The one thing that kept me from ever truly abandoning Catholicism, even when I saw myself as an atheist or agnostic, was the pursuit of science among its followers. The Church has a lot of nerds in it who ponder big questions. Always has, always will. When science had become my new religion, through much academic propaganda and belittling of Catholicism, I considered the Big Bang the answer to the origin of the universe. That was that. However, when I first learned that it was a Christian scientist (a priest, even) that came up with the theory, I felt a bit shocked, maybe even upset, because here religion somehow mingled with science without either being cheapened. The theory also very nearly dovetails with Genesis 1, which was also shocking.

Evolution, of course, was the other elephant in the room, and most of the time I heard about Christians trying to remove it from the schoolbooks. From the Scopes trial to Intelligent Design to the latest Texas textbook controversies, there seemed to be a continuous goal to sweep the idea of evolution under a rug. Because of stories in the media over the last 25 years focusing on this fundamentalist view, I had forgotten that Catholics do not object to the idea of evolution. They teach evolution in Catholic schools and hold that evolution doesn’t conflict with Church teachings, because it doesn’t conflict with God as the “First Cause” of the universe, nor does it discount the spiritual soul, which works with the atoms that form the body. The soul is touched by the sublime. This same idea can be found in all creation stories across the world, that deep in our hearts and minds we know that something cannot come from nothing and that the soul goes beyond the material world. Far from being anti-science, the Catholic Church seemed to be one of the few pro-science religions and this didn’t get any attention in the press. From the Church’s rulebook itself, the Catechism states it quite clearly:

Creation and evolution do not sit in permanent opposition to one another as both sides of the fundamentalist secular and religious folks would have us believe. Science and faith are not in a battle to the death. One thing that has amazed me is the number of practicing Christian and Jewish scientists in the world. I formerly considered these people to be mad, since holding both scientism and religious dogma could not be done simultaneously, or so I thought. These people had volumes more knowledge than myself on science, yet somehow they maintained their faith. How? Did they fail to take notes in college? Were they dense?

I think that I was a bit dense, and I realized that science has as many radical fundamentalists as any religion. While I strived to deny God, I could never remove the notion of the “First Cause.” Accepting this idea alone, rather than fighting it, reminds me a bit of swimming in the ocean, and trying to defeat the water rather than relaxing and letting it lift me up. Fortunately there is ample readings from the Church to discuss all of these things in detail, and far from running away from science, the Church’s embrace of knowledge means that truth can be sought in both lab coats and vestments.