Actually, I did read the book. I found it even more tendentious and simplistic than the movie. Please don't think that what Dan Brown means by "faith" is the real thing.
Hi, I know that I'm 7 years late to the debate but I just discovered the Robert Langdon books and I really enjoy them as mystery thrillers. I'm not a religious person and even though I would never call myself an atheist, I am fundamentally opposed to the idea of a God described in any of religious scripts throughout human history. I sometimes get very materialistic in my views but quickly get reminded of how obviously inadequate materialism is. I do enjoy religious themes and discusions mainly because of the ideological questions but Dan Brown's books actually got me interested in the cultural aspect of Religion. The point that I was trying to make before digressing was: The books, especially Angels and Demons really go out of their way to shed some light on really important scientific discoveries that were made by either the Catholic church or some of it's members. By the end of the book I didn't get the feeling that the church ended up looking like the bad guy. I actually felt that both the church and the materialistic scientists got a healthy dose of humbling, which I consider a good thing. Anyway, I will be subscribing to your channel. I would really like to hear your opinion on the Lucifer show as it is one of the most interesting depictions of the devil and angels that I have ever seen without taking any jabs at the Catholic church. I understand that expecting that you watch the whole TV show is kind of a stretch but I still hope.
@@VidVrbanovic what I've found is the catholic understanding of God is actually far more in line with not only what makes sense but also so much easier to approach. Not to say there isnt any fear of God or that scripture is completely metaphorical but it for sure takes a much more level headed and earthly look at it. But I'm glad you enjoyed the book
I haven't read the book Father but I think you got the movie wrong. In the movie, the late Pope was very welcoming with the idea of science and by extent, the church, but only it is the camerlengo that wants to defy science.
An old gent in my parish told how his older sister was at a Catholic school in the 1940s, and when she said she wanted to go to university she would have to ask the bishop's permission. The Bishop consented, but the parish priest was opposed to it. He said she'd get ideas and lose her faith. In other words, he thought she'd start thinking for herself
Come on, friend, that's way too simplistic. Among the most important of the early astronomers and cosmologists were Jesuits at the Vatican, and many of them were friends and colleagues of Galileo. The story of Galileo is tragic and complex, and it doesn't fit into easy categories of "reasonable science" vs. "irrational faith."
Don't worry Father Barron, Gallileo's case is oftenly misunderstood, at this point if people actually cared for him, they would have done their homework and know that Gallileo was not judged, nor killed by the catholic church for his science research and such, if i recall correctly, Gallileo died with sacrament and blessing of the pope in his house of Florentia. The thing is that he was warned to be careful on the whole research he was going as there were many parts of it that could be misleading not only doctrinal but also acording to scientific knowlege of the time, and that for more passionate that he was on the affair he should not compete or undermind the church's researches as well.
Sam McPhail I have an idea: rather than ask everyone to go do research on an argument against their position, actually make an argument yourself. Then we'd have something to respond to...
Okay, I thought it was worth one more try. I will continue to pray for you (and I don't mean that in a patronizing way). I really do think that your fascination with my videos signals that you are, at some deep level, dissatisfied with your materialist view of the world. Peace!
Great piece, Father! I've realized recently that it's only the protestant churches, particularly the evangelicals that think of science and religion as adversaries. I love that the Catholic church embraces science, education, intelligence and discovery. I fully agree with what you are saying Father Barron about the movie. But let me give you a different perspective. Had I been raised Catholic I would have likely been offended by the DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons books and movie. But as someone raised Protestant, mostly in non denominational, evangelical churches, I can honestly say that it was my reading of the Da Vinci Code back in 2003 that brought me on the long and windy road that ended at the doors of the Catholic church. God works in mysterious ways, indeed! It was only when I read the book that I started digging into the history of the Bible, trying to separate Dan Brown's fiction from fact in the book ( as the book was full of both fact and fiction, I honestly didn't know which was which) My evangelical faith did not hold up under my findings. "You mean there were other manuscripts? The bible was written in the 3rd century? There were parts of the Bible left out? There are contradictions in the Bible? My faith as an evangelical came crumbling. My faith as a Catholic would have been fine. But to this day I will credit my reading of that book to where my faith is today. My husband was raised even more evangelical than me. He's in his 40s and still struggling with the faith but for him, another huge step in his faith toward the Catholic church was his love of both movies, DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons. The line at the end of the movie Angels and Demons gets him. "I don't believe God led me here." and the priest's response, "Of course He did." So simple but the scene is powerful. So not to defend Dan Brown. I don't believe his intentions to the Church were good intentions. But to put it simply, something good came of something not so good with regards to restoring our faith and moving us to the Catholic Church.
I've read a few of Dan Brown's novels (ex. Angels and Demons, Da Vinci Code, Deception Point, and Digital Fortress) and could definitely sense the author's dislike/suspicion of the Catholic Church. I also figured out who is the villain in each novel before the halfway point: they're usually the assistants of a powerful figure or a character that was introduced later into the novel. After two novels, I already saw a fairly predictable plot pattern. Personally, I find Arturo Perez-Reverte's novels more compelling and the running theme of human imperfection and sin more realistic. Both authors bring up similar theological themes/questions in their novels, however Perez-Reverte's characters and plots are more creative/realistic and the questions evoked are much deeper than Dan Brown's novels. I, too, also used the theological questions that came up in these fictional books as starting points to learn more about my own Catholic faith. It led me to seeking answers and truth which I still find in my Catholic faith.
Was any of the Dan Brown movies and/or books offensive to us Catholics? Was it in any blasphemous? I know this is an old video but I just want to know.
@PWJ57 I've never denied that certain churchmen, even of a very high rank, got this one wrong. But given the massive amount of counter-evidence, I've argued that it's extremely unfair to say simply that "the church" has always been opposed to science. And here's what's really important: there is no question that today the Church is deeply interested in a creative dialogue with the sciences.
I actually took a class on Galileo and we were only allowed to study the evidence that was available to the men of the era, meaning we could not use Newtonian physics. Based on the evidence presented, I cam to the conclusion that Galileo's model was compelling, but not demonstrably true. It would not be until the discovery of the Law of Gravity that the heliocentric model would be definitively proven. I then found out at the end of the term that my approach to Galileo was similar to the Church's. That's not to say that Church was as gentle as I was, but we both came to the conclusion that Galileo had a good hypothesis, but nothing that was definitive. Galileo demanded that the Church either accept it as truth or reject it.
Creation and evolution are fundamentally different realities. The second describes the means by which living organisms develop within nature; the first describes the relationship between contingent realities and their non-contingent ground. Because they are so different, they are utterly compatible.
@sciencelives2000 Well so what?! "Nature" doesn't "kill" anyone. Killing is an act of the will. What happens through nature is irrelevant to the discussion of morality.
Not finding a first cause to contingency is tantamount to saying you have no way of explaining how contingent things actually exist. It is to lock you in stance of incoherency. And I don't see how "feelings" have a thing to do with this. It is a claim of logic.
Because in so answering, you haven't explained anything, and the whole enterprise was a search for the explanation of a present anomaly, viz. how could something that doesn't have to exist (a contingent thing) actually exist? I have argued that the only way coherently to explain such a situation is to appeal finally to some reality that exists through its own nature. So I mean, you can say "I don't know," but it doesn't get you anywhere constructive.
@sciencelives2000 Let me see if I have your logic right: since "nature" kills tens of millions of people every year, we should have no laws against murder!
Are apples "compatible" with oranges? God is not a being in the world or one causal agent among many. He doesn't fit into any chain of causality. He is rather the reason why there is anything at all. So let the sciences--which explore the web of contingent causality--go unhindered. Creation names something else altogether.
How do you explain universal intelligibility? Where do the laws of nature come from? Why do our mathematical formulas agree so startlingly with the depth structure of reality?
thank you again Bishop Barron! The Catholic Church, despite its perceived flaws, still holds the highest standards of Education, combined with tolerance of any ecumenical movement on earth. Thank you for your patience knowledge and insight while discussing this work of fiction. God hid himself so well from our world that it still requires the simple faith of a child to find him.
Contingent being must be grounded in something non-contingent. All matter is contingent because it is changeable. Hence the non-contingent must be non-material. Your problem, shared by so many others on this forum, is scientific reductionism. Science is a way of knowing certain modes of existence, but not the whole of existence.
Where did they learn their mathematics, their astronomy, their physics, and their logic? They learned them in Christian universities. Copernicus was himself a cleric. It is one-sided in the extreme and deeply misleading to say that "the church" simply opposed them. The Church in a very significant way sponsored them and made them possible. The implacable hostility between religion and science is a modern myth.
Did you watch the video? Copernicus and Galileo were both formed in the context of a Christian culture, Mendel was a priest, Georges Le Maitre was a priest, Pascal and Descartes were devout Catholics,John Polkinghorne, Cambridge particle physicist, is a priest. The Vatican today eagerly sponsors scientific symposia and an observatory. Galileo is one unhappy paragraph in a one chapter of a very long book.
Fr. Barron, I considered myself a "secularist", but i admit that American "atheists" have made a lot of myths about Catholicism. Most of Americans "Atheists" attempt to ignore the fact that most of European intellectuals and philosophers are Catholic clerics (or trained as clerics), and the Catholic clerics once have done a tremendous job on preserving classic works and translating them into Latin in the Dark Age. Thank you for your comment, Fr. Barron.
inferno0020 that’s bc the church controlled all of Europe so there was no room for anyone else because they would kill you. The difference between now and then is you can believe what you want, when you are talking about intellectuals in the church, they were only to the extent of what the church allowed, so you have to stop acting like the church was great. They halted hundreds of years of science and progress and have scared the life out of millions of people with their made up beliefs. Gtfo of here
I quite agree. And that is why the Catholic philosophical tradition has consistently denied that God is a "thing," or one being among many. He is ipsum esse, the sheer act of to-be itself.
No friend, you haven't grasped the argument. I'm saying, to state it again, a contingent thing requires an explanation. If we simply keep appealing endlessly to other contingent things, we haven't found our explanation. Therefore, if we are to explain the existence of a contingent thing, we have to come, sooner or later, to that which is not contingent. This is what I mean by God. Now if you can't see the difference between this claim and saying "I don't know," then I give up!
Again, if this process just goes on and on, nothing has been explained. And contingent things are, by definition, things that have to be explained, since they don't carry within themselves the reason for their own existence. I don't know if I can make this any clearer.
A contingent reality is something that does not contain within itself the reason for its own existence. You, for example, are contingent in the measure that you eat and drink, breathe, and had parents. My argument is that in order to explain a contingent thing one cannot appeal indefinitely to other contingent things, for that finally involves us in an infinite regress of caused causes. There must finally be some non-contingent ground for contingency. This is what Catholics mean by God.
Explain why the physical sciences emerged and flourished in the West. They didn't emerge out of a Hindu or Buddhist culture, and they didn't flourish in ancient Greece or Rome. How come?
I''ve not watched the movie, but I've read the book, and I think it was pretty clear there that the Catholic Church was not "the great enemy of science" not even the antagonist of the story, it was the camerlengo alone, a single individual, who could not see a connection between science and religion as a good thing for mankind. In the book they even mention Lameitre as the formulator of the Big Bang theory, and the fictional deceased Pope (among other characters) believed and with good reasons that science and religion can coexist.
But it's not a jump at all. I'm saying that we can't just go back and back through contingent causes if contingency is what we're trying to explain. What I mean by "God" is just this necessary ontological ground.
With you 100% on this one, Father. Between Catholicisim and Science there need be no conflict. Best quote is the line about the fundamentalist approach being in debate with science, but not a Catholic viewpoint.
The Catholic doctrine concerning the image of God hasn't a thing to do with denying evolution. We are in God's image in the measure that we have intellect and will.
The thing is that in the book, it is completely clear that the church is NOT against progress and science! Only the Camerlengo was, but in an extremely radical way. The old pope, father of the Camerlengo, even aimed to give CERN financial support! And cardinal Mortati is also described as a progressive man.
If you think that we're both just making arbitrary assertions, you haven't grasped the nettle fo the argument I'm making. And friend, how, pray tell, would our physics and mathematics explain the world unless there were something objective to which these sciences correspond? How do you explain the fact that a man-made, conventional system such as mathematics actually describes the structure of reality at the deepest level. That is not "just the case;" that is a stunning correspondance.
What I'm talking about here doesn't have a thing to do with the so-called ontological argument. I just meant that God contains within himself the fullness of perfection.
But you're sliding past the really interesting point. The conditions that make that 1:1 correspondance possible are indeed written into the intelligibile structure of being. That things like coins act in remarkably predictable ways when they are flipped in the air is a function of very definite ontological structures.
Hume's anti-watchmaker argument hasn't a thing to do with what I'm talking about. He was going after design in the cosmos; I'm pointing to something much more basic, namely, universal intelligibility. That's why I stated my questison in terms of the laws of nature and not design in the universe. The universe in its totality is marked by staggeringly complex mathematical structure. I say that that cries out for an explanation and you say it's just dumbly there.
No. I'm rejecting the possibility of an infinitely extended causal series, not infinity as such. To say that contingency is explained through an indefinite appeal to other contingent things is, finally, no explanation at all.
If he means that all religion, in its human element, is fallen, then I agree with him. If he implies that religion is nothing but a human invention and hence essentially fraudulent, then I disagree with him.
@BlizBob The "Vatican" does not espouse any particular scientific view of the world. The Church is concerned with theology, metaphysics,morality, and spirituality. It leaves the determination of the details of astrophysics to the experts.
Both da Vinci code and angels and demons are full of complete fiction, but the thought that went into both books by dan brown to link all the parts together is just fascinating
@sciencelives2000 That's for the civil authorities to adjudicate. My job is to point out the moral status of certain acts, not to determine the punishment for them.
@adstanra Well friend, it doesn't matter particularly who first "discovered" the intelligibility of the world. What's important (and quite interesting) is the assertion that a mind must stand behind that intelligibility. With this idea firmly established, Christians gave rise to the physical sciences in the West. Whatever conflict there might have been between science and religion is far less important than this deep congruence--recognized by all of the great founders of the modern sciences.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17How precious tob me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.
Read any biography of Galileo and you'll see that it's not what happened. Just like the Boltzmann case (as much important for science than the G case), the Semmelweis case, the Wegener case and many, many others, the Galileo case was one in such one scientist faced de opposition of the status quo, which in his time happened to be represented by the church. In the other cases, the status quo was represented by other people, including the scientific community itself. In every case, the scientist ended up ostracized. Galileo was not an enemy of the church, but a very influential member. In fact, one of his best friends and supporter was Maffeo Barberini who ended up being elected pope Urban VII in 1623.
@Fr. Robert Barron: Can you please make a commentary on the Galileo Affair. I lifted this article from a secular source so maybe you can articulate it into one of your videos. As an amateur astronomer who is also a devout Catholic convert, I would be honored if you can join us in shedding the Truth on this issue. I will be posting the relevant parts here --- The idea that Galileo was persecuted by the Church for his teachings is bogus. Quite apart from the fact that he was overturning several thousand years of research, the theory he proposed was eighty years old by the time of the trial. Both Galileo and Copernicus, the guy who proposed the theory, were Catholics, and Copernicus was a priest. So why was Galileo actually put on trial? The story is hard to pin down exactly but the major reason is that he got on the backs of the scientific community and was a destructive critique to the pope, a former supporter of his. Galileo was basically told that his theory didn't have enough proof for him to go round saying it was fact and told him to stop teaching it. Galileo would later publish another scientific book without incident. Galileo was very difficult as a personality. He has been suspected to have suffered from a mild form of Autism. It is safe to say that he was in serious, often very personal dispute, with the contemporary scientific figures. This being the Renaissance and most institutions of learning in Europe (and many leading scientific figures involved in disputes with Galileo) associated with the Catholic Church, the Church became involved in these disputes. "Galileo was famously tried before a court for an issue regarding the veracity of heliocentrism" is about as neutral as the pop cultural understanding of the actual sequence of events is likely to get; most people seem to think Galileo was declared a heretic. Let's start with the context: A monk named Nicolaus Copernicus (for whom is named "The Copernican Revolution") famously brought heliocentrism into vogue. He wrote a long text on the subject, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, but put it into the care of a Protestant friend to be published after his death (the book, which contains an excellent account of heliocentricity, was dedicated to Pope Paul III). The friend, a Lutheran clergyman named Andreas Osiander, anticipated the massive ramifications this theory had for Protestant scriptural interpretation (Martin Luther seemed to condemn the new theorynote Luther calling Copernicus an "upstart astrologer" probably didn't help.) and, the likelihood that it might be condemned; to counter this, Osiander prefaced the book with the claim that the descriptions within were theoretical only, and were only employed to simplify computations... something Copernicus never intended. Another proponent of heliocentrism was Johannes Kepler, a Protestant who expounded on Copernicus' work; Kepler, who did not couch his developments, faced opposition from fellow Protestants, but found a welcome reception from a number of Jesuits notable for scientific achievement. It is commonly assumed that Galileo proved heliocentrism - he didn't. He merely made the biggest noise about it. He started by writing a letter in response to the Duchess of Tuscany saying, in effect, "Well, I wouldn't put too fine a point on it, but yes, the evidence does suggest that, scientifically speaking, the Church and Aristotle really do have the whole structure of the Universe wrong." Notice all the hedging: Galileo was convinced, but knew he didn't have definitive, incontrovertible proof. Proponents of heliocentrism were unable to counter the strongest argument against it, which had been proposed by Aristotle himself-if heliocentrism were true, there should be observable parallax shifts in the position of the stars as the Earth moved. Now, there are observable parallax shifts, but the technology to demonstrate that hadn't been developed until after Galileo's death. Until that point, the evidence suggested that the stars' positions were fixed relative to the Earth, and thus, only the Sun, Moon, and other planets were moving; Copernicus' (correct) explanation that the stars were too far away to exhibit visible parallax was not accepted, even by non-geocentrists like Tycho Brahe. However, being a bullheaded and rather stubborn sort of fellow, he later doubled down on heliocentrism, and that got him in trouble. Note also that the Church was in the process of figuring out how to reconcile heliocentrism with their theological teachings, just in case something (e.g. the eventually-forthcoming proof of Copernicus' theory that the stars are really far away) made it impossible to argue against heliocentrism on the facts. They'd done this kind of dancing before, and to quote James Burke, explaining away a heliocentric universe would be a "mere bagatelle"-in other words, heliocentrism wasn't a serious threat to orthodoxy. They had gotten pretty far, but weren't quite ready, and thus got annoyed when Galileo started yelling about it. When the aforementioned letter to the Duchess of Tuscany was first shown to a Churchman, the Church's message to Galileo was, in effect, "Would you quiet down a bit? This business is undermining Church authority. It's not that we think you're wrong; it's that you can't tell the people about this right away. Give us time to feed it to them slowly." Unfortunately for Galileo, as we said above, he doubled down on heliocentrism and argued against the literal interpretations of the Bible in the non-theological arena, as it contains passages that explicitly contradicted heliocentrism (the most quoted being the one where Joshua commands the Sun and Moon to stand still over Canaan). Taking to the debate floor, he insisted that the Bible and nature must agree as both proceeded from the same creator, and began insisting Scripture be reinterpreted to suit the theory he couldn't quite prove. Just to make it worse, as Europe was in the midst of the Catholic-Protestant Thirty Years War (technically though, the Thirty-Year war was not really religious in nature as much as people trying to polarize their factions from one another using religion as a banner, but it was just about a bunch of people who are feeding the flames of war to keep the money rolling), everyone was a bit touchy about religious doctrine, and Galileo's abrasive personality and previous clashes with Jesuit scientists really weren't helping his cause. In 1616, he appeared before Pope Paul V; the pope, weary of controversy, turned things over to the Holy Office, which condemned the theory. Later, Galileo made a request of a friend - Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit; he was granted a certificate that allowed him not to hold or defend heliocentrism, but to conjecture it. Later, he met with another pope (and a personal friend), Urban VIII, in 1623; he was granted permission to write on the subject, but was cautioned not to advocate it, instead presenting the arguments for or against it. Not happening. What Galileo actually wrote (in the form of a dialogue) was clearly in favor of heliocentrism, and the arguments against it - including the ones offered by his friend the pope - were placed in the mouth of the character named "Simplicio" (i.e. "Simpleton"), who was a debater of obviously inferior intelligence and status than the one arguing heliocentrism. The Vatican assigned two Jesuits, Christoph Scheiner and Orazio Grassi, to look into Galileo's science. Both had solid credentials as astronomers. However, Galileo had managed to alienate both of them. Schiener was one of the first astronomers to observe sunspots and was, as far as he knew, the first to describe them in a scientific paper (in fact, the first paper on sunspots was published the previous year by David Fabricius, but his paper was unknown outside of Germany.) Galileo attempted to grab the glory of having first seen sunspots from Scheiner, and compounded this by plagiarizing Scheiner in his own paper. Grassi and Galileo disagreed on the nature of comets. What made things interesting was that Grassi was right and Galileo was wrong. Grassi had observed a comet over a period of time, and had noticed that the moon moved faster in the sky than the comet did; Grassi correctly assumed that the comet was further from the Earth than the moon was. Galileo believed that they were optical illusions in the atmosphere. Galileo wrote an essay, Il Saggiatore - "The Assayer" - attacking Grassi and his theory. This essay is still taught in Italian schools as a masterpiece of polemical writing. Naturally, having been held up to ridicule, Grassi was no friend to Galileo. Having publicly mocked the Pope, alienating the Jesuits to boot with attacks on two of their astronomers, Galileo's actions resulted in the famous trial. While he eventually recanted his teachings for the time being, he was not [threaten with] tortured; he was actually merely placed under house arrest, at a fine mansion in the countryside belonging to a friend... and given a manservant. Galileo was not explicitly declared a heretic, though he was found to be "vehemently suspect" of it; the testimony from his trial (Galileo was tried before an ordinary tribunal) was brought before a group of ten cardinals. Three of them refused to sign his verdict, but his works were eventually condemned. To keep it short, the Church of Galileo’s day issued a non-infallible disciplinary ruling concerning a scientist who was advocating a new and still-unproved theory and demanding that the Church change its understanding of Scripture to fit his. At the end of the day, the entire fiasco boils down to an overgrown squabble involving a cranky old man with very powerful friends and a bunch of annoyed bigwigs who decided to cut him down to size.
Father Barron its always a pleasure to listen to your insight. "Ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam" "Deus discerne causam meam de gente non sancta; ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me"
How am I downplaying or dismissing the evil things that certain Christians have done (sometimes in the name of the Church) over the centuries? I fully admit them. And I don't think that everything Thomas Aquinas said was right. What I'm reacting to is the mindless, knee-jerk anti-Christianity that one sees in so much of the academy today, especially around the issue of science.
Catholic "guilt" = nice profit for Dan Brown. These books are popular especially because formerly practicing Catholics find refuge, if not justification for their decision not to be practicing or even exploring their Catholic faith any longer. Just as we do with cable news and polarizing social media news outlets, many people are searching for validation, and these DaVinci Code books do just that for many who suddenly feel better for leaving the Church because of the "history" presented.
+Dave Reddy -- and yet at the same time, these books have gotten evangelical and nondenominational Christians interested in researching the roots of their faith, leading them straight into Catholicism as the undeniable Church established by Christ.
@jormorcastan Well I assume you know why this is the case. The churches do all sorts of things--from education to feeding the hungry, to caring for the sick--that the state would have to do otherwise. Exempting churches from taxation, therefore, is not some kind of perk; it's strict justice.
Oh lighten up! I'm not blaming secularism for everything. Where do you see evidence of that? I'm reacting to the deeply prejudiced view, on display everywhere on these forums, that religion and science are enemies and that Catholicism has stood in the way of progress.
But one shouldn't be "comforable" with uncertainty if some measure of certainty can be had. I've offered a metaphysical argument for a non-contingent ground, and I've shown (in other comments) why it can't be material. Show me precisely where these arguments fail.
Hey unbeguiled, the only reason that you have read Plato, Homer, Aeschylus, Caesar, Cicero, Ptolemy, Boethius, or any other classical author is that some patient Christian monk copied down their texts. As Chesterton said, the only real light during the dark ages was the church!
Again, you get surprisingly uncurious just when the questions get interesting! If you came across the startling order of a Saturn rocket, you would, I imagine, wonder who or what caused it. And please don't pull the "where did God come from" trick! God is that reality which exists through the power of his own essence. God is the intelligence which explains the intelligibility.
Because it can't be! That whose very nature it is to be must be infinite and perfect in being. Anything else is a kind of being or a determinate type of existent. A fluctuating vacuum (whatever that is) is altogether limited, potential, and contingent and hence could never qualify as the ground of existence. I'm continuing this conversation because I sense that you are not far from the kingdom of God!
And that's precisely why it can't be the non-contingent ground of contingency! Precisely as "a roiling sea of pure potentiality" it needs to be explained.
Well, have patience! Trust me when I tell you that the non-contingent ground of contingency is what Catholic theology and philosophy mean by God. In time, after further logical investigation, you will see why this reality possesses the classical divine attributes of perfection, infinity, simplicity, intelligence, and will.
You've misunderstood me. I'm saying that your kind of proposal--that contingent things just are--is incoherent, logically repugnant. We can therefore know that there must be a non-contingent ground for contingency. And this is what Catholic theology calls God.
4Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. 5You hem me in-behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. 6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. 7Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
An infinite regress doesn't explain anything. We have to come finally to some reality whose intelligence grounds intelligibility, just as we must conclude, finally, to some reality whose very nature is to exist. This intelligent, non-contingent ultimate cause is what Catholic theology calls "God."
I highly recommend reading Rodney Stark's works, particularly "Bearing False Witness" as it covers the multitude of anti-Catholic rhetoric that continues to plague western history and he does a fine job in debunking nearly all of it. Well actually yeah pretty much all of it.
@UnBeguiled Thanks for taking the time to post all these intelligent and rational responses. You seem to have more spare time than me to do so these days ;-) I went to read on the quantum vacuum and it's very interesting indeed. But as you say, we still have no way to figure out if that would be our "#2" explanation so I am still comfortable with saying "I don't know where ALL contingent things come from".
Friend, I'm not just making an assertion; I'm making an argument. An infinite series of contingent causes doesn't finally answer the question of why contingent things exist. That's why we must affirm the existence of a non-contingent ground.
"please tell me how "accepting what feels right" is anywhere in the ball park of the argument that I have laid out over and over." There are two things that you "laid out over and over" and that you believe without proof, the second depending on the first, but they can be refuted separately so even if we don't agree on the first we can still discuss the second, we are not stuck.
I am 70 years old. When I was a kid the word "secular" did not connote anything "bad" to me. I had the impression that the secular had its place as did religion. Over the years the meaning changed. Did I misunderstand then, or has there really been a change in thinking -- in meaning? (I was rasied a Methodist.)
+de0den -- It depends on the context. A secular priest is a diocesan priest who works in the world. Separating the two isn't possible -- there will always be overlaps because people always carry their beliefs into the world somehow. But secularists (a.k.a. secular humanists, a.k.a. atheists) want to eliminate all religious influence on the world, so they insist that the secular has its place and religion belongs behind closed doors, not to be taken into the public sphere....as in "Don't shove your morals down my throat," and "You can't vote morality," for example. That was an idea that was popular when you were a kid, and was overpowering when I was a kid some 20 years later, so I thought about it a lot, and came to the conclusion that I would tell secularists, "Ok. You first. Stop voting for what you believe in. Stop shoving your morals down other people's throats." Because you can't separate beliefs from the person. Demanding the complete separation of Church and State in such a way that the Church (through its members) has no voice in secular matters is simply anti-democratic. And you can't say, "I don't believe in this personally for myself, but I can't tell others what to do, so I'll vote for a candidate who supports funding abortion." When you do that, you become morally complicit in grave sin. All authority comes from God, so if your leader inherits the position, then you are obligated to obey that leader as God up to the point of what you know to be God's natural law (e.g. not sacrificing to the gods of the leader, or not praying at the mosque even if it's required by civil law). If you are born into a society where people have a voice in choosing their leaders, then you are obligated to participate in the process -- it's a sin not to vote because how we vote determines the course of the country and the people's well-being. In that sense, we are to be involved in secular life, regardless of the offense secularists may feel regarding our right to vote.
> In a few words it states that in an ISOLATED SYSTEM , Entropy > shall tend to increse over time until a certain maximum Specifically define entropy as it relates to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
I never said it was wrong, nor that the Church is against it. What I meant is that the Church message focuses on the spiritual life. This does not mean we cannot improve our physical existence as well.
Father, what about the index of forbiden books. It could sugest lack of willingness to pursue truth and to stop others thinking otherwise from speaking.
OK, I believe in God, and the idea of the universe being rational and thought into existence makes sense to me intuitively. But how would you respond to somebody who would say, well then the mind of God is also rational, so should we conclude that God's mind was thought into existence?
I saw the movie last weekend and it was "entertaining" but VOID of any meaning. Thank you Father Barron for showing "truth". You are doing the Lord's work, thank you, and keep your posting coming.
I loved the book. it was a great thrill to read. And I liked the way the Bishops who were killed were in a way presented as martyrs of the faith which is how I think it would have been seen if these events truly took place. I don't mind watching this spoiler and not seeing the movie since I know what happens anyway.
You gave several great examples of scientists that were deep Catholics but if there is such harmony between the two ideologies, why did the Church persecute Galileo? After all, his findings were justified so what motivated the Church to persecute him?
I wonder if Dan Brown would ever even bother writing something like this about the Temple Institute and Mount Moriah of Jerusalem or the Ka'aba of Mecca? Perhaps even the Taj Mahal? Where does this strange 'what if we destroyed this?' genre end?
Well, some of the most virulent anti-Catholics have been Christians. And your distinction between entertainment and ideology is way too sharp. Lots of propagandists have announced their point of view by means of "entertaining" stories and plays.
There was a time in my life where I looked to science for answers that I couldn't find in the church. It was in my reading and learning about astrophysics is when I realized that science and religion are connected. Science does far more to prove the existence of God than it does to disprove his existence. But I had no idea it was a priest that developed the Big Bang Theory! That's amazing!
I agree, it is quite sad that some people swallow everything they see on TV or movies or read on the internet. Unfortunately many are not educated to be critical of the information they receive.
Lots of love to you, my wonderful sheppard, I follow your tapes and am so proud of having you to explain so patiently everything! I learn so many things with you, but most of all, to be patient with these people fed only by propaganda. God bless you. I pray that you would be the next pope. But maybe you would be less free! I love you.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
Actually, I did read the book. I found it even more tendentious and simplistic than the movie. Please don't think that what Dan Brown means by "faith" is the real thing.
Hi, I know that I'm 7 years late to the debate but I just discovered the Robert Langdon books and I really enjoy them as mystery thrillers.
I'm not a religious person and even though I would never call myself an atheist, I am fundamentally opposed to the idea of a God described in any of religious scripts throughout human history. I sometimes get very materialistic in my views but quickly get reminded of how obviously inadequate materialism is.
I do enjoy religious themes and discusions mainly because of the ideological questions but Dan Brown's books actually got me interested in the cultural aspect of Religion.
The point that I was trying to make before digressing was:
The books, especially Angels and Demons really go out of their way to shed some light on really important scientific discoveries that were made by either the Catholic church or some of it's members. By the end of the book I didn't get the feeling that the church ended up looking like the bad guy. I actually felt that both the church and the materialistic scientists got a healthy dose of humbling, which I consider a good thing.
Anyway, I will be subscribing to your channel.
I would really like to hear your opinion on the Lucifer show as it is one of the most interesting depictions of the devil and angels that I have ever seen without taking any jabs at the Catholic church.
I understand that expecting that you watch the whole TV show is kind of a stretch but I still hope.
@@VidVrbanovic what I've found is the catholic understanding of God is actually far more in line with not only what makes sense but also so much easier to approach. Not to say there isnt any fear of God or that scripture is completely metaphorical but it for sure takes a much more level headed and earthly look at it. But I'm glad you enjoyed the book
I haven't read the book Father but I think you got the movie wrong. In the movie, the late Pope was very welcoming with the idea of science and by extent, the church, but only it is the camerlengo that wants to defy science.
An old gent in my parish told how his older sister was at a Catholic school in the 1940s, and when she said she wanted to go to university she would have to ask the bishop's permission.
The Bishop consented, but the parish priest was opposed to it. He said she'd get ideas and lose her faith. In other words, he thought she'd start thinking for herself
Come on, friend, that's way too simplistic. Among the most important of the early astronomers and cosmologists were Jesuits at the Vatican, and many of them were friends and colleagues of Galileo. The story of Galileo is tragic and complex, and it doesn't fit into easy categories of "reasonable science" vs. "irrational faith."
Don't worry Father Barron, Gallileo's case is oftenly misunderstood, at this point if people actually cared for him, they would have done their homework and know that Gallileo was not judged, nor killed by the catholic church for his science research and such, if i recall correctly, Gallileo died with sacrament and blessing of the pope in his house of Florentia.
The thing is that he was warned to be careful on the whole research he was going as there were many parts of it that could be misleading not only doctrinal but also acording to scientific knowlege of the time, and that for more passionate that he was on the affair he should not compete or undermind the church's researches as well.
Sam McPhail I have an idea: rather than ask everyone to go do research on an argument against their position, actually make an argument yourself. Then we'd have something to respond to...
Okay, I thought it was worth one more try. I will continue to pray for you (and I don't mean that in a patronizing way). I really do think that your fascination with my videos signals that you are, at some deep level, dissatisfied with your materialist view of the world. Peace!
Great piece, Father! I've realized recently that it's only the protestant churches, particularly the evangelicals that think of science and religion as adversaries. I love that the Catholic church embraces science, education, intelligence and discovery.
I fully agree with what you are saying Father Barron about the movie. But let me give you a different perspective. Had I been raised Catholic I would have likely been offended by the DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons books and movie. But as someone raised Protestant, mostly in non denominational, evangelical churches, I can honestly say that it was my reading of the Da Vinci Code back in 2003 that brought me on the long and windy road that ended at the doors of the Catholic church. God works in mysterious ways, indeed! It was only when I read the book that I started digging into the history of the Bible, trying to separate Dan Brown's fiction from fact in the book ( as the book was full of both fact and fiction, I honestly didn't know which was which) My evangelical faith did not hold up under my findings. "You mean there were other manuscripts? The bible was written in the 3rd century? There were parts of the Bible left out? There are contradictions in the Bible? My faith as an evangelical came crumbling.
My faith as a Catholic would have been fine. But to this day I will credit my reading of that book to where my faith is today. My husband was raised even more evangelical than me. He's in his 40s and still struggling with the faith but for him, another huge step in his faith toward the Catholic church was his love of both movies, DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons. The line at the end of the movie Angels and Demons gets him. "I don't believe God led me here." and the priest's response, "Of course He did." So simple but the scene is powerful. So not to defend Dan Brown. I don't believe his intentions to the Church were good intentions. But to put it simply, something good came of something not so good with regards to restoring our faith and moving us to the Catholic Church.
God uses even contrary things to lead us to Himself.
Summerafternoon .... so plot twist da Vinci code is a catholic propaganda daaaam . Glad that you found your way in life have a nice day ! :)
I've read a few of Dan Brown's novels (ex. Angels and Demons, Da Vinci Code, Deception Point, and Digital Fortress) and could definitely sense the author's dislike/suspicion of the Catholic Church. I also figured out who is the villain in each novel before the halfway point: they're usually the assistants of a powerful figure or a character that was introduced later into the novel. After two novels, I already saw a fairly predictable plot pattern.
Personally, I find Arturo Perez-Reverte's novels more compelling and the running theme of human imperfection and sin more realistic. Both authors bring up similar theological themes/questions in their novels, however Perez-Reverte's characters and plots are more creative/realistic and the questions evoked are much deeper than Dan Brown's novels.
I, too, also used the theological questions that came up in these fictional books as starting points to learn more about my own Catholic faith. It led me to seeking answers and truth which I still find in my Catholic faith.
You know, I've really tried to engage your questions. I don't particularly appreciate being compared to a robot.
There’s always negative critics, skeptics & haters. I assume that Dan Brown was using Christianity in fictional stories.
Was any of the Dan Brown movies and/or books offensive to us Catholics? Was it in any blasphemous? I know this is an old video but I just want to know.
@PWJ57 I've never denied that certain churchmen, even of a very high rank, got this one wrong. But given the massive amount of counter-evidence, I've argued that it's extremely unfair to say simply that "the church" has always been opposed to science. And here's what's really important: there is no question that today the Church is deeply interested in a creative dialogue with the sciences.
I actually took a class on Galileo and we were only allowed to study the evidence that was available to the men of the era, meaning we could not use Newtonian physics. Based on the evidence presented, I cam to the conclusion that Galileo's model was compelling, but not demonstrably true. It would not be until the discovery of the Law of Gravity that the heliocentric model would be definitively proven. I then found out at the end of the term that my approach to Galileo was similar to the Church's. That's not to say that Church was as gentle as I was, but we both came to the conclusion that Galileo had a good hypothesis, but nothing that was definitive. Galileo demanded that the Church either accept it as truth or reject it.
Whoever taught that class is awesome.
Creation and evolution are fundamentally different realities. The second describes the means by which living organisms develop within nature; the first describes the relationship between contingent realities and their non-contingent ground. Because they are so different, they are utterly compatible.
@sciencelives2000 Well so what?! "Nature" doesn't "kill" anyone. Killing is an act of the will. What happens through nature is irrelevant to the discussion of morality.
Not finding a first cause to contingency is tantamount to saying you have no way of explaining how contingent things actually exist. It is to lock you in stance of incoherency. And I don't see how "feelings" have a thing to do with this. It is a claim of logic.
Because in so answering, you haven't explained anything, and the whole enterprise was a search for the explanation of a present anomaly, viz. how could something that doesn't have to exist (a contingent thing) actually exist? I have argued that the only way coherently to explain such a situation is to appeal finally to some reality that exists through its own nature. So I mean, you can say "I don't know," but it doesn't get you anywhere constructive.
@sciencelives2000 Let me see if I have your logic right: since "nature" kills tens of millions of people every year, we should have no laws against murder!
Are apples "compatible" with oranges? God is not a being in the world or one causal agent among many. He doesn't fit into any chain of causality. He is rather the reason why there is anything at all. So let the sciences--which explore the web of contingent causality--go unhindered. Creation names something else altogether.
Okay, I give up.
God bless you.
Very interesting point on science and Christianity! I heard Professor Garland make the same point in one of his Great Courses lectures.
How do you explain universal intelligibility? Where do the laws of nature come from? Why do our mathematical formulas agree so startlingly with the depth structure of reality?
thank you again Bishop Barron! The Catholic Church, despite its perceived flaws, still holds the highest standards of Education, combined with tolerance of any ecumenical movement on earth. Thank you for your patience knowledge and insight while discussing this work of fiction. God hid himself so well from our world that it still requires the simple faith of a child to find him.
Contingent being must be grounded in something non-contingent. All matter is contingent because it is changeable. Hence the non-contingent must be non-material. Your problem, shared by so many others on this forum, is scientific reductionism. Science is a way of knowing certain modes of existence, but not the whole of existence.
Where did they learn their mathematics, their astronomy, their physics, and their logic? They learned them in Christian universities. Copernicus was himself a cleric. It is one-sided in the extreme and deeply misleading to say that "the church" simply opposed them. The Church in a very significant way sponsored them and made them possible. The implacable hostility between religion and science is a modern myth.
Did you watch the video? Copernicus and Galileo were both formed in the context of a Christian culture, Mendel was a priest, Georges Le Maitre was a priest, Pascal and Descartes were devout Catholics,John Polkinghorne, Cambridge particle physicist, is a priest. The Vatican today eagerly sponsors scientific symposia and an observatory. Galileo is one unhappy paragraph in a one chapter of a very long book.
Fr. Barron,
I considered myself a "secularist", but i admit that American "atheists" have made a lot of myths about Catholicism. Most of Americans "Atheists" attempt to ignore the fact that most of European intellectuals and philosophers are Catholic clerics (or trained as clerics), and the Catholic clerics once have done a tremendous job on preserving classic works and translating them into Latin in the Dark Age.
Thank you for your comment, Fr. Barron.
inferno0020 that’s bc the church controlled all of Europe so there was no room for anyone else because they would kill you. The difference between now and then is you can believe what you want, when you are talking about intellectuals in the church, they were only to the extent of what the church allowed, so you have to stop acting like the church was great. They halted hundreds of years of science and progress and have scared the life out of millions of people with their made up beliefs. Gtfo of here
I quite agree. And that is why the Catholic philosophical tradition has consistently denied that God is a "thing," or one being among many. He is ipsum esse, the sheer act of to-be itself.
No friend, you haven't grasped the argument. I'm saying, to state it again, a contingent thing requires an explanation. If we simply keep appealing endlessly to other contingent things, we haven't found our explanation. Therefore, if we are to explain the existence of a contingent thing, we have to come, sooner or later, to that which is not contingent. This is what I mean by God. Now if you can't see the difference between this claim and saying "I don't know," then I give up!
Again, if this process just goes on and on, nothing has been explained. And contingent things are, by definition, things that have to be explained, since they don't carry within themselves the reason for their own existence. I don't know if I can make this any clearer.
What is the material (empirically verifiable) ground for your universal claim that the real is reducible to the material?
A contingent reality is something that does not contain within itself the reason for its own existence. You, for example, are contingent in the measure that you eat and drink, breathe, and had parents. My argument is that in order to explain a contingent thing one cannot appeal indefinitely to other contingent things, for that finally involves us in an infinite regress of caused causes. There must finally be some non-contingent ground for contingency. This is what Catholics mean by God.
Explain why the physical sciences emerged and flourished in the West. They didn't emerge out of a Hindu or Buddhist culture, and they didn't flourish in ancient Greece or Rome. How come?
Have you ever forbidden books or movies to your children?
So what? Lots of Christians are anti-Catholic.
An angel.
I''ve not watched the movie, but I've read the book, and I think it was pretty clear there that the Catholic Church was not "the great enemy of science" not even the antagonist of the story, it was the camerlengo alone, a single individual, who could not see a connection between science and religion as a good thing for mankind. In the book they even mention Lameitre as the formulator of the Big Bang theory, and the fictional deceased Pope (among other characters) believed and with good reasons that science and religion can coexist.
But it's not a jump at all. I'm saying that we can't just go back and back through contingent causes if contingency is what we're trying to explain. What I mean by "God" is just this necessary ontological ground.
Practically every contingent thing has a contingent cause, but that cause cannot be its ultimate cause.
Father if I may ask, what was the moment in your life when you knew God was 100% real, was it through an experience you had or something else?
With you 100% on this one, Father. Between Catholicisim and Science there need be no conflict. Best quote is the line about the fundamentalist approach being in debate with science, but not a Catholic viewpoint.
The Catholic doctrine concerning the image of God hasn't a thing to do with denying evolution. We are in God's image in the measure that we have intellect and will.
The thing is that in the book, it is completely clear that the church is NOT against progress and science! Only the Camerlengo was, but in an extremely radical way. The old pope, father of the Camerlengo, even aimed to give CERN financial support! And cardinal Mortati is also described as a progressive man.
If you think that we're both just making arbitrary assertions, you haven't grasped the nettle fo the argument I'm making. And friend, how, pray tell, would our physics and mathematics explain the world unless there were something objective to which these sciences correspond? How do you explain the fact that a man-made, conventional system such as mathematics actually describes the structure of reality at the deepest level. That is not "just the case;" that is a stunning correspondance.
What I'm talking about here doesn't have a thing to do with the so-called ontological argument. I just meant that God contains within himself the fullness of perfection.
But you're sliding past the really interesting point. The conditions that make that 1:1 correspondance possible are indeed written into the intelligibile structure of being. That things like coins act in remarkably predictable ways when they are flipped in the air is a function of very definite ontological structures.
Yes, that's part of it. To some degree, the Galileo fiasco was the result of personality conflicts.
Hume's anti-watchmaker argument hasn't a thing to do with what I'm talking about. He was going after design in the cosmos; I'm pointing to something much more basic, namely, universal intelligibility. That's why I stated my questison in terms of the laws of nature and not design in the universe. The universe in its totality is marked by staggeringly complex mathematical structure. I say that that cries out for an explanation and you say it's just dumbly there.
But physical reality is eminently changeable and hence contingent. Therefore, the non-contingent ground cannot be material.
No. I'm rejecting the possibility of an infinitely extended causal series, not infinity as such. To say that contingency is explained through an indefinite appeal to other contingent things is, finally, no explanation at all.
If he means that all religion, in its human element, is fallen, then I agree with him. If he implies that religion is nothing but a human invention and hence essentially fraudulent, then I disagree with him.
@BlizBob The "Vatican" does not espouse any particular scientific view of the world. The Church is concerned with theology, metaphysics,morality, and spirituality. It leaves the determination of the details of astrophysics to the experts.
Both da Vinci code and angels and demons are full of complete fiction, but the thought that went into both books by dan brown to link all the parts together is just fascinating
What a brilliant man! Thank you father for your teaching.
@sciencelives2000 That's for the civil authorities to adjudicate. My job is to point out the moral status of certain acts, not to determine the punishment for them.
And so "reality" is not dumbly there; it's intelligibily there. And that points to an intelligence that has thought it into being.
@adstanra Well friend, it doesn't matter particularly who first "discovered" the intelligibility of the world. What's important (and quite interesting) is the assertion that a mind must stand behind that intelligibility. With this idea firmly established, Christians gave rise to the physical sciences in the West. Whatever conflict there might have been between science and religion is far less important than this deep congruence--recognized by all of the great founders of the modern sciences.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17How precious tob me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.
Read any biography of Galileo and you'll see that it's not what happened.
Just like the Boltzmann case (as much important for science than the G case), the Semmelweis case, the Wegener case and many, many others, the Galileo case was one in such one scientist faced de opposition of the status quo, which in his time happened to be represented by the church.
In the other cases, the status quo was represented by other people, including the scientific community itself. In every case, the scientist ended up ostracized.
Galileo was not an enemy of the church, but a very influential member. In fact, one of his best friends and supporter was Maffeo Barberini who ended up being elected pope Urban VII in 1623.
@Fr. Robert Barron: Can you please make a commentary on the Galileo Affair. I lifted this article from a secular source so maybe you can articulate it into one of your videos. As an amateur astronomer who is also a devout Catholic convert, I would be honored if you can join us in shedding the Truth on this issue. I will be posting the relevant parts here
---
The idea that Galileo was persecuted by the Church for his teachings is bogus. Quite apart from the fact that he was overturning several thousand years of research, the theory he proposed was eighty years old by the time of the trial. Both Galileo and Copernicus, the guy who proposed the theory, were Catholics, and Copernicus was a priest. So why was Galileo actually put on trial? The story is hard to pin down exactly but the major reason is that he got on the backs of the scientific community and was a destructive critique to the pope, a former supporter of his. Galileo was basically told that his theory didn't have enough proof for him to go round saying it was fact and told him to stop teaching it. Galileo would later publish another scientific book without incident.
Galileo was very difficult as a personality. He has been suspected to have suffered from a mild form of Autism. It is safe to say that he was in serious, often very personal dispute, with the contemporary scientific figures. This being the Renaissance and most institutions of learning in Europe (and many leading scientific figures involved in disputes with Galileo) associated with the Catholic Church, the Church became involved in these disputes.
"Galileo was famously tried before a court for an issue regarding the veracity of heliocentrism" is about as neutral as the pop cultural understanding of the actual sequence of events is likely to get; most people seem to think Galileo was declared a heretic. Let's start with the context:
A monk named Nicolaus Copernicus (for whom is named "The Copernican Revolution") famously brought heliocentrism into vogue. He wrote a long text on the subject, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, but put it into the care of a Protestant friend to be published after his death (the book, which contains an excellent account of heliocentricity, was dedicated to Pope Paul III). The friend, a Lutheran clergyman named Andreas Osiander, anticipated the massive ramifications this theory had for Protestant scriptural interpretation (Martin Luther seemed to condemn the new theorynote Luther calling Copernicus an "upstart astrologer" probably didn't help.) and, the likelihood that it might be condemned; to counter this, Osiander prefaced the book with the claim that the descriptions within were theoretical only, and were only employed to simplify computations... something Copernicus never intended.
Another proponent of heliocentrism was Johannes Kepler, a Protestant who expounded on Copernicus' work; Kepler, who did not couch his developments, faced opposition from fellow Protestants, but found a welcome reception from a number of Jesuits notable for scientific achievement.
It is commonly assumed that Galileo proved heliocentrism - he didn't. He merely made the biggest noise about it. He started by writing a letter in response to the Duchess of Tuscany saying, in effect, "Well, I wouldn't put too fine a point on it, but yes, the evidence does suggest that, scientifically speaking, the Church and Aristotle really do have the whole structure of the Universe wrong." Notice all the hedging: Galileo was convinced, but knew he didn't have definitive, incontrovertible proof. Proponents of heliocentrism were unable to counter the strongest argument against it, which had been proposed by Aristotle himself-if heliocentrism were true, there should be observable parallax shifts in the position of the stars as the Earth moved. Now, there are observable parallax shifts, but the technology to demonstrate that hadn't been developed until after Galileo's death. Until that point, the evidence suggested that the stars' positions were fixed relative to the Earth, and thus, only the Sun, Moon, and other planets were moving; Copernicus' (correct) explanation that the stars were too far away to exhibit visible parallax was not accepted, even by non-geocentrists like Tycho Brahe. However, being a bullheaded and rather stubborn sort of fellow, he later doubled down on heliocentrism, and that got him in trouble.
Note also that the Church was in the process of figuring out how to reconcile heliocentrism with their theological teachings, just in case something (e.g. the eventually-forthcoming proof of Copernicus' theory that the stars are really far away) made it impossible to argue against heliocentrism on the facts. They'd done this kind of dancing before, and to quote James Burke, explaining away a heliocentric universe would be a "mere bagatelle"-in other words, heliocentrism wasn't a serious threat to orthodoxy. They had gotten pretty far, but weren't quite ready, and thus got annoyed when Galileo started yelling about it. When the aforementioned letter to the Duchess of Tuscany was first shown to a Churchman, the Church's message to Galileo was, in effect, "Would you quiet down a bit? This business is undermining Church authority. It's not that we think you're wrong; it's that you can't tell the people about this right away. Give us time to feed it to them slowly."
Unfortunately for Galileo, as we said above, he doubled down on heliocentrism and argued against the literal interpretations of the Bible in the non-theological arena, as it contains passages that explicitly contradicted heliocentrism (the most quoted being the one where Joshua commands the Sun and Moon to stand still over Canaan). Taking to the debate floor, he insisted that the Bible and nature must agree as both proceeded from the same creator, and began insisting Scripture be reinterpreted to suit the theory he couldn't quite prove. Just to make it worse, as Europe was in the midst of the Catholic-Protestant Thirty Years War (technically though, the Thirty-Year war was not really religious in nature as much as people trying to polarize their factions from one another using religion as a banner, but it was just about a bunch of people who are feeding the flames of war to keep the money rolling), everyone was a bit touchy about religious doctrine, and Galileo's abrasive personality and previous clashes with Jesuit scientists really weren't helping his cause. In 1616, he appeared before Pope Paul V; the pope, weary of controversy, turned things over to the Holy Office, which condemned the theory. Later, Galileo made a request of a friend - Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit; he was granted a certificate that allowed him not to hold or defend heliocentrism, but to conjecture it. Later, he met with another pope (and a personal friend), Urban VIII, in 1623; he was granted permission to write on the subject, but was cautioned not to advocate it, instead presenting the arguments for or against it. Not happening. What Galileo actually wrote (in the form of a dialogue) was clearly in favor of heliocentrism, and the arguments against it - including the ones offered by his friend the pope - were placed in the mouth of the character named "Simplicio" (i.e. "Simpleton"), who was a debater of obviously inferior intelligence and status than the one arguing heliocentrism.
The Vatican assigned two Jesuits, Christoph Scheiner and Orazio Grassi, to look into Galileo's science. Both had solid credentials as astronomers. However, Galileo had managed to alienate both of them. Schiener was one of the first astronomers to observe sunspots and was, as far as he knew, the first to describe them in a scientific paper (in fact, the first paper on sunspots was published the previous year by David Fabricius, but his paper was unknown outside of Germany.) Galileo attempted to grab the glory of having first seen sunspots from Scheiner, and compounded this by plagiarizing Scheiner in his own paper. Grassi and Galileo disagreed on the nature of comets. What made things interesting was that Grassi was right and Galileo was wrong. Grassi had observed a comet over a period of time, and had noticed that the moon moved faster in the sky than the comet did; Grassi correctly assumed that the comet was further from the Earth than the moon was. Galileo believed that they were optical illusions in the atmosphere. Galileo wrote an essay, Il Saggiatore - "The Assayer" - attacking Grassi and his theory. This essay is still taught in Italian schools as a masterpiece of polemical writing. Naturally, having been held up to ridicule, Grassi was no friend to Galileo.
Having publicly mocked the Pope, alienating the Jesuits to boot with attacks on two of their astronomers, Galileo's actions resulted in the famous trial. While he eventually recanted his teachings for the time being, he was not [threaten with] tortured; he was actually merely placed under house arrest, at a fine mansion in the countryside belonging to a friend... and given a manservant. Galileo was not explicitly declared a heretic, though he was found to be "vehemently suspect" of it; the testimony from his trial (Galileo was tried before an ordinary tribunal) was brought before a group of ten cardinals. Three of them refused to sign his verdict, but his works were eventually condemned.
To keep it short, the Church of Galileo’s day issued a non-infallible disciplinary ruling concerning a scientist who was advocating a new and still-unproved theory and demanding that the Church change its understanding of Scripture to fit his. At the end of the day, the entire fiasco boils down to an overgrown squabble involving a cranky old man with very powerful friends and a bunch of annoyed bigwigs who decided to cut him down to size.
+MythicalSun
Cool article brother, is this an exerpt from a text or book?
If so can you direct me where I can get it
Thanks
Source please
Father Barron its always a pleasure to listen to your insight.
"Ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam" "Deus discerne causam meam de gente non sancta; ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me"
The form of humanity; the unconditioned truth; justice; love unto death.
How am I downplaying or dismissing the evil things that certain Christians have done (sometimes in the name of the Church) over the centuries? I fully admit them. And I don't think that everything Thomas Aquinas said was right. What I'm reacting to is the mindless, knee-jerk anti-Christianity that one sees in so much of the academy today, especially around the issue of science.
Catholic "guilt" = nice profit for Dan Brown. These books are popular especially because formerly practicing Catholics find refuge, if not justification for their decision not to be practicing or even exploring their Catholic faith any longer. Just as we do with cable news and polarizing social media news outlets, many people are searching for validation, and these DaVinci Code books do just that for many who suddenly feel better for leaving the Church because of the "history" presented.
+Dave Reddy -- and yet at the same time, these books have gotten evangelical and nondenominational Christians interested in researching the roots of their faith, leading them straight into Catholicism as the undeniable Church established by Christ.
@jormorcastan Well I assume you know why this is the case. The churches do all sorts of things--from education to feeding the hungry, to caring for the sick--that the state would have to do otherwise. Exempting churches from taxation, therefore, is not some kind of perk; it's strict justice.
Oh lighten up! I'm not blaming secularism for everything. Where do you see evidence of that? I'm reacting to the deeply prejudiced view, on display everywhere on these forums, that religion and science are enemies and that Catholicism has stood in the way of progress.
But one shouldn't be "comforable" with uncertainty if some measure of certainty can be had. I've offered a metaphysical argument for a non-contingent ground, and I've shown (in other comments) why it can't be material. Show me precisely where these arguments fail.
Bishop Barron is a national treasure
Hey unbeguiled, the only reason that you have read Plato, Homer, Aeschylus, Caesar, Cicero, Ptolemy, Boethius, or any other classical author is that some patient Christian monk copied down their texts. As Chesterton said, the only real light during the dark ages was the church!
Oh sure!
Again, you get surprisingly uncurious just when the questions get interesting! If you came across the startling order of a Saturn rocket, you would, I imagine, wonder who or what caused it. And please don't pull the "where did God come from" trick! God is that reality which exists through the power of his own essence. God is the intelligence which explains the intelligibility.
Because it can't be! That whose very nature it is to be must be infinite and perfect in being. Anything else is a kind of being or a determinate type of existent. A fluctuating vacuum (whatever that is) is altogether limited, potential, and contingent and hence could never qualify as the ground of existence. I'm continuing this conversation because I sense that you are not far from the kingdom of God!
And that's precisely why it can't be the non-contingent ground of contingency! Precisely as "a roiling sea of pure potentiality" it needs to be explained.
Wasn't the whole morale at the end of the movie that faith and science should be more intertwined?
Call it what you want. I'm just looking for explanations. If that's a bad instinct, then all of philosophy and all of science fall.
Well, have patience! Trust me when I tell you that the non-contingent ground of contingency is what Catholic theology and philosophy mean by God. In time, after further logical investigation, you will see why this reality possesses the classical divine attributes of perfection, infinity, simplicity, intelligence, and will.
You've misunderstood me. I'm saying that your kind of proposal--that contingent things just are--is incoherent, logically repugnant. We can therefore know that there must be a non-contingent ground for contingency. And this is what Catholic theology calls God.
4Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O Lord.
5You hem me in-behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
@ccheng21 Well, lasts time I checked, the chuch wasn't defending those things; it was against them!
An infinite regress doesn't explain anything. We have to come finally to some reality whose intelligence grounds intelligibility, just as we must conclude, finally, to some reality whose very nature is to exist. This intelligent, non-contingent ultimate cause is what Catholic theology calls "God."
@wordonfirevideo Why did I discover this just now? I am learning so much from you. Thank you!
The fact that the church looks into this is very interesting
@JeffersonDinedAlone So Hitler's murder of six million is not really wrong in itself; it's just a subjective hang-up that some people have.
I highly recommend reading Rodney Stark's works, particularly "Bearing False Witness" as it covers the multitude of anti-Catholic rhetoric that continues to plague western history and he does a fine job in debunking nearly all of it. Well actually yeah pretty much all of it.
I'm working on that book right now! It's incredible
@UnBeguiled
Thanks for taking the time to post all these intelligent and rational responses. You seem to have more spare time than me to do so these days ;-)
I went to read on the quantum vacuum and it's very interesting indeed. But as you say, we still have no way to figure out if that would be our "#2" explanation so I am still comfortable with saying "I don't know where ALL contingent things come from".
Friend, I'm not just making an assertion; I'm making an argument. An infinite series of contingent causes doesn't finally answer the question of why contingent things exist. That's why we must affirm the existence of a non-contingent ground.
"please tell me how "accepting what feels right" is anywhere in the ball park of the argument that I have laid out over and over."
There are two things that you "laid out over and over" and that you believe without proof, the second depending on the first, but they can be refuted separately so even if we don't agree on the first we can still discuss the second, we are not stuck.
Well, you missed my point about the coins, but I will continue to pray for you.
I am 70 years old. When I was a kid the word "secular" did not connote anything "bad" to me. I had the impression that the secular had its place as did religion. Over the years the meaning changed. Did I misunderstand then, or has there really been a change in thinking -- in meaning? (I was rasied a Methodist.)
+de0den -- It depends on the context. A secular priest is a diocesan priest who works in the world. Separating the two isn't possible -- there will always be overlaps because people always carry their beliefs into the world somehow. But secularists (a.k.a. secular humanists, a.k.a. atheists) want to eliminate all religious influence on the world, so they insist that the secular has its place and religion belongs behind closed doors, not to be taken into the public sphere....as in "Don't shove your morals down my throat," and "You can't vote morality," for example. That was an idea that was popular when you were a kid, and was overpowering when I was a kid some 20 years later, so I thought about it a lot, and came to the conclusion that I would tell secularists, "Ok. You first. Stop voting for what you believe in. Stop shoving your morals down other people's throats." Because you can't separate beliefs from the person. Demanding the complete separation of Church and State in such a way that the Church (through its members) has no voice in secular matters is simply anti-democratic. And you can't say, "I don't believe in this personally for myself, but I can't tell others what to do, so I'll vote for a candidate who supports funding abortion." When you do that, you become morally complicit in grave sin. All authority comes from God, so if your leader inherits the position, then you are obligated to obey that leader as God up to the point of what you know to be God's natural law (e.g. not sacrificing to the gods of the leader, or not praying at the mosque even if it's required by civil law). If you are born into a society where people have a voice in choosing their leaders, then you are obligated to participate in the process -- it's a sin not to vote because how we vote determines the course of the country and the people's well-being. In that sense, we are to be involved in secular life, regardless of the offense secularists may feel regarding our right to vote.
> In a few words it states that in an ISOLATED SYSTEM , Entropy
> shall tend to increse over time until a certain maximum
Specifically define entropy as it relates to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
I never said it was wrong, nor that the Church is against it.
What I meant is that the Church message focuses on the spiritual life.
This does not mean we cannot improve our physical existence as well.
Father, what about the index of forbiden books. It could sugest lack of willingness to pursue truth and to stop others thinking otherwise from speaking.
OK, I believe in God, and the idea of the universe being rational and thought into existence makes sense to me intuitively. But how would you respond to somebody who would say, well then the mind of God is also rational, so should we conclude that God's mind was thought into existence?
I saw the movie last weekend and it was "entertaining" but VOID of any meaning. Thank you Father Barron for showing "truth". You are doing the Lord's work, thank you, and keep your posting coming.
That's why "I don't know" is just as valid as "I know it's finite but I don't know why and can't describe the first cause".
Can someone give me information about "Angels and Demons" statue? Cannot find anything anywhere on internet.
I loved the book. it was a great thrill to read. And I liked the way the Bishops who were killed were in a way presented as martyrs of the faith which is how I think it would have been seen if these events truly took place. I don't mind watching this spoiler and not seeing the movie since I know what happens anyway.
You gave several great examples of scientists that were deep Catholics but if there is such harmony between the two ideologies, why did the Church persecute Galileo? After all, his findings were justified so what motivated the Church to persecute him?
Can someone give me information about statue in Rome of "Angel and Demon in one body"? Cannot find anything anywhere on internet.
I wonder if Dan Brown would ever even bother writing something like this about the Temple Institute and Mount Moriah of Jerusalem or the Ka'aba of Mecca? Perhaps even the Taj Mahal? Where does this strange 'what if we destroyed this?' genre end?
Well, some of the most virulent anti-Catholics have been Christians. And your distinction between entertainment and ideology is way too sharp. Lots of propagandists have announced their point of view by means of "entertaining" stories and plays.
There was a time in my life where I looked to science for answers that I couldn't find in the church. It was in my reading and learning about astrophysics is when I realized that science and religion are connected. Science does far more to prove the existence of God than it does to disprove his existence. But I had no idea it was a priest that developed the Big Bang Theory! That's amazing!
I agree, it is quite sad that some people swallow everything they see on TV or movies or read on the internet.
Unfortunately many are not educated to be critical of the information they receive.
Take a good look at the trailer for this movie and tell me that Ron Howard doesn't have an anti-Catholic message.
Excellent video Padre. Keep it going!!
Hmmm... Then maybe this intuition of yours is wrong!
Lots of love to you, my wonderful sheppard, I follow your tapes and am so proud of having you to explain so patiently everything! I learn so many things with you, but most of all, to be patient with these people fed only by propaganda. God bless you.
I pray that you would be the next pope. But maybe you would be less free! I love you.