Transcript

Do you remember when we were told to trust the science during the COVID-19 pandemic?

I do, and now I find that many Christians are skeptical, if not downright hostile, to the findings of modern science given how proponents of science acted during the pandemic in dishonest ways.

So, in today's episode, I want to talk about how Christians should approach modern science and that we should avoid two extreme positions on the issue.

So, the first extreme is believing anything a scientist says you should believe.

Now, this is embodied in Anthony Fauci, who served as the chief medical advisor to the president during the pandemic.

Fauci had the audacity to even consider himself the science.

But they're really criticizing science because I represent science.

Fauci and his partners at the CDC unleashed many draconian restrictions during the pandemic that we now know caused more harm than good.

It's why some writers are now asking for a COVID amnesty.

They want us to say, Oh, no biggie, to the businesses, schoolchildren's futures, and even lives that these unnecessary policies ruined.

During the pandemic, I practiced civil disobedience because I knew many of these so-called scientifically backed recommendations were stupid.

For example, I took my children to closed public parks because kids were not at serious risk from COVID and playing outdoors was one'the safest things that you could do.

Someone even called the police on my family while we were at a park, and I asked the officers who responded why I wasn't allowed to take my children to the park, but thousands of people were, at that time, allowed to be in downtown San Diego rioting after the death of George Floyd.

The police officers said they didn't have a good answer, and they told me to have a nice day.

Fauci even admits that they just made up the six-foot social distancing rule without any scientific support at all.

He says the rule just sort of appeared.

When I made my explanation of what it was, I was saying that there was no trial that looked at ten versus six versus three versus not even worrying about it at all.

And it's not just the pandemic.

In 2015, a Washington Post writer paraded around a single study which downplayed the importance of time that mothers spend with their children.

This led to articles with stupid titles like, It Doesn't Matter How Much Time Parents Spend With Their Kids, but this study was totally flawed.

Justin Wolfers in The New York Times noted that, quote, This non-finding largely reflects the failure of the authors to accurately measure parental input.

In particular, the study does not measure how much time parents typically spend with their children.

Instead, it measures how much time each parent spends with children on only two particular days, one a weekday and the other a weekend day.

So, the study was completely flawed.

It did not prove what it said that it proved.

I remember reading one author who said that white-collar liberals were happy to promote such a flawed study because it took away some of the guilt that they had over having jobs that often took away from quality time with their own children.

And, of course, this single contradicts the massive amount of studies that we do have which say things like the more time parents spend with their children, the higher their children's wellbeing will be.

So, that's one extreme, believing anything a single scientist like Fauci or a single study says.

And it's easy to have outrage at bad science that leads you to the other extreme, which rejects science altogether.

But this is like saying a few cases of bad religion means you're gonna quit religion entirely, and we can see this mistaken extreme in a July Candace Owens podcast episode where she said that she was leaving the pagan faith of science.

Owens later clarified her view when she appeared on Don Lemon's podcast.

This is a clip from one of your shows.

It was just last week as we continued this conversation.

It's about flat Earth and round Earth and conspiracies.

Let's play this.

If there's a bunch of people that believe something, I now want to know what it is that they believe.

And, of course, he pushed me on this and he was talking about the Earth curvature and science, and I said to him, Listen, I'm, I'm, I'm not a flat-Earther.

I'm not a round-Earther.

Actually what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.

I have left the megachurch of science because what I have now realized is that science, what it is actually if you think about it, is a pagan faith.

Okay.

Candace?

Yeah?

Do you actually believe this stuff, or are you saying it because you want to generate outrage and you want more attention and you want people to sort of click on your show?

Do you actually believe that?

I mean, science is, is science.

What do you mean the cult of science?

What, do you believe you're not a flat-Earther or a round-Earther?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I mean, co- uh, sometimes I think you're a very bright and very intelligent woman, and I said, Is she just playing in our faces?

Like, what's that all about?

Well, first let me ask you, did you watch the full episode or did your producers pull a clip out of context?

No, I d- I did not watch the full episode, but I'm asking you-

Okay.

Well, let me put it into context.

because you're putting the context-

Yeah.

No.

I'm sure.

I'm, I'm happy to put it into context-

Thank you.

Thank you.

because that's, that's the beauty of the media.

It's just always a clip and then people go, Oh, what's going on here?

So, that was an episode we were talking about birth control.

I was sharing I'm very passionately against, uh, the, birth control because of all the women who, in my life, are suffering side effects, who can't get pregnant, and are realizing that inserting copper IUDs into your body over time can have an impact.

And women were sharing their stories online about how the doctor told them it was safe and effective and it obviously wasn't safe and effective long-term because people just simply accept what the experts tell them without thinking.

Well, the experts say six feet social distancing works, and so everyone starts walking around with six feet social distance between them until Fauci comes around like he did recently and said, Ah, they kind of made that up.

So, once again, I agree with Candace that a lot of the so-called science during the pandemic was wrong, but the way we know it was wrong is through science.

For example, we can use scientific studies to see that countries which did not implement lockdowns, like Sweden, fared just as well or even better than countries that did use lockdowns.

Owens also gave the example of friends who were told that IUDs were safe, intrauterine devices, contraceptives, but they're now permanently infertile .

but something can be safe, generally safe, and still have risks.

Childbirth in the United States is safe, but some women still die while giving birth in the United States.

How many women who use IUDs become permanently infertile?

Well, it's not 0%, but it's also not 100%.

Only science can tell us what that percentage actually is because we need data to reach a conclusion on the matter, or maybe we don't need data.

Here's Owens sharing a clip from Andrew Tate and what he has to say about data.

I think it was maybe just me and the Tate brothers.

He's, what, the second most Googled man in the entire world, and a lot of people feel that they don't understand why he has the platform that he has, but I found this clip to be extremely interesting.

Take a listen.

One of my habits now is ignoring all data.

If- if you're listening to this on podcast, please know I'm trying hard to not bust out laughing because Andrew Tate is basically in his underwear in front of a sports car desperately trying to prove his own insecure masculinity, but go on, Andrew.

If you even look at data nowadays, you're a dumbass.

You should just know.

Street smart people don't need data.

We've just been around, you know?

I've just been around.

I just know things because I've just been around.

Honestly, that is so relatable to me, I can't even explain it.

Sure.

Let's just get our advice on understanding the world from a guy who the closest he's come to a PhD is the pimpin' hoes degree he offered as part of his Hustler's Online University course.

The only art that matters in this world is pimpin', and I've got a PhD.

Can you explain PhD briefly, if you- if you don't mind there?

A pimpin' hoes degree, a doctorate.

The problem is that while there are some things we can know with common sense, in many other cases, we need data from specialists.

Common sense can be misleading.

In fact, in some cases, science helps Christians when nonreligious people prefer what they think is common sense.

Common sense might tell them that the universe is just a huge empty space that's always been here, but science points towards the beginning of the universe coming out of a- an expansion, the Big Bang, which was pioneered by the Belgian physicist Monsignor Georges Lemaître.

It was later derisively called The Big Bang Theory by critics who thought it was a case of religion intruding into science.

Owens also said this.

And this is sort of what happened when on Monday, you know, I did this whole long episode about why I am now rejecting the cult of science and so many things that they've lied to us about, vaccines, birth control, people that are being injured, and they- we just accept everything the experts say, and we're sacrificing our own bodies.

It just feels strange.

It feels wrong.

When you look further in the history, they just keep lying and getting away with it.

What I said was that science has become a pagan faith.

Yes, that's what I actually believe.

And I said, If I don't get it from the Bible and I can't observe it with my own eyes, I- I don't stand it as the truth.

So is Candace Owens going to stop believing in atoms or viruses because she can't see them with her eyes and they're not found in the Bible?

Maybe she will.

I don't know.

I hope she doesn't.

But many people appeal to common sense or their own eyes and will say things like, A two-celled embryo is not a human being.

And what do pro-lifers say?

Well, we say, No, science reveals what your human eyes may not see, things like DNA, which you can't see with your own eyes, that proves this human embryo is a complete human being.

And what's interesting is that even when scientists are totally biased on a question like the issue of abortion, the truth still comes out in their research.

In 2018, Steve Jacobs surveyed over 5,000 biologists on the question of when life begins.

He said, As the usable responses began to come in, I found that 5,337 biologists, or 96% of the survey, affirmed that a human's life begins at fertilization.

Jacobs also said that 85% of the biologists were pro-choice, 63% were nonreligious, and 92% of them identified as Democrats.

Yet, the data could not be contradicted that the life of a human being begins at conception.

Now, it's true that science has been used to justify evils like lobotomies, eugenics, and so-called sex change surgeries, but science can also catch up and be the tool that exposes these lies, which we're seeing in Europe where the data has moved lawmakers to ban so-called sex change surgeries for children now that science has shown how harmful they are.

So we have the one extreme that treats all of science as being infallible, even when it's just a single study or a single scientist's opinion, and we have the other extreme that treats all of science as being an unreliable pagan faith.

Both views are wrong because it treats scientific truths as if they all have the same level of authority.

It treats keep six feet of social distancing and the Earth is round as all having the same authority coming from the pagan faith of science, but that's wrong.

For example, the Earth is not technically a sphere.

It's actually an ellipsoid or a spheroid.

The Earth looks like a basketball someone sat on and causes the middle, the equator, to bulge.

This led science fiction writer Isaac Asimov to say the following.

When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong.

When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong.

But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Likewise, if you think science is just believing some pagan faith, and so thinking that six feet of social distancing is as sketchy to believe as the Earth is round, then you are wronger than wrong.Not all science is equal, so our attitude towards scientific claims cannot be either extreme acceptance or extreme rejection.

So those are the extremes to avoid, but what's the sensible middle ground?

Well, there's no clear answer to know which science you can trust and which you can't because there are so many different circumstances where scientific findings come up.

So in this episode, I just wanna offer a few tips that I hope will guide Christians, and really anyone listening to this episode, towards fruitfully navigating science.

Number one: reject scientism.

Scientism is the view that all truth, or even the most important truths only come from science.

The physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow wrote in their book The Grand Design, What is the nature of reality?

Where did all this come from?

Did the universe need a creator?

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy.

But philosophy is dead.

Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, especially physics.

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

The arrogance in this quote is astounding, because philosophy is what distinguishes science from pseudoscience.

Science can't even tell us what science is.

Philosophy also grounds assumptions, like the uniformity of the laws of nature or the reliability of our senses that make science even possible.

This also comes up a lot in ethics, such as in the atheist Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape, which tries to ground morality completely in science.

The book was widely panned, even by atheists, because science only tells us what is, not what ought to be.

When people try to use science to say certain behaviors are normal, your alarm bells should definitely be ringing.

Science can only say what is statistically normal or what is commonplace.

Science can also tell us what is normal for the biological function of an organ, for example.

But science cannot tell us which common behaviors are morally good or morally evil, which ones make you a morally good person or a morally bad person.

Science may be able to explain why people commit evil acts such as mental illnesses that lessen their moral culpability, but science cannot tell us which moral acts are evil and which are not.

So if science tells you an intrinsically wrong act is normal or right, then it's the science that's wrong in that case.

Number two: distinguish scientific facts from political applications.

Just as science cannot answer philosophical questions or ethical questions, science can't answer political questions.

During the COVID pandemic, some people said that science says we need lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

But science cannot answer the question of what public policies are best for society because that's not a scientific question.

For example, science says that you're far less likely to die in automobile collisions under 25 miles per hour, but that doesn't mean science says we need a universal 25-mile-per-hour speed limit.

That would reduce the harm of traffic deaths, but it would cause many more harms, it would cause greater harms in disrupting traffic and commerce shipping, so we don't do that.

All public policies involve trade-offs, and science cannot tell us which trade-offs are worth it because that's a value question, an ought question.

It's not a science question.

It's not a question of what is.

It's a question of what ought to be.

Now just because some political proposals during the pandemic were dumb, that doesn't mean that science is dumb.

As we saw, some of these proposals, like the six-foot rule, had no scientific backing whatsoever.

So don't blame science.

Blame bureaucrats.

And in other cases, mandates for things like vaccines, they might have been imprudent or wrong, but they don't tell us whether the vaccines are effective or not.

What's important to remember is that science could be right about something, but the implementation of that scientific truth could be wrong or it even could be evil.

Every scientific innovation needs to be examined on a case-by-case basis.

And thank God He gave us rational minds to create so much life-saving medicine.

The book of Sirach puts it well: Honor the physician with the honor due him, according to your need of him.

For the Lord created him.

The Lord created medicines from the earth, and a sensible man will not despise them.

Number three: watch out for black-and-white thinking.

Some people think there are only two sides to an issue.

So for COVID-19 you were either on the side that wore three masks and got 18 booster shots, or you were on the side that thought COVID-19 was just the flu and there was no grave danger to anyone.

A sensible middle ground position might be that early strains of COVID-19 were more dangerous than the flu for some people, like the elderly.

So for some of these people, the risk of the disease outweighed the risks of getting the vaccine, and this justified them voluntarily getting vaccinated even if it didn't justify mandating the vaccines for everyone.

I'm not saying you have to hold to that view.

I'm just saying that you should watch out for debates over science that devolve into two extreme positions that leave out more sensible middle ground positions.

Or consider climate change.

For some people, you either think climate change is a gigantic hoax or you think that if we don't all buy electric cars next week, the world's gonna end in 12 years.

The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don't address climate change, and your biggest issue-

Mm-hmm.

is Your, your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?

But in my dialogue with Tony Annett on the subject of Catholics and climate change, I outline a middle ground position.

I said there is good evidence that the climate is changing, humans are causing this, and it will have positive and negative impacts.

However, climate change isn't apocalyptic, and many political proposals to combat climate change are wrongheaded and actually harm human flourishing.

You can check out our dialogue in the link below, and stay tuned for a future episode that I'm releasing on what's wrong with so-called green energy and why Catholics don't have to support it.

Once again, I'm not saying you have to hold to my view on climate change.

I'm just saying that it's a middle ground position which often gets overlooked, which brings me to point number four .

with great freedom comes great responsibility.

We shouldn't follow scientific claims that contradict what the church teaches, which happens most often when science tries to do ethics.

But many scientific claims have nothing to do with faith and morals, so Catholics are free to accept or reject them, and we should respect people's freedom.

For example, I'm personally convinced that life on Earth evolved over the course of billions of years.

However, God made our first parents and gave them immortal souls.

The church allows you to believe this, but the church also allows you to reject evolution, and believe the Earth is only thousands of years old.

So, we should respect the freedom Catholics have to reject scientific consensus.

They don't have to follow science like they have to follow church teaching.

On the other hand, if you choose to publicly go against the consensus, and especially if you ridicule people who follow it, then you should be prepared to explain why you've done that.

Because the scientific consensus is usually correct.

That doesn't mean it's always correct, but science works, and so we should at least give it the benefit of the doubt.

If you're gonna go against the consensus, especially when it involves issues where people's lives and health are at stake, then at a bare minimum, you should examine a good defense of that consensus position and be able to say what you find lacking in it.

So for evolution, you might read Don Prothero's book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, and say why you're not convinced.

Or for vaccines, you might read Paul Offit's book, Deadly Choices.

When I ask atheists, What's the best book defending God's existence and what's wrong with it?

many of them can't give me an answer.

They haven't bothered to engage the best defense of the historical consensus among humanity on God's existence, that atheism is false, and that makes me question if they're really open-minded truth seekers.

But that means Christians should be willing to model that same open-mindedness, at least on matters related to science, where there isn't a divinely revealed answer, and so we have to follow evidence apart from magisterial guidance.

Number five, avoid unnecessary conflicts between science and faith.

In 1870, the First Vatican Council said the following, Even though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.

God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth.

The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either the dogmas of the faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the Church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.

So notice that one source of the alleged conflict is holding a mistaken view about what the church teaches and saying that mistaken view contradicts science, not what the church actually teaches.

In the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas said something similar when he said that a superficial reading of the Book of Genesis could lead one to think there was an infinite body of water above the heavens, the firmament.

And he says this is false.

There is no such infinite body of water above us, and so Genesis could not possibly be saying that.

It's a misinterpretation of Genesis to say that it's saying that.

And what Aquinas said about that matter can also be applied to other mistaken interpretations of scripture.

If it can be shown to be false by solid reasons, it cannot be held to be the sense of Holy Scripture.

It should rather be considered that Moses was speaking to ignorant people, and that out of condescension to their weakness, he put before them only such things as are apparent to sense.

One modern case of this would be applied to geocentrism.

There are Catholics even today who believe that the plain sense of scripture and older magisterial teaching mean that we must infallibly believe geocentrism is true, or that the Earth does not move, and that not just the sun, but the entire universe revolves around the Earth every 24 hours, which would require the stars to travel faster than the speed of light.

Hugh Owen from the Kolbe Center says the following about geocentrism.

And as Saint Robert Bellarmine pointed out to Galileo's party, from the time of King Solomon, the entire tradition of the People of God has maintained that the Bible teaches geostatic geocentrism.

So in the time of Saint Robert Bellarmine, there was a tradition more than 2,500 years old, continuous, that every time scripture spoke about anything regarding the relationship between the Earth and the sun and the relative motion, that it was the Earth that was stationary, and it was the sun that was moving in relation to the Earth.

But if the Earth doesn't move, then why does Focault's pendulum spin in a circle in 24 hours and not simply stay in the same place?

Geocentrists say, Something, something, the rest of the universe must be pulling it.

All right.

Well, if the Earth doesn't move, why do hurricanes spin counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere?

Geocentrists say, Something, something, there's these strange forces in the universe affecting each hemisphere differently.

Or maybe there's a simpler explanation.

Our faith does not teach geocentrism.

The Earth actually rotates, and scripture simply uses the language of appearance when it talks about the sun moving, like how we talk about the sun rising, even though the sun's rising is caused by the Earth's rotation.

By accepting this explanation, the supposed conflict between faith and science disappears, because geocentrism is not an article of the Catholic faith.

Cardinal Caesar Baronius once said during the Galileo controversy, The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

Number six, avoid unfounded conspiracy theories.

In order to get around scientific consensus and the massive amounts of evidence for certain scientific positions, I've seen some fundamentalists resort to conspiracy theories.

Flat Earthers will say that there is a conspiracy about how fast airplanes travel, and the governments of the world won't let people travel to Antarctica and find the edge of the flat Earth, even though people have done that to debunk flat Earth theory.

When it comes to geocentrism I need to know this.

If the Earth does not move, it doesn't rotate, how can NASA and private companies like SpaceX reliably send probes into space, and even to other planets like Mars?

If Mars was really moving around the Earth once a day, why don't probes calculated to reach it based on a much slower heliocentric model miss their target by millions of miles?

I've heard geocentrists say in response that, Well, that's a conspiracy.

We haven't sent anything into space and no one's even making it to the moon.

Yes, there's more alleged conspiracies involving astronomy than you might think, and I'm not just talking about the moon landing, which is a silly conspiracy, because you can fire lasers off the photo reflectors that astronauts left on the moon.

The conspiracy arises because Catholic geocentrists deny the theory of relativity, because their model requires stars to move faster than the speed of light.

And they actually weren't the first to challenge the theory of relativity, and those who did challenge it revealed a foolishness in going against the consensus for dumb reasons.

In 1931, a book was published called A Hundred Authors Against Einstein that tried to refute his theory of relativity.

In response, Albert Einstein allegedly asked why 100 were needed, Because if I were wrong, then one author would have been enough.

Some of the criticisms were that relativity must be false because Einstein was a Jew, and his new theory was simply part of a Jewish conspiracy.

Philipp Lenard, a Nobel Prize-winning German physicist, called Einstein's theory of relativity Jewish physics.

He said, The Jew wants to create contradictions everywhere, and to separate relations, so that preferably the poor, naive German can no longer make any sense of it whatsoever.

In Germany, anti-Semites proposed a new science they called German or Aryan physics.

They even attacked Werner Heisenberg, the man behind the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics as being a white Jew, in spite of the fact that Heisenberg was a non-Jewish Lutheran.

Of course, Aryan science is dead, and the theory of relativity is a bedrock principle in modern physics.

Now, there are conspiracies in real life, but assuming a conspiracy is not the same as proving a conspiracy.

And making outlandish accusations, well, it just hurts your credibility.

That's why I was so disappointed to see Candace Owens respond to criticism of her views on science by trying to paint NASA as part of a Satanic conspiracy.

She spent most of the episode where she does this sharing true facts about Jack Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL. These include things like Parsons' involvement with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and his other acts of sexual occultism.

Owens then says this about NASA.

There you have it, guys.

That's the origins of NASA and the program, the Jet Propulsion program, the, you know, we're-gonna-make-it-to-space mission.

But don't worry, it would be totally crazy for you guys to think that Satan worshipers are still involved with NASA. Obviously, after it got started, they went totally clean.

You know, everything was a bit above board, nobody believes in this stuff anymore, and, uh, yeah, everything's great and everything's normal.

That doesn't make any sense.

One evil person helps create a company, JPL, which gets absorbed into NASA years after that person's death.

That doesn't follow from that that the people at the new company all share his Satanic views.

Fritz Zwicky, the guy who discovered neutron stars and later oversaw the company Parsons founded, wanted nothing to do with Parsons, and he helped to get Parsons fired and his government security clearance revoked.

Owens also claims that Parsons invented rocket technology because of his desire to promote Satanic beliefs to get people into space, and that this has now permeated NASA.

Before Jack Parsons enters the scene in America, the scientific consensus was that we would never enter space, that that was an impossibility.

But this rich kid, who also happened to be an occultist and who also would perform sex rituals and blood sacrifice to summon demons, well, now he expressed the belief that they could fundamentally alter humanity and he had a vision.

He said, No, we can make this work.

We can, we can get to space.

But as Joe Carter notes in his book, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, Parsons gave up on rockets after World War II. He didn't see them as a viable form of space travel.

After he was fired in 1944, Parsons thought he could use his payout money to open a chain of laundromats.

It was during this period, when he didn't work at JPL anymore, that Parsons did all this weird stuff with L. Ron Hubbard.

NASA wouldn't even be founded for another 14 years, long after Parsons' death, and JPL, the group Parsons started, is run by the California Institute of Technology, not NASA. And while Parsons made improvements to rocket fuel technology, he didn't single-handedly give the world rockets or space travel through some kind of Satanic influence.

Parsons isn't even mentioned in the Wikipedia article on rocket history.

It was Robert Goddard who launched the first liquid fuel rocket in 1926.

Indeed, it was many people using the ingenuity God gave them that developed tools that would change the world, by giving us things like reliable orbiting satellites and manned spacecraft, and other technology that makes my podcast and Candace Owens' podcast possible.

I have a link in the description below to an interview I did with my father-in-law, who was a NASA rocket scientist and is one of the most faithful Catholics that I know.

Or maybe he's in on the conspiracy too, right?

And I guess so was Robert Jastrow.

He worked at NASA when it started in 1958 and he became the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1961, named after Robert Goddard.

While he remained an agnostic, Jastrow admitted the following in his book, God and the Astronomers: Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world.

The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.

He has scaled the mountains of ignorance.

He is about to conquer the highest peak.

As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Does that sound Satanic to you?And finally, number seven, become scientifically and logically literate.

The best way to sift through good and bad science is to become good at applying reason and basic scientific truths to different claims.

Just as Catholic doctrine has different levels of authority, ranging from infallible dogma to permitted theological opinions which could be shown to be wrong in the future, science has different levels of authority, ranging from well-established theories like the theory of gravity or the germ theory of disease, to a hypothesis supported by maybe a single study that might be disproven later.

By understanding how to think, as well as the basics of fundamental scientific theories, Catholics can help people sift truths from falsehoods.

In fact, this is something Catholic thinkers have been doing for centuries.

Saint Thomas Aquinas said in the Summa Contra Gentiles that science, or what he called scientia, was the knowledge of things from their causes.

In the Middle Ages, everything, including theology, was considered science.

What we call science today was called natural philosophy back then.

It was the Catholic Church that invented the concept of the university in the Middle Ages to study things like natural philosophy, and it subsidized the study of things like astronomy in order to better understand the calendar and worship God.

Cathedrals were even built specifically with this knowledge gained from universities of where the sun would be shining throughout the year in stained glass windows.

According to historian J.L. Heilbron, the Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages and in the Enlightenment than any other, and probably all other institutions.

The Franciscan friar Roger Bacon helped promote breakthroughs in the science of optics.

He even proposed that in the future there could be submarines and flying machines.

Andrew Gordon was an 18th-century Scottish monk who invented the electric motor.

The 19th-century Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel's experiments with pea plants resulted in what are now known as the Mendelian laws of inheritance.

This is why Mendel has been called the father of modern genetics.

And Saint Albert the Great, who lived at the same time as Saint Thomas Aquinas, became famous for his discoveries in the fields of botany, zoology, and geology.

Albert even pioneered the study of minerals, and he said, It is the task of natural science not simply to accept what we are told, but to inquire into the causes of natural things.

In order to know which science is new and controversial and which is well-established based on decades or even centuries of evidence, we need to learn about science to apply it, and we can do that through magazines or watching documentaries, or even reading discounted used science textbooks from universities.

If Catholics do this, they can help identify bad science that leads people away from the truth and good science that leads people towards God.

As Psalm 19:1 says, The sky proclaims the greatness of the Lord.

The heavens are his handiwork.

For more on this subject, I'd recommend Catholic chemist Stacey Trusanko's book, Particles of Faith: A Catholic Guide to Navigating Science.

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Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.