angelicum in rome and so i'd i'd say anybody who's interested in this uh should go look at at that um on our soundcloud page and maybe uh caleb or or caitlyn uh can put that in the chat a link to that uh to that talk because uh his his talk was entitled um did christ die for neanderthals and i see uh that's that's just gone into the um into the chat so um that's uh uh he he addresses all of the particular scientific evidence on uh the you know human origins and also original sin and uh that account of our first parents it's very interesting so dr oberg i'm not gonna ask you to comment on that unless you unless you really want to get into this question i've got another one for you then let's take the other one and i'll see if i want to weave something in so roger penrose this is the next question roger penrose the latest winner of the nobel prize argues for an infinity universe i don't know if that's the technical term if it's if that's a typo for an infinite universe in any case i'll let you explain that uh dr over but roger penrose the question goes argues for an infinite or infinity universe which has no beginning nor end uh is this compatible with faith so maybe you could say something about that i i'm happy to talk about aquinas has actually something to say about this but please go ahead yeah no this is a cool question especially because of the the connection to aquinas i'll have a first stab at it um so as i was uh saying at the very beginning when we talk about the big bang theory that just tells us the beginning of our visiboli universe there is nothing scientifically or logically that rules out that this universe formed from something else or there's ideas these are multiverse theories where you have so universes are bubbling off uh and expanding uh multiverse um i would say these are maybe somewhere in between philosophical and scientific theories because we have no idea how we would actually test them against reality since we only have access to our own universe but but there's nothing that would would stop there being something eternal is maybe a better word than an infinite some maternal universe that we are part of from just a philosophical or a scientific point of view and what's cool about that and what i think father dominic wants to get into is that this actually puts us back in very similar shoes to where thomas aquinas was uh when the best um at his time the best scientific explanation of the cosmos was the aristotelian cosmology uh which um was there in some sense naturally an eternal cosmology it didn't have a clear beginning or end when the big bang theory was introduced this was immediately celebrated by many catholic intellectuals including the pope at the time as a vindication that now we know that the cosmos has the beginning but the theorist who came up with the big bang theory uh le met he actually argued very strongly into using the big bang as a proof for that the cosmos has a beginning and lumet was of course a catholic priest and i think we'll be talking more about him during the 101s um so uh and he was right but that put us back in the same situation as thomas aquinas was in uh where we don't know from scientific or philosophical points of view whether the universe has a beginning in time or not uh it is something uh that we can know by faith because it's revealed to us through scripture as interpreted by the church but it's not something that you can get from the scientific theory or even from philosophy and father dominic i'll hand it back to you yeah well i mean this is a really interesting question because uh in the um in the university of paris in the middle ages so in the 13th century when aquinas was teaching there uh and actually he was brought back to the university of paris after having already taught there and he left he took another position and then the dominican order brought him back to the university of paris because there was an enormous controversy raging at the university of paris among other things on precisely this question um and so aquinas wrote a little work on it uh at which he he was very he's very strong actually it's one of the one of the interesting things when you go back and look at this work is that you know aquinas is usually very measured he's usually extremely like kind of um uh distant emotionally distant from the arguments you know he doesn't make you feel like he's really strongly emotionally invested um and although i i believe often often he did care very deeply about them but uh on this issue aquinas wrote extremely strongly uh and said basically you know he he criticized the stupidity of the people who held the opposite position um and his argument went uh something like this you cannot prove from philosophy alone that the universe had a beginning point or what he calls the world so he just means like the whole of uh of creation basically uh or everything that is uh so he thinks that you cannot prove from philosophy that there was an absolute beginning point and that it is philosophically consistent that you would have a a world or a universe that uh was infinite in time that is that it goes on like without without a a beginning point or an end point um now he thinks that by divine revelation that is scripture has revealed to us that there was a beginning point and so uh he holds that there is a beginning point but he doesn't think you can prove that from a philosophical argument and so he defends aristotle on this point to say like the people that you had people at the university of paris saying you know aristotle's this pagan philosopher and he's bringing this bad pagan ideas and contaminating christian belief with them and aquinas said no actually aristotle on this point is defending i mean aerosol opines that that you could have a universe with a that's uh has like an infinite duration uh and that's not logically uh that's not that's not logically absurd it is possible uh it's just been revealed to us that's in not in fact the case so uh let's move on to another question and uh this is maybe a question where we can go back to uh father schmidt um because it's a question about uh biblical criticism but but maybe we could also uh shape it a little bit and go back to dr oberg um here's the question from gerald guzman on zoom one of the main ideas emerging in the critical textual methods of sacred scripture popped up in questioning the historical moses and as a whole uh the exodus uh so the exodus event um and so he asks what would be the response to the fact that we don't seem to have explicit evidence uh that you had israelites in egypt and following the exodus i i gather that the question is really um we read about this in a text but is there any other evidence to support it what other disciplines can we bring to uh sure up or answer the truth that we find asserted in the scriptures yeah so a good question um you know there's um i would just say that they're they're to to begin with as on an apologetic level you know there's plenty there are plenty of things in the scripture and on uh just in general that uh you we don't have like physical proof of so one thing um this is kind of a bizarre example but i'll just use it uh since it popped into my head there's a place called porcupine north dakota and porcupine north dakota is a very small town that actually burned uh completely burned down in a in a prairie fire not very long ago so it's referenced in um you know in newspapers and so forth but it's not there and there's not really so there's not like physical evidence of it but you don't you know um people don't question the fact that it existed because there's not the same level of um investment emotionally in this question because the idea is um people being what i would say um minimalistic in what they're willing to believe because they don't have positive proof in the realm of archaeology so moving to this question of moses um so there there are these uh there there is no archaeological evidence um that biblical stories happened how they happened before roughly uh 950 bc so that's just a rough starting point of when we would have the um that the oldest kind of material um the the first reference to the house of david actually is quite old it's from about uh an inscription of about uh 850. so i guess the point is that human beings by nature we communicate linguistically and we communicate the things that we value in writing and we've done so for thousands of years um and that um that itself i think has a certain power of attesting to the truth of these things um so the the the idea that we don't have any archaeological proof of something that happened um 3 000 what would it be 3 3450 years ago um in order for something to survive that long uh you need an incredible kind of constellation of you know of atmospheric conditions to obtain so um you know that the israelites didn't live in substantial palaces at that point or anything like that they didn't you know they carried everything with them uh they had very rudimentary houses that couldn't uh you know show up in the archaeological record or something and then uh therefore somehow prove that there's a problem with the biblical record is i think absurd and one principle that's a little catchy one that i like to use that other scholars use as well is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence so if just because you don't have positive evidence for something having happened that's not evidence that it didn't happen and that but that error in arguing is often infrequently made by by people who want to uh set out to disprove the biblical narrative i hope is that kind of answered i hope i kind of i think so dr robert did you have anything you wanted to add i mean you from your perspective uh you're studying something that's a little different than what we'd find in you know say scientific or historical uh relics from the exodus but is there anything analogous um so so the thing i actually just wanted to to bring up is something a little bit more general which is what evidence um what evidence counts and i think we live in a time where scientific evidence uh sort of holds um is there put on uh is put above other kinds of evidence there's a hierarchy of evidence with a scientific one on top and then you sort of go down to maybe artifacts and then somewhere far down is is testimony which is how we know most of the things uh that we take on faith is is via via testimony and the only comment i want to make is that this is not obvious at all that this is an objectively like reasonable hierarchy to accept it is something that is a cultural artifact of the time uh we live in um that also discards often philosophical lines of reasoning and sort of evidence from philosophy and just to be suspicious of arguments that presupposes that scientific evidence is better than other kinds of evidence there are things you can question using the scientific method there are things you can question using philosophy and there are things you can only know by testimony and that does not make one kind of knowledge more or less valuable than the other so this is just i guess um and like an urging to um just keep that in mind that that often sneaks in to conversations without being stated explicitly that basically value judgment which is not something that the scientific method itself can prove or demonstrate is is a proper hierarchy of values so so i think that's the main thing i wanted to say that's great uh dr obergen and as i know but our viewers don't yet know you have a video coming out on precisely this subject um and uh that it's we've we've already gone through the animations and it's looking good so it's not it's not completely done yet but it will be done in time for its release i think it's going to be released on march 29th so just so everyone can watch out for that on the scientific method its benefits and its limitations um you know one of the things that i wanted we've gotten a lot of questions about uh will this subject will that subject be covered in the series and so i thought maybe it would be useful for me to just read to our audience uh some of the some of the videos that we have uh on the way and actually this also would be a chance for me to uh just say i hope that you know each of you watching will give some thought to who you might know who might profit from watching these videos and how you could uh you know suggest to someone else uh to take a look at it i think that we found that a lot of people can really be helped uh when they when they um have some of these puzzles uh solved or at least the the indication for how faith and science can be compatible it really can unlock a lot of things for people's minds and it can be a great help in their uh in their life and they're living out the faith um you know i think it's sometimes uh we think about religion as something that is a matter of the heart and of course it is a matter of the heart but it's surprising how much of the battle for a soul is in the mind and uh misconceptions that get into the mind can make a huge uh can become a huge obstacle for people so that's just a little uh exhortation to all of our viewers um we're going to send you uh after this i think probably tomorrow we'll send you a link and an email that we hope that you will share with your friends uh in order to encourage them to sign up and get more people watching this series because we think it will make a big difference um so uh here's uh just a a list of of some of the things that we have coming up so faith science and the search for wisdom that's what we're going to start with on uh march 16th and then we'll have father james brent is reason enough and really what is reason then we're going to hear from dr oberg on the scientific method its benefits and its limitations and another video on common objections to faith from the side of the scientific method uh we'll we'll then have videos on uh the materialistic reductionism that you find uh in some uh kind of skeptical advocates of science that think that you can explain everything by reducing it just to matter um we'll have another video on why it's important to preserve a classic optimistic idea which is that there is something real which we call form and that that is what is uh really intelligible so we'll hear from father james brent on that we'll hear from father thomas davenport father davenport uh is a dominican who teaches at the angelicum in rome and he has a phd in theoretical uh physics from stanford so he's a very uh sophisticated uh physicist and also a philosopher he's going to speak about emergent properties and uh how you understand that in quantum mechanics he thinks he gives evidence for the the truth that there is such a thing as form uh he also talks has a video about teleology in science and in quantum mechanics that's actually a very tricky thing if if we have some students uh or or professors who are watching today who have studied quantum mechanics it can be very weird uh and it can make you begin to wonder oh are the the traditional categories traditional philosophical categories do they still hold and father davenport is going to argue based on his work in quantum mechanics that in fact that does not undermine traditional philosophical ideas uh he has a a whole video just on um the kind of thought experiment put forward about schrodinger's cat does schrodinger's cat violate the principle of non-contradiction or does it say that you can have two contradictory realities existing at the same time and father davenport thinks the answer to that is is no but we'll also hear from dr oberg about scientists believing other science scientists uh there'll be some videos from me about faith and how faith works in this whole way of the mind coming to know god we're going to do a whole series uh on chance randomness quantum mechanics divine providence uh and um human freedom um also then we have a series on evolution and contemporary scientific accounts of the evolution of life dr oberg is going to say something about that dr roberg actually does some work on uh the search for uh signs of extraterrestrial life um and then we're to hear from dr schmidt or father schmidt excuse me i i keep wanting to give you a return to your doctor qualifications on uh on the scriptural accounts of creation and of human origins uh and that scriptural account is found not only in the book of genesis uh but also in other books like the book of wisdom the prophets we even find in a certain way in the prologue of john's gospel another uh creation narrative uh so the the issue of adam and eve uh original sin where was the garden of eden these are all questions that are subjects for future videos so you can see we've got a lot coming so let me just encourage you again to uh to sign up and to have your friends sign up okay back to the next question sorry i went on a little monologue there um so this is a great question from andrew mangum um and it's a question about teleology so teleology which is going to be a theme in the series is the uh the aristotelian idea or an idea not only found in aristotle but it's uh importantly um explained in aristotle the things have a tendency uh so they act for an end and aquinas certainly believes that very strongly so this is his his question aristotelian metaphysics has undergone a massive revival over the past 30 years or so with that has come a revived interest in teleology and he cites the work of a number of philosophers on this issue uh and uh now this question is coming your way dr oberg uh he says i know a lot of these people have focused on hilomorphic interpretations of quantum mechanics but i haven't seen much focus on biology and then for dr oberg he asks as someone who has done work in astrochemistry and astrobiology do you see teleology as fundamentally real yes so so i think teleology i think got a bad name within the scientific community because people sort of misconstrued i think to large extinct what um both aristotle and people like st thomas meant about it and they sort of merged it with some ideas about sort of conscious directionality and that is obviously not very helpful either in pre-human you know biology or in astronomy and so on um but i don't see how you could even like do science if you did not have a very firm um belief or a firm conviction that there are um tendencies that um are discoverable and that act the same like they go in the same direction wherever you look i mean in some sense that is a precondition for a concept of loss of nature that you can actually predict how something is going to develop how something is going to uh to move him and so on i think one place where where this is pretty uh pretty clear that scientists actually hold this to be true even though they wouldn't use those words is as the questioner asked is audience of life kind of research which is sort of astrobiology we think about uh how can life have originated here on earth how likely is it to originate on other planets so we don't know how life originated here on earth however we think that it happened through a chemistry that chemistry developing prebiotically so before there was any life around into more and more complex structures eventually forming the molecules that we associate with living things things like things like rna proteins cell membranes that that would happen by chance you just you know randomly put atoms together to form these kind of molecules there aren't enough even if every star in the universe has a planet there aren't enough planets in the universe for that to happen with any kind of reasonable likelihood on a single planet if that's sort of a pure chance uh kind of event so then the other view is that then there is it is somehow a guided uh a kind of process that there is something in the loss of chemistry that directs the chemistry in the direction towards biology when you are in a certain planetary environment that is the assumption that i would say every single person who actually does research in origins of life chemistry presupposes that because otherwise it would be totally pointless to try to figure out the laws of chemistry that actually allows for this to happen i would also say that every astronomer that's looking for life on other planets implicitly assumes that if you have the right planetary conditions the chemistry will develop with some reasonable likelihood into biology because otherwise it would also be not a very smart way to be spending taxpayers money to building big telescopes to look for life on other planets so i think scientists today including myself are very poorly educated in philosophy and i think we therefore often don't know how to express what we believe about the the cosmos or about the scientific method about what we do in philosophical terms but i think this is just one of the things that's just implicit in the whole scientific project well jordan do you have anything you wanted to add well yeah it's an interesting parallel in biblical studies because people uh ward off the word teleology like it's um uh yeah like the plague really because uh it's it's a very similar thing it's a misunderstanding of what the word means but uh the idea that the biblical authors had a notion of teleology is always understood as a kind of um yeah sort of imposition of a western ideal and oftentimes they go to hegel or someone from the 20th century of a philosopher and understanding that term but in my own research i've actually come across a an unmistakable kind of influence of really uh hellenistic that is greek philosophical thought even as early as the latest books of the old testament in the book of ecclesiastes and the book of sirach there is an idea of the um the teleology of created things and i always use the term propositive be like that something has a purpose in order to leave off the baggage of these philosophical terms but this is something that the these um uh sacred authors wrote about in reflecting on god's creation of the the world and the things in it that there is a purpose for everything that nothing is created in vain uh that um this is part of the way that we come to know god uh and the way that god still interacts with us in the universe is through the the these purposes being shown to us and having an effect in our lives so it's it's kind of an interesting parallel i think yeah thanks brother jordan uh so i have we we just have a maybe three minutes left so this will be the speed round uh back to the two of you and i'm gonna kind of combine two questions which are it's a deep question but you only get you know you only get 60 seconds um uh dr oberg does science have anything to say about miracles and dr dr schmidt um uh you know how how do we think about the possibility of miracles which get recounted in scripture and sometimes seem to be marginalized or or kind of um you know historical critical scholarship suggests that maybe there aren't miracles there um and maybe you could even think about that in the creation account you know when you read it in a certain way um you know you say well you know i don't know if you really want to believe all all that it's saying there um so maybe start start with that dr schmidt you've got 60 seconds and then you'll go to dr ober well it's very very important to just always remember to figure out what you're you're talking about so like talking about miracles um if you're talking about the miracles of christ obviously that's uh is something that we affirm um and as augustine says if you're willing to believe that jesus christ is true god and true man and that the eternal word of god became flesh then uh it makes no sense to deny miracles or or yeah it's almost a moot point if if they happen or not uh is his in the apologetic controversies but um again i just refer to my previous comments if we believe uh in god and we believe that god through the holy spirit uh inspired these writers to to put these things down then it's for our salvation to read them reflect on them and believe them dr uber so i would say the scientific method cannot be used to prove a miracle wrong like you cannot say that the scientific method has shown that water does not have enough surface tension for humans to walk on it and therefore jesus did not walk on water because miracles are sort of the opposite of the regular patterns of nature that the scientific method can be used to to describe and to investigate however the scientific method is sometimes used also within the church today to elucidate if a miracle has occurred so if we're thinking about um a miraculous healing for example which can be claimed after [Music] asking for an intercession of a particular saint for example what the church does is it uses the scientific method it uses doctors in the science of medicine to explore if there could be um sort of a natural explanation as understood through uh the study of science uh for this healing and it's only if it passes that test that it starts being you start entering into the question really was this miraculous so indirectly it can't say something but it cannot use to be proven wrong that's great dr oberg and i i wish that we had more time to listen to the two of you uh but i have an important uh announcement to make to our um to all of our viewers uh this is some good news i hope for you all um that is signing up for aquinas 101 science and faith comes with some significant benefits and i just wanted to let you know uh what some of those are and what what more are coming your way uh the first one that you already know is that you get the curated aquinas 101 videos and additional readings that will be sent into your inbox on a weekly basis so it's better than just watching the videos on youtube you actually get some supplementary materials and there's the ask a friar feature which gets unlocked for you when you sign up for the video course on aquinas101.com so that's what i want to encourage everyone to do is if you haven't already gone to aquinas101.com and signed up the course is totally free and uh we're just trying to get more people exposed to the truth so um that's that's the first point the second point is if you sign up on aquinas101.com you will receive today a 50 off coupon code for the bilingual latin english uh very handsome editions of the works of thomas aquinas which if you don't already have them i actually some of them are on the shelf behind me right there it's what i use to teach from they're great um great additions and if you sign up uh soon you will get the coupon code for 50 off those editions and that's that's a huge savings they're uh they're really handsomely done and they're worth having um the the third thing uh is the spiritual benefit uh so just today um i offered a mass for everyone who signed up for aquinas 101 science and faith so far we have a uh a a regular staff mass uh at the tumistic institute and today actually i celebrated a beautiful it's very nice with our staff a dominican right mass so i know some people are intrigued by that so if you signed up for aquinas 101 already you had that mass offered for your intentions and we'll do that again so uh there are real spiritual benefits we want to create a kind of communion among the people who sign up for aquinas 101. so uh with that uh we're going to draw this to a close and let me just say one more time you'll find in the chat uh the link that you can send to your friends and to your family members and give to other people i hope that you'll share it widely to get them to sign up for this uh free video series so really if they go to aquinas101.com they will find everything they need to know and um uh i hope that you'll you'll encourage them to sign up and to watch the videos and you know after you sign up on the website then go to our youtube channel and subscribe because believe it or not youtube uh bumps our videos up in popularity when more people subscribe so i'm happy to say we've got over 28 000 subscribers to our youtube channel uh most of those people joined shortly after we released the beginning of the aquinas 101 series i'd like that to you know to get to a hundred thousand and at 100 000 subscribers there's going to be hundreds of thousands of new people that the youtube algorithm will show our videos to and that i think is just a win for everybody so i hope that you will do that and i thank you all for being with us i'm very grateful to dr oberg and to father schmidt for having taken their time first of all to be speakers in the aquinas 101 series and then tonight to help us promote the series and to uh caleb and caitlin who are working hard behind the scenes to make all this uh run so smoothly thanks for joining us and i look forward to seeing you on aquinas 101 god bless bye bye

Channel: The Thomistic Institute

Views: 5,225

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Id: zTzCzyqCtvE

Length: 53min 49sec (3229 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021