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Pope says science no threat to faith: “VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Science made such rapid progress in the 20th century that people may sometimes be confused about how the Christian faith can still be compatible with it, Pope Benedict said on Friday.”

(Via Reuters: Science.)

Related to posts here and here.

The Pope is making a renewed statement of commitment to the idea that religion and science are not mutually exclusive ideas. I like this.

If you had to ask me what I was, in the sense of what my belief system is, I would have to say agnostic (small ‘a’). We simply don’t know, with any degree of certainty, and we probably can never know, with any degree of certainty. It’s just a fact of life, and whether or not this is the result of a totally naturalistic universe in which proof of a higher power can’t be located because it’s not there or whether or not the universe has a supernatural causation that we simply cannot perceive is, to me, not a very interesting question.

If, in fact, there is a God and if, in fact, he is omnipotent/omiscient/omnipresent/omnibenevolent and if, in fact, he judges us on death for inclusion in the Heavenly Afterlife Club, then I have to think that living a good life without any firm belief in that afterlife has to be as good as doing so because you have the fear of God in you, and maybe better.

It just doesn’t make sense otherwise.

And if there’s not anything in the hereafter, and we all move through life in a completely naturalistic universe, then living a good life has its own intrinsic benefits that at least make me feel good while I’m here. And that’s enough for me.

So back to the Catholic Church, their position is a sensible one. Religion will never be able to suppress science indefinitely. Religious authority, in position of temporal authority, can slow it down, or divert it to more amenable environments, but it can never totally stop it; sooner or later a people’s natural inquisitiveness and science’s inherent unmatched utility to solve the problems of our lives will reestablish science in a position of primacy, at least so far as it involves questions dealing with the natural world.

Science leaves questions of the supernatural and spiritual to religion. And the Pope correctly recognizes that questions of the natural and the physical world rightly are answered by science.

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