Alan: Aquinas held that the proper role of faith was in those "domains" inaccessible to sensory knowledge.
However, Aquinas also taught that in any domain where human senses can penetrate, divine truth must accord with scientific finding.
This view is well-expressed in the Tantum Ergo, whose lyrics were written by Aquinas in the 13th century.
(N.B. G.K. Chesterton's biography of Aquinas: The Dumb Ox is freely available online at http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/stt03002.htm)
I see no good coming from conservatism's replacement of trust-in-science with ever more abstract acts-of-faith.
I see no good coming from conservatism's replacement of trust-in-science with ever more abstract acts-of-faith.
Not only is this substitution personally, politically and environmentally dangerous, it is also "ungodly" - at least in every way my Catholic formation can conceive God.
The impulse to deny provable, peer-reviewed knowledge -- the kind of knowledge that undergirds all science and technology -- is intimately bound with many Christians' patriarchal view of God, who, according to that narrative, will always "provide" for individuals who establish a devout, personal relationship with God.
And so it becomes unthinkable - indeed, heretical - to posit that human beings must, under any circumstance, undertake collective activity - typically on issues so big and so encompassing that God can not save us in any traditionally providential framework.
Many of life's circumstances do not lend themselves to "divine intervention," not even in theory.
In case of a "car crash," even "true believers" will not be "thrown free of the car."
If you smoke cigarettes, your health will suffer.
If you eat six strips of bacon every morning, your arteries will clog.
It is foolish to depend on God to prevent predictably damaging sequelae.
Rather, we depend on "best knowledge."
Not "perfect" knowledge, but "best knowledge."
In the context of global warming, "salvation" is only available when the whole community works together as a unified political body, and it is this "collectivity" that terrifies conservative Christians whose world view collapses if God, in his "unfailing providence," can not be counted on to "take care of us" - always, everywhere and under any circumstance.
Many of life's circumstances do not lend themselves to "divine intervention," not even in theory.
In case of a "car crash," even "true believers" will not be "thrown free of the car."
If you smoke cigarettes, your health will suffer.
If you eat six strips of bacon every morning, your arteries will clog.
It is foolish to depend on God to prevent predictably damaging sequelae.
Rather, we depend on "best knowledge."
Not "perfect" knowledge, but "best knowledge."
In the context of global warming, "salvation" is only available when the whole community works together as a unified political body, and it is this "collectivity" that terrifies conservative Christians whose world view collapses if God, in his "unfailing providence," can not be counted on to "take care of us" - always, everywhere and under any circumstance.
Hence, Christian conservatives cannot acknowledge global warming without destroying the "relational predicate" on which faithful-but-thoughtless Christianity depends: there is one person, and there is one God, and both act in one individual relationship.
Only in individual relationship.
Only in individual relationship.
Aquinas, on the other hand, would look out on "the seen" and "the unseen" and then argue on behalf of "both."
"Fundamentalist" Christianity looks out on the world and sees only the Manichean starkness of "either/or."
Fundamentalists have no understanding that there are, in fact -- and by divine "ordination" -- two kinds of people in this world: "Those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't."
In the end, America's recurrent passion for Know Nothing politics is a blend of aggressive ignorance with bumpkin stupidity and intellectual indolence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_nothing
Protestants -- and an increasing number of Catholics -- have made the fundamental mistake of failing to realize that “the work of heaven alone is material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.” Gilbert Keith Chesterton - http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/index.html
American Conservatives And Aggressive Ignorance
Protestants -- and an increasing number of Catholics -- have made the fundamental mistake of failing to realize that “the work of heaven alone is material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.” Gilbert Keith Chesterton - http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/index.html
And so, America -- especially The Bible Belt -- is, as it has always assured us, an unusually "spiritual" place.
And that faux "spirituality," coupled with the mirror-image Manicheaism of Islamic jihad, comprise the existential problem of our time.
Arguing against those who said that natural philosophy was contrary to the Christian faith, (Aquinas) writes in his treatise "Faith, Reason and Theology that "even though the natural light of the human mind is inadequate to make known what is revealed by faith, nevertheless what is divinely taught to us by faith cannot be contrary to what we are endowed with by nature. One or the other would have to be false, and since we have both of them from God, he would be the cause of our error, which is impossible." "Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World" by John Freely http://www.amazon.com/Aladdins-Lamp-Science-Through-Islamic/dp/0307277836/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327882581&sr=8-1
Study: Conservatives' Trust of Science Hits All Time Low
A sociologist at UNC-Chapel Hill says more people are moving to a conservative "anti-intellectual" ideology, and more people than ever are lumping scientific and political agendas together.
March 29, 2012http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/03/29/study-conservatives-trust-of-science-hits-all-time-low-
It's not just the vitriol surrounding this year's upcoming election: More conservatives than ever distrust science, according to a report released Thursday.
Just 35 percent of conservatives said they had a "great deal of trust in science" in 2010, a 28 percent decline since 1974, when 48 percent of conservatives—about the same percentage as liberals—trusted science. Liberal and moderate support for science has remained essentially flat since 1974, according to Gordon Gauchat, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He published his findings in the journalAmerican Sociological Review.
About 41 percent of Americans identify as "conservative," according to an August poll by Gallup, up from 37 percent in 2008.
Gauchat says conservatives' rebellion against the "elite" and the shifting role of science in society is to blame for the decline. He argues that the conservative minority has rebelled against science in the same way it has against media and higher education.
"It kind of began with the loss of Barry Goldwater and the construction of Fox News and all these [conservative] think tanks. The perception among conservatives is that they're at a disadvantage, a minority," he says. "It's not surprising that the conservative subculture would challenge what's viewed as the dominant knowledge production groups in society—science and the media."
He says science has also changed—in the middle of the 20th century, science was tasked with creating things for the Department of Defense and NASA, things that "easily built a consensus."
"Since then, science has become autonomous from the government—it develops knowledge that helps regulate policy, and in the case of the EPA, it develops policy," he says. "Science is charged with what religion used to be charged with—answering questions about who we are and what we came from, what the world is about. We're using it in American society to weigh in on political debates, and people are coming down on a specific side."
Jeremy Mayer, a professor at George Mason University's School of Public Policy, disagrees with that notion. He says science was used in politics long before global warming was an issue, and that Gauchat's assessment "ignores the role that science played in supporting political views throughout American history. Segregationists relied on science for years to support their views that whites were superior. The fact that it was pseudo-science is obvious to us today. It was not so obvious then. Evolution was a political issue long before the space race, and so on."
Mayer, who co-authored Closed Minds?: Politics and Ideology in American Universities, says the "anti-intellectual" populist vote, which used to belong to southern Democrats, is now a Republican theme. "Ever since the [George] Wallace types joined the Republicans, they have gradually moved against science in increasingly open ways," Mayer says.
That dichotomy is no more evident than when you compare President Barack Obama with Republican contender Rick Santorum. In his first months in office, Obama told the National Science Foundation that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over. Our progress as a nation - and our values as a nation - are rooted in free and open inquiry. To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy." Meanwhile, Santorum has called human-caused climate change a "hoax," and "patently absurd," and has said that teaching evolution "promotes atheism."
Gauchat says those two issues are where conservatives most readily reject science. He used data from the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey that asks respondents, in general terms, their level of confidence in the scientific community, so it's impossible to tell which specific scientific developments conservatives reject. But he doesn't see it changing anytime soon.
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