Back in the early 1840s, John Henry Newman observed that physical philosophers—that is, scientists—"are ever inquiring whence things are, not why; referring them to nature, not to mind; and thus they tend to make a system a substitute for a God..." The "tending" has been, as they say, trending ever since. About a hundred years later, in 1948, Fulton Sheen remarked in his outstanding study Philosophy of Religion, that:

Science cannot give us a philosophy, nor can it give us an ethics; it cannot give us a philosophy, because it immerses man in nature and avoids the important subject of his destiny. It cannot give us an ethics because science by itself is amoral. Morality comes from its ends, and science is indifferent to ends.

Lest it be thought that Sheen was anti-science or the enemy of scientists, consider his remark, from his 1928 book Religion Without God, that the "rock-surenes of 'Science' does not exist in the mind of the scientists themselves, although it does love and throb in the minds of publicists and propagandists. Scientists themselves disclaim they possess ultimate truth; rather they look upon it as a horizon toward which they are proceeding." Sheen was indicating that when a scientist begins to make metaphysical or philosophical assertions, he is no longer speaking as a scientist. Of course, a great number of famous scientists—Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking come to mind immediately—have used their scientific reputations in order to wade into waters that are better described as ideological and polemical. And even political.

All of those elements were obvious in the "March for Science" event that took place last week. I was blissfully unaware of the event until a friend sent a link to the local newspaper's coverage of the March for Science in Eugene, which featured some 1,500 or so true believers. And I don't say "true believers" with any sarcasm or snarkiness; on the contrary:

“We teach science and we believe in science,” said Carrie Ann Naumoff, a fifth-grade teacher at Edison Elementary in Eugene. “We’re concerned that science is being blocked and interrupted. We’re concerned about the EPA and concerned that ­scientists are being harassed for what they’re publishing. We want our students to have access to real information.”

"We believe in science." Whatever does that mean? What if the seventh-grade home-ec teacher (if such a thing still exists) exclaimed, "We believe in the culinary arts", or the 10th-grade French teacher solemnly explained, "We believe in language." Huh? But we can guess what Ms. Naumoff means: she and the enlightened educating class are the guardians of science, which is the one, true source of truth and goodness, leading us into a future of bliss. However, such a belief is not really about scientific research and fact, but about a particular ideological perspective, generally called scientism, which is not about following physical evidence where it might lead, but flattening all of reality into the narrow confines of materialist proofs and premises.

Dr. Austin L. Hughes, a professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina, described it well in an 2012 essay titled "The Folly of Scientism":

Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit.

Writing about the recent March for Science event—which was directly inspired by the hyper-political Women's March in January—Eric Metaxas & G. Shane Morris observe:

There was a time when “science” meant the systematic pursuit of knowledge through experimentation and observation. But it’s rapidly becoming a synonym for progressive politics and materialist philosophy.
 
To be labeled a “science-denier” in 2017 often just means you’ve upset someone who insists on teaching strict, Darwinian orthodoxy in schools, or who advocates particular climate legislation, or who supports ethically fraught research on embryos.
 
In contrast, being “pro-science” has become a shibboleth for supporting progressive ideology. Think of a recent ad by National Geographic with the caption, “Stand behind the facts. Stand with science. Stand for the planet.” But just weeks prior, National Geographic had run a cover depicting a nine-year-old boy dressed as a girl. Because, as we know, they stand with science.
 
But if there were ever going to be a ceremony inaugurating this new and useless definition of science, it’s got to be last weekend’s “March for Science” in the nation’s capital, co-chaired by Bill Nye, “the science guy.” Nye, a children’s TV host from the nineties with no formal training as a scientist, has recaptured the spotlight with his videos on climate change, abortion, women’s rights, and other topics.
 
To say his arguments in some of these videos are embarrassing is being kind. For instance, in one odd and rambling speech promoting abortion, Nye claimed that because many lives end through natural causes before they leave the womb that it’s okay for us to kill the unborn ourselves. That’s like saying it’s okay to kill adults, because millions die of natural causes. That does not stop Nye’s supporters from honoring him as a champion of science.

But, again, Nye and his supporters are not really about science, but about scientism; they are not interested so much in limited, focused empirical data, but broad, sweeping claims that many would associate only with the stereotypical wild-eyed fundamentalist. Yet it's fitting, since scientism is the result of a hijacked and confused religious impulse. One serious problem, as Sheen pointed out in 1948, was that if "philosophy"—which is not much taught, learned, or loved by most Americans—"can no longer judge science, then science is its own justification; it can be used as well for purposes of destruction as for human betterment, and no one can pass judgment on its morality." Nye is a perfect example of this fundamentalist scientism, as evidenced in an op-ed he wrote for CNN.com in which he states:

With more than 600 marches taking place around the world, we conveyed that science is political, not partisan, and science should shape our policies. Although it is the means by which humankind discovers objective truths in nature, science is and has always been political. 

Which, of course, is nonsensical and irrational, just like Nye's support for abortion. The editors of The Register-Guard, perhaps mildly taken aback or even embarrassed by the creed of Ms. Naumoff and company, sought to strike a more agnostic note, stating:

The march will have served a useful purpose if it succeeds in getting Americans, including the Trump administration, to think about what science is, and what it isn’t. Science isn’t truth, and it isn’t something people should believe in. It is a method for zeroing in on the truth by testing possibilities and gathering evidence.

Hughes, in concluding his essays, offers this very sober note of warning:

Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself. Yet it seems the very antithesis of reason to insist that science can do what it cannot, or even that it has done what it demonstrably has not. As a scientist, I would never deny that scientific discoveries can have important implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and that everyone interested in these topics needs to be scientifically literate. But the claim that science and science alone can answer longstanding questions in these fields gives rise to countless problems.
 
In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer.
 
Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence.

Around the same time that Sheen was writing Philosophy of Religion, a young, agnostic medical student named Walker Percy discovered—through debilitating illness and then deep reading of Christian philosophy—that science, which he once viewed as the final word on everything, could not answer the ultimate questions. Modern science, he later wrote (after becoming Catholic), "is itself radically incoherent, not when it seeks to understand things and subhuman organisms and the cosmos itself, but when it seeks to understand man, not man’s physiology or neurology or his bloodstream, but man qua man, man when he is peculiarly human. In short, the sciences of man are incoherent."

And in a self-interview, "Questions They Never Asked Me," Percy put it this way:

This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, ‘Scientific humanism.’ That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and infinite delight; i.e., God.

We can either have an earth-bound and cramped system, or Truth Himself. The former offers trendy marches and Bill Nye rants; the latter offers infinite mystery and infinite delight.
 
 
Originally published at Catholic World Report. Used with permission.

This past weekend former-educational-TV-star-turned-science-advocate Bill Nye posted a video about abortion on Big Think. Nye attempts to use science to resolve the debate about abortion and arrives at the following conclusion: “When it comes to women’s rights with respect to their reproduction, I think you should leave it to women.”

The video is a perfect example of Maslow’s Hammer, or the saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In this case, the hammer is science and the nail is anything people disagree about. While science can tell us a lot about the world, it can't answer all of our questions.

For example, science gives us facts about the way the world functions (or what is), but only philosophy and/or religion tell us how we should live (or what we ought to be). This includes telling us whether it is right or wrong to kill unborn humans (or any human for that matter).

Refuting Nye's Main Argument

Unfortunately, not only does Nye’s video contain terrible philosophy, it doesn’t even get the science right. Let’s break it down:

"Many, many, many, many more hundreds of eggs are fertilized than become humans. Eggs get fertilized, and by that I mean sperm get accepted by ova a lot. But that’s not all you need. You have to attach to the uterine wall, the inside of a womb, a woman’s womb."

Yes, human beings in the embryonic stage of life receive nutrients from their mothers' uterus. A human embryo cannot develop into an adult without implanting in the uterus just as a human infant cannot develop into an adult without attaching to his mother's breast or some suitable alternative.

"But if you’re going to hold that as a standard, that is to say if you’re going to say when an egg is fertilized it’s therefore has the same rights as an individual, then whom are you going to sue? Whom are you going to imprison? Every woman who’s had a fertilized egg pass through her? Every guy who’s sperm has fertilized an egg and then it didn’t become a human? Have all these people failed you?"

Does Nye believe that newborns are persons? If so, then does he think we should imprison mothers and fathers whose children die of natural causes like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)? If having a high mortality rate means one is not a person, then born children were not persons throughout much of human history. Historically, (as well as in some parts of the world today) the child mortality rate was between 33% and 50%. That means one-third to one-half of all children died before they reached the age of five.

If we accept that born children sometimes die from causes beyond their parent's control, and that this tragic fact does not nullify their right-to-life, then the fact that unborn children also die from causes beyond their parent's control does not nullify their right-to-life either.

Plus, it may not be the case that large numbers of human organisms are miscarried. Instead, what might be happening is defective human tissue that could never develop into a fully mature human being is lost. According to embryologists Keith Moore and T.V. N. Persaud, “The early loss of embryos appears to represent a disposal of abnormal conceptuses that could not have developed normally.”¹

Answering Ad Hominems and Other Bad Arguments

"It’s just a reflection of a deep scientific lack of understanding and you literally or apparently literally don’t know what you’re talking about. And so when it comes to women’s rights with respect to their reproduction, I think you should leave it to women."

Bill, if you want to see someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, look in a mirror. If you want to see the scientific evidence that a human organism begins to exist at conception, watch this video.

"I’m not the first guy to observe this: You have a lot of men of European descent passing these extraordinary laws based on ignorance. Sorry you guys. I know it was written or your interpretation of a book written 5,000 years ago, 50 centuries ago, makes you think that when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse they always have a baby. That’s wrong and so to pass laws based on that belief is inconsistent with nature."

What does being a male of European descent have to do with abortion? This seems pretty racist and sexist to me. Imagine if I said in response to another hot-button issue, “You have a lot of people of African descent protesting police conduct and trying to pass laws that are based on ignorance.”

Also, it was seven white men of European descent that struck down all legal protection for the unborn in Roe v Wade. Now that was an extraordinary law based on ignorance, but their positions are okay because apparently men are only allowed to have an opinion on abortion if they’re pro-choice!

Second, both Christians and non-Christians have put forward powerful, secular arguments against abortion that have nothing to do with the Bible. Read Christopher Kaczor, Patrick Lee, Scott Klusendorf, Don Marquis, Stephen Schwarz, Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen, and Frank Beckwith just to name a few.

Third, Christians do not believe that, “when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse they always have a baby.” Sometimes the sperm and egg never meet and so no new life is created. Sometimes they meet but what is created is just randomly generating tissue and not a human organism (e.g. a complete molar pregnancy). But sometimes the sperm and egg recombine to form something that is neither sperm nor egg. It is instead, as the eminent embryologists Fabiola Müller and Ronan O’Rahilly describe, “a new, genetically distinct human organism.”²

Pro-life advocates simply believe that all human organisms (i.e. human beings) ought to be treated equally. They should not be killed just because they are unwanted by older, bigger, more powerful human beings.

On "Telling People What To Do"

"I mean it’s hard not to get frustrated with this everybody. And I know nobody likes abortion, okay. But you can’t tell somebody what to do. I mean she has rights over this, especially if she doesn’t like the guy that got her pregnant. She doesn’t want anything to do with your genes; get over it, especially if she were raped and all this."

Why is it that “nobody” likes abortion? If the unborn are not human beings then abortion would be as innocuous as a wisdom tooth extraction. Instead, society's ambivalence towards abortion is evidence that abortion destroys a living human, organism.

After all, how could two human beings procreate a non-human offspring that only becomes human after birth? The answer is "they can’t.” Therefore, the human organism they procreate (i.e. the baby) should have the same right to life as his born brothers and sisters. All children have the right to loving support from their mother and father even if one of these people "doesn't want anything to do" with the genes of the other. At minimum, children have the right not be killed just because one parent despises the other.

In response to Nye’s assertion that “you can’t tell somebody what to do” I say bullocks. Nye says in another video that fracking, or drilling for natural resources with high pressure water, “can’t be unregulated.” So, it’s okay to tell businesses not to pollute the earth but it's not okay to tell parents not to kill their children. What about "My corporation, my choice!"

Finally, what is the “this” that Nye says women have rights over? I’m sure Nye means “the pregnancy” but that is just a roundabout way of saying the mother has unlimited rights over her unborn child. Civilized people long ago rebuked the idea that children are chattel property of their parents that can be disposed of at a whim. Perhaps Mr. Nye would like to join the rest of us in the 21^st century and stop peddling crude, Stone-Age-like tyranny over helpless human beings.

Are There More Important Issues?

"So it’s very frustrating on the outside, on the other side. We have so many more important things to be dealing with. We have so many more problems to squander resources on than this argument based on bad science, on just lack of understanding."

It’s true abortion isn’t the only issue today any more than slavery was the only issue that affected people in America in the 1850's. But slavery was the most important issue because the lives of human beings matter more than "economic choice" or "state autonomy."

Likewise, if the unborn are human beings then over a million of them are killed in our country ever year and many of their parents suffer physical and emotional trauma related to this killing for decades after the fact. Unless a pro-choice advocate can show the unborn are not human beings (which Nye has failed to do), then he has no grounds to say abortion is not an issue worth pursuing in public debate.

"It’s very frustrating. You wouldn’t know how big a human egg was if it weren’t for microscopes, if it weren’t for scientists, medical researchers looking diligently. You wouldn’t know the process. You wouldn’t have that shot, the famous shot or shots where the sperm are bumping up against the egg. You wouldn’t have that without science. So then to claim that you know the next step when you obviously don’t is trouble."

This argument is akin to saying, “Look, without scientists you wouldn’t even have medicine that treats diseases like syphilis, so don’t tell us it’s wrong to deceive and kill African-Americans in order to study this disease! You don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

Mr. Nye, you are the one who is completely ignorant of the developmental growth of a human being. By defintion a human embryo is a human being in the first seven weeks of life and a human fetus is a human being in age anywhere from eight weeks until birth. Saying an unborn human being is not human because he or she is an embryo or fetus is as ridiculous as saying a fifteen-year-old is not human because he is a teenager.

"Let me do that again. Let me just pull back. At some point we have to respect the facts. Recommending or insisting on abstinence has been completely ineffective. Just being objective here. Closing abortion clinics. Closing, not giving women access to birth control has not been an effective way to lead to healthier societies. I mean I think we all know that."

I’m going to keep this post limited to just the topic of abortion, but notice that Nye is simply making assertions here and not giving any evidence for his position. He just wields the “hammer of science” (a metaphor that some news sites have even adopted) in order to shut down the discussion with one massive appeal to authority. This is ironic since Bill Nye only has a bachelor's degree in engineering. As one writer puts it, “Calling yourself the ‘Science Guy’ does not mean that you are an expert on anything. It means you're the host of a kids show.”

Why Not Debate the Issue?

"And I understand that you have deeply held beliefs and it really is ultimately out of respect for people, in this case your perception of unborn people. I understand that. But I really encourage you to look at the facts. And I know people are now critical of the expression 'fact-based' but what’s wrong with that? So I just really encourage you to not tell women what to do and not pursue these laws that really are in nobody’s best interest. Just really be objective about this. We have other problems to solve everybody. Come on. Come on. Let’s work together."

You want the facts? Okay, would you be willing to debate the facts about abortion with me? You recently debated Ken Ham on the issue of evolution and his only credentials are a long history of advocating for young earth creationism. When it comes to this issue I have the credentials that would justify a debate between us.

I have a graduate level education and have studied abortion for over a decade. I have written a book that has become the most comprehensive popular-level defense of the pro-life position (which is currently the first thing that comes up when you search “pro-life” on Amazon). It's also been endorsed by nationally known pro-life advocates such as Lila Rose and Fr. Frank Pavone. Finally, I have been invited by secular universities to debate other well-known defenders of the pro-choice position such as Dr. Malcom Potts at UC-Berkeley.

And just so it isn’t “two white men arguing over women’s rights” I would be happy to do a team debate where you and a female pro-choice advocate of your choosing debate me and a female pro-life advocate of my choosing, such as my friend Stephanie Gray. As you said, “I really encourage you to look at the facts.” So, let’s look at the facts together in front of an audience and see who’s position they really support.
 
 
(Image credit: New York Times)

Did you watch the big debate last night between Ken Ham and Bill Nye? It was an excellent exchange with good points made on both sides, but decidedly missing from the debate was the fuller and traditional Catholic view. Thus for the purpose of our dialogue here at Strange Notions, I'd like to explore the "third way" absent from last night's event.

How are Catholics taught to view the world? To quote the apologist Frank Sheed, in the very beginning of his book Theology and Sanity: “There is the intellect: its work is to know, to understand, to see: to see what? To see what’s there.” Ken Ham represented the young earth creationist view, arguing that historical science should be interpreted literally according to the English translation of the Bible. Bill Nye represented the “science guy” view, arguing that historical science should be interpreted according to the laws of nature that can be observed. Yet the Catholic view could summarily be described as natural realism.

The question under debate last night was, “Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?” Let's compare the positions.

Ken Ham, Biblical Creationist

 
Ken Ham argued that terms must be defined correctly. He defined “science” as either observational or historical. The science that develops spacecraft, smoke detectors, and antibodies, for instance, is observational, based on experiments in the present. The science that deals with origins is historical. “Molecules to man” he said, is not about technology. No one was there to observe it.

He accused the secularists of imposing the “religion of naturalism” on kids when textbooks teach that “molecules to man” is scientific fact. But since the Bible teaches something else, evolution and creation are two opposing world views. His strongest point was that “observational science confirms creationism,” because if Biblical creation is true then we should expect to find evidence of intelligence, we should expect to find that animals produce offspring after their own kind, we should expect the human race to be one race, we should expect from the Tower of Babel for different groups to have different languages, and we should expect to find evidence of a young earth, and he furthered, we do. We do find that the world is ordered by laws of logic and laws of nature, we find that finches beget finches and dogs beget dogs, we find that the human race is one and that people have different languages, and he believes we find scientific evidence of a young earth. If kids were taught this, then they would accept the moral laws of the Bible too, such as those regarding marriage, abortion, euthanasia. The teaching of the “religion of naturalism” is responsible for moral decay in our culture. Ham wants children to be taught the right foundation, namely that they are special and made in the image of God.

Bill Nye, the Science Guy

 
Bill Nye, on the other hand, argued that scientists do not make the distinctions Ham makes, and that even most of the billions of people who are religious do not believe in a 6,000 year old earth. He mentioned the limestone and the fossils everywhere, millions of layers of ancient life. “How could those animals have lived their lives and formed these layers in only 6,000 years?” he asked.

He mentioned the snow-ice rods found in Greenland that contain 680,000 layers of packed ice, trapping ancient pockets of air, and the California bristlecone pines that are over 6,000 years old. Old Tjikko in Sweden? That tree is 9,550 years old. How could that be? Even more, the Grand Canyon features layers upon layers of ancient rock containing fossils of sea animals, trilobites, clams, oysters, and mammals, but without any of the “higher” animals mixed in with the “lower” ones. Nye challenged Ham to find one example anywhere in the world where all forms of animals were mixed together in the layers of rock. He argued that observational experience does not support the creation account.

“Here’s the thing,” Nye said, “what we want in science is an ability to predict, a natural law that is so obvious and well-understood that we can make predictions.” In the fossil record, we find a sequence of animals. Historically, when there were missing links and people wondered if there was a fossil that filled that gap. For example, after finding reptiles and amphibians people wondered if there was some animal in between that had characteristics of both. But then that which was predicted was indeed found.

Nye later argued that, “Ken Ham’s model doesn’t have prediction capability!” He claimed that kids were not being taught to appreciate observational science, but instead to believe an account in a book that could not be observed. Therefore, he argued, such teaching hinders education and produces future adults who cannot innovate new technology. He pointed out that scientists now can use a drug based on Rubidium to do heart imaging without having to cut open a patient. “There’s no place like that in Kentucky [where Ham’s Creation Museum is located] to get a degree to do this kind of medicine. I hope you Kentuckians find that troubling. You have to go out of state for that.” This, I think, was rhetorically powerful but probably his weakest point.

The Traditional Catholic View

 
There is another way to view this whole discussion, though, and it is how Catholic scholars have traditionally viewed the order in nature. I described it earlier as natural realism. It is a Biblical worldview, the same worldview of the early Christians and the same worldview of the Christian scholars in the Middle Ages when modern science was born.

Throughout the Old Testament, the naturalness of the universe, the predictability and order, the power of God as Creator and Lawmaker are emphasized: “The Lord...the God of hosts, the same who brightens day with the sun’s rays, night with the ordered service of moon and star, who can stir up the sea and set its waves a-roaring.” (Jeremiah 31:35) The prophets spoke of God as the Creator of the universe, the one who “measured out the waters in his open hand, heaven balanced on his palm, earth’s mass poised on three of his fingers” (Isaiah 40:12). This naturalness, by which I mean the rationality in reality, is densely featured in the Wisdom literature, in the references to God’s wisdom in the created world and its stability:
 

"The Lord made me [wisdom] his when first he went about his work, at the birth of time, before his creation began. Long, long ago, before earth was fashioned, I held my course.
 
Already I lay in the womb, when the depths were not yet in being, when no springs of water had yet broken; when I was born, the mountains had not yet sunk on their firm foundations, and there were no hills; not yet had he made the earth, or the rivers, or the solid framework of the world." (Proverbs 8:22-26)

 
The Old Testament is the story of the unity between cosmic and human history, describing how the Maker of the World is also the Shepherd of His People.
 

"Sure knowledge he has imparted to me of all that is;
how the world is ordered, what influence have the elements,
how the months have their beginning, their middle, and their ending,
how the sun’s course alters and the seasons revolve,
how the years have their cycles, the stars their places.
 
To every living thing its own breed, to every beast its own moods;
the winds rage, and men think deep thoughts;
the plants keep their several kinds, and each root has its own virtue;
all the mysteries and all the surprises of nature were made known to me;
wisdom herself taught me, that is the designer of them all." (Wisdom 7:17-21)

 
This naturalistic mindset was present in the Old Testament, as well as in the New, and it thrived among the early Christians. For instance, Athenagoras in the second century noted that “neither is...it reasonable that matter should be older than God; for the efficient cause must of necessity exist before the things that are made.” Irenaeus, also in the second century, emphasized that faith in the Creator of all was the basis of Christian belief. Clement urged in his Exhortation to the Greeks a confident attitude toward nature, a view of the world created by a rational Creator:
 

"How great is the power of God! His mere will is creation; for God alone created, since He alone is truly God. By a bare wish His work is done, and the world’s existence follows upon a single act of His will."

 
St. Augustine in the fourth century showed an appreciation for quantitative relationships. His view was that knowledge of the quantitative exactness of the natural world, including the cosmos, could not help much in understanding the biblical message. Augustine also rejected any biblical interpretation which denied or ignored the established conclusions of natural studies. He was explicit on this point. Read this with the Ham and Nye debate in mind:
 

"It is often the case that a non-Christian happens to know something with absolute certainty and through experimental evidence about the earth, sky, and other elements of this world, about the motion, rotation, and even about the size and distances of stars, about certain defects [eclipses] of the sun and moon, about the cycles of years and epochs, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and the like. It is, therefore, very deplorable and harmful, and to be avoided at any cost that he should hear a Christian to give, so to speak, a “Christian account” of these topics in such a way that he could hardly hold his laughter on seeing, as the saying goes, the error rise sky-high." (Sancti Aureli Augustini De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinoram, Volume XXVIII, Section III, Part 1.)

 
Augustine realized that when statements of the Bible conflicted with hypotheses of the workings of nature, and when reason and observation provided no clear solution and decisive evidence, nor did Scripture seem to be explicitly literal, then the matter was open to further inquiry. Whenever scientific reasoning seemed to settle a matter, however, he urged that Scripture would have to be reinterpreted. When it could not be settled, he said that questions which “require much subtle and laborious reasoning to perceive which the actual case” he had no time for because “it is not needed by those whom [he wished] to instruct for their own salvation and for the benefit of the Church.” In other words, he knew that salvation did not come from knowledge of the natural world.

This is to show that, traditionally, Christians have not rejected reason and observation in favor of a literal Biblical interpretation. They had a natural view of the cosmos and sought to understand it as far as reason could go. It seems, in other words, they would have rejected Ken Ham’s view.

The Catholic scholars in the Middle Ages, when modern science was born, continued this worldview, guided by faith in a rational Creator. They rejected conclusions drawn beyond observations that contradicted the Christian Creed, such as pantheism and animism, but whatever they observed and measured, they viewed it all as a work of Creation and asked questions about how these created things worked. This is covered in much more detail in my book, Science Was Born of Christianity: The Teaching of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki. Jaki's writings, of course, cover this in even more detail. So rather than belabor the point, I will move on.

Even into the twentieth century, this view has been maintained. In 1909, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a document, Concerning the historical nature of the first three chapters of Genesis. The decisions are summarized below, taken and highlighted from Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma.
 

"a) The first three Chapters of Genesis contain narratives of real events, no myths, no mere allegories or symbols of religious truths, no legends.
 
b) In regard to those facts, which touch the foundations of the Christian religion, the literal historical sense is to be adhered to. Such facts are, inter alia, the creation of all things by God in the beginning of time, and the special creation of humanity.
 
c) It is not necessary to understand all individual words and sentences in the literal sense. Passages which are variously interpreted by the Fathers and by theologians, may be interpreted according to one’s own judgment with the reservation, however, that one submits one’s judgment to the decision of the Church, and to the dictates of the Faith.
 
d) As the Sacred Writer had not the intention of representing with scientific accuracy the intrinsic constitution of things, and the sequence of the works of creation but of communicating knowledge in a popular way suitable to the idiom and to the pre-scientific development of his time, the account is not to be regarded or measured as if it were couched in language which is strictly scientific.
 
e) The word “day” need not be taken in the literal sense of a natural day of 24 hours, but can also be understood in the improper sense of a longer space of time."

How Does "Natural Realism" Fit Into the Debate?

 
The Catholic view is, as Frank Sheed said, to see “what’s there.” It is an open-minded, curious, and confident view that science, the application of mathematics to objects, can reveal the laws of nature—and it is a humble view that admits those laws are profound and not fully known. The goal is to reconcile faith and science, but as long as our knowledge is incomplete, then it is acceptable to clarify where the incongruities seem to be with an attitude toward reconciliation.

If there is an apparent conflict, it is the result of partial knowledge, not actual conflict. We must keep searching.

So what's the answer to the debate question, “Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?” The answer is yes, if creation is taken to be "creation of all things by God" as understood by the Old Testament and Christian authors. Also, the answer is yes so long as it is understood that man, as a rational creature made in the image of God, is capable of discovery, but is also a discursive creature who learns in steps, and therefore does not possess omniscience.

This attitude seems to be missing in both Ken Ham’s and Bill Nye’s arguments. Perhaps there is some truth to both of their arguments, and perhaps some error. The fuller and balanced Catholic view admits this and says:

“Keep going, keep studying, keep researching, keep debating. Teach kids science in science class and religion in religion class. Instruct kids in the virtues, to will to do good an to avoid vice. Encourage kids to use their intellects, to think and learn, to discover and innovate because they were made for it. Teach them to pervade all willing and learning with a confidence in a Creator who ‘ordered all things by measure, number, and weight’ (Wisdom 11:20), a God who holds everything in existence and interacts in the history of mankind in the same manner as He rules the cosmos. For that is your origin.”
 
 
(Image credit: Chicago Now)