Garvey: I’m kind of curious as to whether anyone has had the experience of a student having a crisis of faith after taking science courses at Holy Cross?
Geoghegan: In both my humanities and science courses, I’ve further explored issues of faith. And in my biology courses, I’m just in awe of how things work and why they work. I finish some of my science classes and I’m just stunned by the complexity. But, if anything, my faith is strengthened. That’s the thing that I appreciate the most about this place—that it forces you to look at every angle, to integrate everything. I think students around here do appreciate that and see that. Although there are certainly students that just want the job and the money.
Freeman: I’ve had students over the years who would read Freud on religion, and they’ll have some of their views on the world shaken in a big way. It’s important to introduce them to some of those ideas in a cautious way, one that allows them to see from the get-go that the goal isn’t undermining their beliefs, but that these are arguments that they are bound to encounter during the course of intellectual life. And it’s going to be important for them to formulate thoughtful ways of thinking through them.
Fr. Clark: This is an interesting aspect of the clash or the meeting of faith and science that I think should be going on at a place like Holy Cross all the time. It’s not just about controversial issues on which the Church has taken a stand, but the whole question of whether it’s possible to have faith and question it at the same time. Does faith mean that which I never question? Or can faith fit into an environment where it can be challenged from all sides?
Kee: Liberal arts colleges have a particular opportunity here. We’re not just training pre-professional physicists or biologists or literary students. This is a place where physicists and mathematicians and biologists and psychologists and religious studies people might actually get together and converse.
Bellin: But the difficulty is that there isn’t a common language in the middle. If you bring practicing scientists in that have a scientific background to discuss these things and then you bring an ethicist or religious studies people in, there’s a divide. And I don’t think it’s just Holy Cross. I think it’s everywhere.
Fr. Clark: Andy (Hwang) and I have been collaborating for the last few semesters. I teach a course called “Introduction to Catholicism,” and we get to a point toward the end of the semester where we’re talking about controversial subjects in Catholicism. So I invite Andy to come into the classroom for an open discussion. The conversation tends to be about evolution and creation questions, but, ultimately, it’s about the relationship between religion and science generally. And Andy gives them one point of view and I give them another, but they’re quite surprised usually to find out that we have a lot of common ground even though we disagree.
Hwang: Interestingly, many students in the course didn't seem to see a fundamental conflict between a belief in evolution by natural selection and Catholic theology. Not surprisingly, though, the students with whom I’ve had the lengthiest conversations do not accept evolution by natural selection. The discussion is particularly difficult because the foundation of one’s world view seems to be at stake.
Bellin: I teach biochemistry and eventually we talk about evolution as being the underpinnings of biology. One student said she felt very uncomfortable reading about evolution because she felt that I was asking her to do something that was against her faith. But we’ve talked about it more in my non-majors class and I’ve even brought up the papal document, Humani Generis, which says that the subject of evolution is a legitimate matter for inquiry and that Catholics are free to investigate and form their own opinion. And the students in the non-majors class tend to learn of this and say, “Wow, I didn’t know that. I always felt like I wasn’t supposed to think about these things.”
Geoghegan: We had a class that discussed evolution and the media. I’d say the majority of the people that I have studied with find no conflict between evolution and their faith. There was one student in the class who was opposed to the idea of evolution by natural selection. In my freshman biology class, our professor said plainly that evolution is fact, that there is no reason to question evolution. Where the controversy comes in is with the mechanism of evolution—whether it occurs by intelligent design or natural selection. But some people are so uninformed about it that they think that the question is about whether or not evolution actually occurs.
Hitt: If some of these students who were in your class wanted to invite Michael Behe or Richard Dawkins as a speaker here, how would you advise your students about making such an invitation?
Ledbetter: I would say anybody’s welcome. I would like to make it into a teaching opportunity—both in question and answer after the talk and possibly in a follow-up conversation with the students on another occasion.
Hitt: But Dawkins and the other attacks on faith have ratcheted up the assault. If Darwinism was perceived as an attack on biblical creation, this new assault goes right after God. Dawkins’ new book is The God Delusion, and he calls belief in God infantile and ridiculous. A recent Newsweek cover declared: “God and the Brain: How We’re Wired for Spirituality.”
Koss: Michael Ruse has written a book in which he sees someone like Dawkins as not merely believing in evolution, but in this ideology called “evolutionism.” According to Ruse, it’s very similar in its dogmatism to intelligent design. It’s what happens when you have two groups that are so absolutely convinced of their own position that they’re not having a discussion. In my thinking, Dawkins’ difficulty is that he believes that evolution by natural selection logically and deductively leads you to atheism. Dawkins is also incorrect in just being so absolutist and in ignoring that scientists also have faith in something different than a belief in God. It may be a faith in materialism, or maybe a faith in inductive thinking, but there is a faith. Dawkins is ignoring what the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi has said—that deep down at the very basis of science is a belief. Our challenge is to get at how to best move forward the conversation. Having Richard Dawkins here would not be the best way. The best way, maybe, is to get people to read Dawkins’ book and have a discussion, you know, four or five people talking about the book, and identifying what is essentially a good argument, what’s a fallacious argument, what’s an obnoxious argument, and dealing with it that way. In other words, we don’t need the drama. We need the conversation.
Faith & Science: A Forum, continued>>>
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