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By Chad C. Pecknold, Ph.D., IHE Fellow and Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, The Catholic University of America

Theology is a science ordered to the end of seeing God, not reinterpreting Him through changing human standards

The young aspiring theologian who embarks on the academic study of theology encounters today a bewildering field of study. They may set out to understand their faith better, and perhaps one day come to teach it. But soon they may discover that theology is also about things other than God. They may soon come to see that theological claims are not simply true or false, but must be constantly reassessed in the light of some new theory about human experience, such as sexuality, gender, race, class, politics, climate, or simply “the future.” At the professional conferences, the young theologian is bound to hear papers which awkwardly “problematize”’ theological topics according to whatever is culturally ascendent. This is usually not done in order to bring a ray of God’s brightness into the darkest places of our cultural minds, but quite the opposite. The aspiring young theologian may thus become habituated to a discipline that trains them to talk far more about ourselves than about God. Like Narcissus, such a person can pursue the discipline of theology only to discover that they have not found God, but an image of themselves reflected in a cultural mirror.

This may sound like a criticism a conservative might make of theology today. But in the nineteenth century, something very much like this concern was raised by Ludwig Feuerbach. Following the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Feuerbach concluded that religion was principally a matter of subjective and social feeling, and that God was just a projection of man’s inner nature infinitely expressed. Theology was, in the end, just anthropology writ large. Feuerbach concluded that this was the essence of Christianity, and so, understandably if wrongly, rejected the ancient faith as so many of his countrymen after him have done.

If the vicissitudes of human experience are taken to be the standard by which theology is ordered and judged, I am afraid that our aspiring theologian will not find the discipline leading to the wisdom of God. It will only and inevitably lead to the collapse of faith itself. And this is why we must think better about the role of faith in theology as a sacred science which we have not made up for ourselves. As Augustine taught, only divine revelation can crush our errors.

Read more here.

Originally published on 24 September 2019 at the Catholic Herald.

By Michael Gorman, Ph.D., IHE Fellow and Ordinary Professor of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America

Thinking about human ecology means thinking about the environment humans need. This includes air quality and so on, but more importantly, it includes our moral and spiritual environment. And just as there are toxins to worry about in the physical environment, so too are there spiritual toxins. One of the worst is disregard for truth.

Sometimes the source of this toxin is greed. We promote the product we are selling by saying things we believe to be false, or by saying things without concern for whether they are true or not—a form of phony talk that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt has analyzed with some care. But greed is not the only source, and maybe not the most important.

Consider pride. We say things not to inform people of truths they need to hear, but to impress our hearers—to make them think we are knowledgeable and important. And if speaking in a deceptive or truth-indifferent way doesn’t work, there are other strategies. Sometimes a conversational non sequitur happens because someone shifts the conversation away from a topic where he’s unable to prevail to one where he is.

Pride, as Augustine taught, is the inordinate appetite for exaltation. Becoming humble involves giving up this appetite—giving up the desire to be the smartest person in the room, the person who won the argument, the person who had the last word. In principle, being a tenured academic makes it easier to arrive at such a purgation, because it makes one less subject to the pressures of politics and public opinion. On the other hand, academics are not particularly known for their humility. It’s a complicated issue, but in a fallen world, the only thing we can really count on for environmental clean-up is God’s grace.

How do aesthetic factors such as beauty, awe, and wonder play a role in scientific research? And how does this change in different cultures or fields?

These and other questions were explored during the first International Symposium on the Aesthetic Dimensions of Science, a day-long conference held at The Catholic University of America on June 3.

The interdisciplinary symposium was organized by Brandon Vaidyanathan, associate professor and department chair of sociology and a fellow with the University’s Institute for Human Ecology. Vaidyanathan chose to organize the event as part of an ongoing research project that explores the ways in which scientific research is not only methodical, rational, and objective, but is also shaped by aesthetic and emotional elements.

“When you read what prominent scientists have written across centuries, they’re often writing rather eloquently about the importance of beauty in science, and beauty as a driving principle, along with awe and wonder,” Vaidyanathan said. “What interests me as a sociologist is whether this is simply the providence of famous celebrity scientists and Nobel prize winners, or is this a part of the ordinary experience of the way scientists work?”

To explore this topic, Vaidyanathan invited astrophysicists, biologists, sociologists, and other renowned experts from around the world to present. The day began with a talk from James McAllister, a professor of philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who spoke about how scientists often describe scientific equations as beautiful. The question McAllister tries to explain is why scientists consider theories that strike them as beautiful as more likely to be true than those that do not.

To explain this, McAllister offers a theory which he calls aesthetic induction, a “learning process where scientists update their aesthetic preferences in the light of empirical performance.” Through this process, he theorizes, scientists look back on past successes and unconsciously begin to think of those experiences as more positive or aesthetically pleasing than other solutions, until eventually the correct solutions begin to seem beautiful to them.

“This provides a link between scientist’s preferences and the objective properties of theories and encourages scientists to think that their aesthetic preferences are tuned to true theories,” he said.

Also presenting during the morning was Mario Livio, an astrophysics professor from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who spoke about the various kinds of human curiosity and why curiosity should be supported. His talk was followed by one from Robert Gilbert, a biology professor from the University of Oxford, who discussed the relationship between natural beauty and knowledge.

Afternoon presenters included sociologists Renny Thomas from Jesus and Mary College in New Delhi, India, and Stefano Sbalchiero from the University of Padova, Italy, who spoke about the ways scientists in India and Italy express their religion or spirituality in their work.

Duilia de Mello, Catholic University professor of astrophysics and vice provost for research support, also spoke in the afternoon and shared how she uses wonder and beauty to build curiosity and excitement for kids learning about science.

“Many of us here are actually teachers and we have a role in kids’ lives of triggering their curiosity,” de Mello said.

One of the keys to triggering curiosity among young people, de Mello said, is to start with interests that they already have. Another method is to use the technologies and communication styles that they use and to keep conversations going.

“Triggering dreams is relatively easy,” she said. “The problem is how do you follow up and keep them interested.”

This article was originally published by The Catholic University of America on June 5, 2019 and written by Katie Bahr, Assistant Director of Communications and Media Relations.