(OSV News) – Are science and religion fundamentally opposed to each other? That common notion has “worked a lot of mischief”, said Bishop Robert Barron, who launched a new conference held on January 13-14 to show how the Catholic Church champions “the unity of faith and reason”.

Some 1000 clergy, religious and lay attendees joined the first-ever Wonder Conference, which took place at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Dallas. The inaugural event was hosted by the Word on Fire Institute, part of the nonprofit Word on Fire Catholic Ministries media apostolate founded by Bishop Barron, who is bishop of the diocese of Winona-Rochester.

In 2020, the apostolate received a US$1.7 million, three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation to address the perceived disconnect between religious belief and scientific inquiry, with the funding helping to sponsor the conference.

The conference featured an array of experts in physics, philosophy, technology, theology and history, including among others Jesuit Father Robert J. Spitzer, president of the California-based Magis Center of Reason and Faith and the Spitzer Center; Jennifer Wiseman, senior astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center; Karin Öberg, professor of astronomy at Harvard University; Christopher Baglow, academic director of the Science and Religion Initiative at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame; and Stephen Bullivant, director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society and professor at St Mary’s University in London.

The “supposed conflict between religion and science, or faith and reason” has become “a major reason for (religious) disaffiliation among our young people”, said Bishop Barron in his January 14 keynote address.
He added that St Thomas Aquinas, a famous Dominican theologian and philosopher from the 13th century, would be “turning in his grave” at the prospect, since the Catholic Church “(stands) for the unity of faith and reason”.

Bishop Barron said that part of the blame for that opposition lay with the Catholic Church itself.

“We dumbed down the faith after the (Second Vatican) Council, and it was a pastoral disaster,” he said, prompting applause from the audience.

A 2015 study by Pew Research found that nearly six in 10 adults, or 59 per cent of the US public, viewed science and religion as often conflicting. Nearly three out of four of those who seldom or never attended religious services were most likely to think science and religion mostly conflict; however, 68 per cent of US adults surveyed at the time said their personal religious beliefs and science did not conflict. Pew Research found religion most likely affected people’s views of scientific topics when it came to human evolution and the creation of the universe.

Bishop Barron said the “fundamental problem” is not science, but rather scientism, or “the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge”.

But scientism cannot address questions of beauty, morality or transcendence, which become “meaningless” when reduced to scientific facts, the bishop said.

In his address, Bishop Barron said that he aimed to survey how the world is fundamentally knowable, the mind is not material but immaterial, and the “inescapability” of metaphysics, or knowledge about what exists beyond the physical world. He cited the late Pope Benedict XVI whose writings stressed the “unique creative Intelligence” to which both the universe and human reason pointed.

In his January 13 presentation entitled “The Evidence for God from Science”, Father Spitzer – who referenced a number of prominent scientists, including physicist Stephen Hawking and cosmologist Thomas Hertog – said the once-popular concept of an “eternally inflating, infinite multiverse” is now “(fading) into the world of fantasy”.

As scientific inquiry into its origins is refined, the universe is shown to be “exceedingly fine-tuned for life” by “a super intelligent, transcendent creator whose image cannot be suppressed”, said Father Spitzer.

Father Sinclair Oubre, pastor of St Francis of Assisi Parish in Orange, Texas, told OSV News that the conference was an important professional development opportunity for parish religious education staff. Father Oubre, who did not attend the conference, sent two of his religious education directors to participate so they could better prepare young people in their high school programmes as they head to universities where they may be challenged by atheistic professors.

The priest said he was grateful for Bishop Barron’s initiative in addressing the “false conflict” between science and religion.

“The Catholic Church has always recognised that reason and what is revealed in natural law is an aspect of God’s revelation,” he said.

Photo: Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minn., is seen speaking at the spring general assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore in this June 11, 2019, file photo. Bishop Barron is the founder of the Catholic media apostolate Word on Fire. (CNS photo/Bob Roller)

The post First-ever Wonder Conference boldly goes to frontier of ‘science and religion’ appeared first on NZ Catholic Newspaper.

The December 1 edition of NZ Catholic had an interesting article reporting on an address given by Bishop Robert Barron to the Fall 2019 meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Bishop Barron is well known as the presenter of the “Catholicism” programme and for informative YouTube videos.

He is well aware of the numbers of people leaving the Church in the United States through the rising number who enter “none” to the census question
asking about religious affiliation. He is of the firm belief that the Church needs to embark on a vigorous programme of evangelisation to bring these people back into the fold.

I suspect that the situation in New Zealand is not much different; people drift away or leave as they are disillusioned at the revelations of sexual abuse and inept handling of this scourge. Bishop Barron outlines his strategy: (i). Getting young people involved in social justice work should be an attractive starting point for them. (Agreed, but I am surprised that he did not mention that care for the environment would also be attractive to young people.) (ii). He recommends that the Church encourages its artists and writers. (Pope Benedict said some time back that looking at the lives
of saints and work of great artists reveals much about Christianity.) (iii). Bishop Barron says we have to stop dumbing down the faith. (I am not sure to what extent practice in the US relates to NZ.) (iv). He also says our parishes need to be seen as mission grounds. (An important point as parishioners might need evangelising to keep them within the fold.) These four are clearly worthy suggestions.

I have recently participated in viewing the bishop’s “Catholicism” programme. Bishop Barron is the narrator in a series of visually and musically engaging videos shot on location in many parts of the world. The programmes present the past glories of the Church and leave one wondering where to next; but his thrust is that an important strength of Catholicism is the intellectual manner in which faith has come to be
understood. My take on this is that the “Catholicism” programme is directed more at providing “head” knowledge than “heart” knowledge.

If I ask myself, a cradle Catholic, why I am still with the Church, I have to respond by saying that what keeps me here is not a system of intellectual assent, but something deeper.

At the beginning of Pope Benedict’s 2005 encyclical God is Love he states: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

Searching the writings of Pope St John Paul II unearths several similar comments. Pope Francis also refers frequently to the importance of our personal relationship with Jesus.

The Leaders Manual for Life in the Spirit Seminars (1971 – 1978) gives, as the first goal of the seminars, “to establish or re-establish or deepen a personal relationship with Christ”. So what Popes St John Paul II, Benedict, and Francis emphasise has been with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal since shortly after the closing of the Second Vatican Council.

The question is — how are we to develop this personal relationship? It is very clear from Pope Francis in Christ is Alive that God seeks human beings with a passionate love; Bishop Barron makes the same point in the “Catholicism” episode on “Prayer and the Life of the Spirit”.

Pope Francis in his 2013 document The Joy of the Gospel emphasises that the initiative lies with us. In paragraph 264, he says: “The primary reason for evangelising is the love of Jesus which we have received, the experience of salvation which urges us to ever greater love of him. What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known? If we do not feel an intense desire to share this love, we need to pray insistently that he will once more touch our hearts. We need to implore his grace daily, asking him to open our cold hearts and shake up our lukewarm and superficial existence . . . .”

Perhaps we can say that the personal relationship with Jesus, discussed by the three popes, develops “heart” knowledge and complements the head knowledge of the “Catholicism” programme.

Would people drift away from the Church if they had developed this personal relationship with Jesus?

Pope Francis spells out the content of the first steps of evangelisation
in Christ is Alive; what he presents is simple and not dependent on intellectual gifts.

At core there are just three statements: A God who is love; Christ saves you; and He is alive. (The explanatory text is in paragraphs 112, 118 and 124 of the document.)

Fr Ken Barker, of Brisbane, in his 2018 book “Go set the world on fire” also promotes the above three-step approach to evangelisation.

Comments on the Synod for the Amazon, held in Rome in October last year, from Cardinal Kurt Koch, the President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, were reported in UK Catholic weekly The Tablet (November 9). He noted that many of those at the synod explained that the rapidly growing Pentecostal communities in the Amazon region were attracting converts from Catholicism. (The situation in New Zealand is similar.) He said: “We must ask ourselves where we have gone wrong and what we can learn from the Pentecostals . . . faith is far more spontaneous in Pentecostal communities and quite naturally a part of life, which means that the Holy Spirit is directly experienced, whereas our Western mentality is somewhat highbrow, too overly intellectual.”

With more than one approach to evangelisation, and there are more than the two above, it is a matter of choice. Personally, I think Cardinal Koch’s observation is telling.

Professor Michael Pender is a professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Auckland. He is a member of St Michael’s parish, Remuera.

The post Approaches to evangelisation appeared first on NZ Catholic Newspaper.