A special liturgy highlighting scientists, science educators and students of science drew about 200 people to Holy Family Church Nov. 18.
Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre celebrated the annual Gold Mass, telling the congregation that faith and science are not in opposition, yet there exists a tension between the two.
That tension can be a good thing, leading both sides to a desire to learn more, he noted.
Faith and science “both take us into the reality that is God,” said Archbishop Fabre.
Deacon Ned Berghausen assisted at the Mass and delivered the homily.
He noted that some may be surprised to hear him preaching about evolution. He assured them that the church has seen no conflict between evolution and Catholicism since at least 1950, when Pope Pius XII released his encyclical “Humani Generis.”
The encyclical states there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and evolution, as long as Christians believe that God created all things.
There’s much evidence supporting evolution, said Deacon Berghausen, who teaches theology at Assumption High School and serves at St. Agnes Church.
“Do you know what a Tiktaalik is?” he asked the congregation.
Tiktaalik describes the genus of an aquatic creature that lived 375 million years ago.
Paleontologists believe it is an ancestor of the human species, said Deacon Berghausen.
Though the human body may have received its shape from an evolutionary process, human beings “uniquely reflect our creator,” he said.
He drew attention to the Gospel reading in which Jesus is transfigured on Mount Tabor — his divinity is on display, yet Jesus shares in the evolutionary process, Deacon Berghausen said.
“When we picture Christ standing on Mount Tabor, bathed in the uncreated light of his transfiguration, we perceive his divinity. … And yet, Jesus, by becoming incarnate and dwelling among us, … became a descendant not just of Abraham and Adam but also a son of the created world,” he said.
“In order to to get a fuller picture of Christ and, by extension ourselves, we need to extend his and our own genealogy to include our aquatic ancestors and everything that came before that. We are created in the image of an ‘inner fish’ as well as the image of God.”
Following the Mass, participants dined together and listened to a presentation by Dr. Christopher Baglow, a professor from the University of Notre Dame.
Baglow leads the Science and Religion Initiative at the McGrath Institute for Church Life on the university’s campus.
Baglow discussed the origin of the perceived conflict between faith and science, which he called the “warfare model of science and religion.”
This conflict states that scientific inquiry and religion are intractably opposed to each other. It says that science and faith have rival ways of explaining the universe, and those who practice faith or science are fighting each other for supremacy, said Baglow.
That conflict was created in the late 19th century by scientist Jon William Draper and historian Andrew Dickson White, Baglow explained.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say these two gave rise to the conflict approach that many today, even young Catholics, accept as unquestionable,” he said.
Baglow noted, however, that the Catholic Church’s “theological tradition” reveals a different approach to looking at faith and science, an alternative to conflict.
Some of the church’s foremost thinkers, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, “let reason inform their faith,” he said.
For example, in St. Augustine’s commentary on the book of Genesis, which he wrote in 414 A.D., he relied on established astronomical observations to conclude that the first creation story must be a symbolic account instead of a scientific account.
In addition to the Gold Mass, celebrated annually, the Archdiocese of Louisville also has a Faith and Science Dialogue group.
