Need FReeper help regarding a religous book

self | self

[wombtotomb]

Freepers- I need some help finding a book explaining the dovetail of science and religion. Here is my senario:

My 15 year old nephew has been raised Catholic, goes to Mass every week, made all sacraments. Mom is practicing, father, agnostic but was raised Catholic.

[wombtotomb]

Nephew is an avid reader and a devotee of history, especially ancient roman history. He feels that there are too many inconsistencies in scripture for it to be accurate, and that he is leaning toward agnostisism. I would love to know if any of you have done apologetics work in this area (science and religion,creatonism, etc), and what books you could recommend on the issue. I have not studied agnostic apologetics as there was never a need in my circle to do so until now.

[Dr. Sivana]

I would recommend Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. It is intelligent, timeless, and not too long.

[Bob J]

If your nephew wants to know more about the roots of Judaism and Chistianity he should bone up on Egyptian, Greek and Sumerian mythology.

[freedumb2003]

You can never go wrong with C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity.”

[Lee N. Field]

Maybe not quite what you want, but: R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science.

[Jason Kauppinen]

159 Faith and science: “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”37 “Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.”38

http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c3a1.htm#159

[Secret Agent Man]

1. “Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe” by Norman L. Geisler

2. “Miracles” by C. S. Lewis

3. “God, Freedom, and Evil” by Alvin Plantinga

4. “Faith & Rationality: Reason & Belief in God” by Nicholas Wolterstorff

5. “The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity” by Lee Strobel

[Brian Kopp DPM]

Start (or at least buy some time) with Ben Stein's documentary EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed.

Its actually a brilliant piece of apologetics for the existence of a Creator-God.

If he is bright, stay away from the strict creationist materials, and lean towards intelligent design proponents. Michael Behe is a good author in that regard.

Also point out that atheism always eventually leads to the destruction of the innocent.

[ROTB]

Here’s what he would do well to read, in this order:

1) http://www.direct.ca/trinity/y3nf.html
2) “The Signature of God” by Grant Jeffrey (skip the Chapter on Torah Codes based on http://www.direct.ca/trinity/closing.html)
3) “The Evidence that Demands a Verdict” by Josh McDowell

[hoppity]

I liked this one. More space/physics oriented. Don’t know if it’s all correct, but made sense to my lay(me) mind.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Show-Me-God/Fred-Heeren/e/9781885849533

[ConservativeMind]

My take on it all at that age was this, and I gave consideration to agnosticism as my own perspective.

The “science” approach was appealing to me. But science has never even had a concept for what was there before the “Big Bang.” Science ultimately places its understanding of the Universe on faith that everything just “is” and that there's an explanation, but we just don't know it yet. Unfortunately, no scientist even has a concept for what happened before the situation that happened before the Big Bang happened. And for each step further back, “science” has never had a clue for any of it. Just a simple “we don't ask such things here and we sure won't ever have those answers.”

Then I was left with thinking that God must have made the Universe. But then, what form was God? This led me to look at various religions, as I surmised that God would have likely wanted us to be here on Earth if we existed and were sentient creatures. Subsequent to that, I looked at various religions, both ancient and recent.

In short, many religions didn't seem to hold up. However, strangely, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all agree that the original “Old Testament” books were, for some agreed reason, legitimate. So the books of the Jews seemed validated by the most entities on the planet. However, in reading those and understanding how Christianity and the Muslim faith came to be, only Christianity seemed valid, so it was this and Judaism. However, Christianity specifically validates key parts of the Jewish understanding from their own books, and even Muslims believe Christ was a Prophet, while Jews generally regard Jesus as a wise man, but not the Son of God.

In the end, a strong, conservative belief in God through the Bible was the only resulting belief left to hold.

[ConservativeMind]

Ping for later.

[JoeFromSidney]

Stanley Jaki, SCIENCE AND CREATION.

[Brian Kopp DPM]

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

THOMAS E. WOODS, JR.

From the role of the monks to art and architecture, from the university to Western law, from science to charitable work, from international law to economics, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization delves into just how indebted we are as a civilization to the Catholic Church, whether we realize it or not.

By far the book’s longest chapter is "The Church and Science." We have all heard a great deal about the Church’s alleged hostility toward science. What most people fail to realize is that historians of science have spent the past half-century drastically revising this conventional wisdom, arguing that the Church’s role in the development of Western science was far more salutary than previously thought. I am speaking not about Catholic apologists but about serious and important scholars of the history of science such as J.L. Heilbron, A.C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, and Thomas Goldstein.

It is all very well to point out that important scientists, like Louis Pasteur, have been Catholic. More revealing is how many priests have distinguished themselves in the sciences. It turns out, for instance, that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Fr. Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher (also called "master of a hundred arts" for the breadth of his knowledge). Fr. Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic theory.

In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits

had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics — all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents [Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189].

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Fr. J.B. Macelwane, who wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America, in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Fr. Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

  

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Contents

The Indispensable Church
A Light in the Darkness
How the Monks Saved Civilization
The Church and the University
The Church and Science
The Origins of International Law
The Church and Economics
How Catholic Charity Changed the World
The Church and Western Law
The Church and Western Morality

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible. Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the nineteenth century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments, and cartography. In Central and South America the Jesuits worked primarily in meteorology and seismology, essentially laying the foundations of those disciplines there. The scientific development of these countries, ranging from Ecuador to Lebanon to the Philippines, is indebted to Jesuit efforts.

The Galileo case is often cited as evidence of Catholic hostility toward science, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization accordingly takes a closer look at the Galileo matter. For now, just one little-known fact: Catholic cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, and Rome were constructed to function as solar observatories. No more precise instruments for observing the sun’s apparent motion could be found anywhere in the world. When Johannes Kepler posited that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini verified Kepler’s position through observations he made in the Basilica of San Petronio in the heart of the Papal States. Cassini, incidentally, was a student of Fr. Riccioli and Fr. Francesco Grimaldi, the great astronomer who also discovered the diffraction of light, and even gave the phenomenon its name.

I’ve tried to fill the book with little-known facts like these.

To say that the Church played a positive role in the development of science has now become absolutely mainstream, even if this new consensus has not yet managed to trickle down to the general public. In fact, Stanley Jaki, over the course of an extraordinary scholarly career, has developed a compelling argument that in fact it was important aspects of the Christian worldview that accounted for why it was in the West that science enjoyed the success it did as a self-sustaining enterprise. Non-Christian cultures did not possess the same philosophical tools, and in fact were burdened by conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science. Jaki extends this thesis to seven great cultures: Arabic, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya. In these cultures, Jaki explains, science suffered a "stillbirth." My book gives ample attention to Jaki’s work.

  

Economic thought is another area in which more and more scholars have begun to acknowledge the previously overlooked role of Catholic thinkers. Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, paid tribute to the overlooked contributions of the late Scholastics — mainly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish theologians — in his magisterial History of Economic Analysis (1954). "[I]t is they," he wrote, "who come nearer than does any other group to having been the ‘founders’ of scientific economics." In devoting scholarly attention to this unfortunately neglected chapter in the history of economic thought, Schumpeter would be joined by other accomplished scholars over the course of the twentieth century, including Professors Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, and Alejandro Chafuen.

---

...it is no surprise that the Church should have done so much to foster the nascent university system, since the Church, according to historian Lowrie Daly, "was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."

---

The Church also played an indispensable role in another essential development in Western civilization: the creation of the university. The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, come to us directly from the medieval world. And it is no surprise that the Church should have done so much to foster the nascent university system, since the Church, according to historian Lowrie Daly, "was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."

The popes and other churchmen ranked the universities among the great jewels of Christian civilization. It was typical to hear the University of Paris described as the "new Athens" — a designation that calls to mind the ambitions of the great Alcuin from the Carolingian period of several centuries earlier, who sought through his own educational efforts to establish a new Athens in the kingdom of the Franks. Pope Innocent IV (1243–54) described the universities as "rivers of science which water and make fertile the soil of the universal Church," and Pope Alexander IV (1254–61) called them "lanterns shining in the house of God." And the popes deserved no small share of the credit for the growth and success of the university system. "Thanks to the repeated intervention of the papacy," writes historian Henri Daniel-Rops, "higher education was enabled to extend its boundaries; the Church, in fact, was the matrix that produced the university, the nest whence it took flight."

As a matter of fact, among the most important medieval contributions to modern science was the essentially free inquiry of the university system, where scholars could debate and discuss propositions, and in which the utility of human reason was taken for granted. Contrary to the grossly inaccurate picture of the Middle Ages that passes for common knowledge today, medieval intellectual life made indispensable contributions to Western civilization. In The Beginnings of Western Science (1992), David Lindberg writes:

[I]t must be emphatically stated that within this educational system the medieval master had a great deal of freedom. The stereotype of the Middle Ages pictures the professor as spineless and subservient, a slavish follower of Aristotle and the Church fathers (exactly how one could be a slavish follower of both, the stereotype does not explain), fearful of departing one iota from the demands of authority. There were broad theological limits, of course, but within those limits the medieval master had remarkable freedom of thought and expression; there was almost no doctrine, philosophical or theological, that was not submitted to minute scrutiny and criticism by scholars in the medieval university.

"[S]cholars of the later Middle Ages," concludes Lindberg, "created a broad intellectual tradition, in the absence of which subsequent progress in natural philosophy would have been inconceivable."

Historian of science Edward Grant concurs with this judgment:

What made it possible for Western civilization to develop science and the social sciences in a way that no other civilization had ever done before? The answer, I am convinced, lies in a pervasive and deep-seated spirit of inquiry that was a natural consequence of the emphasis on reason that began in the Middle Ages. With the exception of revealed truths, reason was enthroned in medieval universities as the ultimate arbiter for most intellectual arguments and controversies. It was quite natural for scholars immersed in a university environment to employ reason to probe into subject areas that had not been explored before, as well as to discuss possibilities that had not previously been seriously entertained.

The creation of the university, the commitment to reason and rational argument, and the overall spirit of inquiry that characterized medieval intellectual life amounted to "a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world…though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged. Perhaps it will always retain the status it has had for the past four centuries as the best-kept secret of Western civilization."

Here, then, are just a few of the topics to be found in How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. I’ve been asked quite a few times in recent weeks what my next project will be. For now, it’ll be getting some rest.

"How the Monks Saved Civilization", chapter three from
How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, is available online here.

[choirboy]

Here's a couple of books from Ignatius Press: www.ignatius.com

"Science and Belief in a Nuclear Age"

The noted Oxford physicist Peter Hodgson, a devout Catholic, here offers a marvelous compendium for Christians who seek to know how faith relates to the discoveries of modern science. Hodgson has at his fingertips the insights of the Church’s theological giants, which he combines with a thorough knowledge of the philosophy of science. Hodgson provides the latest information on Einstein, quantum physics, nuclear power and more. As would be expected from a Christian scientist, Hodgson does not stop at the superficial level of the empirical data but asks the deeper questions that Christians need to answer in order to come to terms with contemporary science.

"The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet"

While everyone is delighted by beauty, and the more alive among us are positively fascinated by it, few are explicitly aware that we can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. Dubay explores the reasons why all of the most eminent physicists of the twentieth century agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth. Likewise, the best of contemporary theologians are also exploring with renewed vigor the aesthetic dimensions of divine revelation. Honest searchers after truth can hardly fail to be impressed that these two disciplines, science and theology, so different in methods, approaches and aims, are yet meeting in this and other surprising and gratifying ways.

This book relates these developments to nature, music, academe and our unquenchable human thirst for unending beauty, truth and ecstasy, a thirst quenched only at the summit of contemplative prayer here below, and in the consummation of the beatific vision hereafter.

"This is as complete a theology of beauty in one simple volume as I know, uniting Christian theology, modern science, and daily experience—a sort of von Balthasar for the masses. It vastly expands our understanding beyond 'aesthetics', and shows us how nearly right Keats was in saying 'Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.'" —Peter Kreeft, Author, Back to Virtue

[freedumb2003]

I respectfully disagree. If he is already conflicted, stay away from Behe, or for that matter, the complete mis-analysis by Stein.

If he is bright, he will see “intelligent design” for the camel under the tent it is. ID does not support science in a faith milieu. It merely substitutes a “designer” for God and still posits creationism in lieu of science.

We may argue here, but I think you need something a lot less ambiguous (and contentious) than Behe (who admitted in open court that ID is as much science as astrology - http://www.epicidiot.com/evo_cre/astrology_high_school.htm).

[taxcontrol]

If he loves history, have him research the Council of Nicea and the Coptic Christians.

Correlate to our own history. For example, the Gospels were written within 50 years of Christ’s death. That is the 1950’s to our perception of time. There are a lot of musical, political and cultural echos into our own time from the 50’s. That will put into perspective the timeliness of the gospels.

Talk about how at Nicea, the Bishops agreed on a standardized codex. Talk about how we have complete copies of the New Testament (Codex Sinaiticus) from over 1600 years ago.

Also, for non-Christian evidence, have him research:
Jewish historian Josephus (37 A.D.–100 A.D.)
Pliny the Younger, Emperor of Bythynia in northwestern Turkey, in his letter to Emperor Trajan in 112 A.D

Evidence for Pontius Pilate, the governor who presided over the trial of Jesus, was discovered in Caesarea Maritama. In 1961, an Italian archaeologist named Antonio Frova uncovered a fragment of a plaque that was used as a section of steps leading to the Caesarea Theater. The inscription, written in Latin, contained the phrase, “Pontius Pilatus, Prefect of Judea has dedicated to the people of Caesarea a temple in honor of Tiberius.” This temple is dedicated to the Emperor Tiberius who reigned from 14–37 A.D.

Challenge him to find as many historical and archaeological references to Christ as possible.

[ROTB]

“The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity” by Lee Strobel

... from another Freeper is also a book that centers on objections to the existence of God. Also great. The best of all Strobel’s books I have read.

[Aggie Mama]

Point him in the direction of the religion threads on FR. Most of the arguments in his mind will play out on the threads every week.

[Ingtar]

You might find some help at http://www.josh.org