Physicist: Science and faith are not ‘at war’

(Photo by Beth Donze, Clarion Herald)

Addressing 240 Catholic high school students assembled Feb. 2 at Schulte Auditorium for the St. Albert Initiative – an all-day master class on the links between science and faith – Dr. Stephen Barr said the pervasive “myth” that there is conflict between the two perspectives confounds him, both as a professor of particle physics at the University of Delaware and as someone who leads more than 2,000 practicing-Catholic academics as president of the Society of Catholic Scientists.

Christian believers over the centuries – including numerous Nobel Prize winners and Catholic priests – have been among the most gifted and tenacious scientists in history. He cited Bonaventura Cavalieri, a Jesuit who helped develop calculus; Georges Lemâitre, the Belgian priest who devised the Big Bang Theory; and Blessed Niels Stensen, a pioneer in anatomy and geology who theorized about the origin of fossils in the 17th century.

“Many people today think that science and religion are opposed to each other – they say you can’t believe in God and also believe in science, you have to make a choice between them,” Barr said. Far from being opposed, “science and belief in God are profoundly connected with each other because they have many of the same roots; they both stem from a sense of wonder about the world, about the universe, the wonder that the universe exists at all and its magnificence and beauty.”

Barr said science and faith also share the belief that “everything holds together” in some coherent way.

“Science tells us about the things that we can observe and measure, but our faith has a much wider scope and answers deeper and more difficult questions – questions about the ultimate cause of the world’s existence and order, the purpose of human life, our ultimate destiny, about spiritual realities: God and man, love and truth, good and evil, sin and redemption. Science tells us how the world works; our faith tells us what the world means,” Barr said.