Methodology for Fatih and Science: Catholic Perspectives, Part II

This continues my series on “method” in faith and science.  This is Part II of a section on Roman Catholic perspectives.

The Catholic “dialogue” approach, at least on some readings of it, already assumes that all investigation of truth is theological.  The possibility of “natural reason” is given precisely because of prior theological claims about the gift of created human nature and its capacity to participate in the truth of God.  In his introductory discussion of the relation between theology and philosophy, in Fides et Ratio, for example, Pope John Paul II states that all knowledge, whether derived from philosophy or faith, depends first on God, who makes knowledge possible by grace.  “Underlying all the Church’s thinking,” John Paul II said, “is the awareness that she is the bearer of a message which has its origin in God himself (cf. 2 Cor 4:1-2).” [1]   The Church did not receive this message through its own power or abilities, nor was the message communicated through abstract intellectual means.  Rather, John Paul II said, it stems from a personal encounter with God in Christ:

At the origin of our life of faith there is an encounter, unique in kind, which discloses a mystery hidden for long ages (cf. 1 Cor 2:7; Rom 16:25-26) but which is now revealed:   “In his goodness and wisdom, God chose to reveal himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of his will (cf. Eph 1:9), by which, through Christ, the Word made flesh, man has access to the Father in the Holy Spirit and comes to share in the divine nature”.[2] 

Further, God’s self-revelation in Christ was entirely a free act of grace:  “[t]is initiative is utterly gratuitous, moving from God to men and women in order to bring them to salvation.   As the source of love, God desires to make himself known; and the knowledge which the human being has of God perfects all that the human mind can know of the meaning of life.”[3]

Therefore there is no question of philosophy superseding faith.  There is no sharp division, in Fides et Ratio, between “nature” and “grace”:  all that pertains to “nature,” to God’s creative design, is also the gift of “grace,” of God’s ecstatic, self-giving love.  Nevertheless, for John Paul II, “nature” involves empirical realities that are susceptible to human knowledge through a form of reasoning appropriate to the object.  “Philosophy” therefore possesses an inherent integrity, structure, and grammar.  “The truth attained by philosophy and the truth of Revelation,” John Paul II said, “are neither identical nor mutually exclusive”:  

There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object….  Based upon God’s testimony and enjoying the supernatural assistance of grace, faith is of an order other than philosophical knowledge which depends upon sense perception and experience and which advances by the light of the intellect alone.  Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the “fullness of grace and truth” (cf. Jn 1:14) which God has willed to reveal in history and definitively through his Son, Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Jn 5:9; Jn 5:31-32).[4]

John Paul II therefore sees a positive role for “philosophy” as a complement to “faith.”   Indeed, for John Paul II, “natural reason,” apart from revelation, is capable of showing that there is a God who created the universe.  Nevertheless, it is finally our faith in God’s creative goodness that establishes confidence in the capacities of “natural reason” to comprehend creation, and it is our faith in God’s transcendence that establishes the proper bounds of reason.   These themes of transcendence and participation as applied to the relation between theology and science are perhaps reflected more clearly in an introduction John Paul II wrote for a 2004 Pontifical Academy of Sciences report in the Academy’s four hundredth anniversary, where he stated

I am more and more convinced that scientific truth, which is itself a participation in divine Truth, can help philosophy and theology to understand ever more fully the human person and God’s Revelation about man, a Revelation that is completed and perfected in Jesus Christ. For this important mutual enrichment in the search for the truth and the benefit of mankind, I am, with the whole Church, profoundly grateful.[5]

The subtle difference between this Catholic vision as expressed by John Paul II and McGrath’s critical realism mirrors, in interesting ways, the dialogue between the two great Swiss theologians who continue to inform many of the differences between broadly Catholic and broadly Protestant approaches to natural theology:  Barth and Balthasar.[6]  The modified, qualified critically realist natural theology of Protestant thinkers such as T.F. Torrance and McGrath, who take their initial cues from Barth, is perhaps more cautious about the analogia entis , and therefore ends up with an integration of faith and reason only after a somewhat prolonged process of methodological separation.   A Catholic thinker such as John Paul II might more readily see analogical correspondences between God and nature. 

Nevertheless, for a Catholic thinker such as John Paul II, even if, as Balthasaar argued, “[n]ature cannot include grace at one moment and then exclude it the next,” grace cannot be “necessarily derived” from nature, and the use of Aristotelian terminology to describe movement of the creature towards the goal of the beatific vision as a sort of “natural” movement is only analogical.[7]  Balthasaar went so far as to argue that Barth’s rejection of natural theology and the analogia entis, if properly understood, was consistent with the decrees of the First Vatican Council on natural knowledge of God, again if properly understood.[8]  And, similarly, the Protestant critical realist McGrath approvingly refers to Erich Przywara’s concept of the analogia entis as a model for the construction of natural theology.[9]  If there are differences between critical realist and specifically Catholic models for the interaction between theology and science, in many cases those differences may be passingly small.