Following the Path of Scientific Conquest

In honor of today’s feast of Albert the Great, patron saint of scientists, I’d like to offer some words on humility. Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived, famously compared himself to a boy “playing on the sea-shore ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me” – and said again “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Nothing better induces a sense of the grandeur of God and of our own smallness than contemplation of the universe that science so astonishingly reveals. Unfortunately some scientists – those who tend to gain a hearing through the secular media – exhibit precious little of Newton’s humility. These are researchers who are insolent in the face of our cosmic origins, who speak of science’s demotion of God, who play satanic games with biotechnology.

But if the hubris of scientists rightly gives believers pause, we should also ask whether Christians are always sufficiently humble before the discoveries of science. I do not mean humble as a post-Christian secularist mindset would construe “humble” – witness the oft-repeated nonsense that Copernicus “put us in our place” by relegating the earth to an obscure orbit around an ordinary star in an average galaxy in a vast cosmos, a claim that foolishly commits the very fallacy its proponents pretend to attack (i.e., that of basing a metaphysical statement on the mere accident of physical location). Rather, I mean “humble” in the authentic sense that we must acknowledge truth wherever it is found, since it has only God for its Author, even if it has been discovered and promoted by those with an anti-Christian agenda. Abusus non tollit usum: the abuse of a good thing is no argument against its legitimate use. Scientific truth is mighty and shall prevail, and it were well that Catholics, following the repeated urging of the popes, boldly follow the path of that conquest.

Stanley Grove is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Music at Wyoming Catholic College.