St. John Henry Newman and Science 

St. John Henry Newman will soon be declared a Doctor of the Church. Newman’s most influential theological idea is the development of doctrine—the belief that Catholic teachings grow and unfold over time under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. His book An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine prepared his own conversion to the Catholic Church and had an impact on Vatican II.

St. John Henry Newman was, by vocation and training, a theologian and pastor. However, given his Oxford education (which included lectures in mineralogy and geology) and his role as Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, Newman was deeply immersed in the intellectual world of his time, including the rising influence of the natural sciences.

Prior to his canonization in 2019, I prepared an article for the Society of Catholic Scientists, https://www.catholicscientists.org/idea/saint-john-henry-newman-a-co-patron-for-scientists, reflecting on his views on science in general and on the theory of evolution in specific.

And I share here a recent comment by Heinz-Herman Peitz (in a translation from German):

“Thank you for the link to a thoughtful tribute of [St. John Henry] Newman by Berta M. Moritz. She presents Newman as a great interdisciplinary pioneer and as one of the first theologians who did not see Darwin’s theory as a contradiction to the Christian faith. For Newman, apparent conflicts between science and faith do not necessarily arise from scientific error but may just as well spring from a misunderstanding of revelation. In this respect—one might add—he was ahead of the First Vatican Council. That Council, to be sure, also recognized that, since there is only one truth, there can ultimately be no genuine conflicts. But when it came to apparent conflicts, it acknowledged only the opposition between “erring reason” and “infallible revelation.”
Moritz also shows Newman’s continuing relevance today, for example in his understanding of “design.” Here Newman inverts the logic employed by many modern proponents of Intelligent Design: “I believe in design because I believe in God, not in God because I see design.”

| Written by B M Moritz | Science meets Faith | Read full story at Read More