Stephen Barr: Science and Religion: The Myth of Conflict [PHOTOS + VIDEO]

Science and Religion: The Myth of Conflict

Over 200 people crammed into Winants Auditorium on the evening of October 24, 2019 to attend the lecture of Professor Stephen Barr. The lecture was called Science and Religion: the Myth of Conflict, and Barr, not only a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Delaware, but also the founding president of the Society of Catholic Scientists, was uniquely suited to speak on the topic.

He began by speaking about materialism. Materialism, he said, says that all reality is reducible to matter and its behavior, and because of this, science itself can often get conflated with scientific materialism, adding into that myth that science and religion are incompatible. This is because, Barr explained, through materialism God could not exist because God, being non-material, isn’t matter. He called scientific materialism an ideology, like Communism or atheism. The goal is to “free” the human mind of all irrationality and delusion—which, of course, to the scientific materialist, especially includes religion.

He confronted the idea that God cannot exist, merely because we can’t see Him. Some people, he said, argue that the universe and all of its beauties exist by random events, and it just happened to be so perfectly ordered. Barr explained why that was not necessarily true using this example: if you enter a house and see that everything is neat and orderly, well-tended and well-decorated, you don’t assume that the house just exists in that state by mere happenstance, but because someone is taking care of it. The same is true, he elaborated, for providence, law, and order. In fact, Barr argued, for there to even be laws we all agree on, there must be someone who gave those laws in the first place. Practically all people can agree that cruelty against animals is wrong, is evil, even. However, in a universe ordered by some great cosmic accident, there is no reason for that to be wrong. This is also why miracles surprise us—in a random universe, nothing would dictate that they couldn’t happen all the time. Miracles presuppose that there are laws that can be broken. God can override the laws of the universe because He is the author of them.  Further, if anything about the universe were even slightly different in the laws of physics, life on earth could not be possible, remarking that if the bonds between protons and neutrons were even a little weaker, it would spell catastrophe. 

Barr also highlighted some especially noteworthy Catholic priests who also happened to be scientists. Notable names included Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics; Francesco Grimaldi, the man who discovered the diffraction of light; Giuseppe Piazzi, who discovered the first dwarf planet; and Georges Lemaitre, founder of the Big Bang Theory. Barr drew attention to this in part, of course, to highlight and celebrate the accomplishments of these men, but more than that, he illustrated how fake the divide between religion and science is. These men founded much of modern science as we know it, while being Catholic priests. Catholicism is not anti-science; Catholicism is in modern science’s DNA.   

This event was co-sponsored by the Corpus Christi Foundation, Campus Ministries, the Offices of Arts and Humanities and Natural and Applied Sciences, and the departments of Geological and Environmental Studies, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Physics, Social Sciences, and Religion.