In our current intellectual circumstances and in practical academic terms, the most important implication of the conception of God broached here is its compatibility not only with all of the natural sciences and their respective findings, but with all possible natural-scientific findings, in principle. Because in principle and necessarily, the sheer fact of existence is conceptually inexplicable and therefore will always remain per se resistant to any naturalist, materialist explanation. Yet theologians, and anyone else who cares about truth, must see this, and know enough about the natural sciences to identify and criticize instances in which their legitimate findings have been confused with unjustified philosophical assertions or moral claims. The power of the sciences via technology throughout our society and culture, in government, medicine, consumerist capitalism, and more, means that there is no greater imperative for theologians than to be able to engage with the natural sciences productively – acknowledging all the extraordinary things that they have accomplished and continue to achieve with respect to explaining the natural order of which we are a part. Roman Catholic theologians in particular should continue to champion the traditional insistence on the compatibility of faith and reason – but how, in what ways, in what manner, with respect to the relationship of Catholicism to the natural sciences? Until and unless Catholic theologians can discuss this in sophisticated, persuasive ways, their influence in intellectual culture and society at large will remain negligible. Fearing the natural sciences, or resenting them, or ignoring them, is a dereliction of duty in our present circumstances, and any retreat from them in order to take refuge in a religiously safe harbor constructed of encyclical, conciliar, and biblical quotations is in effect an act of intellectual cowardice. It turns out that the institutional separation of most Catholic seminaries from universities since the nineteenth century, like the insulation of neo-scholastic philosophy and theology from other academic disciplines prior to Vatican II, did not serve the Church well with respect to the intellectual culture of the wider society. The combination of metaphysical naturalism, moral relativism, philosophical liberalism, assertive individualism, and neoliberal capitalism is indeed based on a constricted understanding of reason – but it is doing incredibly expansive and ever-expanding damage to human beings and to our planet at one and the same time. This would seem to be the bottom-line implication of Laudato Si’. For those who care about reason and truth – expanded reason and the fullness of truth – now is not the time to sit on the sidelines in quiet resignation or nostalgic torpor. The fate of souls and our shared life on the only planet we have hang in the balance.
1 Federico Lombardi, «The Concept of Expanded Reason,» at https://expandedreasonawards.org/the-concept-of-expanded reason/, accessed 28 August 2019. For indications of Ratzinger’s concern, see e.g. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster, preface Michael J. Miller (1969; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), and idem, Values in a Time of Upheaval, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).
2 Michael Hanby puts it well when he writes that the success of the scientific revolution, «which began in the seventeenth century and has not ceased,» «is nothing short of stunning, and it has given us insights into objects whose existence could not even have been imagined.» Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 107.
3 Pope Francis, Praise Be to You/Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), §§ 91, 117.
4 On the centrality of practical, applied «useful knowledge» in the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the economy that has so drastically transformed the entire world over the past two and half centuries, see Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).
5 Christian Smith, Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can’t Deliver (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 45.
6 In the words of the British historian Keith Thomas, «in the modern liberal West, as well as in many other parts of the world, it is axiomatic that all human beings are entitled to fulfil themselves in the way they choose and that, so far as possible, society should be ordered in such a way as to enable them to do so.» Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9.
7 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 21.
8 For a scientifically informed, philosophical and theological critique of «ultra-Darwinist» efforts such as Dennett’s as fundamentally misguided and incoherent, see Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids, Mich. and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010).
9 For an impressive analysis of this extension and its implications, see Hanby, No God, No Science?
10 Apparently, about 25 percent of the total is dark matter and 70 percent dark energy. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 294-303, 432-435.
11 Smith, Atheist Overreach, p. 69.
12 See, for example, Mario Bunge, Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, ed. Philip Clayton and Paul Davies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
13 James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 81-117, quotation on 117.
14 Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, U.K.: Acumen, 2011).
15 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 12: «I confess to an ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding it possible to regard the design alternative as a real option. I lack the sensus