A while back, I wrote a critique of a project proposed by Tommaso Todesca and his colleagues: a comic book (or “graphic novel” if you will) designed to make the point that science and religion are fully compatible. (I found a description of the project on PuffHo.) Todesca a Catholic of Italian extraction and a wealthy banker in Los Angeles, proposed to spread a message of accommodationism he read in an Italian book called Scienze e fede (“Science and faith”). The purpose of the comic-book project?:
The “hook of the project,” Todesca said, is the message that “science and faith are not in conflict with each other.”
“Through the patience of dialogue, science and faith can and should complement each other, and make each other stronger,” he told The Huffington Post.
. . . The graphic novel will feature Savagnone and Briguglia — a philosopher and a physicist, respectively — as comic book characters who go on a journey that takes them from Rome to Florence to Toulouse, meeting with great scientists and thinkers of the past and the present, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Thomas Aquinas. [JAC: The Kickstarter video also mentions that Savagnone and Briuglia will meet Richard Dawkins, but that meeting is pointedly omitted by PuffHo; possibly because potential funders see Dawkins as Satan incarnate.]
Their dialogue draws from the original book, which Todesca said “makes a compelling case for faith as a type of knowledge that can find its ground in rationality.”
To fund the comic, Todesca set up a Kickstarter site, asking for $10,000. (Why a a wealthy banker would need $10,000 to get this project off the ground eludes me.) You can see some of the tedious and tendentious graphics at that site, or in my previous post on the project, “Oy! An accommodationist comic book.”
Unfortunately for Todesca, the appeal for funds failed: here’s the outcome:
I guess Science and Faith is not to be.
My critique of the project was largely along the lines of Faith Versus Fact, attacking several dubious claims made in the proposal for Science and Faith. These include the claim that religion isn’t concerned with empirical realities about the cosmos; that “faith” is far more than “belief without evidence”, and is in fact a “way of knowing”; and that, to Todesca, religion, was perfectly compatible with science. So often, as in Todesca’s case, the last claim is merely a version of the “no true Scotsman” argument: “Well, MY religion is compatible with science, and so ALL religion is compatible with science.” And those religions that prove incompatible with science, like the faiths of more than 40% of Americans, can be written off as “not true religions.”
Apparently, Todesca found out about my criticism and posted a comment on my piece, a comment that I decided to put above the fold. Todesca’s entire comment is indented below, but my commentary on it is flush left.
A few days ago a friend told me: “Take a look, someone wrote a nasty piece on your comic book project. He sounded really angry, you must have pissed him off big time!”.
So I read this article, and oy! my friend was right, it is pretty nasty indeed.
I wondered: “How did my project offend this person so much?”
Dr Coyne, exactly what kind of war are you fighting? Initially I thought it might be a cultural war, as a hero against ignorance. That would be a worthy cause, but in that case you should specify that you are addressing literalism, fundamentalism, and superstition, as those are the common names of ignorant faith.
The title of your blog would suggest that is your mission…. but that’s not the case. You seem to attack “faith” and “religion” in the broader possible sense.
That means your war is being waged against 85% of the world population. That is a lot of anger.
So I understood. That’s what I did to offend you: by being catholic and by talking about my faith in a book (a book that has the utmost respect for science), I offended you.
Here Todesca’s playing the “anger” card in lieu of addressing my arguments. In fact, I wasn’t angry at all, though I was a tad offended that someone with brains could be so misguided about faith and its relationship to science. But I didn’t write the piece to let off steam; I wrote it, as you’ll see if you read it, to go after Todesca’s claims. And I don’t give a rat’s patootie if 85% of the world’s population is religious and that makes them a majority. None of them—not one person—has convincing evidence that their religious beliefs are true, or that a divine being exists.
Todesca goes on:
Just like Dawkins, Hitchens, etc., by stating that faith wants to say something about the natural world, you completely miss the point of religion, and you demonstrate a deep confusion about christian theology.
Catholic faith holds science in deep respect, and catholic theology is very aware that the Bible has nothing to teach us about biology.
In two words, when it comes to evolution, geology and every single statement that pertains to science, we agree. We couldn’t agree more!
Todesca is apparently unaware of three things. First of all, lots of theologians, including Sophisticated Ones™, argue that faith really does say something about the natural world, and that Steve Gould’s NOMA claim that it doesn’t is simply wrong. In Faith Versus Fact I give a many quotes by theologians about this issue. So Todesca is wrong on this point.
Second, Todesca apparently thinks that his own conception of faith is the one that everyone holds. As I show in my book, he’s wrong. And if he thinks his own conception of faith is the right conception of faith, well, he’s wrong there, too. There is no “right” way to delimit the realm of faith.
Third, Catholic theology certainly does make assertions about biology. Here’s one: humans, uniquely among animals, have a soul, and it’s immortal. Somewhere in the evolutionary pathway from ancestral primates, God gave us that soul. Here’s another: as Pope Pius XII affirmed in 1950, all humans all literally descended from Adam and Eve as our sole progenitors. Because of that claim, and the genetic disproof based on historical estimates of H. sapiens’ population size, Catholic theologians are tying themselves into knots.
Todesca goes on:
What you don’t seem to realize or acknowledge is that you and the catholic theologians are actually talking about two completely different things when it comes to words like universe, beginning, and “God”.
In the words of David Bentley-Hart: “If one is content merely to devise images of God that are self-evidently nonsensical, and then proceed triumphantly to demonstrate just how infuriatingly nonsensical they are, one if not going to accomplish anything interesting”. “The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God is the habit of conceiving God as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power and duration, but not ontologically, and is related to the world like a craftsman is related to his artifact”.
Earth to Todesca: David Bentley Hart (no hyphen) is not only not Catholic (he’s Eastern Orthodox), but he’s also not the world’s expert on what God is like. (See my posts on him here and here.) In fact, nobody is the world’s expert on what God is like, because there are thousands of different conceptions of God, many at odds with each other. And the whole enterprise fails anyway because there’s no convincing evidence for God. Hart’s conception is on the apophatic side, but of course many people believe in God as a Celestial Person, with feelings and desires. See Faith Versus Fact for the documentation.
Todesca goes on:
Of course, as you say, scientific knowledge is only one. There aren’t different types or flavors of scientific truths.
But faith is most definitely a form of knowledge: a knowledge that does not relate to protons, neutrons and the stars, but to the human experience. Whether Hindu, Catholic, or whatever else, faith is about our human reality, our traditions, and how to make the best out of our limited life.
Well, Mr. Todesca, can you tell us one definitive piece of knowledge that faith has given us? I’m a bit confused here.
I am also appalled by the preposterous statements of Earth Creationists, Evangelicals who take the Bible in a literal sense, or even Hindu nationalists who insist that Rama’s bridge was actually built by Hanuman’s monkeys.
Of course, just like you, I find these ideas ridiculous. I pity the people who support them, and I’m sorry that they clearly did not receive an adequate education.
So, again, we certainly agree.
Well, 40% of Americans, and about a quarter of American Catholics—Todesca’s coreligionists—are young-earth creationists, and so see an incompatibility between the facts of science and their religious belief. Todesca’s form of faith, and what it teaches us, is far from universal.
But while my approach is – in a very limited way through my comic book project – to encourage an open dialogue and to try to popularize the ideas of two professors who have been studying theology, philosophy and science for most of their lives, your approach seems to be a full-on attack on all religions based on the statements of those who get catholic theology completely wrong (fundamentalists and literalists). And you even wrote a book on faith, when your credentials in the area of theology are weak at the very least.
There’s the credential card! But I think I know something about Catholic theology, and I suspect it’s at least as much as Todesca knows about science. But let’s put credentials aside because, like playing the “you’re angry” card, it’s just a way to avoid the substantive issue: faith can’t tell us anything about the cosmos, or even limn a way of life that most people agree on. And speaking of Catholic theology, Mr. Todesca, could you enlighten us about how that theology regards homosexual acts, divorce, what happens during Communion, and whether there’s an afterlife? Do we all misunderstand those things, too?
He goes on:
It is such a shame to see brilliant scientists like yourself and R. Dawkins spend so much of your time speaking and writing about things that go beyond your area of expertise, and that don’t really do much aside from making ignorant people even angrier and firmer on their creationist (etc.) positions. You will never change their minds.
My suggestion? Leave it. Relax. Focus on your scientific publications, projects, and use your intelligence for constructive activities.
This is the only part that gets my bile up: the you-don’t-understand-religion-because-you’re-an-atheist claim. Seriously, theology is not rocket science, and you can learn a great deal about it (granted, with much mental pain) by reading for two years, as I did. I deny that religion, or Catholic theology is beyond my expertise. If they are, then they’re certainly also beyond the expertise of the average Catholic, who hasn’t read nearly as much as I have about Catholic theology.
In fact, Todesca doesn’t seem to grasp that his brand of Catholicism isn’t universally shared, and that, at least in America, far more people are young-Earth creationists than are Catholics.
Why do religious people assume that theology is so hard to grasp? After all, it’s just making stuff up about a being for which we know nothing. Theology is, as Dan Barker says, “a subject without an object.” Further, as I often say, while some believers are literalists about nearly everything, nearly every believer is a fundamentalist about something. For Catholics, the literalism involves the divinity of Jesus, his death and resurrection, and the claim that accepting Jesus as saviour will grant us eternal life. That must surely be part of the “knowledge” vouchsafed by Todesca’s Sophisticated Faith.
But I’ve gone on too long in response to someone who is just raising the same old arguments. So, Mr. Todesca, so long, thanks for all the bromides, and good luck with your comic book. When you have some real evidence for God, we’ll talk.
I have faith that all people will eventually see the errors of thinking that faith and science are compatible. And since I have faith in that, I guess it is knowledge. It will happen, because I have faith, and therefore knowledge that it will happen.
Oh, too bad that his fantasy won’t take flight. I would have been interested in what they found in Toulouse. Toulouse (I lived there for a while), as you may know, is right down the road from Albi (from which the Albigensian Crusades take their name), and Béziers, site of the famous massacre of the Cathars AND their Catholic neighbors.
Maybe they’d have a nice little discussion with Pope Innocent III and his pet rabid dog Simon de Montfort, who did his best to make Cromwell and Torquemada look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Yes, ad hominem attacks in place of a substantive argument—Jerry’s criticism is motivated by anger and ignorance, thus is invalid.
I agree, when he has some evidence, we’ll listen.
Theists often mistake ridicule for anger, since one thing they do not do is ridicule faith. It discombobulates them and they conclude that the person doing it must be really angry.
It’s also notable that Tom Todesca is very keen on telling is about what God is *not*, but not so keen on telling us what God *is*, and the evidence for the claim.
(PS Jerry, you have two paragraphs beginning “Second”).
His comic book will explain things just about as well as Batman, Superman, Spiderman and Archie comic books do. When it is all fantasy and fiction, the best one can do is entertain.
I hate to argue with Mr. Terrace here, but I looked at the panels of Mr. Todesca here, and the above mentined comics are far superior.
I always love the argument of “where will they get their morals?”
I was raised fundamentalist. The brief compulsory Sunday and Wednesday night performances were usually confusing and conflicted, when not just deadly dull and irrelevant.
We spent a couple of few hours a week on that crap by force, yet we spent countless hours on comics, books, movies and music which were almost always dealing with morality in some sense, or at least human relationships. I’d put the morals of Star Trek, humanist morals, against any existing religion.
This argument about credentials and qualifications is getting annoying. If I want to get into debate with Dr Coyne about the evolution of the fruit fly, then I’ll very quickly be out of my depth. Not because I’m not a qualified evolutionist, but mainly because I haven’t read about the subject. After all, a qualification is simply an award you are given that acknowledges you have read absolutely loads about something.
In any event, many subjects hardly need much in the way of dedicated study; I know almost nothing about astrology, or alchemy, or homeopathy, but I know enough to know they’re woo. Along with religion.
Indeed, 6 years old are knowledgeable enough to go atheist. No study needed really, just a degree of mature thinking vs magic thinking.
One could argue that everyone is born atheist…since it’s the lack of belief in gods, the tabula rasa begins with no beliefs at all.
The argument also goes one way, apparantly. “You don’t know enough about theology to say faith and science are incompatible!” Well, has Todesca considered the possibility that he doesn’t know enough about science to say it’s compatible with faith? Presumably not.
The only credentials that can be seen just glancing at the writings of Todesca are his blinding beliefs in himself and g*d. When the argument includes the statement that faith is a form of knowledge you have lost the battle. You are in opposition to most every dictionary as well.
I think these guys pull that angry BS only because they are the angry ones and to release this angry they attempt to stick it on us. He gets all heated up reading PCC’s argument and his only answer is – man are you angry.
People like Todesca proclaim themselves as ‘experts’ in something because “I is one of those”. PCC(E) should just declare himself as a Sophisticated™ Theologist with expertise in all religions to quiet the complaints. (never mind that he published in the discipline).
Apparently, bankers are experts in theology *and* science.
Todesca regards his compartmentalised approach to religion and his dismissive, aggressive-passive anger as being sociable, acceptable, and beyond criticism. Since his innocent, blameless, and sickeningly sweet handle on life is being criticised, it must be because he is not being recognised as not one of the religious troublemakers, those awful literalists and fundamentalists. He seems to be so beyond the curve here focusing on non-existent anger and atheists’ poor grasp of what he considers to be good religion, that he is shocked to find that all religion is being criticised, mercilessly and without end until it is totally acceptable to do so.
Of course, all religious believers have the right to practice their particular notion of religious nonsense, but they have no right not to be lambasted for their non-evidential stance and even more so, for their disgusting expectation of respect they demand for such beliefs.
Nicely done.
“If you knew what I know you would agree with me. Because you don’t agree with me, you must be ignorant.”
That’s basically become the mantra of sophisticated theology.
But unless you’re indoctrinated into it, or infatuated with it, religion doesn’t pass the simple sniff tests, that would encourage deeper study.
FYI: If someone gives me $10,000 dollars I’ll produce a full color comic that shows how science and religion are incompatible 🙂
Would you do it for $3.87? 🙂
Well, we could try crowd-sourcing the dough.
Pliny,
Are you talking about a comic book or just a single comic?
A comic book would be cool, and I suspect all or most of the dough could be crowdsourced from the regular readers of PCC’s website.
A full on graphic novel with Vatican intrigue, the GOP, ISIS and perhaps a climax atop the Scientology building in LA which of course would include our own resident super hero and his peeps. 😉
With Mormons, child-endangering JW’s, faith healers and snake handlers?
Those groups would be represented by an umbrella organization: Federated Theological Association of Religious Deniers of Science
So is there a place to contribute?
That climax can only end with David Miscavige splattered on the pavement below.
Pliny, what are you “in-between”? A rock and a hard place? No matter, your comics are both funny and informative. I enjoy them a lot. Keep up the good work.
In between the Elder and the Younger
Thx for the kind words.
Fun fact:
Besides what we know it to mean colloquially, there is this:
That test seems to pass the sniff test.
Coincidence? (Don’t ask a religious believer.)
That is the most obscure attempt I have seen to try to conceal the fact that if a religious magic agency is acting on the world, we can describe it as an agency within the universe. (Especially since universes and so multiverses are zero energy, so they can’t be acted on, they either originate randomly or not.)
I had to look up Sophisticated Theology of apophatic bent again, and it is pure mysticism: “An example occurs in the assertion of the 9th-century theologian John Scotus Erigena: “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything [i.e. “not any created thing”]. Literally God is not, because He transcendsbeing.”” [Followed by a Sophisticated Theology rewrite; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology ]
It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I always refer to the Pew study of US, where the average atheist knew *more* about a religion in question than the average sect member, except for Jews and Mormons. So phooey on Todesca’s apologetics.
Show me the evidence for your magic beliefs, or be for ever silent! (One can wish.)
Lol duly noted passive aggressive concern haha.
I forgot this, which is a mine going off directly in Todesca’s sectarian corner:
Todesca is unaware of the many hundreds of creationist (etc.) converts in Dawkins’s Convert’s Corner!
Speaking of religious ignorance and hubris.
I should add that the converts have been swayed by Dawkins but also other people who have spent time speaking and writing about how religious magic belief is woo.
Tommaso is all like, harmless, completely harmless, I can assure you. And then Jerry is like
*Boom* *Mic drop*
Jerry, and everyone here: Why do you hate world peace so much? Why oppose the 85% that lives happily together in spiritual communion? 😀
I know, as if it’s all a bowl of cherries out there. Who’d want to live in a theocracy? I will take atheist Europe any day.
Take carefully, atheist Europe is being covertly infiltrated by Middle Eastern theocrats as we speak.
To some extent, this may be true, but it is at least equally true that many immigrants to western Europe are trying to escape the oppressive religion of their homelands.
Show me where anyone here anyone here hates world peace?
Do you have anything substantive to say or do you just pass the time flogging straw men?
I am offended, and you are not helping your cause. This is an intelligent informed audience. Perhaps you are new to that.
I can go three blocks in any direction and not find people “living happily in spiritual communion.” Muted tolerance, sure. We just tacitly agree not to voice our private beliefs in the secular arena.
Perhaps you should take that under advisement.
I think Aneris is being sarcastic, judging from the happy emoticon at the end.
I think.
I’ve noticed that my sarcasm was perhaps not obvious enough, so let’s spell it out: 85% of believers are of course not living together in harmony, and of course it’s not atheism that wages war against anyone. Of course, it’s not the case that everyone is happy, just the atheists are left out of the happy family.
It’s further even an illusion to speak of Muslims or Christians since they often times do not even recognize each other as being together in their belief — especially not through history. Smallest religious differences are apparently enough to create strongest ingroup-outgroup feelings when the circumstances require it. Further, the uniting powers of religion only work with brutal oppression, fire and sword, as seen in the “old world” with both Islam and Christianity.
All religious faith is ignorant faith, in that the faithful don’t realize it don’t want to admit that faith is not a valid epistemology.
*or* don’t want to admit…
Faith is knowledge.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Literary allusions aside, I think the most objectionable – because overreaching, nonsensical, and hypocritical – part of Todesca’s reply is when his ethnocentric placing of Catholicism and faith above the beliefs of creationists and Hindus meets the overreaching claim that faith is knowledge. As in, “I have faith in X, so X is knowledge”. This is like claiming that because I don’t participate in a competitive sport, I am therefore engaging in a radically different form of exercise superior to that performed by people who take up the sport and lose.
It betrays a dismissal of scientific methodology because it claims to be beyond it and thus can look down on any “lesser faith” amenable to it. It wants it own elite club, or its own cargo cult, without the hard work of actually being elite, of actually understanding how air traffic control works. He can now take part in provincial Catholic superstitions and think he’s on par with scientists unravelling the nature of the universe.
It’s not just wishful thinking, but embarrassingly extreme wishful thinking.
“…faith is about our human reality, our traditions, and how to make the best out of our limited life.”
How can faith be about “how to make the best out of our limited time” when to be an adherent people blow themselves up with suicide bombs, mutilate females, force females to be submissive to men, deplore and kill homosexuals, deny condoms in HIV hot spots, thereby aiding in h spread of the disease, terrorize adults and children a like with tales of a torturous eternity for whatever is considered “sinful”, encourage ignorance by refusing to educate its girls and educating its boys with only holy books? All these things seem miserable to me and their just a sample of some of the things “faith” does.
Sorry, but I think you’re really talking about Humanism and it’s deity and dogma free.
My excuse for my misquote and shit typos is I was on my iPhone in bed (recovering from yesterday’s migraine).
Doesn’t matter Diana, your posts are always a pleasure to read and who cares about the shit typos, not me.
Awwww, thanks plingar!
What’s more, I thought christian faith was all about receiving eternal life. What is it about eternal life in heaven that is limited?
Todesca seems strangely unaware that the Catholic god must have something akin to thoughts and feelings, otherwise why send Jebus? The whole narrative, whether allegorical or real, depends on god’s love of people and hatred of sin.
God’s perverse moral logic demands the death and blood of an innocent sacrifice (sometimes barbecued, sometimes not) for the remission of this hated sin. Because love.
Even as fiction, that’s not an apophatic god. The two are incompatible.
It is worse than that. If Jesus is god, as Catholics claim, and Jesus was (also) a man, and men have thoughts, then god has thoughts.
One quibble. Members of the Orthodox Catholic Church (so called eastern orthodox) certainly consider themselves catholic (and the orthodox version thereof). They have just not been in communion with that upstart Roman Catholic papacy for the past thousand years.
Mr. Todesca writes:
“Catholic faith holds science in deep respect, and catholic theology is very aware that the Bible has nothing to teach us about biology.”
I can’t help but notice a very wide and, I’m sorry to say, disingenuous gap between what mr. Todesca writes and the pope preaches. This year, the horrible woman named Mother Teresa will be made a saint for supposedly healing a Brazilian man, despite the fact that she’s been dead for almost two decades. It is a biological fact that dead people do not heal the living. Nor do they come back to life, like Jesus supposedly did. And the virgin birth isn’t real either. Virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus are the core of catholic doctrine – and they are also biological claims.
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Oh yeah! The Catholic Church is totally cool with science! Like when they placed Galileo under house arrest for asserting the Earth revolved around the Sun. Or when they burned Giordano Bruno at stake for saying that the Sun was one star among many. And remember, this was before, as accommodationists love to claim, fundamentalism “ruined” religion.
But, but, his faith gives him a really strong feeling, and he feels really certain that this feeling feels like knowledge that can only come from faith.
QED: Faith brings a sort of knowledge that science can’t.
What a condescending asshole.
Re ” If they are, then they’re certainly also beyond the expertise of the average Catholic, who hasn’t read nearly as much as I have about Catholic theology.”
It’s actually odd how little many Catholics know about church history as well as theology.
I have met two Roman Catholics who did not know that Saint John Neumann (4th bishop of Philadelphia) and John Henry Cardinal Newman are not the same person.
Hundreds of Catholic high schools are named “Robert Bellarmine”. Few grads of these schools know he was Galileo’s chief antagonist in the Catholic church- and also of Giorduno Bruno. (If they’re going to name schools after famous Catholic educators, why not the more innocuous St. John Bosco?)
More innocently, hundreds of Catholic high schools are named St. Gregory. Few grads know he is the source of Gregorian chant, and one of the first popes to be viewed with suspicion by the Eastern churches.
I have met at least one Catholic who did not know that in Catholic theology God has no physical material body.
“Anything with an esoteric vocabulary, and transformation rules for using that vocabulary in well-formed expressions, is an intellectual discipline; and until someone asks whether the words actually refer to anything that can confirm the truth, or establish the falsity, of those expressions, it can seem as though participants in the language game are actually talking about important matters, when, in fact, the whole activity might be entirely self-contained, a very complex, intellectual jeu d’esprit in which many enjoyable hours may be spent. Religion is, in my view, such a language, and the question whether it can have any relationship to an intellectual discipline which actually confirms or disconfirms propositions on the basis of things external to the manipulation of expressions within the discipline is the point at issue.”
I think that comes from a certain, possibly former, ex-theologian.
Oops! That wasn’t supposed to go there.
So what does that say about the divinity of Jesus? Does it imply that he is/was not god? Or that perhaps he did not walk on earth with a material body?
And anyway, how can they reconcile the idea of the trinity with monotheism? 3 does not equal 1. (Ok ok, except for some very small values of 3.)
Todesca is so condescending. I wonder if he would feel so uppity after reading your rebuttal. Good job, Jerry!
Poor guy. Did his Mummy not tell him the truth about Santa Claus, and how he is going to rot (or otherwise be recycled) after his inevitable death?
No, actually I’ll withdraw that “inevitable ” for a “highly likely”. It is not impossible that a well – funded individual today might be able to fund sufficient medical interventions to stave off death indefinitely. But it is extremely unlikely, particularly since the academic-industrial-technological basis of our so cities seems to be heading for a series of crunches. So, there’s a slender chance of him not dieing. Or of him being the last human to due. But only slender.
Thomas Huxley: Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that wherever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter have been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched if not slain.
Won’t lie – I waded into the comments just to see if Todesca found his way here again.
That last highlighted section is some of the most condescending piffle I’ve read in a long time – especially from someone whose own “expertise” seems to be in business management, and not religion *OR* science, judging by my own research into him.
When people like him claim religion has nothing to say about the natural world, the immediate follow-up question should always be whether that means they are asserting the resurrection of Christ never happened (if they are Christian). That either happened, or it didn’t. Same goes for the genetic implausibility of Adam and Eve. Without these events, the entire foundation of “Original Sin” falls apart.
So does he believe those things happened, or not? If he does, then how do they not impose at all on the natural, scientific world? These cases pretty clearly make serious asks of biology and genetics, respectively.
The rest is just the usual “sophisticated” attempt to remove God from any plane of existence where any request of evidence could ever reasonably be made. Typical “God is completely unknowable, now here’s what I, Sophisticated Theologian (TM), know about him…” dissembling.
notice that in his kickStarter proposal, under “Risks and Challenges”, todesca’s entire evaluation consists of:
lack of demand is most indeedy a major investment risk, as QED’d by the abysmal failure of this fundraiser, and todesco’s cursory dismissal of this eventuality brings into question his alleged business acumen, or perhaps explains his curious unwillingness to put even so little of his own money where his mouth is.
LOL. Mr. Todesca, Jerry goes after non-Christians for accommodationism all the time. And it probably wouldn’t take more than a few minutes of keyword searching and reading to figure that out. Its not about your Catholicism. Its about your accommodationism.
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“But faith is most definitely a form of knowledge:”
Replace “knowledge” with “ignorance” or “wishful thinking” – i.e. its antithesis – and the resulting sentence is accurate.
“a knowledge that does not relate to protons, neutrons and the stars, but to the human experience.”
Actually no. This partitioning of astronomy and physics to science on the one hand, and “human experience” to faith on the other hand, demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what science is. The fact is that there is no genuine reason to indulge human exceptionalism to the point that it requires a completely different field to tackle it.
And here, succinctly if crudely put, is why: Humans and their experiences are made out of protons, neutrons, and – if I may include a Sagan turn of phrase – star stuff. There is no magic ingredient in human consciousness to warrant a completely new field divorced from the skepticism and criticism of scientific methodology and philosophy. Certainly not fluffy, insubstantial, and credulous faith.
In any case, Todesca is wrong to assign human experience to the purview of faith. Biological and social and mind sciences “relate” to the human experience. History and literature studies “relate” to the human experience. Even ethics and epistemology are forms of knowledge “related” to human experience, because they are critically about something that can be shown to exist. Whether or not they are roped under the umbrella of scientific endeavour – Coyne and Ben Goren have made cases to that effect on this site – they definitely have more substance than the mythology of Catholicism. Todesca’s best offering is basically to pass off the work of these fields as that of religion, i.e. plagiarism.
And what does Catholicism have to offer? Faith that Jesus Christ, e.g., was the Son of God and can be eaten once a communion is down there with the creationists and Hanuman devotees. The faith that Todesca believes raises his own religion above theirs actually puts it squarely among them. Even Hart’s barely there tuft of wordy air is no more respectable, because he provides no genuine reason to think his “he’s-not-a-Y” God has any more basis in reality than Hanuman’s monkeys. If anything, Hart seems determined to make his apophatic god even less credible by denying it any tangible relation to reality whatsoever, under the bland disguise of claiming everything is proof of God’s existence (as he’s basically revealed in his writings elsewhere).
If Todesca thinks his Catholicism is in the same ballpark as the genuine fields of study mentioned above – to the point that he thinks he can look down on Evangelicals and Hindus, and rub shoulders with particle physicists and astronomers – he’s kidding himself.
Repetitive redundancy. He’s a believer. There is nothing else there but self-kidding.
I suspect that when some people think of theology as hard to grasp or that critics aren’t experts in it therefore their criticism falls short, what they actually -feel- (as opposed to reason) is that unless a person has been transformed by one’s theological study, one can hardly “know” what it’s all about. Even within theological discussions I think this distinction exists. Christians place great importance on this transformative aspect of their lives. Because Jerry wasn’t transformed by his study, he obviously didn’t “really” study theology. Perhaps a similar sentiment exists on the science side of things? If after reading the available literature etc one still rejects the theory of evolution, photosynthesis, etc, then obviously one hasn’t really done one’s due diligence. The difference here may be that between one who seeks evidence in the facts, after which a transformative event naturally follows (the science side), and one who sees the transformative event as such as evidence (the theological side).
Since I appreciate very much your accuracy in presenting scientific facts supporting evolution, I dare to comment that your quotation of Pius XII lacks a similar standard. The affirmation you refer to reads as follows:
“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. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own [Cfr. Rom., V, 12-19; Conc. Trid., sess, V, can. 1-4].”
Here the exclusion of “other progenitors” for humanity is formulated very carefully under the condition that there is no way of reconciling “such an opinion” with the Teaching of the Church regarding original sin. If this condition is not fulfilled, then doors remain open. This was stressed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) as early as 1964.
The final outcome of the Pope’s teaching is that one should not deduce original sin and Redemption from ‘Adam and Eve’, but resort to the primeval single couple only if there is no other way of explaining how the first personal sin “is passed on to all”.
The facts and arguments I provide in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFqrCH7HWKw
support that other explanations are possible. Catholic theologians are not tying themselves into knots. On the contrary, evolution appears more and more as the smartest form of creation.
“But I think I know something about Catholic theology, and I suspect it’s at least as much as Todesca knows about science”- my favorite sentence in your whole reply! It perfectly tweaks his elitist stance and makes one wonder just how many SCIENTISTS he had working on his little “project”, just so they’d get it right, ya know?