Pints With Aquinas - 204: Faith and Reason w/ Jimmy Akin

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

In this episode of Pints with Aquinas, Matt interviews Jimmy Akin on "faith & reason." Among other things they discuss: - The problem with fideism and rationalism - What Christians mean by faith - Aquinas' response to the double-truth theory - Do Catholics have to believe in a literal Adam and Eve? - The Galileo controversy SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints  Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING  Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show.  LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/  SOCIAL  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pints_w_aquinas/  MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx  CONTACT  Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform  Website - mattfradd.com Facebook - facebook.com/mattfradd/ Twitter - twitter.com/mattfradd

Yeah, g'day, how you going? Welcome to... Hmm, try that again. G'day, how are you? I'm Matt Fradd. Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. Today, I will be joined around the bar table by my good mate, Jimmy Akin, to discuss faith and reason. In his encyclical, John Paul II said that faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. And God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth, in a word, to know himself, so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. This is going to be a very helpful episode to you. If you've always wanted to understand what the church has to say about skepticism on one hand, fideism, don't worry, we'll explain what that is later.

On the other hand, what the Bible means by faith, how to respond to certain atheist tropes, like faith means believing what you know ain't so. If you wanted to understand the church's relationship with science, we're going to be talking about the Galileo affair and everything that went on there. You're going to learn a lot in this episode. And I'm just so happy to have Jimmy on the show. He used to work with Jimmy Akin at Catholic Answers. Jimmy Akin is an internationally known author and speaker. As the senior apologist at Catholic Answers, he has more than 25 years of experience defending and explaining the faith. Jimmy is a convert to the faith and has an extensive background in the Bible, theology, the Church Fathers,

philosophy, canon law, and liturgy. Jimmy is a weekly guest on the national radio program Catholic Answers Live, a regular contributor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a popular blogger and podcaster. His personal website is jimmyakin.com so be sure to check that out um hey i told you about this last week before we get into today's show i want to tell you one more time i created a course called strive21.com please check it out strive21.com if you are a man who struggles with pornography or lust in any way shape or form this course is for you. We currently have over 14,000 men going through the 21 days right now. It's a 21 day challenge.

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Here we go. Good day, Jimmy. Great to have you with me. Thank you. How are you doing, Matt? I'm doing excellent. Yeah, really well. It's great. I mean, you and I used to work together at Catholic Answers. It was just a joy to work with you and to learn from you, so it's a real pleasure to get to chat with you again. Likewise. It's always great to get together and really appreciate and you know back in the day really appreciated the kind of vibrant bouncy spirit you brought to stuff so that's awesome. Good well thank you very much

and how have you been doing what projects you involved in what's new with you? Oh well working on all kinds of stuff recently I mean in, I've had several books come out. Most recently, one on the history of the Bible called The Bible is a Catholic Book. I read it. It talks about... Oh, awesome. Yeah. Actually, when I say read it, I heard it through Audible, and I thought it was excellent.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, it was... I actually recorded it right here in my home studio using this mic, so... That's good quality. Yeah. Yeah. But you were saying? I was saying that it was, at first I thought it was going to be more of an introductory level because it's not terribly long. But you really delved deep into some issues there regarding the canon and Jews in the first century and how they viewed scripture and things like that.

It was really helpful. Awesome. I hope it was easy to read. That was one of the things I was really striving for. Good, good. So I had that come out. I had a book on the magisterium come out called Teaching with Authority, which is one that I wrote to fill a need because there are a lot of people today who are like on the Catholic Internet who are talking about the magisterium and what's infallible, what's not infallible.

And a lot of them haven't really studied the subject well. And so you get a lot of opinions being expressed that aren't well grounded in how the church actually approaches these things. So I wrote that book to talk about, you know, how the church teaches, different levels of authority, how to identify what has what level of authority, and that's been very well received. Also, Catholic Answers has just started an online learning service called the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics, and I did the first course for that, which is an introduction to apologetics. So the curriculum is put together of short video segments, and we're working towards having a full line, like a college-level curriculum covering a wide variety of subjects. And we, in the future,

hope to even offer people certifications in apologetics. So it's one of our long-term goals. certifications in apologetics. So it's one of our long-term goals. So doing a lot professionally on the private side of things, I do, well, I did until the coronavirus thing, do a lot of dance calling for different types of dance, square dance, round dance, English country dance, contra dance, and things like that. That's on hold right now. But because, you know, social gatherings are verboten. But by the way, speaking of the coronavirus, I've been following your situation. I reached out to you after you had your situation. You and Cam are both doing well now. Thanks for asking. Yeah, we both we were both got negative results, so we apparently don't have it. It was unlike anything either of us have ever had before. Cameron was admitted into hospital because of low oxygen. She had to be on breathing treatment, antibiotics, but I feel really great right now. So thank you for asking. So is it you did have it and then you cleared the virus and now you're testing

negative or not sure if you had it. It seems that we didn't have it, which is a little embarrassing, honestly, because I know that a word got out to pray for us. And there was just, I think more shares on EWTN's Facebook page than, than I have had followers for a long time. So it was quite humbling. I was rushed to the emergency room on doctor's orders from a doctor's office. My wife was admitted after being in the emergency room. So it certainly wasn't anything, a figment of our imagination or

anything like that. It was something serious. But we both had the tests. They shoved that thing right up our nose and it was terrible. And they say we're negative. Well, that could be a false negative. My understanding is that the false positive rate on the current tests is low. So if they say you the test showed you have it, you really probably do. But I've also heard the false negative rate is unusually high. So you might have had it and they just might have been false negatives on the tests. Whatever it was, though, it was obviously serious.

So y'all needed the prayers. And I know I was praying and I'm glad other folks were too. Yeah, thanks for reaching out and thanks for asking. I'm halfway through that apologetics course, by the way, that you did. And I have been very, very impressed.

I forget who it was. It was some marketing book that said, whenever you come, whenever you engage something like you buy a certain product or you have a certain experience that you've paid for you either get what you expected less than you expected or more and i've always thought about that as i've tried to write books and do different things trying to give more than people expect i definitely got more than i expected on this this was fantastic really really well done yeah wow

thank you so much. I mean, your presentation, but also just the whole way the whole thing was put together, the curriculum. Excellent. Yeah. Yeah. We have a team of people working on it and it's a really professional team and all of us have done a lot. Already come out with a second course, which was by Trent Horn on moral apologetics. We have a whole bunch more in the pipeline. So we're looking forward to expanding out the curriculum. In fact, we were just having discussions about additional courses we're going to be taping next month today. So looking forward to doing that. Oh, also on the outside of professional thing, I was going to mention since dancing is on hold, I don't have that at the moment, but I am continuing my podcasting efforts.

Yes, I've been listening. Oh, cool. Yeah, just last night. Catholic Answers Focus. I also do some podcasts with the Starquest Network. I do a Secrets of Doctor Who podcast, a Secrets of Star Trek podcast. And then the most famous one that comes out every Friday is called Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. And it's a podcast where we look at mysteries, could be natural mysteries like, you know, oh, I don't know, various transhumanism is one we did. That's kind of a natural mystery. Could be historical mysteries like the death of JFK, could be paranormal mysteries like Bigfoot or UFOs, could be religious mysteries like Fatima.

And we look at them from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. So in every episode, we kind of lay the background of the mystery. Then we say, let's look at it from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. So in every episode, we kind of lay the background of the mystery. Then we say, let's look at it from the reason perspective. What would reason say about this? And then we look at it from the faith perspective. What would the faith say about this? And we even cover some Australian mysteries. A while back, we did one on the Somerton Man.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He's an unknown gentleman who was found dead on the beach in Somerton, Australia, in South Australia, back just after World War Two and at the people at the time, they didn't have great pathology tests yet, but they thought it might be poison. And there's evidence that emerged that he may have been a Soviet spy in Australia who either was killed or was ordered to kill himself. And so we looked into the Somerton Man. You might want to check out that episode. I will, for sure.

I'm from South Australia. Oh, really? I should definitely check that out and talk to my folks about it. Oh, so where in South Australia are you from? I'm a couple of hours north of Adelaide in a town called Port Pirie. So it's not very well known, but I'll have to look into it. Yeah, sorry, Alexa was just talking to me for a second. I can't ever hear about south australia without of a particular dance that i do australia where i was born yes exactly we do that as a sing-around right before doing the dance which is also called south australia very good

very good well thanks for coming on the show today and speaking of reason and faith. That's what we want to talk about today. Faith and reason, how we should view the two, whether the two can ever be in conflict. I want to talk about skepticism on one hand, fideism on the other, these sorts of things. But perhaps before we begin, I thought it might be helpful if we just defined what we meant. I think so often we talk about things without ever having slowed down enough to sort of understand what we mean by the term. So what do we mean by faith, and what do we mean by reason? So both terms are defined in different ways. You'll encounter different definitions for them. In terms of faith, one of the ways it's defined, and I'll start with scriptural ways, the way the term

faith is used in Scripture—but one of the ways it's defined is basically as intellectual assent to the truths of Christian doctrine. So you see it used this way, for example, in the letter of James, where James is talking about how faith alone is not sufficient. And he says, you you believe that God is one. You do well. The demons believe and shudder. So the idea is and one of the things is kind of weird about English. Forgive me if I back up and take a historical tangent for just a second. Please do. English is very unusual compared to other languages. Its grammar is actually pretty simple compared to other languages, but its vocabulary is enormous.

And one of the reasons that it's so enormous is because of the way English developed historically. It's often classified as a Germanic language, so it belongs to the same general language family as German and Dutch and languages like that. But in 1066, the Normans conquered England and the Normans spoke French, which is a Romance language rather than a Germanic language. So what happened was you had the new French overlords introducing lots of Latinate Romance words into English while the Anglo-Saxon speaking underclass kept their Germanic language words. And so you had this sudden double vocabulary. So that's why in English we have two words, a minimum of two words for almost everything. You know, is it beef or is it cow, to give one example? Is it pork or is it swine?

And so we inherited this double vocabulary, and subsequently we've picked up even more words from even other languages like the word ketchup. That's from Indonesian. That's a word we don't say in Australia, incidentally. We just call it sauce. Oh, really? Or tomato sauce.

But we don't say ketchup. It's very American. Yeah. Oh, OK. Maybe it's in English, England as well. In Australia. In England, they sometimes call it tomato ketchup. OK.

But in Indonesian and Malaysian, ketchup is just a word for sauce. So it sounds like in Australia, you just brought the word over and translated it. Whereas in the U.S., we transliterated it into ketchup. this has affected our religious vocabulary in English because the word faith comes from fetus, which is a Latin word, so it's one of our Romance language words, but belief is a Germanic word. And one of the quirks of how theological vocabulary has developed in English is we have a word for faith as a noun, but we also have the word belief, which is a close synonym for faith. If you say, I believe something, I have faith in that, they kind of mean sort of the same thing. Also, we lost the verb form for faith in English. So you can't say, I faith in Jesus. You can say, I believe in Jesus, though. So something to be aware of as part of the discussion is that faith and belief are

basically interchangeable, but we have weird usage rules in English because of its history. So in any event, when James says in his letter, you believe that God is one, meaning you have faith that God is one, as opposed to being, you know, bazillion gods, you do well, that's true. But that's not sufficient, because even the demons believe that God is one. They know there's only one God, but yet they shudder at the prospect of his wrath, because it's not going to save them. The mere fact they believe in one God is not going to save them from God's wrath. So we see that here, this kind of faith is basically limited to just intellectually assenting to the truth that there is one God. It's a very limited form of faith. You believe there's one God,

but that's about it. And of course, demons are aware of other truths of theology too. But this mere intellectual agreement or mere belief is not sufficient for salvation. And so there are other kinds of faith as well. And we also see these in scripture. All right. I want to take a pause from this fascinating discussion with Jimmy Akin to tell you about Halo. Halo is a fantastic app. It's a Catholic meditation app to help you find peace and grow in your spiritual journey. This is incredibly well produced, and you can go download it right now.

Halo offers a permanently free version of their app, which includes content that's updated every day, as well as a paid subscription option with premium content. that's updated every day, as well as a paid subscription option with premium content. But by using the promo code Matt Fradd, you can try out all the sessions in the app for a full month totally for free. So to take advantage of this special offer, just go to hello.app slash Matt Fradd, create your account online before downloading the app. Be sure to use that promo code Matt Fradd. You can try this out. My wife and I use this. It's actually incredibly well-produced and 100% Catholic. So if you're somebody who's been trying to pray more

but maybe struggling, check out hallo.app slash Matt Fradd. All right, let's get back to our discussion with Jimmy Akin. One of the common meanings of faith in both Hebrew and in Greek incorporates not just belief belief but also trust. So the idea if you believe in God or have faith in God in this sense, it means you not only believe

that God exists, you also trust in him. And so that's a more robust form of faith, because we have that as believers, but demons don't have that. They're not trusting in God. Then, even beyond that, there's a form of faith that St. Paul describes as faith working through love, or faith working through charity. And that's the one that does save. If you have faith working through charity, that puts you in a state of grace, and as long as you stay in a state of grace, you'll be saved. So that's an even more robust form of faith that incorporates all three of the theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. Hope being another way of saying trust. If you're trusting in someone for something, you're hoping in that person for something.

Sometimes atheists will say that—or they'll quote Mark Twain in saying, you know, faith is just believing in what you know ain't so, or they'll quote Mark Twain in saying, you know, faith is just believing in what you know ain't so, or something to that effect. I was going to say, there are then secular definitions of faith which will kind of get weird. Some of them are like believing in something you know isn't true, the Twain one, or believing in something that's false. That's not what we mean by faith. That's a distortion of the concept. Another distortion is believing something contrary to evidence. That's not what we mean by faith either, or believing something— What would be an example of that?

Well, you could say—and let me see if I can come up with a couple of examples here—you could say let me see if I can come up with a couple of examples here. You could say all of the evidence, like let's borrow an example from the philosopher William James. Let's suppose you're in a situation where you have to leap across a chasm or you're going to die. You know, you're being pursued by evil cyborgs. They're going to kill you if you don't leap across this chasm. And the evidence may say, you don't have the ability to make this leap. The chasm is just too wide. But if you don't attempt and if you don't talk yourself up and do, I can do this, you'll definitely fail. So even though the evidence would suggest you can't leap across the chasm, you could still say, I'm going to take a leap of faith anyway. I'm going to assume I can

and I'm going to do this. That would be one example where even though the evidence seems to point one way, you could say, I'm going to I'm going to choose to act on. I'm going to choose to believe the contrary. And James would say, in certain specific situations, that could be reasonable, like if you're being pursued by killer cyborgs. But in most situations, that's not what you want to do. You want to go with the evidence instead of contrary to the evidence informing your beliefs. Also, there's believing something without evidence, and there's an aspect, there's kind of a related usage that you do find in Scripture, because Scripture does say at one point that faith is the evidence of things not seen, and we walk by faith, not by sight,

meaning there are certain things that we can't prove them for ourselves, but we accept them anyway. I would say that's not really, in the biblical sense, that's not believing without evidence. That's believing without the ability to prove it personally. We still have good evidence that these things are true, because they're revealed to us by God. And this gets us to a very interesting understanding of faith that is shared in a way by every human being. Because most of the things that we believe—this is something C.S. Lewis talks about in his book Near Christianity—most of the things that we believe are not things we can prove ourselves. You know, I believe in electrons. You know, they're what's used in electronics, which is

how we're talking to each other right now, via electronics. But I can't prove the existence of electrons. I don't know how to run those experiments. I'm believing the scientists who do understand those things and who can prove them. And everybody, for most of the things we believe, most of the things we believe are not things we've proved ourselves. So most of our actual knowledge is something we take on faith in the sense of I haven't proved it for myself, but I have evidence from experts that leads that I trust that lead me to believe it's true. And so once you recognize that principle, you can extend it a little further. And some years ago in, you know, doing apologetics, I imagined, you know, suppose I was blind. Well, if I was blind, you know, blind from birth, I'd never seen anything. I could verify certain

things about the world, you know, by touching them and tasting them and things like that. But and I could even notice things like, hey, it's warmer for part of the day than than another part of the day. It's like 12 hours. It's warmer, 12 hours. It's cooler. Why is that? Well, just relying on my own four senses, since I don't have sight, I could never realize the true explanation for that. But if I talk to someone who was sighted, who could see this other aspect of reality that I can't with my senses, that sighted person could tell me, oh, the reason that it's warmer half the day is because there's this thing up in the sky. It's shaped like a disc. It's called the sun. It's really bright. It looks yellow.

The sky also looks like a big field of blue. And he would be telling me the truth. And if I have if I have reason to believe the sighted person, you know, he could give me evidence that he is sighted. I could say, how many fingers am I holding up? And I could tell if he's touching my hand to figure out how many fingers, and if I don't feel him and he says, you're holding up four, that would give me evidence he has this magical sense called sight. And once I have reason to believe that he has this magical sense called sight, that gives me evidence to trust him when he tells me things like there is a sun and it's bright and warm and yellow and it appears in the sky for half the day and the sky is blue normally. I have no experience of yellow or bright or blue or the sun, I would have reason to believe these because I have reason to trust the sighted person who's telling me about them. So what if we expand it further to where we don't limit it to other human beings? What if an angel comes to me,

and the angel has additional awareness of other aspects of reality that the five senses don't reveal, well, if the angel can do things that presuppose a deeper understanding of reality, like maybe heal somebody, you know, on the spot, well, that would give me the evidence that the angel is really supernatural and is aware of things supernaturally that i'm not naturally aware of and that would give me reason to trust the angel with what the angel tells me like there's a god in the sky and he's a trinity not literally in the sky but using a metaphor so um so actually everybody has faith in the sense of trusting and believing things they can't prove for themselves.

That is most of human knowledge. And when we apply that principle to religion, we don't find a difference in kind. Now, of course, we're going to want to say, well, what are the evidences for a particular religion? Why should we accept its claims about the supernatural world, just like we would want to say if we're blind, why should I trust this person who claims to, you know, have sight? Well, we need evidence for that, and it's the job of apologetics to provide us with the evidence. But the principle is the same, that it can be rational with evidence to accept things you can't prove for yourself by learning them from someone who has an expanded form of awareness that is aware of them. And so

that's actually kind of a common form of faith that both believers and skeptics have. It's different than reason. Now, reason gets defined a bunch of different ways, too. But to keep it simple, reason is what we use if we can prove something for ourselves without and kind of the kernel of reason is being able to prove something for ourselves just by our own faculties. Now, in in the course of human affairs, that gets broadened out to where I don't have to be the one to be able to prove it. I could trust other human beings, like the scientists who say there are electrons. I could trust them to prove it. And we'll still call that reason because it doesn't involve any senses that humans don't have. And after the development of technology, we've even broadened it a little further because we've created now devices that have senses that we don't have, you know, like electron microscopes that view things with electrons instead of with photons or radio telescopes that listen in radio frequencies rather than in sound frequencies. But these are just technological extensions of human abilities. And so these days,

reason gets broadened out to cover things that we could prove based either on the human senses or on technological extensions of the human senses. And what reason doesn't include, what is left to the realm of supernatural faith, is stuff that goes beyond what human senses and their technological extensions can prove. So we have no way of directly detecting the fact that God is a trinity. fact that God is a trinity. That's something that has to be revealed to us by an angel or by God directly or something like that. We can use reason to prove that there is a God, but specifically that God is a trinity, that's a mystery that we can't prove by human reason alone. We have to use information that's given to us by revelation. That was a really great summary and a really great analogy, too, there with being blind and trusting a competent authority or someone you deem competent after you've done that little experiment. So I suppose we could say that faith can be thought of as a sort of trust and reasonable faith could be thought of as a sort of trust in a reliable authority.

And this is kind of what the Christian can mean when he talks about having faith in God. It's not something that he believes without evidence, that might be the case, but that's not what the New Testament means. That's not what I think what kind of intelligent Christians mean when they talk about having faith in God, they mean they have reasons for believing a competent authority, namely God. Yes, absolutely. Okay. So where does this conflict lie then? Because people who tend to think of themselves as very reasonable look with suspicion upon faith, and people who tend to be very faithful might tend to view with suspicion scientific advancements, especially if they seem to contradict

the views that the opinions they have based on their religious faith. Yeah, well, partly this the so-called conflict of faith and reason is an artifact of history because of the way the development of, in particular, science has happened over the course of history. And that's a fascinating subject in its own right. But if you look past the history to what's the core of the, why does this phenomenon happen in general? Why did it ever happen? It's because of limited evidence. When you are a person, there's only so much you can study. You can only be an expert in so much stuff. And you can't be an expert in everything. And that means you have to focus your attention

in a particular area and look at the data that comes from that area. So, for example, if you're a biologist, you may know a lot about animals and plants, but you may know next to nothing about physics. Similarly, if you're a physicist, you may know tons about physics and next to nothing about animals and plants. The problem is that as we study different areas, we can form impressions about those areas that look different than the evidence from another area. So a biologist could observe phenomena in animals and plants and say, oh, well, this is what seems to happen. And they can infer from that any number of things.

And a physicist could come along and say, oh, no, wait, that's not possible because physics works this other way. And they can have disagreements because the evidence that they're aware of suggests different things to them. Now, what will happen these days is people looking at that situation will say, well, you know, they both need to expand their horizons. They need to look at a broader slice of the evidence. And even if the evidence of biology makes it look one way and the evidence of physics makes it look another way, they can't both be right. Either one of them's right or the other's right or the truth is something else. The truth could be something that embraces both perspectives. But what needs to happen in this situation is both the biologist and the physicist

need to take a closer look at the evidence with an open mind and see what kind of resolution is possible. It might turn out the biologist is right, might turn out the physicist is right, it might turn out they're both partially right, or that neither one of them is right, and the truth is something else. So that's how we resolve such situations in the sciences, and the same basic principle applies with what we classically call faith and reason issues. So we have, under the reason perspective, we have this body of evidence that comes to us by the human senses and the technological extensions of them. And then we have this other body of evidence that comes to us by divine revelation.

have this other body of evidence that comes to us by divine revelation. Ultimately, there can only be one truth, and so truth cannot contradict truth. And so if the evidence we're looking at from science suggests something different than the picture you get when you look at revelation, or if the evidence that the picture you get when you look just at revelation without science, when they look different, what happens is we need to look more carefully at both pools of evidence with an open mind and say, how can these be brought together? Because ultimately, from a faith perspective, all truth is God's truth. He's not lying to us through nature, and he's not lying to us when he reveals stuff, so there must be a way to bring these two things together and understand them.

And so that's essentially the process that, well, like, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas would recommend, that we can't prioritize one over the other and say, we must use reason alone and discount revelation, or we must use revelation alone and discount what reason says. Both of them are things that need to work together. We need to use both of them and strive to use them in harmony, and we can trust that there is a resolution because God is the author of both. God both gave us the gift of reason, God both gave us the gift of reason, and he gives us the gift of faith, and they're not in conflict with each other when understood properly. Our challenge as his creatures is to try to understand them both properly,

and understand how they fit together. This issue of faith and reason obviously was a big deal in Thomas Aquinas' day. Could you talk a little bit about Averroes, the Latin Averroist, like C.J. Brabant, what was meant by the double truth theory? So, yeah, so let's go back to kind of the root of this. You did have both in Christianity and Islam a discussion of philosophy, which was kind of, back in the day, philosophy was almost a synonym for reason. If you were learning stuff by reason, especially if you were answering deeper questions, it meant you're doing philosophy. That's kind of an inheritance of the Greeks. But then you also had this divine revelation, either the Christian revelation or the purported revelations of Muhammad, and people in both camps had to try to say, well, how can we

integrate these ideas from reason that we're getting, for example, from Greek philosophers like Aristotle, with the teachings of our faith, which we hold to be divine revelation? with the teachings of our faith, which we hold to be divine revelation. And in the Middle Ages, there was an Arabic philosopher named Ibn Rashid, or to use his Latin name, Averroes. And he was very famous for writing commentaries on Aristotle. Some of Aristotle's writings, like his writings on logic, had been preserved in the West, but his other writings had not, and so they were preserved in Arabic, in the Arabic-speaking world, and Averroes was a commentator, because sometimes Aristotle is hard to understand, so Averroes would write commentaries to explain, here's what Aristotle meant. So Averroes would write commentaries to explain, here's what Aristotle meant.

Well, then about the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, actually a little bit before Aquinas, you started having Latin translations made of Aristotle's writings. And people knew Aristotle is a good logician, so they were very interested to see, well, what else did he have to say about philosophy? And at the time, philosophy actually included what we would now consider science. It was called natural philosophy. And it also included what's called natural magic, but that's another subject. So they got these new commentary, these new writings of Aristotle who were fascinated by them. They proposed all these new ideas about metaphysics and aesthetics and biology even, and physics. And also, here are these helpful commentaries by Averroes to help you understand what Aristotle meant. I just want to show everybody

this quick picture, Jimmy, while you're speaking, of the confounding of Averroes. You're familiar with the painting, I'm sure, with Thomas Aquinas preaching, and you have Averroes laying on the floor with his translations of Aristotle. I just wanted to say that for the folks at home who are seeing that. Sorry, continue. No, no problem. So anyway, as medieval Christian thinkers—this is in the 1200s now—as they're starting to read these new writings of Aristotle they haven't had access to, and as they're starting to read Averroes' commentaries, it kind of intensified the faith and reason discussion, because you had Aristotle, as interpreted by Averroes, as a voice of reason. They're not using Christian—Aristotle's not using Christian revelation to arrive at his conclusions. And then you have, you know, the traditional Christian teachings on a whole

variety of—and these things weren't always in harmony with each other. Aristotle, for example, These things weren't always in harmony with each other. Aristotle, for example, believed that the world was eternal. He thought that the world had never been created, that it just always existed. In the same way, Aristotle believed that every species in biology had always existed. So humans had always existed, and rabbits had always existed, and oak trees had always existed. So humans had always existed, and rabbits had always existed, and oak trees had always existed. He was not a Darwinist, it turns out. But nevertheless, that was in conflict with the Christian faith. The Christian faith holds that God did create the world at some finite distance in the past. Genesis talks about that. Also,

humans have not been around forever. You know, we got created on the sixth day, as did bunnies. Oak trees got created, you know, on maybe the fourth day. And so these species are not eternal either. And so you had one set of things suggested by reason, meaning by Aristotle, and another set of things suggested by revelation, meaning the Bible in this case. And how do you square those things? Well, some of—now, Averroes himself did not hold what's going to be called the theory of double truth. What Averroes himself said was, when there's a conflict between faith and reason, faith is going to be right, and whatever reason suggesting must be wrong. When his ideas got picked up by some Christian thinkers, though,

and they're called the Latin Averroists, including like Seeger of Brabant, they would say, well, some truths are proposed by reason and can even seem certain on the basis of reason. It looks like you can prove that, whereas other truths seem certain on the basis of faith. And they were always careful to say, faith is right, the Christian faith is true. But they then would sometimes seem to go on to suggest that it was somehow okay to believe things that were contrary to the faith that they thought could be proved by reason. the faith that they thought could be proved by reason. And so they were kind of called out on this. Today, it's a little hard to figure out what their motives were. Some people have suggested that the Latin Averroists were really on the side of philosophy, but they were giving lip service to

the truths of faith as a way of avoiding trouble for themselves. Other people have said, well, no, maybe they were sincere in thinking you could somehow hold both of these truths, but the Bishop of Paris was not having any of it. And so when his theological faculty at Paris started teaching at the University of Paris, started teaching these Averroist ideas. He got, actually the Pope, got Albert the Great on the question, and Thomas Aquinas got on the question, and the Bishop of Paris condemned like 213 propositions that were being taught by Averroists in his area, and he accused them of holding this double-truth

theory, that no matter what they said, the bottom line—even though they tried to be more careful than this—the bottom line, in his opinion, was they're saying somehow these things can be both true at the same time, even though they contradict each other. And whether or not they actually were claiming that, the subsequent judgment of the Church and of Christian theology has been, yeah, things cannot be both true and false at the same time, in the same way, in the same respect. That's the law of non-contradiction. There can only be one truth on a given matter. It's a question of figuring it out. But that still leaves us with the question of how do we figure it out? And that leads to the perspectives that you mentioned earlier,

skepticism, which in this case we might want to call rationalism, and fideism. So you can weight yourself, weight the evidence of one kind of evidence more than another. You could say, weight the evidence of one kind of evidence more than another. You could say, as say a lot of scientific skeptics today would say, oh, well, when there's an apparent conflict between the evidence of reason and the evidence of faith, clearly we look at the evidence of reason. Just that faith, that's all fairy stories. We need to go with what science says about a matter. And so that could be a form of rationalism or scientism, that in trying to sort out the question of, you know, how do we square this evidence, it basically minimizes the evidence of faith and maximizes the evidence of reason. The flip side

of that would be a form of fideism, where you could have people saying, oh, well, if Genesis says six days, that's what counts. We shouldn't give any thought to this archaeology, you know, paleontology stuff. And so you could have the reverse, where a person stressing faith would put all of the weight or all of their confidence in what they perceive the revelation to be saying, and much less confidence in what the evidence of reason would seem to be saying. And the Church, for its perspective, would not counsel either of those approaches. The Church obviously has enormous respect for the data of Revelation, but it also has respect for reason. And so in, for example,

Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio, which is Latin for faith and reason, he compares the two things, faith and reason, to the two wings of a bird by which we soar towards the contemplation of God and the truth. So you shouldn't minimize either the evidence of faith or the evidence of reason. You need to, if there's an apparent conflict, you need to take both of them seriously and look at both of them with an open mind to say, what am I missing here? Maybe I've misunderstood some of the data of reason. Maybe I've misunderstood some of the data of revelation. I can have confidence in both sets of data. The problem is probably in me. I've misunderstood some of the data of Revelation. I can have confidence in both sets of data. The problem is probably in me.

I've misunderstood one or the other or maybe both of them. Okay, I'd like to get to Fideism a little bit more in a moment and see how perhaps some early church fathers, maybe Tertullian and Protestant reformers, different Protestant groups today view faith. But before I do, I can imagine somebody saying, yeah, but the presupposition is that your faith is right. And so from your point of view, there can never be a true conflict between faith and reason because both are kind of

describing reality or addressing reality in some way. And I could see the atheist maybe getting a little upset because if he were to try to point out evidence that debunks what you think is true based on revelation, you just weave that into the tapestry. You just make it work. It's like there's a plot hole in a movie you've written, but you pretend it was supposed to be there or something. So when it comes to evolution, but you pretend it was supposed to be there or something. So when it comes to evolution, you see Christians start to talk about interpreting Genesis, you know, different to how perhaps some or maybe most of the church fathers did. When it comes to, say, perhaps modern genetics, saying, look, you really can't make the claim that we have evolved from single parents,

then, well, OK, in that case, then, you know. So, I mean, I see what you're saying. You come to the evidence, and you have to try to make them work. But does that put you in a place where you can't ever be convinced that faith is wrong? Your faith is incorrect based on kind of scientific studies and reason? your faith is incorrect based on kind of scientific studies and reason? Well, speaking as a faithful Catholic and as an apologist, I'm convinced my faith is right, and I'm convinced that the evidence will never show that. So that's my position.

But I would say, as I have kind of gestured at in some aspects of our discussion, let's take this out of a religious context. Let's see what the principles, let's see how the same principles get applied in other fields. So let's suppose I'm a physicist, and let's suppose I believe in the theory of relativity, okay? And so someone who doesn't believe in the theory of relativity comes to me and says, oh, well, if I bring you evidence, I mean, you're a convinced relativist, so if I bring you evidence against relativity, you'll just try to, like, reincorporate it and find a way to harmonize it and adjust your theory in some way. And as a physicist, I would say, yeah. As a believer in relativity, I'd say, yeah, if you bring me evidence that my theory needs to be modified, sure.

But I've already seen enough evidence to tell me relativity in some form is true. I need to tweak my understanding of it a little bit, but I have confidence that some form of relativity is true, and you're not in the end going to be able to say, oh no, it's completely bunk, there's no truth there. And in the same way, as a Catholic, I would say, okay, I may need to refine my understanding of this point or that. You know, there is such a thing as doctrinal development that God leads the Church through, but that doesn't mean that the Christian faith itself, or the Catholic faith in particular, is false.

I'm convinced there's good evidence for those, and I'm convinced that an honest look at contrary evidence you would bring forward is not going to disprove them. I may need to refine something here or there, in my understanding, but fundamentally I've already seen enough evidence to know this is true. Just like a physicist could say, I've already seen enough evidence to know this is true. Just like a physicist could say, I've already seen enough evidence to know that matter is made out of atoms, or that relativity is true, or that light is a spectrum, or things like that. But there are certain, I mean, as Catholics there are certain things that we have to say we can't adjust, and this might get to the book that you've written on authority, having

to do with certain dogmas. Like original sin is something we can't jettison if we decide there are no original parents. We have to kind of reinterpret the story. So in that sense, because I've heard Protestant apologists say things like, that doesn't disprove God's existence. That doesn't disprove the resurrection of christ kind of appealing to this mere christianity like the lowest common denominator here's all you need to believe in order to be a christian but it would seem as a catholic in some sense it's it's it's going to be a little more difficult

because you have all these other doctrines and dogmas and you can tell me the difference between those two things um that we have to continually guard, because if one of those things does actually get knocked down, then we have to give up Catholicism. So we do have a difference compared to our Protestant friends in that we have more sort of minimums, if you want to put it that way. You alluded to the difference between doctrine and dogma. We probably ought to explain that for folks because a lot of people aren't aware of the distinction. A doctrine, so I guess back up a little bit. First kind of category is theology, and theology is an attempt to understand God based on divine revelation.

And people can have lots of different theological ideas, but as long as it remains in the sphere of theology per se, it's a matter of opinion, okay? I could have the theological opinion that this interpretation of some passage in St. Paul is right, and some other interpretation is wrong. That's a matter of theology, that's a matter of opinion. When the Church weighs in on a question and authoritatively teaches something, we move from the realm of theology to the realm of doctrine. Doctrina is just the Latin word for teaching, and so if the Church authoritatively teaches something, that's when it becomes a doctrine. Within the realm of doctrine, Church teachings can have different levels of authority. Some are very tentatively proposed.

Others are very firmly taught. At the top of the spectrum is infallible teachings. So in an infallible teaching, it's guaranteed to be true. The church doesn't have a huge number of infallible teachings. It actually has a lot less than people think, but it does have a good number of them, and anything the Church has taught infallibly is mandatory for Catholics to believe. Within the set of infallible teachings, there is a subset of what are called dogmas. Dogmas are things, not just things that the Church has infallibly taught to be true. That's just an infallible teaching. Dogmas are

things the Church has infallibly taught to be divinely revealed, And that's what makes it a dogma as opposed to just an infallible teaching, is that the Church has infallibly said, not only this is true, but God directly revealed this to mankind. Can you show us an example of something that's a dogma and something that's been—that something's infallible that isn't a dogma? Yeah, that isn't a dogma and something that's infallible, that isn't a dogma. Yeah, that isn't a dogma. An example cited by Cardinal Ratzinger a number of years ago, before he was Pope Benedict, is women's ordination to the priesthood. He said that currently that has been taught with such firmness that it is infallible,

but the Church has not yet infallibly taught that it's divinely revealed. He says one day the consciousness of the Church could progress to the point that it becomes a dogma, but it's not a dogma yet, it's just an infallible teaching. Interesting. Okay. In order to do that, you'd have to kind of go back into history, would you, and do an investigation to see whether or not this is something that was kind of believed firmly by the first Christians? It's not just a question of firmness. It's a question of what's the basis? How do we know it? Is the fact that only men can be ordained to the priesthood, is that an inference we're making from other things we know, or can we find something in Scripture and tradition where God has directly revealed this? Okay.

Okay. That's a help. Yeah. You'll note when things like—when dogmatic definitions do get made, where the Church does say something is a dogma, they will spell that out. Right. So, like, at Vatican I, when they defined papal infallibility as a dogma, they said this is divinely revealed. Same thing with the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary. They both times said this is divinely revealed, which makes it a dogma.

They didn't just say it's infallibly true. Okay. Okay. And maybe since I've brought it up a couple of times, this idea of having an original Adam and Eve, maybe address what was said in Humanae Generis. And to my mind, there's a sort of lack of that kind of directness when the issue of Adam and this is a controversial and widely misunderstood issue. One of the key documents, in fact the foundational document for exploring this question, is an encyclical that Pope problematic that were being proposed in his day, particularly by figures like Teil something a lot of people were talking about in the 20th century. biological evolution when it comes to the human form, that God could have used prior biological forms to help produce, under his guidance, under his providence, to help produce the body of the first humans, which he then had to give a soul, because the soul is from a different order of reality. It's metaphysically different than the body. He said souls don't evolve the way bodies do, and so God had to intervene in history to grant souls to our first parents.

He then addressed the question of, well, how many first parents were there? Could it have been more than another couple, more than just one couple? Could it have been more than Adam and Eve? And he said that even though Catholics have the liberty to propose evolution in some forms, they do not presently have the liberty to propose that there were more than two original parents, a theory called polygynism. The opposite, that there were just one set of one original human couple is called monogynism. And so he said Catholics don't have the liberty to propose polygynism because it is not at all evident how it could be squared with the doctrine of original sin, as taught in Scripture and Church teaching. So you have to parse this carefully.

When he says they don't have the liberty, that is a disciplinary regulation. It concerns the liberty of discourse, the freedom we have to discuss things. That's different than saying the church teaches there were only one original couple so but the fact he uses this uh the language he does pope pius the 12th is that who you're talking about at this point yeah i have it in front of me here please if you're interested it says now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of oh Right, but back up and read the previous statement. The sons of the church do not have okay depending on the translation yeah the children of the church by no means enjoy such liberty for the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after adam

there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Right. So the key word in all that is liberty, as opposed to the verb teach. If he had said, the church teaches, this is the case, it would have been a doctrinal statement. But because he used the word liberty, it's a disciplinary statement. So he established a discipline that the children of the Church did not have in 1950, the freedom to explore polygynism because it is by no means evident how to square that with the sources of faith concerning original sin. But he didn't say it could never be squared. And so what this had the effect of was refocusing

attention on the doctrine of original sin. And you've got theologians exploring original sin and saying, is there a way that we could square these two things? In which case, it would become a situation where Catholics might have the liberty to propose this. And that discussion got underway very quickly after 1950. And here's where most people's understanding of the situation kind of stalls, because most people have not done a careful study of the subsequent history of this question. They just know what Pius XII said in 1950, and they treat that as if that's it. There's been no subsequent development on this. Well, by the 1960s, the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, which at the time was,

you know, really carefully watched. I mean, today it runs reviews of The Simpsons, but back then it was really carefully watched for its doctrinal orthodoxy. So the Vatican's own newspaper in the 1960s was running articles saying, here's how maybe we could square the idea of polygynism with original sin. The Vatican's own newspaper, you know, I mean, this gets signed off on at a pretty high level, or it did back then. So that's a significant shift when the Vatican's own newspaper is exploring how could we square these two things. You also had a series of national catechisms get written. Now, the first one that this got dealt with in was the so-called Dutch Catechism, which had major flaws. And the Dutch bishops—so this is, again, the 1960s. The Dutch bishops released the catechism.

It's got major flaws in it. So Pope Paul VI has a commission set up to look at its flaws and demand revisions. And so they looked at it, and they demanded revisions, and they didn't demand a revision on the section that dealt with polygynism. That's another notable development. Then you have the German bishops, right? Now now because of the experience the bad experience with the Dutch catechism the Holy See put in a new rule that said if you write a national catechism as a group of bishops you have to before publishing it you have to run it through the congregation for the doctrine of the faith we don't want another Dutch catechism situation. So the German Conference of

Bishops wrote a catechism, and they submitted it to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and their catechism says, provided you maintain the following points about original sin, you could square evolution with—you could square original sin with polygynism. So it would then be a purely scientific question of whether or not polygynism happened or not. That would belong to the realm of science as long as you preserve these points about original sin. And so they submitted it to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was headed by Joseph Ratzinger at the time. And the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith signed off on it. And it was subsequently

published. In fact, it was published by Ignatius Press, a very reputable Catholic publisher. It's called A Catholic Catechism for Adults, if you want to get a copy of it, by the German bishops. Then you start, if you track papal statements on this question. You find Paul VI talking to a group of folks in Rome who are meeting to discuss original sin, and he says, don't be quick to endorse polygynism because it's based on unproven stuff. He doesn't say you can't discuss it. He says, don't just assume it's true because it's based on unproven stuff. Then you go to the reign of John Paul II, and he makes a number of statements on evolution over the course of his pontificate. Early on, he's saying things like, be careful, be open, but evolution is not yet solidly grounded fully in the scientific evidence.

By the 1990s, though, he's saying that multiple lines of evidence have emerged from different fields of science that really do strongly support biological evolution. But we need to respect the teachings of my predecessor, Pius XII, on the following points. This all happened under God's guidance, and God had to create the first human souls, like all other human souls. The end. He does not mention the restriction on polygynism. He's gone silent on that. He mentions everything else Pius XII said but that, and that's a notable omission, especially given all these other developments. Then, in the early 2000s, the International Theological Commission releases a document

called Communion and Stewardship, which is devoted to the image of God in man, what that means. And so folks are aware the International Theological Commission is not itself an organ of the magisterium. It's an advisory committee that's put together by Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and it's headed by the president, by the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which at the time was Joseph Ratzinger. So the president of the ITC is the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which at the time was Joseph Ratzinger. So the president of the ITC is the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It's all running under his auspices. And the documents of the International Theological Commission cannot be published without the prior review of the Holy See, and they can't be released unless the Holy See has no difficulty with them. That's in its bylaws. The only way they get to publish their documents is if they're reviewed

by the Holy See, and the Holy See does not have any difficulty with them. So what does it say in communion and stewardship? Well, in communionwardship, it entertains the possibilities both that Adam was a single individual and that Adam, whose name means man or mankind, is a symbol for the original human community. discusses the common scientific account of humans emerging as a population from Africa between, you know, 50 and 150,000 years ago. And it talks about how it expresses openness to both the idea that mankind emerged either as individuals or as a population. And this got approved for release by Joseph Ratzinger. You then look further beyond these into the writings of individual theologians, like let's say Cardinal Gerhard Muller, who was the head of the CDF, has a reputation as a very orthodox theologian. You look in his Catholic Dogmatics, it's a theology textbook he wrote, he talks about polygynism, and he's open to it.

And it is not just him. You look at any of these major people who have reputations for orthodoxy, who've talked about this subject, who are connected with the CDF, and this is a recurrent theme. So even though—now, I'm not saying polygynism is true. Right. I'm not saying that the Church teaches polygynism. It does not. But it also allows Catholics to explore the idea of polygynism in a way that is different from 1950. And if you watch the situation and how it's developed over the last seven decades, there has been a notable shift. Now, a given individual may or may not like the idea of polygynism, and there's more than one version of it. But, you know, but I don't think we can be honest if we say there has been no movement on

this question in terms of how the Church is handling it. And I think the reason is that the Church is wanting to avoid another Galileo situation. Ooh, I want to get to that. But before I do, I want to ask you, maybe just in under a minute, how might somebody explain polygynism, Adam and Eve, and original sin? How might they combine them together if they were trying to explain that? Two ways that have been tried. One way is to say, okay, there was an original couple, ways that have been tried. One way is to say, okay, there was an original couple, and so you have the first what you could call theologically modern humans. They have a human form, and they've

got the full modern human soul that God has created. Each one of them, he's given them a modern human soul. Now, all life forms have souls. That's what keeps them alive. You know, Aquinas talks about how even plants have souls. They have vegetative souls. Animals have sensitive souls. Humans have rational souls. Well, so there were apparently, from the archaeological record, near humans. In fact, one of the things that paleontologists are happy to acknowledge, most of them, is that around 100,000 years ago, there were what are called anatomically modern humans. You look at their bones, you look at their DNA, it looks like ours, but – or at least their bones. But they don't display the behaviors that modern humans do. split the behaviors that modern humans do. Then, say around 50,000 years ago, they start acting like us out of the blue. You get all these new cultural innovations. And so those are called

behaviorally modern humans. But because biologically the same, you could have a behaviorally modern human breed with an anatomically modern human. So one way of accounting for how original sin might work is you could say, okay, God took a couple of behaviorally modern humans and gave their children full human souls of the modern rational type. And so they became behaviorally modern at that moment. And that started what paleontologically is called the Great Leap Forward, where you have this sudden evolution in human culture. And they were the first true theological humans, but there were only two. But then, because they were behaviorally modern and they had a more advanced culture, their bloodlines came to dominate. And so very quickly

by today, all humans are descendants of that original couple, even though they married with behaviorally modern humans who didn't have a fully human rational soul. They would have had something close to it, but not the same thing. So that's one possibility that's been proposed. The other is that Adam and Eve—so Adam means man or mankind, humankind, to use the highfalutin politically correct term. But it does, in Hebrew, it means more than just a male. I mean, it means both genders. And Eve is derived from the word for life, because she's the mother of all the living.

So you have these figures named mankind and life, and you have them in a text that otherwise is pretty easy to show contains some symbolism in these early chapters of Genesis. So you could say, well, maybe Adam and Eve are a symbol for the early human community, which then as a whole turned its back on God. And that's what original sin was. It was a collective turning away from God by the early human community, even though he offered them original innocence and so forth with him. So you could have just one couple that turns away from God, but that we're all then descended from. Or it could be the early human community as a whole turned away from God and we're all descended from them. Those are two ways that have been proposed to try to square.

And remember, I'm not advocating any of these ideas. I'm just saying these are what people have been talking about, that those are two ways of trying to square original sin with the idea of polygynism. sin with the idea of polygynism. Okay, so what does a faithful Catholic do then if one day, you know, single human parents, Adam and Eve, does become infallible teaching? No, I don't think that'll happen. The reason being that it would be a question of science, not a question of faith, and so it would never be declared a dogma. Just like the Church today does not teach evolution.

That's a matter for science. What the Church did was it looked at the early texts in Genesis and says, in light of everything we know, are there ways that these texts can be harmonized with the idea of biological evolution? And they said, yeah, but once they've made that ruling, it then becomes, what's the scientific evidence? You've got to fight that out scientifically. That's not a matter of faith. It's not a matter of doctrine that evolution happened. That's a matter of science. But the sources of faith permit that option. And so what would happen in this case would be something similar. The Church could one day come out with a formal statement that, yes, you can, there are ways you could square the sources of faith with polygynism, but whether polygynism happens or not, that's a matter for science, and you've got to—that's not going to to be the church is never going to teach polygynism it might it might say you can square the sources of faith with it but it's then going to be up to

science to to give you evidence one way or another on that question all right fair enough thanks that was a really fascinating uh a topic to to delve into since you brought up galileo i do want to touch upon this because especially atheists who are looking at the Catholic Church who want to say that it's opposed to reason will bring this up. And they'll say that the church imprisoned and tortured Galileo because of his view of the earth going around the sun and so on. So could you help us understand what took place there? Oh, it's a big one. Depends on how deep you want to go into it. Right. Well, I know you've probably written on this at length elsewhere, and perhaps we could put up a link to an article that

you'd suggest below for people, but maybe let's just touch upon it for those who want a basic grasp of the topic. Yeah. So, okay. So let's start with the things that you mentioned. Galileo was never tortured. That did not happen. Galileo was eventually put under house arrest, and that's something that happened—there's kind of a history to how that happened. Originally, so back in the 1400s, you start having, and it really didn't really take off until actually Galileo himself developed a modern form of telescope. It was primitive by today's standards, but he developed a telescope. This is in the early 1600s. And he started looking through it, and he starts to see the moons of Jupiter, for example, orbiting around Jupiter, at least the four that are big enough to see from Earth. So that's, you know, Io, Ganymede, and a couple of others. And he sees these moons going around Jupiter. And it's clear, okay, here's this moon.

It's going around. Oh, it's going behind. Oh, here it comes back on the other side. It's clearly going around. Oh, it's going behind. Oh, here it comes back on the other side. It's clearly going around Jupiter. Well, this didn't square with the dominant astronomical theory of the time, or cosmological theory of the time, which had been proposed by a Greek astronomer, not a Christian, but a Greek astronomer in the AD 100s named Claudius Ptolemy. So this is called the Ptolemaic system of cosmology. It held that the Earth is at the center and that the other objects we see are embedded in spheres that surround the Earth and that rotate around the Earth at different speeds. But it had been noticed that some of the objects kind of are wonky in how they move across the sky.

Some of them move forward for a little bit, then they'll back up a little bit, and then they'll go forward again. And to explain that, they actually suggested that, okay, some of these objects are on little subspheres that orbit around as they go around on the bigger spheres. These were called epicycles. And so this explained largely the observations that you had with primitive astrolabes and things like that. But then astronomers started to get more refined instruments, and they started noticing, hey, this model doesn't quite work. And then you have Galileo whips out his telescope and sees the moons of Jupiter, and they're clearly

going around Jupiter. They're not part of this other system. Suddenly we have evidence not everything revolves around the Earth. And that then led Galileo to adopt a set of views that had previously been proposed by Nicholas Copernicus to say, hey, maybe the sun is at the center of the universe, not Earth. Maybe everything goes around the sun. And actually, the mathematics works out much easier if you make that assumption. But there were also problems with Galileo's arguments. Some of them were of a scientific nature. One of the problems concerned what's called the parallax of the stars. Parallax is what happens if you view the same point from different angles.

So like I'm trying to get my thumb here. If I look at it through one eye and then I shift to my other eye, I've got to move. Well, you can do the same thing with distant stars because as the Earth moves in its orbit, you can measure the angle that it appears at in January and then look at it again in June. And if the stars were under, if they were moving around the way that was predicted by the system, you should be able to see parallaxes for them. And you couldn't, given the telescopes that were available at the time. And so there were some problems with the scientific evidence. Also, frankly, from a perspective of modern physics, Galileo wasn't any more right than the geocentrists.

Because the sun isn't at the center of the universe either. It's near the center, the gravitational center of the solar system. But that's not the center of the universe. So from a modern perspective, this is based on, among other things, Einstein's theory of relativity. You have to pick your frame of reference. If you pick the Earth as your frame of reference, well, it's the center. If you pick the sun as your frame of reference, it's called the Berry Center, sometimes it's inside the sun, but sometimes it's not. It moves around as the planets move around the sun. Sometimes the gravitational center of the system is not in the sun. So you have to pick your frame of reference, because we can't see the edge of the universe. That's right. I was just thinking, if you were in a gigantic room and couldn't see the sides, you wouldn't be able to know whether you were

in the middle or not, center or not. And that's the situation we're in with the the sides you wouldn't be able to know whether you're in the middle or not center And that's that's the situation. We're in with the universe. We can't see edges and so Wherever you're standing looks like the center you have to pick an arbitrary frame of reference now the mathematics works out Gravitationally very nicely if you say gravity is what's driving all this and the Sun is very close to the center, gravitational center of the solar system, but it's not exactly there. But that couldn't have been done in Galileo's day because Isaac Newton hadn't come along yet. Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. And it was Isaac Newton who worked out the theory of gravity. And so they didn't have a gravitational explanation for why the sun and the planets would relate in this way.

So that's another aspect of the evidence that was missing from Galileo's case. He just said the sun's at the center and everything goes around it. Why? Well, he didn't have the theory of gravity to explain why, because Isaac Newton proposed that. And Isaac Newton got major pushback when he did propose it, because one of the tenets of Aristotelian physics was that you can't have action at a distance. You can't have one physical thing causing an effect somewhere else unless there's a physical connection between It's called The Case of the Missing Universe. And it's mostly about dark matter and dark energy.

But I talk about gravity and how Newton proposed it. It's actually fascinating. In his day, like I mentioned, the word science was not used for natural sciences. They were called it was called natural philosophy or even natural magic. Natural magic was supposed to deal not with calling up demons. That was something else. Natural magic was supposed to deal with hidden forces in nature, forces that you couldn't directly observe. Like you can observe the rain. You know, you can observe sunshine. Those are not hidden occult forces. Occult is just the Latin word for hidden occultus. So but Newton proposed there's this hidden force in nature that we can't see called gravity. and he got pushback for proposing this occult hidden force that nobody could explain.

But his equations worked so well for things like why did the sun and the moon and the planets orbit the way they do, that eventually people kind of got over the occult hidden nature of gravity and accepted it as part of natural philosophy, which then became natural science. and accepted it as part of natural philosophy, which then became natural science. But that's part of why Galileo couldn't provide a convincing rationale for his theory, because they didn't have the theory of gravity yet. Okay. So the point of this is that the reason he received—is this what you're arguing? The reason he received pushback from the Church wasn't because the Church is anti-science,

but because he didn't have enough evidence to back up his view that's part of it some of the evidence like didn't go his way like parallaxes they said we should see parallaxes we don't so that's where it looked like the evidence contradicted him then he didn't have support for his theory by gravity he didn't have an explanation for why this should be the case. And he made a crucial mistake. He started writing a book in the 1630s called The Dialogue Concerning Two Great World Systems. And he phrased it as a dialogue between different characters talking about. So you have one guy in the dialogue who is a Copernican, who, you know, of course, gets all the best lines. And you have another guy who's a geocentrist, and his name is Simplicius, which is Latin for simpleton. Right. So you got the simpleton who's arguing for geocentrism. Well, the Pope at this time, Pope Urban, actually kind of

liked Galileo. They had a friendship. But the Pope said, I don't want you to come to a conclusion in the book. I want you to let the different perspectives speak for themselves, and I want you to include arguments for both geocentrism and Copernicanism in here. And so Galileo said, I'll do that. I'll put your—including arguments Pope Urban himself had proposed—I'll take your, my buddy Pope Urban's arguments and put them in the mouth of my geocentrism character, who happens to be named Simpleton. Yeah. Right. So that really went down well. Uh-huh. And it hurt Urban's ability, actually, to kind of defend Galileo, because Urban did not want to look weak in defending church teaching and church scripture. church teaching and church scripture. And so this Galileo, both for scientific reasons and for political reasons, brought down the wrath of the authorities on himself. It was a significant

mistake. But rather than putting him in a prison, which would have dramatically shortened his lifespan, they commuted his sentence to house arrest, which was actually an element of mercy. But didn't Pope John Paul II apologize for the church's condemnation of Galileo? Well, he expressed regret. Because I'm just imagining skeptics watching this video and thinking, it sounds like all you're doing is defending the church and saying the church did nothing wrong, and it was on the side of galilee is that what you're saying no no no no no no the we're talking about human beings here uh galileo my the point is the reason i go into galileo's situation is partly to help like on the scientific and evidential grounds to help people understand

back then there was another perspective on this scientifically right um the we didn't have the astronomical evidence like parallaxes that would help confirm his theory and there wasn't a way of explaining it like gravity so so that's it wasn't open and shut right right not on scientific ground that's right and then rounds. And then you have Galileo, who's often canonized as a scientific saint, as if he did no wrong. Well, no, wait a minute. He kind of made some mistakes on his own. So I don't say this to say the church authorities were right in everything they did. I think that it would have been better to handle the situation in other ways that would have done justice to a variety of different factors. So I'm happy to criticize various people, including the churchmen, including some cardinals. There was a Spanish cardinal in particular who were putting pressure on Urban to deal harshly with Galileo.

I'm happy to criticize them. I'm happy to criticize the church authorities, too. What I don't want to see is a one-sided presentation that makes it look like, oh, they were just irrational for what they did, and Galileo was a saint. Gotcha. No, they were not irrational. Galileo was not a saint. There's plenty of blame to go around here. around here. How would you explain in around a minute, say, to somebody who says the Church is kind of against science, they're opposed to science, skeptical of science, as far as like the Church's contribution to fields of science? What would you say? Oh, well, so I would say they need to study the history of science, because Catholics, the Church supports the sciences,

it runs an observatory. It has the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to encourage discussion among scientists. And people who have been appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences include people like Stephen Hawking, who weren't even Catholic. So it's genuinely supporting the scientific effort. That's just modern stuff. You look back in the history, okay, genetics, you know who the big genetics guy was? It was, it was a monk. I mean, Mendelian genetics. He was a monk who was studying the pea plants in his garden that came up with, uh, with the, with the, some of the core basic theories here. Then the guy who came up with the Big Bang Theory, Father Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest. You look back at other figures from the history of science, you find priests and monks and theologians all over the place. I'm even

thinking of Blaise Pascal who invented the first... He was a mathematician. Yeah, or invented the first computer or calculator, depending on how you define that. Yeah. Also, Rene Descartes. If you remember from geometry class, the Cartesian plane where you have the x-axis and the y-axis, that was Rene Descartes, a Catholic philosopher and theologian. So you've got Catholics making major contributions to science all over the place in history and today. We like simple narratives, don't we? You know, the French are arrogant.

Americans are loud. These people are rude. You know, it's easy. Australians cuss too much. Yeah. And find random people on the shores of their beaches. Uh-huh. Okay, very good.

Well, this has been terribly helpful. If somebody wanted to kind of learn more about how faith and reason complement each other, other than reading, say, John Paul II's encyclical, Fetus at Ratio. Oh, you stole my thunder, dude. Ah, yeah. Which people can look up online for free and check out. What else should they check out? Well, there are a lot of books that have been written on this. I mean, a good place to start, actually, surprisingly, Wikipedia actually is a good jumping on point. Now, it's got its flaws, but if you look at its articles, it usually has references to other places. Also, there are quite good encyclopedias of philosophy that are available online, like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is at

plato.stanford.edu, or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a peer-reviewed journal, or the Catholic Encyclopedia. And look in some of these encyclopedias, look under their articles for faith and reason and various figures we've talked about, including like Averroes, or the Latin Averroists, or Thomas Aquinas. Those are great places. There are also books that have been done that explore these issues. Some of my favorites are written by an evangelical apologist named J.P. Moreland. He's got books on Christianity and natural science, as well as a nice book called Scaling the Secular City. Obviously, I don't agree with everything these authors write, but those are some good starting points. And of course, you already mentioned Fides et Ratio as a really good jumping on point, too.

And I always tell people to go to catholic.com. Whenever I'm out there speaking, I tell them to pour themselves a cup of coffee and use that search bar. Pick a topic that interests you or a topic that bothers you. You're not sure how to reconcile. There's just a wealth of information there at catholic.com. I hope folks will check out my books, like The Bible is a Catholic Book, Teaching with Authority. There's also an easy read called A Daily Defense, which is 366 short entries defending various aspects of faith and reason. You can check that out. And then also check out my podcasts, including Jimmy's Mysterious World.

And just for those who are wondering, that was episode 83 that you referenced a moment ago about the case of the missing universe. Missing universe. Yeah. Check that out. Okay. Thank you very much for watching the show. If you haven't yet subscribed what are you waiting for be sure to do that and then we are going to pick up the rest of this

discussion over at patreon so if you're not yet a patron go join today patreon.com slash matt frad patreon.com slash matt frad in the post show wrap up with jimmy i talked to him about comic books he's a massive fan i ask him who would win a fight between Batman and Superman. Not only will his answer surprise you, but it's going to be a heck of a lot more sophisticated than any other answer you have heard before. But check this out. Once you become a patron, you get access to our online community. I don't really do a lot on social media, but we have these great discussions all the time over on Patreon. I'll send a signed copy of my book to your door stickers. You get access to these video courses we're doing.

We just did this online video course on Flannery O'Connor. We're currently doing one right now on the great books of the Western canon. And I get these actual teachers to teach you. They record the videos. They're in the comment section dialoguing with you. It's really like being a part of a university course. It's fascinating. You give more, you get more.

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