Fr. Barron's "Youtube Heresy" ~ Part 3

The third Youtube Heresy is scientism. Fr. Barron defines scientism as, "the reduction of knowledge to the scientific way of knowing." This basically is a concept that people can know truth only through the sciences (i.e. what we can measure and observe through the emperical world). This statement in itself though is a contradiction for there is no way to prove that we can know everything through the sciences. The claim that all knowledge is reducible to scientific knowledge is not itself somthing that can be proved scientifically.

The argument also does not take into account philophical paths to truths, for example, you cannot prove scientifically what is morally right and wrong and what beauty is. A wise old priest told me that the volumes and volumes and pages upon pages of work by St. Thomas Aquinas can best be summed up in two words: res sunt (things are). How strange it is that there is something rather then nothing?

All sciences rest upon the concept of intelligibility; that the universe is somehow to some degree knowable. We somehow have this innate belief that we can measure and observe the natural world and through that know something about it. Intelligibility is an act of faith in the truest sense; that we can somehow know something without any scientific proof.

The relationship between faith and reason is overly misconstrued in many people. The Catholic tradition has always been faith and reason, not one or the other, but both and.  Many of the greatest scientific minds have also been very religious individuals themselves.  Take for example Newton, Pascal, Descartes, Tycho Brahe.  Its also interesting to note that the man who began modern genetics, Gregor Mendel, was a friar and the formulator of the Big Bang Theory of the universe, Georges Lemaître, was a priest.  Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Ze Dong however were atheists.

Part 4 coming soon.

Gregor Mendel

                                                                   Georges Lemaître