A meeting of religion and science: Sister Frances Zajac sees no conflict in her callings

The above selection is all that is available for free at the paper's website. The rest of the story continues as follows:

In 1993, she returned to Meriden, where her friends from high school had largely dispersed. She found she missed the communal aspect of Cameroon.

When a friend asked if she’d like to do some volunteer construction work on the then-embryonic Franciscan Life Center, she obliged and was startled by the communal atmosphere she found.

“Part of the allure of Africa was that everything was so family- and community- oriented,” she said. “My response was to the sisters’ energy. They’re happy, hardworking and the biggest surprise to me was that they were all professional women.” She was shocked, for instance, to learn that one of the sisters was a soil scientist.

Established in 1973, the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist work in the professional world as teachers, counselors, Web site designers, pharmacists, college professors, marriage and family therapists and other professions that lend themselves to what the organization calls “promoting the culture of life.”

About 20 sisters live in the Meridenbased center. Sister Frances is the only public school teacher from the center.

Having a Catholic sister in the public school system has no effect on the student body, said Maloney principal Ann Hushin. Well, perhaps one. “The students respect her because she has the habit on — maybe more so than other teachers because she has the habit on.

So she doesn’t have to deal with the bad language.” A sign in Zajac’s classroom indicates that “inappropriate language is forbidden.”

Sister Barbara Johnson, executive director of the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist, says having a Catholic nun in the school allows the students and faculty to be “reminded that there is more to this life. Even if people who see Sister Frances do not believe in God, they, too, are still wired for happiness.

Sister Frances is a sign — and a question — of that deeper reality.”

For the sisters in the convent, Johnson says, “Sister Frances extends our presence into places that we can’t go. Her presence in the public school system also shows our church’s embrace of people of many different faith persuasions — or of no faith.”

Before Zajac’s afternoon of volunteer constructing, she had not had any real relationship with religious women. But she said she found the communal lifestyle and visible ability to express their faith — all the sisters wear habits — to her liking. “A big piece for me was to be able to show externally, through the habit, my faith, was a very powerful thing,” she said. “There’s something about it that the world now so much needs. In Africa, faith was such a part of every day. With the sisters, I was intrigued with the intensity of the life. I knew they prayed together. I knew they worked in the convent together. There’s a piece of that that is very appealing to me.”

In March 1997, after volunteering with the sisters for three years, Zajac entered the order as a pre-postulant. By 1999, she was a novice and began wearing her habit to Maloney. She professed her perpetual vows in April 2007.

For Zajac, although it was important to maintain her position as science teacher in a public high school, had the school board and superintendent not agreed to let her continue teaching, she would have left the school.

“There’s a piece of me that fits so well in the public school,” she said. “But I knew that through the sisters, wherever I would work in the end would be just fine, too.”

Being a Catholic, Zajac says, does not alter her teaching of science. “Science confirms what we believe in terms of when life begins,” she says. As for the gnarly debates over the teaching of evolution, Zajac says evolution is consistent with Catholic teaching.

“Genesis isn’t literal, but it’s figurative,” she says. “We know through science, fossil records that things evolved.” As early as 1950, Pope Pius XII wrote that “biological evolution is compatible with Christian’s faith.” Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the belief in 1996, writing that “the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis.”

But for the most part, it is not questions about evolution or the beginning of life that confound Zajac, it’s questions about professional and personal direction.

“The beauty of today’s teenagers is that they’re not afraid to ask pertinent questions,” she says. “We give kids a lot of credit for knowing a lot that they don’t really know.

Usually, kids want to know about what gives life meaning?

‘How do I know what I’m supposed to be?’ I think if kids see you as sincere, they tend to ask you these kinds of questions.”

“Genesis isn’t literal, but it’s figurative,” she says.

1) Is she claiming that God lacks the ability to do exactly what Genesis says He did?
2) If Genesis is figurative, then where does that style of interpretation stop? Christ rising from the grave? Is that figurative? 'Cause most scientists would say death doesn't work that way. Maybe the whole resurrection thing is just a "meaningful story", huh?

“Genesis isn’t literal, but it’s figurative,” she says. “We know through science, fossil records that things evolved.” As early as 1950, Pope Pius XII wrote that “biological evolution is compatible with Christian’s faith.”

Not only is that wrong, but there's an even bigger problem; evolution is not compatible with modern mathematics and probability theory.

The (proportionally) biggest group of people not buying into evoloserism is mathematicians, and not Christians.

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening at once (which is what you'd need), best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. For the pieces of being a flying bird to evolve piecemeal would be much harder. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now:
OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools.
2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

Bookmark

Christianity requires Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) once.
Evolutionists require Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) over and over and over and ...

I RECOMMEND Christianity to anybody looking for a recommendation.

Nonetheless, if all you're looking for is something better than evolution, just about anything would do. Voodoo or Rastafari would do in fact since neither requires any sort of an infinite sequence of pure zero-probability events. I mean, how does anybody believe in evolution and then make fun of the witch doctors down there in Haiti or in backwards African regions?

**ALL** government schools in this nation teach everything from a godless and secular perspective. The worldview of **all** government schools is godless! How can this be reconciled with Christianity? I claim that it can't.

Christian teachers should know that it is morally reprehensible to train children to think godlessly, yet this is what they agree to do when they accept a contract to teach in godless government schools.

Surely at some point the children themselves conclude that there is a disconnect between Christian philosophy and what the so-called Christian teacher is **actively** supporting and promoting in godless schools. These students would be justified in concluding that Christian teachers are:

1) lukewarm in their faith and that teaching children to think godlessly is acceptable to the Christian teacher.

2) Or...Christians are hypocrites who will sell their principles for a paycheck.

Some Christian teachers claim that they try to sneak in Christian moral and ethical teaching into their godless curriculum. What lesson is taught here through their example about Christians and their faith?

1) Christians are sneaky.

2) Christians are timid and weak and feel the need to hide behind subtrefuge.

Some Christian teachers feel that by being a Christian in a government school that their example will help lead children to Christ. So?...Why would any child be interested in a religion filled with timid, lukewarm, and sneaky hypocrites?

Will the job of **real** missionaries be easier or hard when these children are grown to adulthood?

Christians who **really** wish to spread the gospel must do three things simultaneously:

**Send out REAL missionaries to help convert the parents of these children so that the entire family can enjoy the fruits of the gospel.

**Seriously work to shut down every government school in this nation. No child should be forced to attend a godless school and no one should be forced to pay taxes for the establishment of this godless worldview.

** Open Christian schools that will **fully** integrate Christian belief throughout every course and all school policies. Since the government schools are giving their product away tuition-free then ( unfortunately) Christian schools must also be tuition-free, at least until government schools can be completely abolished.

Newt Gingrich once stated the problem of evolutionism and morality about as succinctly as is possible in noting that the question of whether a man views his neighbor as a fellow child of God or as a meat byproduct of random processes simply has to affect human relationships.

Basically, every halfway honest person with any brains and talent who has taken any sort of a hard look at evolution in the past 60 years has given up on it and many have denounced it. A listing of fifty or sixty such statements makes for an overwhelming indictment of that part of the scientific community which goes on trying to defend evolution and they (the evolosers) have a favorite term ( "quote mining") which they use to describe that sort of argument.

My own response to that is to note what I view as the ultimate evolution quote by the noted evolutionist (actually, FORMER evolutionist) Jeffrey Dahmer:

"If a person doesnâ€™t think there is a God to be accountable to, thenâ€”then whatâ€™s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? Thatâ€™s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothingâ€¦"
Jeffrey Dahmer, in an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC, Nov. 29, 1994.

Dahmer converted to Christianity before he died. The basic tenets of true religion appear to be inprinted upon most of us biologically which is the only reason that Islammic societies and "secular humanist" societies like Britain and Canada function at all. A psychopath like Dahmer is basically somebody on whom that imprint did not take. For those guys, it has to be written down somewhere, and it has to be written down accurately; the bible does that. Telling somebody like Dahmer that we all evolved from "lucky dust" is a formula for getting people killed.

Evolution was the basic philosophical cornerstone of communism, naziism, the various eugenics programs, the out of control arms races which led to WW-I and WW-II, and all of the grief of the last 150 years. Starting from 1913, Europe had gone for a hundred years without a major war. They didn't even have to think. All they needed to do was act cool, go to church, have parades, formal balls, attend board meetings, and they'd still be running the world today; they'd be so fat and happy they'd not know what to do with themselves. Instead, they all got to reading about Darwinism, fang and claw, survival of the fittest and all the rest of that nonsense, and the rest as they say is history.

The most interesting analysis of that sad tale is probably Sir Arthur Keith's "Evolution and Ethics".

Keith apparently viewed belief in evolution as some sort of duty of the English educated classes, nonetheless he had a very clear vision of the problems inherent in it and laid it out in no uncertain terms:

From Sir Srthur Keith's "Evolution and Ethics:

Chapter 3

The Behavior of Germany Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942

....It is worth noting that Hitler uses a double designation for his tribal doctrine National Socialism: Socialism standing for the good side of the tribal spirit (that which works within the Reich); aud Nationalism for the ethically vicious part, which dominates policy at and outside the German frontiers.

The leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice. For him the national "front" of Europe is also the evolutionary "front"; he regards himself, and is regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary destiny of its people....

... "Humanitarianism is an evil . . . a creeping poison." "The most cruel methods are humane if they give a speedy victory" is Hitler's echo of a maxim attributed to Moltke. Such are the ways of evolution when applied to human affairs.

...I have said nothing about the methods employed by the Nazi leaders to secure tribal unity in Germany methods of brutal compulsion, bloody force, and the concentration camp. Such methods cannot be brought within even a Machiavellian system of ethics, and yet may be justified by their evolutionary result.

12.

....No aspect of Hitler's policy proclaims the antagonism between evolution and ethics so forcibly as his treatment of the Jewish people in Germany.... ...Hitler is an uncompromising evolutionist, and we must seek for an evolutionary explanation if we are to understand his actions....

It must not be thought that in seeking to explain Hitler's actions I am seeking to justify them. The opposite is the case. I have made this brief survey of public policy in modern Germany with a definite object: to show that Dr. Waddington is in error when he seeks to place ethics on a scientific basis by a knowledge of evolutionary tendencies and practice.

Chapter 4

Human Life: Its Purpose or Ultimate End

IN THE COURSE OF GATHERING INFORMATION concerning man's morality and the part it has played and is playing in his evolution, I found it necessary to provide space for slips which were labeled "Life: Its Ultimate and Proximate Purposes." Only those who have devoted some special attention to this matter are aware of the multitude of reasons given for the appearance of man on earth. Here I shall touch on only a few of them; to deal with all would require a big book. The reader may exclaim: Why deal with any of them! What has ultimate purpose got to do with ethics and evolution! Let a man with a clearer head and a nimbler pen than mine reply. He is Edward Carpenter, who wrote Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889).

14.

It is from the sixteenth edition (1923) I am to quote, p. 249:

If we have decided what the final purpose or Life of Man is, then we may say that what is good for that purpose i

s finally "good" and what is bad for that purpose is finally "evil."

...If the final purpose of our existence is that which has been and is being worked out under the discipline of evolutionary law, then, although we are quite unconscious of the end result, we ought, as Dr. Waddington has urged, to help on "that which tends to promote the ultimate course of evolution." If we do so, then we have to abandon the hope of ever attaining a universal system of ethics; for, as we have just seen, the ways of national evolution, both in the past and in the present, are cruel, brutal, ruthless, and without mercy. Dr. Waddington has not grasped the implications of Nature's method of evolution, for in his summing up (Nature, 1941, 150, p. 535) he writes "that the ethical principles formulated by Christ . . . are those which have tended towards the further evolution of mankind, and that they will continue to do so." Here a question of the highest interest is raised: the relationship which exists between evolution and Christianity; so important, it seems to me, that I shall devote to it a separate chapter. Meantime let me say that the conclusion I have come to is this:

the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed.

All of that, of course, deals only with the question of ethics and the logical consequences of evolutionism. The fact that evolution is junk science argues against it as well.

I think it’s great that this nun is in a public school. The idea that there’s a conflict between science and Christianity is not the only Christian position even if some would like to promote that idea.

Being a Catholic, Zajac says, does not alter her teaching of science. “Science confirms what we believe in terms of when life begins,” she says. As for the gnarly debates over the teaching of evolution, Zajac says evolution is consistent with Catholic teaching.

“Genesis isn’t literal, but it’s figurative,” she says. “We know through science, fossil records that things evolved.” As early as 1950, Pope Pius XII wrote that “biological evolution is compatible with Christian’s faith.” Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the belief in 1996, writing that “the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis.”

Ho-hum. Same old, same old.

Wonder if she believes the eucharist is figurative?

LOL.

Jeffrey Dahmer, a noted evolutionist. That’s hilarious.

You don’t do your arguments any good with that kind of silliness.

I think it’s great that this nun is in a public school.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Please read post #7.

I agree that regarding science and Christianity there is no conflict. In my personal opinion is a Christian duty to learn as much as possible about God’s creations and to apply that knowledge to give service to our fellow brothers and sisters.

However....There is a conflict between government schools and Christians teaching in government schools.

**ALL** government schools in this nation are godless and secular in their worldview. Everything ( curriculum and policies) revolve around a godless worldview. Everything! There is a complete conflict between teaching children to think godlessly and Christianity. The two can **NOT** be reconciled. ( Please read post #7 for an explanation.)

“*ALL** government schools in this nation are godless and secular in their worldview. “

Perhaps but this is only a problem if you accept the proposition that God operates only on the same level as everything else. In Catholicism the idea is that God is the prime mover/prime cause but that there are secondary movers and causes that operate through his bidding. Therefore there is no either/or dilemma which requires that either God did something or a scientific process did it. I think the mere fact that a nun in a habit is teaching science would remind students that whatever the physical forces and processes that cause change that there is another force (demonstrated by her appearance) that is in charge.

St. Francis - preach the Gospel where ever you go, use words if you have to.

PS - I do think public schools are an evil here. They were designed from the start to separate children from the beliefs of their parents.

Indeed. Discovering the processes whereby life changes and new species arise no more removes God as their creator than discovering the principles of nuclear fusion removes God as the creator of the Sun.

If Genesis is figurative, then where does that style of interpretation stop? Christ rising from the grave? Is that figurative? 'Cause most scientists would say death doesn't work that way. Maybe the whole resurrection thing is just a "meaningful story", huh?

Regardless of whether the Creation account is literal or figurative, this is a poor argument, because there are parts of the Bible that are unquestionably figurative.

St. Francis - preach the Gospel where ever you go, use words if you have to.

If you know of a Christian government teacher who is still employed then you know that they are following St. Frances' admonition. They are not preaching the Gospel at least while in their government school. If they were they would have been fired already.

I do think public schools are an evil here. They were designed from the start to separate children from the beliefs of their parents.

So?...How can a Christian reconcile supporting, upholding, and abetting a school that is evil? How can a Christian agree to assist in separating children from the beliefs of their parents?

On some level the students cannot reconcile this either. They **rightly** conclude that Christian teachers are hypocrites who will sell their principles for a paycheck and pension, and are lukewarm and timid in their beliefs. If Christians do attempt to sneak in some Christian belief into their classes they are teaching the students that Christians are sneaky.

You can preach the gospel by your actions and by the day to day things that you do. I think that’s what St. Francis had in mind. She’s not sneaking anything, she’s openly Christian and her actions will be credited to Jesus because of that. All the nuns I’ve met have been really good people. I hope the kids at her school see her that way.

I think most kids will see her as strong not weak. I know that’s how my public school kids see me in CCD . Nuns are very well educated. I expect she would be able to tackle any theological or philosophical questions on how a scientific position is held by a believer .

Certainly some language in the Bible is figurative:

(Isa. 55:12). "The hills shall break forth before you into singing; and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."

But if the language could be literal, then it should be interpreted literally. "God created heaven and the earth" means just that. It's not a figurative way of saying "Nature sure is impressive, huh?"

The Catholic church needs to get rid of the idea that evolution and Christianity are reconcilable. The basic bottom line as documented above is that they aren’t.

The Catholic Church is not going to have a problem with the scientific idea of evolution. Saints as important as Aquinas and Augustine have believed in some variation of the idea.

Newt Gingrich is free to believe in the either/or dichotomy but it's not one developed by the Catholic Church.

"Whether, with St. Augustine and St. Thomas, one hold that only the primordial elements, endowed with dispositions and powers (rationes seminales) for development, were created in the strict sense of the term, and the rest of nature — plant and animal life — was gradually evolved according to a fixed order of natural operation under the supreme guidance of the Divine Administration (Harper, "Metaphysics of the School", II, 746); or whether, with other Fathers and Doctors of the School, one hold that life and the classes of living beings — orders, families, genera, species — were each and all, or only some few, strictly and immediately created by God — whichever of these extreme views he may deem more rational and better motived, the Catholic thinker is left perfectly free by his faith to select." link