I came across Bishop Robert Barron today and decided to listen to some of his work. In the piece, “Knocking Holes in the Buffered Self,” he said something right at the end of part 1 that gave me words for some of my thoughts on religion and science.
In speaking about the opening verses of John’s gospel (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”), Bishop Barron says (quoting partly from Pope Benedict), “If everything came into existence through a word, everything is necessarily stamped by an intelligible form, an intelligent purpose. And this is why, according to Ratzinger [Benedict] and to a number of other commentators, it’s not surprising that the modern physical sciences emerged precisely out of a culture shaped by this Biblical imagination. If one believes in creation, one will readily make two assumptions necessary for the development of the sciences: namely, that the world is not God, and hence can be analyzed and experimented upon; and that the world is universally intelligible, and hence likely to yield results to those who examine it intelligently. What I find particularly illuminating about this observation is how it makes clear that religion is not only not the enemy of science, but in fact the condition for its possibility.”
This goes to what I had talked about in this post: where did Christians turn the corner from being great leaders in the sciences to being so suspicious of them?
Here’s the bottom line: if God truly created the world, why should we be so afraid to explore it? Why should we be intimidated by scientific discovery?
The world glorifies God. Things like the incredible intricacies of life on the planet show his complexity and wonder. Things like climate change are evidence of our abuse of his creation. Understanding life and the world around us can and should be an endeavor that honors God. We should never turn our backs on something that does that.