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gluadys -> RE: Please help me remember - Catholic way of dealing with Science (6/6/2008 4:26:44 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: reillan
In one of my classes, I remember hearing about a doctrine either of the Catholic church or of a Catholic philosopher, but I can't remember the quote exactly, who said it, or when it was created. Can someone help me with this?
It was, in essence, as follows:
If science and the Bible appear to disagree, then it is our job to understand how the Bible agrees with the science.
Basically, the idea that the science is always correct, but that our interpretations of the Bible might not be, and since the Bible is always correct too, that means we misinterpreted the Bible.
I am not familiar with the exact quote, but I would caution against the idea that science is always correct. Even science doesn't claim this. After all, when one scientific theory is replacing another, the rejected one was science in its time, but it was wrong. And the science of today will likely be amplified and corrected, at least in details, by the science of tomorrow.--or more often---incomplete.
However, I expect the gist of the quote was that if the science is soundly based on evidence and reason and there is no competing theory that could explain the observed evidence coherently, we should accept it as the best model of creation that we have.
And since we hold scripture to be correct as well, then any apparent conflict must lie in our understanding of scripture. Very likely we are looking at a revelation that was given in terms of the human knowledge of the time. The revelation is still true, but the terminology used to convey the message is conditioned by the historical context in which it was received, and need not be considered essential to the revelation.
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