Science and Religion: both are important to me. “Grace Builds on Nature” is axiomatic in Roman Catholic Theology since the days of St. Thomas Aquinas. It means that God is communicated through nature. Therefore the more we understand nature, the more open we are open to the communication of God. St. Thomas held that by reason alone one could come to the knowledge of God. I believe that this is the backbone of the Catholic intellectual tradition, and it is one of the prime reasons why I find Catholicism so attractive.

Science is a means of understanding nature. Science has to be allowed to stand on its own ground however. The means of investigation and reasoning in science are not those of theology. One mode of investigation cannot be used to constrain the other. The Church made that mistake with Galileo already.

Like most Americans I have grown up in a scientific age that places great emphasis on observation, hypothesis, experimentation and then, interpretation. I find this manner of critical thinking, properly applied, keeps me humble. I know that pride leaps right in when we reach the interpretation phase of science, but properly practiced, the scientific method reminds me that I am only a seeker, and investigator, in a complex and fascinating universe. My knowledge is not complete.

As soon as I say that there are those on the religious side of the equation who label me a “relativist” someone who hold that there is no truth in the universe. I respectfully disagree; I simply hold that neither I, nor anyone else thus far, knows all the truth about nature. Truth is something we seek and humility is the best way to minimize error.

Now, on the other side of the equation, I do not believe science is all there is. There is more to life than the data that result from empirically observable natural phenomena. The ultimate interpretation of this data into the world of personal human meaning, into the world of truth, belongs to the fields of philosophy, theology and art. As scientists we have to be careful to be aware of the a-priori theoretical assumptions that govern our inquiry. As Einstein said:

“It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe. You must appreciate that observation is a very complicated process. The phenomenon under observation produces certain events in our measuring apparatus. As a result, further processes take place in the apparatus, which eventually and by complicated paths produce sense impressions and help us to fix the effects in our consciousness. Along this whole path—from the phenomenon to its fixation in our consciousness—we must be able to tell how nature functions, must know the natural laws at least in practical terms, before we can claim to have observed anything at all. Only theory, that is, knowledge of natural laws, enables us to deduce the underlying phenomena from our sense impressions. When we claim that we can observe something new, we ought really to be saying that, although we are about to formulate new natural laws that do not agree with the old ones, we nevertheless assume that the existing laws—covering the whole path from the phenomenon to our consciousness—function in such a way that we can rely upon them and hence speak of “observation”. ~Einstein

Anyway, in this section I am going to highlight areas of scientific discovery and news that are interesting. Since I am a clinical psychologist, I am drawn to areas of science that deal with brain and behavioral sciences more that say, physics, astronomy or math. But I do have a laymen’s interest in those things also when they hit the headlines.

I am going to present information about ways in which our understanding of science influences our faith experience and comment on places where religion, faith and spirituality and faith have something to say about the findings of science.

The first area I am going to present material is on how what we have learned about the experience of the illness depression affects the spiritual life of people who suffer from that illness.