How Science Enriches Theology

245 Pages·2012·14.637 MB·English

by  Benedict M. Ashley, John Deely

HOW SCIENCE ENRICHES THEOLOGY
Books by John Deely from St. Augustine’s Press
The Basics of Semiotics
The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics
The Semiotic Animal
What Distinguishes Human Understanding
Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot
Other Titles of Interest from St. Augustine’s Press
John of St. Thomas, Intro, to the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Human Nature, tr. Alfred J. Freddoso
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle s Metaphysics
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle s Nicomachean Ethics
St. Augustine, The St. Augustine LifeGuide
St. Augustine, On Order [De OrdineJ
John Paul II, The John Paul II LifeGuide
Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II), Man in the Field of Responsibility
Josef Pieper, The Christian Idea of Man
Servais Pinckaers, O.P., Morality: The Catholic View
C.S. Lewis & Don Giovanni Calabria, The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis
Jacques Maritain, Natural Law: Reflections on Theory and Practice
Gerard V. Bradley & Don De Marco, eds., Science and Faith
Peter Kreeft, Summa Philosophica
Philippe Beneton, The Kingdom Suffereth Violence: The Machiavelli /
Erasmus / More Correspondences and Other Unpublished Documents
Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism
Remi Brague, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization
James V. Schall, The Regensburg Lecture
Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person s Guide to Modern Culture
HOW SCIENCE
ENRICHES THEOLOGY
Benedict M. Ashley, o.p.
and John Deely
(D
St. A ugustine’s Press
South Bend, Indiana
Copyright © 2012 by Benedict M. Ashley, o.p. and John Deely
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ashley, Benedict M.
How science enriches theology / Benedict M. Ashley and John Deely.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 978-1-58731-364-6 (clothbound: alk. paper)
1. Religion and science. 2. Catholic Church - Doctrines.
I. Deely, John N. II. Title.
BX1795.S35A84 2011
261.5'5 - dc23 2011028423
°° The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri­
can National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
St. Augustine’s Press
www.staugustine.net
The authors wish to express special thanks for help in proofreading to
Dr. Christopher Morrissey of the Philosophy Department at Redeemer
Pacific College in Langley, British Columbia, Canada; the attention to
detail of Professor Morrissey’s corrections was so great that we can al­
most make him responsible for any remaining errors! Mr. Stephen
Sparks of the graduate philosophy program at the University of St.
Thomas, Houston, also provided help with the volume. And finally we
wish to thank Professor James Clarage of the Physics Department of the
University of St Thomas, Houston, for his reading of and suggestions
for Chapter 2, as mentioned in note 1 of that chapter, p. 35 below.
This work is dedicated to
the Members of the Former Albertus Magnus Lyceum
and the Present Members of the Institute for Advanced Physics
Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., a graduate of the University of Chicago
(where he studied with Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Hutchins)
and Notre Dame University, was ordained a Dominican priest in
1948. From 1963-1969 he was the Regent of Studies at the Aquinas
Institute of Philosophy at River Forest, Illinois (a Pontifical Faculty
accredited also by the North Central Association), which emerged
as one of the three leading centers of Thomistic thought in North
America, the “River Forest School”, with an emphasis on the
continuity of modern science with Latin Age natural philosophy.
Author of more than nineteen books and numerous articles, his Way
toward Wisdom (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) in particular
provides an overview of the Neothomistic development launched by
Pope Leo XIII in 1869. Fr. Ashley served as a Consultant for the
National Catholic Bishops Conference, 1965-2000. He has been a
consultant and teacher at many institutions, including the John Paul
II Cultural Center in Washington, DC. Retired as Emeritus Profess
of the Aquinas Institute of Theology at St. Louis University, he is
currently living at St. Pius V Dominican Priory in Chicago, and is
an Associate Faculty of Philosophy for the Institute for Advanced
Physics in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
John Deely holds the Rudman Chair in Philosophy at the Center
for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston,
Texas. Author of twenty-three books and several hundred articles, he
has also co-authored and edited some thirty-four volumes, including
notably Shaping Psychology. How we got where we’re going with Msgr.
Timothy Gannon (= Sources in Semiotics vol. X, 1991), and The
Problem of Evolution (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969) with Fr.
Raymond J. Nogar, O.P., himself author of The Wisdom of Evolution
and Lord of the Absurd. Named the first living Thomas A. Sebeok
Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America in 1993, in October of
2009 Deely received both the “Aquinas Medal for Excellence in
Christian Philosophy” from the International Gilson Society, and the
“Scholarly Excellence Award of the American Mari tain Association”.
In 2001 he published Eour Ages of Understanding. The first postmodern
survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the 21st century
(University of Toronto Press), and most recently Medieval Philosophy
Redefined (University of Scranton Press, 2010), showing how Latin
thought provided the background and framework which made
science in the modern sense an inevitable development.
CONTENTS OVERVIEW
Preface:
“Truth Cannot Contradict Truth” ..........................................vii
Contents in Detail.........................................................................xi
Chapter 1
The Postmodern Dilemma of Theology and Science...........3
Chapter 2
The Immensity, Variety, and Dynamism of the Universe
Reveal God the Father.............................................................35
Chapter 3
Creation’s Order, Uniqueness, and Truth
Reveal God the Son...................................................................61
Chapter 4
The Universe’s Evolution, Freedom, and Plenitude
Reveal God the Holy Spirit.....................................................113
References.................................................................... 165
Index............................................................................................199
vii
VU1
Preface
“T ruth Cannot C ontradict T ruth”
Reason, our intellect or “human understanding”, Thomas
Aquinas points out in many places,1 is ordered to know first of all
the surrounding world “outside” of our minds. The maturation
of that ordering is precisely what we have come to call “science”,
both science in the sense of philosophy, which deals with the criti­
cal control of objectification within the sphere of experience com­
mon to all human beings, and science in the modem sense which
goes beyond common experience to critically control objectifica­
tion by means of experiments and mathematization of results.
As we will examine below,1 2 “scientia” — science — in me­
dieval usage, as earlier in Aristotle, was still a generic term, yet
one anticipating in particular the specific development of mod­
em science, “ideoscopic” science (which Aquinas considered
generally dialectical or probable research, but which turned
out to have considerably more demonstrative possibilities than
anticipated), in contrast to philosophy as “cenoscopic” science
(which Aquinas considered demonstrative or certain, supplying
principles for further research, and also, as Peirce would much
later show,3 as semiosis, the very framework within which ide-
oscopy actually works).
1 E.g., Aquinas 1266: Summa theologiae I, q. 87, art. 3, et alibi passim.
2 See Chapter 1, p. 6f., esp. text at note 11.
3 See Peirce 1902: Minute Logic, CP 1.241-242; 1908: “On the Classifica­
tion of Signs”, 8.342, et alibi passim. Cf. Deely 2008: The Crossroad of Signs
IX
X How Science Enriches Theology W Benedict Ashley and John Deely
Thus the development of science in the modem sense is
precisely a maturation of human understanding — one, we
think, that has not been sufficiently recognized in ecclesiastical
decrees heretofore;4 yet the technologies to which science has
given rise have become essential to advancing the well-being
of our species as a whole. Truth in this sense, involving the ex­
pansion over the centuries of our understanding of the world
around us, is essential to the development and well-being of
civilization, as should be apparent from our dependency upon
our surroundings to survive.
Now truth as it involves religious belief is something else
again, for this truth does not come simply from reason, as does
scientific truth, but from faith. Yet since truth is one, and does
not admit of internal contradictions, the truths of faith go be­
yond, but cannot go contrary to, truths demonstrably attained
by reason.5 Indeed, it was the view of Aquinas that the very
and Ideas, p. 74 and passim. In the medieval context, a synonym for scientia
in the as-yet-unadumbrated specific sense of cenoscopic in its contrast with
specifically ideoscopic science, was precisely doctrina (not at all to be con­
fused with “dogma” in the theological sense): see, in Deely 1982: Appendix
I, “On the Notion ‘Doctrine of Signs’,” 127-130; and Deely 1986: 214, the
terminological entry “Doctrine” in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, ed.
Thomas A. Sebeok et al.
4 See, in Chapter 2, pp. 41-42 note 10, the remark of Maritain 1973:
209-210, on the error of holding ideoscopic science “in its own development
to be subject to theology, and to a literal interpretation of Scripture”.
5 Aquinas c. 12 57/8: Super Boetium De Trinitate, q. 2. art. 3c: “So therefore
in the development of theological doctrine we can make use of philosophy
[i.e., of scientia, science, generally] in three ways. First, for the purpose of
demonstrating matters which are conducive to faith [‘praeambula fide?], which
one believing ought to have knowledge of, such as the truths about God prov­
able by natural reason — that God exists, that God is one — and other truths
of this kind, whether about God or about creatures, which are proved in phi­
losophy [or now in science in the modem sense], and which faith presupposes.
Second, for calling attention to natural phenomena which suggest or bear
some resemblance to truths which are held on faith, the way Augustine in his
book on the Trinity draws many parallels from teachings of philosophy to il­
lustrate the Trinity. Third, for resisting assertions advanced contrary to faith,
either by showing them to be false or by showing them to be gratuitous.”