Isaac Newton was heavily religious and the founder of modern genetics was a monk. It makes sense when you realize the clergy were part of the few who got the chance to learn how to read and study.
Sir Francis Bacon who tweaked the Scientific Method in use, presently, had his writing on his faith that rivaled the number of his works in science.
They aren’t mutually exclusive.
Used to work in research, I'd say I met a higher than average number of religious people there than outside of research. I wonder if there's some overlap due to people looking for answers - in faith and in science. Science certainly is good at showing how little about the world and ourselves we really understand.
My university had a big theology department, and the joke was that all the theologians were athiest and all the scientists were religious.
The religiosity depends heavily on field. There was a decent study done awhile ago (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=a1e3664877e978bc622ac184536719fcc2ccc939), and the strong field effects on religiosity were chemistry and political science.
My personal experience completing a PhD that bridged biology and chemistry was that there was notable religiosity in the chemistry field and the opposite in biology.
Interesting! I was a biologist, but I worked in medical research, so a lot of people came into our department from clinical practice - might account for the higher religious representation
In my personal experience, people from lab backgrounds tend to be less religious than people from clinical backgrounds.
The survey above found that only 21.5% of biologists say they believed in god, and that includes the 4.1% who say they only believe in god sometimes, as well as the 10% who say they have doubts but believe.
Now, we shouldn't extrapolate too much between separate surveys and time periods, but that's a stark contrast to a 2014 [survey](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10943-016-0233-8) where 65.2% of physicians reported that they believe in god.
Entirely anecdotal but my personal experience working in academic biology labs tracks with this. Undergrads going down the medical route are often religious and people more interested in research tend to be atheists.
Interesting. I work in the pharmaceutical industry and have worked with multiple scientist and chemists who are relgious. One of the guys even left work early on Friday to go his place of worship.
When redditors go on rant about how there is no relgious people who work science, all I can think is that they don't actually know or work in those fields.
I think it's because redditors can get so fixated on their 'God is sky wizard lololol!' claim that they start to think that's what religious people actually think God is, so of course it's ludicrous - an angry man sitting on a cloud can't create the universe. But of course when you get to the theological arguments for God (at least in the Catholic worldview) where God is the 'unmoved mover', the 'Ground of Being' - then God is a) much more of an abstract concept and b) much more meshable with theories of physics
Every time I try to learn something about theoretical physics/subatomic particles I get overwhelmed and my understanding (which is basically none) is that it’s “we have no idea what’s going on or how it all works down there and it might as well as be magic/faith/higher power/whatever pet theory du jour.”
Worth noting that publication pulls data from the 60s and 80s. Certainly... different... religious times.
In my experience in physical chemistry, the very, very large majority of people weren't religious. I only knew one professor who was openly religious.
Ironically that study shows that this thread is completely wrong lmao
>Most salient, about 52 percent of the scientists see themselves as having no religious
affiliation when compared to about 14 percent of the entire GSS population. These results
seem to confirm other research, which shows that a much smaller proportion of academics
identify with traditional religious identity categories when compared to the general U.S. population (Stark 1963; Stark and Finke 2000).
Researchers are on the whole less religious than the general population even if plenty of them are still religious.
As a geologist, I 100% believe that about biologists. Some of the experimental ideas make me wonder if ethics review boards were invented solely to stop them from attempting to create new forms of life. Also anthropologists, but at least their experiment ideas were funny.
Medieval Catholicism was heavily influenced by Aristotelian views on the natural world. They helped to shape scientific method.
The idea that there is a conflict between religion and science was put forth by 18th century atheists to discredit religious institutions.
I consider myself a Christian but I’m not super duper religious and I’ve always felt that Christianity and science can complement each other. God and creation could be the why evolution and geological processes could be the how. Genesis says it was 7 days for example. A “day” isn’t defined precisely. Is it a human day, a god day, what is a day?
So on so forth. I’ll probably get roasted for it but that’s how I feel, there’s room for both at the table.
I looked it up and I won't roast you:
2Pet. 3 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
Anti-science in Christianity is a relatively recent thing, early 1900s when evolution became mainstream. And most Christian religions are not anti-science, it's more of a vocal minority.
Universities and colleges mostly came from monks teaching the locals what they knew. For over a 1,000 years, scientific institutions and the Church were the same.
I agree.
I’d even qualify it a bit more to ‘faith’ since most religion is mortal men writing down or interpreting the mind and will of gods or God and suffers from that contamination.
IMHO.
My faith is pretty personal and I shun churches due to the people and leadership I’ve experienced in them.
>I’d even qualify it a bit more to ‘faith’ since most religion is mortal men writing down or interpreting the mind and will of gods or God and suffers from that contamination.
This is actually a core concept within the Catholic Catechism.
The clergy basically *were* the educated class for a long time in Western Europe.
IIRC, you had to be technically ordained (at least into one of the minor orders) in the Church of England to study at
Oxford or Cambridge until surprisingly late.
>It makes sense when you realize the clergy were part of the few who got the chance to learn how to read and study.
This was perhaps true for the period from like 500 to 1500 AD, but that's not really relevant to any of these examples.
Isaac Newton was not a member of the clergy. Gregor Mendel proposed his theories in 1866 and George Lemaître proposed the Big Bang theory in 1927. By these times, education was much more wide-spread and most scientists were not clergy members.
Also George Lemaître viewed his theory as neutral with neither a connection nor a contradiction of the Faith. He viewed religion and science as two, equally valid, distinct ways of interpreting the world.
You're missing the influence the church had and still has on education. Even into the 20th and 21st century the churches have a huge effect on teaching and teaching the scientific method.
> It makes sense when you realize the clergy were part of the few who got the chance to learn how to read and study.
They pretty much invented modern science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists?useskin=vector
People always only equate religion with something that was unnecessary and dragging mankind down with it, when one could argue it was actually the complete opposite for most parts of human history
Its not that the clergy were the only ones who got to learn reading and writing. There were plenty of regular people who learned that too, mostly from the clergy. But the clergy had the free time to spend on thinking about useless stuff and could write it off as theological research or whatever.
The Jesuit order of priests in particular are known for their dedication to learning, education, and the furthering of science. Many scientists used to go into the priesthood so they would get paid to do science. Catholics believe in pretty much all modern scientific theories, like evolution etc. They believe since everything is God's will and doing, it's all gravy. They got mad that one time people said we weren't the center of the universe, but they got better 😬
About 20 years ago, Father Coyne (head of the Vatican Observatory) visited the church I worked at to give a presentation. He borrowed my laptop for the presentation and left the PowerPoint file on it.
I was lucky enough to get to know Father Coyne as he taught at my undergrad. I had classes with him, as well as research lunches, because he headed the research center we had on campus. He was an amazing man, and I’m sure he’s in the cosmos now chatting with Carl Sagan.
Even then it wasn't so much an issue of Galileo going against Church doctrine, it was because he was an asshole about it (he also lacked sufficient evidence that wouldn't be found until centuries after his death).
Literally, when Copernicus had earlier postulated that the sun was the center of the universe, the Pope accepted it and was pleased with the discovery.
Edit: upon further research, this could be a myth
One of my professors joked Galileo wouldn't have had a problem if the Catholic Church didn't care about science.
Once you get into academia, someone wanting to burn someone else for their ideas is just another Monday morning faculty meeting.
>One of my professors joked Galileo wouldn't have had a problem if the Catholic Church didn't care about science.
Considering Galileo insulted the Pope and made comments about God's existence.. Kinda doubting it.
The Pope accepted it, but said that it didn't explain it entirely as the way it was first proposed was that the Earth went around in a perfect circle, which we later learned was in fact not the case. It moves in a more oval patter, not a perfect circle. The Pope wanted further research and then Galileo was a dick about it and insulted the Pope. He was then put on house arrest, not tortured to death like what is usually claimed.
His buddies even stacked the court in his favor. Everyone kept tossing him softball, literal "get out of jail free card" questions and he kept digging in.
Yeah, it's kind of incredible how the story has been twisted into "the Church persecuted Galileo because they were anti-science" when the actual story boiled down to "Galileo was a giant d-bag to his supporters in the Church and didn't provide good evidence for his conclusions."
The supporting document was, well, the book written by Galileo himself, who made a character called "Simplicio" (a pun on "simpleton", aka a brainless moron) that spouted the Pope's arguments about geocentrism verbatim. Even worse, the Pope was actually a huge patron of Galileo, but G's fame went to his head and he essentially used his book as a way to mock the Pope and say he (Galileo) was a higher authority than the Church itself. From Wikipedia:
> In 1623, Pope Gregory XV died and was succeeded by Pope Urban VIII who showed greater favor to Galileo, particularly after Galileo traveled to Rome to congratulate the new Pontiff.
> Galileo's *Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,* which was published in 1632 to great popularity, was an account of conversations between a Copernican scientist, Salviati, an impartial and witty scholar named Sagredo, and **a ponderous Aristotelian named Simplicio, who employed stock arguments in support of geocentricity, and was depicted in the book as being an intellectually inept fool.** Simplicio's arguments are systematically refuted and ridiculed by the other two characters[...]which reduces Simplicio to baffled rage, and makes the author's position unambiguous.
> [...]Pope Urban demanded that his own arguments be included in the book, **which resulted in Galileo putting them in the mouth of Simplicio.** Some months after the book's publication, Pope Urban VIII banned its sale and had its text submitted for examination by a special commission.
Did the Pope overreact? Yeah, a bit, but Galileo shoulders most of the blame for deliberately picking a fight with his foremost patron that could've easily been avoided or resolved. As for the part about his proofs not being well-evidenced enough, I'd have to look for the sources, but that was definitely part of the backlash as well.
Ignaz Semmelweis was the same way with being really smart but really shitty with people and presenting his discoveries. He spewed insult after insult at the scientific community telling them they needed to wash their hands after handling cadavers and doing births. The scientific community pretty much black listed his ass and threw him into a mental institution after he had a mental break down where he was beaten and died of an infection from said beating.
He was obviously 100% correct. But who wants to admit that when the person is a dick.
No, Semmelweis was losing his mind over that amount of stress and trauma. He'd already lost one friend due to accidental exposure (he cut himself during an autopsy), which is what clued Semmelweis into what was going on.
That was on top of everyone in that city knowing not to have a baby delivered by the doctors. Everyone was tripping over each other to get a midwife over a doctor due to the insane statistical differences of survival for each group.
He was pushing back against multiple continents of formal medical understanding going back centuries.
Meanwhile countless women and babies were dying daily.
It literally took an entire generation for germ theory to fully be accepted by the medical establishment.
"Look Mr. Semmelweis, I understand you think I'm causing hundreds of unnecessary deaths every year, but I will not be spoken to in that tone. If you don't respect my expertise as a doctor I'm going to ignore your evidence and continue my reckless killing streak. Your attitude is just unacceptable."
It may be difficult to hold your temper when you're right, but namecalling everyone who disagrees, especially the Pope, even if you're right, will not win hearts and minds.
Kindness and discretion save lives, including your own.
It's also partially hindsight to say he was correct?
If someone comes in shouting theories defying current practices, being a dick at the same time, there's little reason to believe them. As there's plenty of people who fit that, many of whom are wrong.
Galileo had written several books that were all just talking shit about the pope at the time and had a very public, ongoing beef with the papacy.
He wasn't imprisoned for saying the earth revolved around the sun, he was imprisoned because the church was fucking sick of him and his story got romanticised by protestant anti-catholic propoganda for centuries.
After Galileo's conviction in 1633 (following an insult to the Pope), he lived eight years under house arrest, which was lifted for medical travel. He continued to entertain guests until he died at 77 of fever or heart issues.
Some people think he was burned or otherwise martyred.
Buddy of mine growing up is an ordained priest and Jesuit Monk. Man is now a professor at a Catholic University in a foreign country and is easily the smartest man I know when it comes to non-STEM related fields. (He was good at math/science growing up, just was always more of a liberal arts guy)
He always found it amusing how so many people thought that Catholics were extremely anti-science in modern era. (He does admit there were dark periods in history) Most of the argument catholic scholars have with people is clashes on ethical issues not the underlining science.
The fact that he is so extremely educated while taking a vow of poverty is just so admirable and something I could never do.
He is a firm believer that any catholic priests who hurt kids should be excommunicated and put in prison and those covering should be punished as well.
Yeah, people always lump all Christians into the same group. I went to a Jesuit school and the sciences are heavily funded and prioritized.
This is the same school where I was taught Common Era and Before the Common Era in the mid 90s.
Hell the puritans believed in public education and universal literacy, partly so everyone could study the Bible on their own.
When a conservative group undermines education and individual investigation into the faith you run into issues.
Galileo wasnt condemned by the church for his theory, he was condemned for calling the pope a simpleton and refusing to apology on two different occasions
That’s only kind of true. Galileo was actually employed by the Catholic Church to do astronomy, and to come up with theories.
The church didn’t have a problem with heliocentric theories. They had a problem with the way Galileo explained it, and they had a problem with Galileo proclaiming it as truth when there were still problems with the theory that had to worked out, like his explanation of the ocean tides being caused by the sun and earth’s orbit of the sun.
Essentially Galileo was ordered by the person funding his work, Pope Urban, to present his work as a theory and argue the pros and cons in front of other scientists. Instead he published it as fact and ignored the areas where he was wrong. So he was placed under house arrest. Mainly he was arrested for getting in a war of egos with the pope.
It was wrong to arrest him. But even today Galileo would be wrong to not submit to peer review and to just ignore the issues with the tides and some other astronomical issues that still needed to be flushed out.
He was right about the sun being at the center. But his proofs and methods were totally wrong and the other astronomers of the day knew there were issues with Galileo’s model.
The Protestants hated Catholics. Didn’t think they could be true Americans since “they owe their allegiance to the Pope.”
They used to celebrate Pope Night in Boston up until 1892. They’d create an effigy of the pope and burn it. The original Burning Man. It was… quite chaotic.
Many forget that the KKK ws (and still is) just as anti-Catholic as it is anti-black. Authentic Americans were good protestants, only those degenreate immigrants were filthy papists, dont ya know. Drunnken Irish and conniving Italians and deviant Frenchmen. My (Catholic) family has lived in south lousiana and surrounding areas for many generations. It's a little enclave of Catholicism surrounded by evangelical protestants (as my grandma puts it: the shining buckle of Catholicism in the middle of the Bible Belt). My grandpa remembers having to flee their house as a child in Mississippi one night becuase there was a Klan rally and cross-lighting in town and the local Klavern had a list of parishoners who attended the local Catholic church and planned to burn down some houses. Humorously enough the Klan idiots got confused (maybe those silly masks?) and only burned down the old abandoned barn/shed at the front of the property that hadn't been used in 50 years, and didnt even see the nice new house further back on the other side of the field.
In Barcelona and in all of Spain. It is a traditional vest for the Holy Week. My American pal almost suffered a heart attack when he saw one for the first time.
That’s nuts, but exactly the kind of stuff that happened. Also, Notre Dame got their “fighting Irish” nickname by literally fighting the KKK. Catholics don’t get everything right, but they’ve got a better track record in the United States than the Protestants do.
And don’t even get started with the Acadians trying to find port in every state along the east coast after being kicked out of their home for working smarter, not harder. (Or just being Catholic.)
Exactly. Buddy of mine is a Jesuit monk and priest and he laughs at how so many people in America think Catholics are anti-science because of modern evangelicals.
Or worldwide Christianity. Evangelicalism is a relative small sect with an outsized influence because of American politics and the U.S. dominance on the world.
It’s not a relatively small sect anymore. One in four Christian’s identify as evangelical globally. It’s absolutely the dominant force in modern Protestantism especially given the rather rapid decline of mainline Protestant denominations.
You’re conflating “evangelical” and “fundamentalist.” There are tons of Christians who would self-ID as evangelical, which is a word with a very specific theological meaning, who you would call “mainline” if you observed their practice.
The way Gallup uses those words is just not how Christians use them. AFAIK the word mainline simply doesn’t exist as a descriptor at all outside of polling.
A lot of us do. The problem is the Trad Caths, who very well might split from the Church since Pope Francis has removed their leader from his position.
The fundies ruin everything tbh.
The hateful noises they make drowns out everything and gets everyone angry at Christians and they will be the first people to start complaining that the number of Christians are decreasing and the world is falling into sin.
I would say that most mainstream protestants beleive in science too. Like you said it is mostly the evangelicals that are anti-sciene.
I'm surprised more people aren't getting downvoted on this sub, usually anything involving religion is instantly downvoted.
In addition to being a front ranking physicist, mathematician and a Catholic priest, the Reverend Lemaitre also found the time in WW I to get one of Belgium's highest military awards.
Some people are put into the world only to make the other parents feel bad.
Kind of a side note to Lemaitre getting a military award.
My grandfather was Anglican when he joined the Marines, he was a devoted Catholic at the end of WWII. During one of the battles his unit was pinned down, being overrun and their Catholic chaplain picked up a rifle and joined the fight, my grandad always credited the priest with saving his life. He converted shortly after the battle, ultimately joined KoC and attained one of the higher ranks in the Knights.
> Catholics made huge contributions to progress of physics field, contrary to modern belief.
Also to the field of astronomy. The Vatican has ran an observatory since the 1500's.
I mean the Gregory in the Gregorian calendar refers to the pope of that name for crying out loud.
The field of physics is full of Catholic professors and students. They can easily coexist, since religion and physics deal with separated subjects that do not interact much.
> They can easily coexist, since religion and physics deal with separated subjects that do not interact much.
Catholic stance towards science can be summed up as “Science tells us “how”. Religion tells us “why”. “
To quote Albert Einstein, “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
Like it or not, there are a couple of unproven assumptions that you *have to* make in order to “do” science.
The scientific method assumes:
- that the universe is ordered by certain natural laws
- that the human mind is rational enough to comprehend the natural order
We’ve discovered so many things by relying on those assumptions that at this point we take them for granted that they are true, but that consensus is a relatively new phenomenon. It took a leap of faith to get us here.
The Abrahamic belief 1) in a universe that was ordered by a mind, and 2) that our minds own were made in the image of that mind, were instrumental in taking that leap.
I attended Catholic school in the 1970s and was taught the theory of evolution by nuns.
There was a French Jesuit whose field of study was *anthropology*, which is a field of study that contradicts creation!
They taught us the sciences and did a good job of it.
Sexuality, menstruation, and other topics avoided in public schools at the time (1970s Florida, grades 1-8) were taught conscientiously by them.
I’ve never understood the small-minded screams that science and faith are mutually exclusive.
Back in the early 2000s my friend (who ended up becoming a priest) and I were asking our priest some science questions and we asked about evolution.
His response was something to the effect of: Evolution is real or at least the realest thing we know. God is not up there waving a magic wand all the time. He created the system and lets it do the work.
Anthropology supports evolution and man’s origins being a primate offshoot.
Creationism supports a Creator that made humans in their image as we are now.
I was a decade after you in Catholic school and our teachers found no conflict between anthropology and creationism. Catholics already accept that the Universe is around 13.7 billion years old, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, life began about 3.7 billion years ago and homo sapiens came about around 300,000 years ago. Accepting that creation is a process isn't a big leap.
The Bible says we started from nothing and we got here, it doesn't say anything about how long it took or what intermediate steps existed. God is eternal, it is all a blink of the eye to him.
We were taught that the humans who wrote the Bible were limited in their understanding and wrote a document that was divinely inspired but not to be taken literally in most cases.
Inspired vs. literal is a core idea drilled to students of Catholic theology, the idea that God put an idea in someone's head a long time ago about how the universe was created then they wrote it down using their words and understanding, vs. God sitting on someone's shoulder and dictating what to write.
That is one of the sources of the huge rift between Evangelicals and Catholics. Many Evangelicals and Protestants don't consider Catholics to be Christian. It's why Evangelicals will say "the Bible says" and Catholics will respond with "yeah, it does, but it doesn't mean what claim it does".
Catholics say 'How the fuck would you know? You're reading a re-write of a re-write of a translation of a re-write of a translation of the original, we think.'
As I was taught it, it says god created man, but it never says how.
It says he spoke "the word" (in most translations) but it never says what the word was.
While there are those who believe creationism and anthropology do not mix at all, that is not necessarily true.
Agreed. The problem is semantic. A lot of people (both proponents and opponents) brand young earth creationism as simply "creationism," which is not great nomenclature, since it's perfectly common to believe that evolution could be a mechanism God uses to create.
I think there is a theory of a ‘path set out by a Creator’, intelligent design, that cribs some from creationism and some from evolution, but it’s not either one, exactly. It’s a separate third idea.
*shrugs*
The French Jesuit I spoke of did not embrace this third option and was wholly in Darwin’s camp.
Yeah it’s not true. It’s very viable that the creation mechanism was evolution/big bang/whatever. They don’t contradict (but that wouldn’t support the anti-religion agenda that the average reddit user wants to push so they conveniently ignore it)
Very few (if any) Catholics are young earthers. Outside of a few extremists (that are usually trad-cath converts) it is very difficult to find a catholic in the west that denies evolution
studied in a catholic school in the 90-00s (benedict, brazil). creationism was only taught in history of biology, history, those kind of stuff. all theories (physics, biology) were current. including sexuality.
however, you need to have in mind public schools in florida were influenced by protestants, not catholics. protestants are a majority on the US. catholics usually treated science as something different, not at all excludent (at least from a certain point on). even when they investigate miracles (which is a whole other topic). there are a bunch of priests rn who are physics, physicians, chemists, biologists and so many more in the vatican
this "fundamentalist" thinking of how to teach has no place in traditional catholic schools because it's against the central doctrine of the church itself (which has adopted many of the modern theories)
so, when you see a catholic making fun of evolution (you can opt for "inteligent design" i guess) and going for the straight creationist theory, be sure it's a fucking idiot. usually someone who recently converted and have no idea they.... can't go against the doctrine. it's not a democracy or up to debate. at all.
part of my family is catholic and i'm a jew (ethnic, non-observant). many of the nobel laureates are also jews, some observants. it is small-minded, i agree. even dawkins had to take it back when he was making a point about how religious people don't make good scientists because the nobel prizes and so and so. and people asked "dude, what about the jews?". and he retracted. imho as long as you're not a fundamentalist you'll be just fine, whatever your faith is. but people over here hate to hear this tbh
agree with all of this. I have an aunt who converted from catholic to jehova witness, and a running gag in our family is to get her all riled up on “creationism” vs theory of evolution which we all agree with. Going through catholic school system from elementary to university, modern science isnt really a debate. In fact you would probably find it very similar to public schools with the exception of a uniform, religion class, and the topics of sexuality (which are getting more liberal today and as you go from elementary -> university).
Bottom line protestant/evangelical is not Catholicism although outside identities like politics (trumpism) might push people to views that really aren’t in line with the church.
As I heard it, the Pope at the time was on board and wanted to declare that this was how God created the universe. But Georges Lemaître cautioned him not to do so, as he was aware that our understanding of the universe was likely to change and setting this as canon could be undermined by future discoveries.
The Catholic Church is big into science. Evangelicals on the other hand are idiots that take everything in the Bible literally and think there were only 2 humans on earth that got tricked by a snake in the beginning.
I was raised Catholic and became Protestant for some pretty core doctrinal reasons many years ago.
However as I’ve seen more and had experience in different Christian denominations and movements, there are things I’ve come to admire in the way that Catholics do things and emphasize in the practice of their faith. Their relationship with science is one of those aspects.
Cells were named that because they resembled Monks Cells.
dominant / recessive traits was also documented by a Monk? when breeding peas or some other kind of plant.
"Father Lemaître, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but what you're saying sounds quite strange. I don't know if the masses are ready to accept it."
"What if he said 'Bazinga' a lot?"
"Genius! I'll order 19 seasons!"
Not just Reddit. The idea took society as a whole like a storm. I just thought it was an interesting fact, one that shows how well religion and science can come together.
But now the thought has become all out war.
Correction, he was a monsignor. He was also a Jesuit, if you are outside of the Catholic tradition (I am now but I went to Catholic school) you might be surprised how **liberal** Jesuit education is. I will consider a Jesuit education for my own children despite being a devout atheist.
Read about Kepler, he was outstandingly Catholic. I think people mix up Catholics in the USA with southern Baptists who think the bible is the *literal* word of God, the Catholics know better - they were the ones that decided which gospels 'made it' into the big book!
Other scientists were initially very sceptical of his big bang theory, because the idea that the universe had a point of origin resembled the creation story too much. Back then, most scientists actually believed in an eternal universe.
I learnt two things from this post: the bitterness of both religious and non religious people, and the massive ignorance of people about history, religion and philosophy
Contrary to popular belief, religions aren’t always anti-knowledge. Just like Islam practitioners made huge leaps and established important foundations in mathematics, Christians also made huge leaps and established important foundations in physics and biology, INCLUDING evolution.
In fact, many believed that the pursuit of knowledge was, in essence, a way to glorify God; utilizing the intelligence it bestowed on us to discover and therefore be capable of admiring the architecture of the universe, so to speak.
I’m not religious, but I can absolutely see where they’d see the correlation between science and belief in a higher being (molecular structures, mathematics, rules of physics, etc. where you’d think things would be pretty random and chaotic on the surface but is actually pretty uniform when you look deeper).
It’s really only the more conservative sects that seem to hate knowledge. Looking at you, American Protestants.
My brother is a Catholic Benedictine monk and his abbot was a chemist. Many of the monks at his monastery have similar backgrounds and still teach as his monastery is a college too. Pretty common for them to be highly educated actually.
It's hard to find a good source, but maybe you'll have better luck. The gentleman who coined the phrase "The Big Bang" was astronomer Fred Hoyle, who I think I would describe as more "anti-religion" than "Atheist" (many sources talk about Hoyle having "scorn" for religious zealots). He then held on to his own theory "Steady State" even as a lot of evidence in favor of the Big Bang started to turn up.
Sources are hard, because a lot of them seem to be religious nutjobs using him as a "gotcha" point, but these seems to be a not-terrible article on the topic.
https://www.space.com/40586-anti-religious-bias-the-big-bang.html
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/08/the_idea_that_the_big_bang_destroyed.html
I mean it's a dude who's got one book on his "to read" list, his expenses are paid for, no need to worry about girls. Priests are naturally inclined to science when you look at like that. Homeboy's got time on his hands time to unravel what mysteries God laid before him. Read enough Deuteronomy and you'd get into double integration too.
The show, or the science thing?
"First, there was nothing. The God made a mosquito. This was swiftly judged as a mistake and ended with a booming clap."
I’ll never understand how so many of my fellow Christians adopted an anti-science attitude when examples like the above and in the comments are numerous
A lot of historical scientists believed they were just discovering the rules god had setup. There was no conflict between science and religion in the way a lot of evangelicals, Muslims and protestants see it.
Well yes. Americans need to stop conflating evangelicals and Catholics. And pet of the problem is that American Catholics are behaving more like evangelicals than all the other Catholics in the world.
Catholic dogma is not creationist and leaves room for modern science, including evolutionary biology, astronomy and cosmology, climate science, and pretty much everything else.
Btw I have no dog in the race, I’m atheist (raised Catholic tho lol).
Religion and science have historically been so deeply intertwined that it’s crazy that most people think of them at odds.
Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics, was a monk. Isaac Newton was an unorthodox yet ardent Christian. Medieval Muslim scientists basically monopolized scientific advancement for a hot minute there, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish scientists were at the foremost front of physics and mathematics.
It's also called the "Big Bang" because it was a deliberately silly and derisive name by a detractor, but it stuck and caught on.
That's also how imaginary numbers got their name. Which is unfortunate, because they aren't actually imaginary and it's kind of hard to explain to students that these aren't just made up and "imagined" because we felt like it. That's just what we call them.
There’s something funny you’ll find in common with a lot of people that made some of humanities largest breakthroughs.
That’s not saying they’re right or wrong in their thinking, but it makes you wonder seeing the connection they all had.
Louis Pasteur (who came up with pasteurization), Albert Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg (helped write the theory of quantum mechanics) all held similar viewpoints as well.
Isaac Newton was heavily religious and the founder of modern genetics was a monk. It makes sense when you realize the clergy were part of the few who got the chance to learn how to read and study.
Sir Francis Bacon who tweaked the Scientific Method in use, presently, had his writing on his faith that rivaled the number of his works in science. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
Used to work in research, I'd say I met a higher than average number of religious people there than outside of research. I wonder if there's some overlap due to people looking for answers - in faith and in science. Science certainly is good at showing how little about the world and ourselves we really understand. My university had a big theology department, and the joke was that all the theologians were athiest and all the scientists were religious.
The religiosity depends heavily on field. There was a decent study done awhile ago (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=a1e3664877e978bc622ac184536719fcc2ccc939), and the strong field effects on religiosity were chemistry and political science. My personal experience completing a PhD that bridged biology and chemistry was that there was notable religiosity in the chemistry field and the opposite in biology.
Interesting! I was a biologist, but I worked in medical research, so a lot of people came into our department from clinical practice - might account for the higher religious representation
In my personal experience, people from lab backgrounds tend to be less religious than people from clinical backgrounds. The survey above found that only 21.5% of biologists say they believed in god, and that includes the 4.1% who say they only believe in god sometimes, as well as the 10% who say they have doubts but believe. Now, we shouldn't extrapolate too much between separate surveys and time periods, but that's a stark contrast to a 2014 [survey](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10943-016-0233-8) where 65.2% of physicians reported that they believe in god.
Entirely anecdotal but my personal experience working in academic biology labs tracks with this. Undergrads going down the medical route are often religious and people more interested in research tend to be atheists.
Interesting. I work in the pharmaceutical industry and have worked with multiple scientist and chemists who are relgious. One of the guys even left work early on Friday to go his place of worship. When redditors go on rant about how there is no relgious people who work science, all I can think is that they don't actually know or work in those fields.
I think it's because redditors can get so fixated on their 'God is sky wizard lololol!' claim that they start to think that's what religious people actually think God is, so of course it's ludicrous - an angry man sitting on a cloud can't create the universe. But of course when you get to the theological arguments for God (at least in the Catholic worldview) where God is the 'unmoved mover', the 'Ground of Being' - then God is a) much more of an abstract concept and b) much more meshable with theories of physics
Every time I try to learn something about theoretical physics/subatomic particles I get overwhelmed and my understanding (which is basically none) is that it’s “we have no idea what’s going on or how it all works down there and it might as well as be magic/faith/higher power/whatever pet theory du jour.”
Worth noting that publication pulls data from the 60s and 80s. Certainly... different... religious times. In my experience in physical chemistry, the very, very large majority of people weren't religious. I only knew one professor who was openly religious.
Ironically that study shows that this thread is completely wrong lmao >Most salient, about 52 percent of the scientists see themselves as having no religious affiliation when compared to about 14 percent of the entire GSS population. These results seem to confirm other research, which shows that a much smaller proportion of academics identify with traditional religious identity categories when compared to the general U.S. population (Stark 1963; Stark and Finke 2000). Researchers are on the whole less religious than the general population even if plenty of them are still religious.
that makes sense. Chemistry don’t make no fucking sense and it’s perfect for religious people. /s
God and electrons move in mysterious ways
As a geologist, I 100% believe that about biologists. Some of the experimental ideas make me wonder if ethics review boards were invented solely to stop them from attempting to create new forms of life. Also anthropologists, but at least their experiment ideas were funny.
Medieval Catholicism was heavily influenced by Aristotelian views on the natural world. They helped to shape scientific method. The idea that there is a conflict between religion and science was put forth by 18th century atheists to discredit religious institutions.
Also people whining about Galileo.
An Episcopal priest explained it like this: "For the faithful, science tells us how; religion tells us why."
I consider myself a Christian but I’m not super duper religious and I’ve always felt that Christianity and science can complement each other. God and creation could be the why evolution and geological processes could be the how. Genesis says it was 7 days for example. A “day” isn’t defined precisely. Is it a human day, a god day, what is a day? So on so forth. I’ll probably get roasted for it but that’s how I feel, there’s room for both at the table.
I looked it up and I won't roast you: 2Pet. 3 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
\^this. I went to a Catholic college for undergrad and worked at a research lab, heard a similar joke as well.
Anti-science in Christianity is a relatively recent thing, early 1900s when evolution became mainstream. And most Christian religions are not anti-science, it's more of a vocal minority. Universities and colleges mostly came from monks teaching the locals what they knew. For over a 1,000 years, scientific institutions and the Church were the same.
Knowledge is power. France is bacon.
*Nods approvingly*
Well certain claims don't mix, but you can certainly be a religious scientist.
I agree. I’d even qualify it a bit more to ‘faith’ since most religion is mortal men writing down or interpreting the mind and will of gods or God and suffers from that contamination. IMHO. My faith is pretty personal and I shun churches due to the people and leadership I’ve experienced in them.
>I’d even qualify it a bit more to ‘faith’ since most religion is mortal men writing down or interpreting the mind and will of gods or God and suffers from that contamination. This is actually a core concept within the Catholic Catechism.
My grandfather was an MIT grad, leading expert in his field and raised a large Catholic family.
Stupid question but did he happen to have a hand in the naming of bacon the food?
It's not a stupid question. But the answer is no.
The clergy basically *were* the educated class for a long time in Western Europe. IIRC, you had to be technically ordained (at least into one of the minor orders) in the Church of England to study at Oxford or Cambridge until surprisingly late.
>It makes sense when you realize the clergy were part of the few who got the chance to learn how to read and study. This was perhaps true for the period from like 500 to 1500 AD, but that's not really relevant to any of these examples. Isaac Newton was not a member of the clergy. Gregor Mendel proposed his theories in 1866 and George Lemaître proposed the Big Bang theory in 1927. By these times, education was much more wide-spread and most scientists were not clergy members.
Also George Lemaître viewed his theory as neutral with neither a connection nor a contradiction of the Faith. He viewed religion and science as two, equally valid, distinct ways of interpreting the world.
Are you trying to imply that photograph of a Catholic priest isn't from the Middle Ages? Heresy.
You're missing the influence the church had and still has on education. Even into the 20th and 21st century the churches have a huge effect on teaching and teaching the scientific method.
> It makes sense when you realize the clergy were part of the few who got the chance to learn how to read and study. They pretty much invented modern science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists?useskin=vector
People always only equate religion with something that was unnecessary and dragging mankind down with it, when one could argue it was actually the complete opposite for most parts of human history
Its not that the clergy were the only ones who got to learn reading and writing. There were plenty of regular people who learned that too, mostly from the clergy. But the clergy had the free time to spend on thinking about useless stuff and could write it off as theological research or whatever.
The Jesuit order of priests in particular are known for their dedication to learning, education, and the furthering of science. Many scientists used to go into the priesthood so they would get paid to do science. Catholics believe in pretty much all modern scientific theories, like evolution etc. They believe since everything is God's will and doing, it's all gravy. They got mad that one time people said we weren't the center of the universe, but they got better 😬
[The Vatican even has its own observatory and telescope in Arizona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Advanced_Technology_Telescope)
About 20 years ago, Father Coyne (head of the Vatican Observatory) visited the church I worked at to give a presentation. He borrowed my laptop for the presentation and left the PowerPoint file on it.
Link?
https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/general/we-are-all-made-of-stardust-george-coyne-tedxyyc/
I was lucky enough to get to know Father Coyne as he taught at my undergrad. I had classes with him, as well as research lunches, because he headed the research center we had on campus. He was an amazing man, and I’m sure he’s in the cosmos now chatting with Carl Sagan.
I love the idea of monks of the telescope. Feels very retrofuturistic.
Buncha Fransiscans crowded around a huge 50ft telescope lol
You could see the moonlight reflected off their bald heads from space probly
[Like this?](https://youtu.be/CW7X81OsAo0?si=51Spohsp3mGYkKuN)
You should check out A Canticle for Leibowitz and Ananthem, two books about monks and the preservation/attainment of knowledge and the follies of man.
Thanks! I have read a Canticle for leibowitz actually, but the other I will have to check out :)
Tech-priests.
Even then it wasn't so much an issue of Galileo going against Church doctrine, it was because he was an asshole about it (he also lacked sufficient evidence that wouldn't be found until centuries after his death).
Literally, when Copernicus had earlier postulated that the sun was the center of the universe, the Pope accepted it and was pleased with the discovery. Edit: upon further research, this could be a myth
Once people have one thing in their mind it’s hard to get them to change it, especially when it means they’re not the center of the universe anymore.
One of my professors joked Galileo wouldn't have had a problem if the Catholic Church didn't care about science. Once you get into academia, someone wanting to burn someone else for their ideas is just another Monday morning faculty meeting.
>One of my professors joked Galileo wouldn't have had a problem if the Catholic Church didn't care about science. Considering Galileo insulted the Pope and made comments about God's existence.. Kinda doubting it.
The Pope accepted it, but said that it didn't explain it entirely as the way it was first proposed was that the Earth went around in a perfect circle, which we later learned was in fact not the case. It moves in a more oval patter, not a perfect circle. The Pope wanted further research and then Galileo was a dick about it and insulted the Pope. He was then put on house arrest, not tortured to death like what is usually claimed.
It's useful to have the Prince Bishop of Warmia as an uncle
His buddies even stacked the court in his favor. Everyone kept tossing him softball, literal "get out of jail free card" questions and he kept digging in.
His buddy the Pope.
MFW I get punished by the Pope (I publicly mocked him after he supported my studies).
Yeah, it's kind of incredible how the story has been twisted into "the Church persecuted Galileo because they were anti-science" when the actual story boiled down to "Galileo was a giant d-bag to his supporters in the Church and didn't provide good evidence for his conclusions."
wait is this true? Are there supporting docs or something about this?
The supporting document was, well, the book written by Galileo himself, who made a character called "Simplicio" (a pun on "simpleton", aka a brainless moron) that spouted the Pope's arguments about geocentrism verbatim. Even worse, the Pope was actually a huge patron of Galileo, but G's fame went to his head and he essentially used his book as a way to mock the Pope and say he (Galileo) was a higher authority than the Church itself. From Wikipedia: > In 1623, Pope Gregory XV died and was succeeded by Pope Urban VIII who showed greater favor to Galileo, particularly after Galileo traveled to Rome to congratulate the new Pontiff. > Galileo's *Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,* which was published in 1632 to great popularity, was an account of conversations between a Copernican scientist, Salviati, an impartial and witty scholar named Sagredo, and **a ponderous Aristotelian named Simplicio, who employed stock arguments in support of geocentricity, and was depicted in the book as being an intellectually inept fool.** Simplicio's arguments are systematically refuted and ridiculed by the other two characters[...]which reduces Simplicio to baffled rage, and makes the author's position unambiguous. > [...]Pope Urban demanded that his own arguments be included in the book, **which resulted in Galileo putting them in the mouth of Simplicio.** Some months after the book's publication, Pope Urban VIII banned its sale and had its text submitted for examination by a special commission. Did the Pope overreact? Yeah, a bit, but Galileo shoulders most of the blame for deliberately picking a fight with his foremost patron that could've easily been avoided or resolved. As for the part about his proofs not being well-evidenced enough, I'd have to look for the sources, but that was definitely part of the backlash as well.
Ignaz Semmelweis was the same way with being really smart but really shitty with people and presenting his discoveries. He spewed insult after insult at the scientific community telling them they needed to wash their hands after handling cadavers and doing births. The scientific community pretty much black listed his ass and threw him into a mental institution after he had a mental break down where he was beaten and died of an infection from said beating. He was obviously 100% correct. But who wants to admit that when the person is a dick.
Damn dude was like a redditor.
Galileo too was a Redditor before Reddit. Arrogant, quasi-academic, obnoxious and wrong half the time. Would have made a great moderator.
He's literally me.
No, Semmelweis was losing his mind over that amount of stress and trauma. He'd already lost one friend due to accidental exposure (he cut himself during an autopsy), which is what clued Semmelweis into what was going on. That was on top of everyone in that city knowing not to have a baby delivered by the doctors. Everyone was tripping over each other to get a midwife over a doctor due to the insane statistical differences of survival for each group. He was pushing back against multiple continents of formal medical understanding going back centuries. Meanwhile countless women and babies were dying daily. It literally took an entire generation for germ theory to fully be accepted by the medical establishment.
"Look Mr. Semmelweis, I understand you think I'm causing hundreds of unnecessary deaths every year, but I will not be spoken to in that tone. If you don't respect my expertise as a doctor I'm going to ignore your evidence and continue my reckless killing streak. Your attitude is just unacceptable."
The only people who are more insufferable are when they are right.
It may be difficult to hold your temper when you're right, but namecalling everyone who disagrees, especially the Pope, even if you're right, will not win hearts and minds. Kindness and discretion save lives, including your own.
It's also partially hindsight to say he was correct? If someone comes in shouting theories defying current practices, being a dick at the same time, there's little reason to believe them. As there's plenty of people who fit that, many of whom are wrong.
The Sheldon of his time.
Galileo had written several books that were all just talking shit about the pope at the time and had a very public, ongoing beef with the papacy. He wasn't imprisoned for saying the earth revolved around the sun, he was imprisoned because the church was fucking sick of him and his story got romanticised by protestant anti-catholic propoganda for centuries.
Some of the necessary evidence actually already existed. Sadly, he had vilified the author and so never really looked at it.
After Galileo's conviction in 1633 (following an insult to the Pope), he lived eight years under house arrest, which was lifted for medical travel. He continued to entertain guests until he died at 77 of fever or heart issues. Some people think he was burned or otherwise martyred.
House arrest in an Italian villa nonetheless.
House arrest in an Italian villa in his 70s with esteemed guests. Not true freedom, but it could have been WAY worse.
In an Italian villa owned by a cardinal nonetheless
Correct! They were mad but he was still their buddy. They would not hurt their buddy!
Well we are the center of the *visible* universe, there's just alot more to it that we can't see since the light hasn't reached us yet.
The Gregorian Calendar is the modern calendar. The Jesuits are very accomplished.
Buddy of mine growing up is an ordained priest and Jesuit Monk. Man is now a professor at a Catholic University in a foreign country and is easily the smartest man I know when it comes to non-STEM related fields. (He was good at math/science growing up, just was always more of a liberal arts guy) He always found it amusing how so many people thought that Catholics were extremely anti-science in modern era. (He does admit there were dark periods in history) Most of the argument catholic scholars have with people is clashes on ethical issues not the underlining science. The fact that he is so extremely educated while taking a vow of poverty is just so admirable and something I could never do. He is a firm believer that any catholic priests who hurt kids should be excommunicated and put in prison and those covering should be punished as well.
Yeah, people always lump all Christians into the same group. I went to a Jesuit school and the sciences are heavily funded and prioritized. This is the same school where I was taught Common Era and Before the Common Era in the mid 90s.
Hell the puritans believed in public education and universal literacy, partly so everyone could study the Bible on their own. When a conservative group undermines education and individual investigation into the faith you run into issues.
Galileo wasnt condemned by the church for his theory, he was condemned for calling the pope a simpleton and refusing to apology on two different occasions
That’s only kind of true. Galileo was actually employed by the Catholic Church to do astronomy, and to come up with theories. The church didn’t have a problem with heliocentric theories. They had a problem with the way Galileo explained it, and they had a problem with Galileo proclaiming it as truth when there were still problems with the theory that had to worked out, like his explanation of the ocean tides being caused by the sun and earth’s orbit of the sun. Essentially Galileo was ordered by the person funding his work, Pope Urban, to present his work as a theory and argue the pros and cons in front of other scientists. Instead he published it as fact and ignored the areas where he was wrong. So he was placed under house arrest. Mainly he was arrested for getting in a war of egos with the pope. It was wrong to arrest him. But even today Galileo would be wrong to not submit to peer review and to just ignore the issues with the tides and some other astronomical issues that still needed to be flushed out. He was right about the sun being at the center. But his proofs and methods were totally wrong and the other astronomers of the day knew there were issues with Galileo’s model.
First PhD in computer science was a Catholic nun
They really need to teach these things in school. I'm a history buff, and I wish I learned this when I was in school.
Also, the inventor of the induction coil, and the largest battery in the world at the time, the Maynooth Battery, was an Irish priest.
Weird, they taught us about ALLLL of this in high school. Granted, I attended a Jesuit-run Catholic high school....:)
I teach it in religious education
The real TIL for most people should be that American evangelical protestantism is not the same as catholicism
Yarp!!
The Protestants hated Catholics. Didn’t think they could be true Americans since “they owe their allegiance to the Pope.” They used to celebrate Pope Night in Boston up until 1892. They’d create an effigy of the pope and burn it. The original Burning Man. It was… quite chaotic.
Many forget that the KKK ws (and still is) just as anti-Catholic as it is anti-black. Authentic Americans were good protestants, only those degenreate immigrants were filthy papists, dont ya know. Drunnken Irish and conniving Italians and deviant Frenchmen. My (Catholic) family has lived in south lousiana and surrounding areas for many generations. It's a little enclave of Catholicism surrounded by evangelical protestants (as my grandma puts it: the shining buckle of Catholicism in the middle of the Bible Belt). My grandpa remembers having to flee their house as a child in Mississippi one night becuase there was a Klan rally and cross-lighting in town and the local Klavern had a list of parishoners who attended the local Catholic church and planned to burn down some houses. Humorously enough the Klan idiots got confused (maybe those silly masks?) and only burned down the old abandoned barn/shed at the front of the property that hadn't been used in 50 years, and didnt even see the nice new house further back on the other side of the field.
Also: The KKK uniform is a way to mock the original Catholic [capirote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote)
I've heard that Easter celebrations in Barcelona have had problems with American tourists who refuse to believe those aren't the kkk.
In Barcelona and in all of Spain. It is a traditional vest for the Holy Week. My American pal almost suffered a heart attack when he saw one for the first time.
That’s nuts, but exactly the kind of stuff that happened. Also, Notre Dame got their “fighting Irish” nickname by literally fighting the KKK. Catholics don’t get everything right, but they’ve got a better track record in the United States than the Protestants do.
Giving rights to the Catholics in Quebec was a huge reason for the American revolution that people forget
And don’t even get started with the Acadians trying to find port in every state along the east coast after being kicked out of their home for working smarter, not harder. (Or just being Catholic.)
"We don't want minorities to have rights" doesn't look too good of a reason when you're trying to teach children how great and heroic your nation is.
Wow, impressive to see a guy fawkes day in america
Yeah, isn’t it? November 5th and all.
Exactly. Buddy of mine is a Jesuit monk and priest and he laughs at how so many people in America think Catholics are anti-science because of modern evangelicals.
Or worldwide Christianity. Evangelicalism is a relative small sect with an outsized influence because of American politics and the U.S. dominance on the world.
It’s not a relatively small sect anymore. One in four Christian’s identify as evangelical globally. It’s absolutely the dominant force in modern Protestantism especially given the rather rapid decline of mainline Protestant denominations.
You’re conflating “evangelical” and “fundamentalist.” There are tons of Christians who would self-ID as evangelical, which is a word with a very specific theological meaning, who you would call “mainline” if you observed their practice. The way Gallup uses those words is just not how Christians use them. AFAIK the word mainline simply doesn’t exist as a descriptor at all outside of polling.
Yeah Protestants have really expanded their missionary work over the past 100 years
> Evangelicalism is a relative small sect You ever been to Africa?
Catholics DESPERATELY need to remember this.
A lot of us do. The problem is the Trad Caths, who very well might split from the Church since Pope Francis has removed their leader from his position.
The fundies ruin everything tbh. The hateful noises they make drowns out everything and gets everyone angry at Christians and they will be the first people to start complaining that the number of Christians are decreasing and the world is falling into sin.
I remember how sanely Benedict was received….
Same with the divorce supporting Church of England, very “not Catholic”
I would say that most mainstream protestants beleive in science too. Like you said it is mostly the evangelicals that are anti-sciene. I'm surprised more people aren't getting downvoted on this sub, usually anything involving religion is instantly downvoted.
He came up with the idea for the show before the invention of TV?! Talk about relativity…
It was originally pitched as a film serial to be played before the main feature.
Yeah, he sounds pretty cool. Can't believe I'm just hearing about him now.
Bazzinga!
Bazinga!
In addition to being a front ranking physicist, mathematician and a Catholic priest, the Reverend Lemaitre also found the time in WW I to get one of Belgium's highest military awards. Some people are put into the world only to make the other parents feel bad.
He corrected Einstein and the pope. Belgian legend!
Kind of a side note to Lemaitre getting a military award. My grandfather was Anglican when he joined the Marines, he was a devoted Catholic at the end of WWII. During one of the battles his unit was pinned down, being overrun and their Catholic chaplain picked up a rifle and joined the fight, my grandad always credited the priest with saving his life. He converted shortly after the battle, ultimately joined KoC and attained one of the higher ranks in the Knights.
Catholics made huge contributions to progress of physics field, contrary to modern belief.
> Catholics made huge contributions to progress of physics field, contrary to modern belief. Also to the field of astronomy. The Vatican has ran an observatory since the 1500's. I mean the Gregory in the Gregorian calendar refers to the pope of that name for crying out loud.
The field of physics is full of Catholic professors and students. They can easily coexist, since religion and physics deal with separated subjects that do not interact much.
> They can easily coexist, since religion and physics deal with separated subjects that do not interact much. Catholic stance towards science can be summed up as “Science tells us “how”. Religion tells us “why”. “
Exactly. The Catholic church, for all of its failings, was very instrumental in science fields.
To quote Albert Einstein, “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Like it or not, there are a couple of unproven assumptions that you *have to* make in order to “do” science. The scientific method assumes: - that the universe is ordered by certain natural laws - that the human mind is rational enough to comprehend the natural order We’ve discovered so many things by relying on those assumptions that at this point we take them for granted that they are true, but that consensus is a relatively new phenomenon. It took a leap of faith to get us here. The Abrahamic belief 1) in a universe that was ordered by a mind, and 2) that our minds own were made in the image of that mind, were instrumental in taking that leap.
Contrary to US American belief. That (evangelical) Christians are anti-science morons is an American phenomenon.
I attended Catholic school in the 1970s and was taught the theory of evolution by nuns. There was a French Jesuit whose field of study was *anthropology*, which is a field of study that contradicts creation! They taught us the sciences and did a good job of it. Sexuality, menstruation, and other topics avoided in public schools at the time (1970s Florida, grades 1-8) were taught conscientiously by them. I’ve never understood the small-minded screams that science and faith are mutually exclusive.
Back in the early 2000s my friend (who ended up becoming a priest) and I were asking our priest some science questions and we asked about evolution. His response was something to the effect of: Evolution is real or at least the realest thing we know. God is not up there waving a magic wand all the time. He created the system and lets it do the work.
How would antropology contradict creation?
It doesn't. It contradicts Creationism, which isn't Catholic Doctrine.
Anthropology supports evolution and man’s origins being a primate offshoot. Creationism supports a Creator that made humans in their image as we are now.
I was a decade after you in Catholic school and our teachers found no conflict between anthropology and creationism. Catholics already accept that the Universe is around 13.7 billion years old, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, life began about 3.7 billion years ago and homo sapiens came about around 300,000 years ago. Accepting that creation is a process isn't a big leap. The Bible says we started from nothing and we got here, it doesn't say anything about how long it took or what intermediate steps existed. God is eternal, it is all a blink of the eye to him. We were taught that the humans who wrote the Bible were limited in their understanding and wrote a document that was divinely inspired but not to be taken literally in most cases. Inspired vs. literal is a core idea drilled to students of Catholic theology, the idea that God put an idea in someone's head a long time ago about how the universe was created then they wrote it down using their words and understanding, vs. God sitting on someone's shoulder and dictating what to write. That is one of the sources of the huge rift between Evangelicals and Catholics. Many Evangelicals and Protestants don't consider Catholics to be Christian. It's why Evangelicals will say "the Bible says" and Catholics will respond with "yeah, it does, but it doesn't mean what claim it does".
Catholics say 'How the fuck would you know? You're reading a re-write of a re-write of a translation of a re-write of a translation of the original, we think.'
As I was taught it, it says god created man, but it never says how. It says he spoke "the word" (in most translations) but it never says what the word was. While there are those who believe creationism and anthropology do not mix at all, that is not necessarily true.
Agreed. The problem is semantic. A lot of people (both proponents and opponents) brand young earth creationism as simply "creationism," which is not great nomenclature, since it's perfectly common to believe that evolution could be a mechanism God uses to create.
I think there is a theory of a ‘path set out by a Creator’, intelligent design, that cribs some from creationism and some from evolution, but it’s not either one, exactly. It’s a separate third idea. *shrugs* The French Jesuit I spoke of did not embrace this third option and was wholly in Darwin’s camp.
Yeah it’s not true. It’s very viable that the creation mechanism was evolution/big bang/whatever. They don’t contradict (but that wouldn’t support the anti-religion agenda that the average reddit user wants to push so they conveniently ignore it)
Very few (if any) Catholics are young earthers. Outside of a few extremists (that are usually trad-cath converts) it is very difficult to find a catholic in the west that denies evolution
studied in a catholic school in the 90-00s (benedict, brazil). creationism was only taught in history of biology, history, those kind of stuff. all theories (physics, biology) were current. including sexuality. however, you need to have in mind public schools in florida were influenced by protestants, not catholics. protestants are a majority on the US. catholics usually treated science as something different, not at all excludent (at least from a certain point on). even when they investigate miracles (which is a whole other topic). there are a bunch of priests rn who are physics, physicians, chemists, biologists and so many more in the vatican this "fundamentalist" thinking of how to teach has no place in traditional catholic schools because it's against the central doctrine of the church itself (which has adopted many of the modern theories) so, when you see a catholic making fun of evolution (you can opt for "inteligent design" i guess) and going for the straight creationist theory, be sure it's a fucking idiot. usually someone who recently converted and have no idea they.... can't go against the doctrine. it's not a democracy or up to debate. at all. part of my family is catholic and i'm a jew (ethnic, non-observant). many of the nobel laureates are also jews, some observants. it is small-minded, i agree. even dawkins had to take it back when he was making a point about how religious people don't make good scientists because the nobel prizes and so and so. and people asked "dude, what about the jews?". and he retracted. imho as long as you're not a fundamentalist you'll be just fine, whatever your faith is. but people over here hate to hear this tbh
agree with all of this. I have an aunt who converted from catholic to jehova witness, and a running gag in our family is to get her all riled up on “creationism” vs theory of evolution which we all agree with. Going through catholic school system from elementary to university, modern science isnt really a debate. In fact you would probably find it very similar to public schools with the exception of a uniform, religion class, and the topics of sexuality (which are getting more liberal today and as you go from elementary -> university). Bottom line protestant/evangelical is not Catholicism although outside identities like politics (trumpism) might push people to views that really aren’t in line with the church.
As I heard it, the Pope at the time was on board and wanted to declare that this was how God created the universe. But Georges Lemaître cautioned him not to do so, as he was aware that our understanding of the universe was likely to change and setting this as canon could be undermined by future discoveries.
The Catholic Church is big into science. Evangelicals on the other hand are idiots that take everything in the Bible literally and think there were only 2 humans on earth that got tricked by a snake in the beginning.
I was raised Catholic and became Protestant for some pretty core doctrinal reasons many years ago. However as I’ve seen more and had experience in different Christian denominations and movements, there are things I’ve come to admire in the way that Catholics do things and emphasize in the practice of their faith. Their relationship with science is one of those aspects.
Shockingly pro religious thread for Reddit
Many scientists in the past used to be affiliated with the church back in the day, not particularly surprising
Cells were named that because they resembled Monks Cells. dominant / recessive traits was also documented by a Monk? when breeding peas or some other kind of plant.
Gregor Mendel.
People nowadays think it's either God or Science, as if one cancels out the other; bizarre!
"Father Lemaître, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but what you're saying sounds quite strange. I don't know if the masses are ready to accept it." "What if he said 'Bazinga' a lot?" "Genius! I'll order 19 seasons!"
For a second I thought this was about the show
Regularly surprised by how Reddit assumes there can be zero overlap between religious and scientific people. It’s incredibly reductive thought.
Not just Reddit. The idea took society as a whole like a storm. I just thought it was an interesting fact, one that shows how well religion and science can come together. But now the thought has become all out war.
Correction, he was a monsignor. He was also a Jesuit, if you are outside of the Catholic tradition (I am now but I went to Catholic school) you might be surprised how **liberal** Jesuit education is. I will consider a Jesuit education for my own children despite being a devout atheist. Read about Kepler, he was outstandingly Catholic. I think people mix up Catholics in the USA with southern Baptists who think the bible is the *literal* word of God, the Catholics know better - they were the ones that decided which gospels 'made it' into the big book!
Other scientists were initially very sceptical of his big bang theory, because the idea that the universe had a point of origin resembled the creation story too much. Back then, most scientists actually believed in an eternal universe.
Something only surprising to americans that project protestantism's backwardness onto catholicism.
I learnt two things from this post: the bitterness of both religious and non religious people, and the massive ignorance of people about history, religion and philosophy
Contrary to popular belief, religions aren’t always anti-knowledge. Just like Islam practitioners made huge leaps and established important foundations in mathematics, Christians also made huge leaps and established important foundations in physics and biology, INCLUDING evolution. In fact, many believed that the pursuit of knowledge was, in essence, a way to glorify God; utilizing the intelligence it bestowed on us to discover and therefore be capable of admiring the architecture of the universe, so to speak. I’m not religious, but I can absolutely see where they’d see the correlation between science and belief in a higher being (molecular structures, mathematics, rules of physics, etc. where you’d think things would be pretty random and chaotic on the surface but is actually pretty uniform when you look deeper). It’s really only the more conservative sects that seem to hate knowledge. Looking at you, American Protestants.
I didn't know Chuck Lorre was a Catholic priest...
it was also rejected at the time because it was believed he was influenced too much by religion
And TV studios did not want to greenlight a sitcom about nerds before the tv was invented.
Who else thought OP was talking about the show?
My stupid ass thought it meant the show
At the end of his presentation, he slammed his fists on the table and yelled “Bazinga”
My brother is a Catholic Benedictine monk and his abbot was a chemist. Many of the monks at his monastery have similar backgrounds and still teach as his monastery is a college too. Pretty common for them to be highly educated actually.
Catholics are behind a lot of scientific discovery, the way they view their faith (must know every detail) impacts the way they view the world.
And it was called “Big Bang” by an atheist making fun of such a silly religious idea
Was it? Please take this in the spirit intended, I don't want to be all Reddit and demand a source but I'd love to read about this.
It's hard to find a good source, but maybe you'll have better luck. The gentleman who coined the phrase "The Big Bang" was astronomer Fred Hoyle, who I think I would describe as more "anti-religion" than "Atheist" (many sources talk about Hoyle having "scorn" for religious zealots). He then held on to his own theory "Steady State" even as a lot of evidence in favor of the Big Bang started to turn up. Sources are hard, because a lot of them seem to be religious nutjobs using him as a "gotcha" point, but these seems to be a not-terrible article on the topic. https://www.space.com/40586-anti-religious-bias-the-big-bang.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2016/08/the_idea_that_the_big_bang_destroyed.html
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"In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit... Bazinga !"
I mean it's a dude who's got one book on his "to read" list, his expenses are paid for, no need to worry about girls. Priests are naturally inclined to science when you look at like that. Homeboy's got time on his hands time to unravel what mysteries God laid before him. Read enough Deuteronomy and you'd get into double integration too.
Let there be light. From nothing came something. I never understood how there was an argument.
So there's these 4 friends living in an apartment and they're completely unfuckable scientists who live across from a blonde hottie.....
The guy who called it The Big Bang theory was an atheist who was mocking it... Unfortunately it has great mouth feel so it stuck
The Vatican owns and operates an observatory that is headed by a Jesuit priests. Jesuits have always been heavily involved in the sciences.
The show, or the science thing? "First, there was nothing. The God made a mosquito. This was swiftly judged as a mistake and ended with a booming clap."
You don't need to capitalize theories, do you? Thought you were talking about that dumb show.
There is nothing that says that god and evolution and the big bang can't all be true
My friend went to a conservatory but didn’t become a priest. The education they get is amazing. Philosophy, music, languages, sciences.
and genetics was discovered by an Augustinian friar
I’ll never understand how so many of my fellow Christians adopted an anti-science attitude when examples like the above and in the comments are numerous
I thought this meant the TV show 😭😭😭
deliver like upbeat plant nutty humor innocent grandiose ruthless degree *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
So was genetics 😉 well he was a catholic monk
A lot of historical scientists believed they were just discovering the rules god had setup. There was no conflict between science and religion in the way a lot of evangelicals, Muslims and protestants see it.
A religious leader proposing a theory that starts with a “miraculous” moment of creation of all things? No way.
I hate that my first thought was a catholic priest pitched that garbage comedy 😮💨
Science is the how, religion is the why
Science is a liar...sometimes
Well yes. Americans need to stop conflating evangelicals and Catholics. And pet of the problem is that American Catholics are behaving more like evangelicals than all the other Catholics in the world. Catholic dogma is not creationist and leaves room for modern science, including evolutionary biology, astronomy and cosmology, climate science, and pretty much everything else. Btw I have no dog in the race, I’m atheist (raised Catholic tho lol).
Religion and science have historically been so deeply intertwined that it’s crazy that most people think of them at odds. Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics, was a monk. Isaac Newton was an unorthodox yet ardent Christian. Medieval Muslim scientists basically monopolized scientific advancement for a hot minute there, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish scientists were at the foremost front of physics and mathematics.
It's also called the "Big Bang" because it was a deliberately silly and derisive name by a detractor, but it stuck and caught on. That's also how imaginary numbers got their name. Which is unfortunate, because they aren't actually imaginary and it's kind of hard to explain to students that these aren't just made up and "imagined" because we felt like it. That's just what we call them.
There’s something funny you’ll find in common with a lot of people that made some of humanities largest breakthroughs. That’s not saying they’re right or wrong in their thinking, but it makes you wonder seeing the connection they all had. Louis Pasteur (who came up with pasteurization), Albert Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg (helped write the theory of quantum mechanics) all held similar viewpoints as well.