Beyond Conflict: Faith and Science in Catechesis and Evangelization, Part 1

Dear Excellencies and Leaders in Catholic Education,

I am very grateful to have an opportunity to reflect on some ways in which catechesis and evangelization can be enriched, made more effective, by engaging science. The issue of ecclesial disaffiliation revolves around the assumption that faith and science are in conflict. The only effective way to dispel the misconception of conflict is through fostering genuine dialogue between teachers and students, between witnesses and the curious. St. John Paul II saw this as the future path for the engagement of science in all areas of theological reflection and religious instruction: “we must overcome every tendency to . . . fear and self-imposed isolation,” asserting that “a community of interchange . . . expands partial perspectives and forms a new unified vision” (“Letter to Coyne,” 06/01/1988). Otherwise, in their inevitable assimilation of scientific ideas, he continued, the faithful will assimilate them unreflectively and with shallowness. And what could be more shallow, or more unreflective, than to allow one’s impression of a physical theory to be that it replaces the widest and deepest perspective on reality?

Dialogue is animated by courage, imagination, generosity, and patience. It seeks unity through respect for the integrity of each perspective. In the words of Jacques Maritain, it distinguishes in order to unite. It means truly believing in your gut that there is a unity to truth, and “that the sciences of today . . . can invigorate and inform those parts of the theological enterprise that bear on the relation of nature, humanity and God.” Only when science is received that way by the Catholic witness and teacher, when respect for it and openness to it is modeled, can the catechist or the evangelist take seriously the questions, concerns and even the prejudices of those whom we seek to re-affiliate or newly affiliate in that deepest sense of the word, its Latin root, which means “to adopt as one’s child”—divine affiliation. I add prejudices here, because what is the conflict prejudice other than various questions that have been hardened into working assumptions, questions that have been answered badly because they have been answered hastily and alone, because they have remained without the light that comes from reflection and discussion and mentorship?

Of course, it benefits no one if they gain all knowledge of the world’s workings yet fail to know the One who measures everything, as St. Augustine made clear in his Confessions. But what our Catholic scientists have shown us is what it looks like when one knows much about how the universe was made and works, and have found in that knowledge a path to the One who causes all things to live and move and have their being. So let us thank them once more for their witness to us.

St. Augustine was right, of course—our knowledge of God is enough, we do not need to be scientists in order to be saved. But what we see in these witnesses is a truth proximate to that one—that believing scientists will seek genuine consonance between scientific discoveries and the truths of faith. In a post-Christian but scientifically advanced society, even those who are not scientists will have sincere questions about how to relate them in dynamic and compelling ways. And I propose that this search for consonance is not mere curiosity, but the work of the Holy Spirit. As St. Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians, “the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.” And so the movement of the mind in wonder about how all things are related to the deep things of God is surely the Spirit’s work and domain.

So how do we usher questioners into this mutual interchange, in which science is embraced by faith and its findings contemplated by it, especially by the young who learn science and begin to wonder if and how it “fits” with what God has revealed to us in Christ? In the rest of my presentation I would like to share some ideas about what this looks like when it leaves behind defensiveness and moves toward what John Paul II called a “relational unity.” I will offer two steps; the first is propaedeutic to the second:

1. The role of apologetics—taking scientific thought captive to Christ by freeing it from monstrous mentalities
2. Finding a path from scientific thought to the central mysteries of the faith—arguments from fittingness

Let us start with apologetics. When John Paul II spoke of apologetics in this arena, he most often expressed caution about attempting to dispel all questions with tidy answers that misrepresent the science in question as well as the progressive nature of the scientific endeavor. As he said to scientists in 1983 at a symposium commemorating the 350th anniversary of the publication of Galileo’s Dialogue Between Two Chief World Systems, “The Church does not first turn to your discoveries in order to draw from them facile apologetic arguments for strengthening her beliefs.” In regard to the doctrine of creation itself and our belief in a temporal beginning to the universe, he warned in his 1988 Letter to the Director of the Vatican Observatory against “uncritical and overhasty” uses of the Big Bang Theory as a demonstration of these truths of faith. Be wary, he would tell us, of the slam dunk argument that cuts away thistles but leaves intact the roots of doubt, that leaves the doubter thinking that science can give us everything.

Much more essential is to affirm the power of well-demonstrated scientific explanations, but also to find where such explanations are accompanied falsely by words like “only,” or “merely,” or “nothing but.” When any scientific explanation is accompanied by such adjectives, the problem is not the scientific explanation, it is the unscientific claim that the scientific explanation is the only explanation.

Students often ask questions or make assertions that are impaired by only’s. And I noticed early on in my teaching that they are rarely interested in defending the only’s. By a kind of instinct, most see that trying to fit everything into the tiny frame of the only, that they have ceased to allow the evidence to shape their explanations. They sense that they have made a giant, unjustifiable leap, but they often are simply animated to take that leap because they see something true, and think that it requires them to do so.

My 2026 student survey is packed with only questions, but here are three:

● “How can God be involved in the universe while science explains natural laws?”
Translation: Natural laws are the only explanation for the universe.

● “How can God have a plan when evolution is a matter of chance?”
Translation: Evolution is nothing but chance.

● “In the Bible, God creates it all but science argues for a completely natural formation.” Translation: Completely here means a merely natural formation.

Now let us pause and recognize that such ways of thinking not only close the mind to the transcendent. They also close the mind to other complementary and compelling scientific explanations. As soon as someone says that life is nothing but complex chemistry, he has not gained insight. He has simply abandoned biology as a science. To return to my three examples, here are some responses in which insights are affirmed, and only’s are challenged:

● “How can God be involved in the universe while science explains natural laws?” Natural laws are explained, if by that you mean discovered, by science, and everywhere these laws are essential; you cannot understand the universe without them. But how can a universe have intelligible laws, and intelligent minds to understand them, if there is no Intelligent Source from which they come?

● “How can God have a plan when evolution is a matter of chance?” Evolution does involve chance, and does so essentially. But how can we even know the nature of chance if there is no order to which it can be compared and contrasted? Can chance be included in a plan intentionally and for a good reason? Does shuffling a deck of cards between poker hands mean denying the order of each suit from 2 through Ace? Or does it bring novelty to the way each hand is played?

● “In the Bible, God creates it all but science argues for a completely natural formation.” Science does indeed explain the natural formation of the universe, and of living things. But why is there a real universe, and living things, for it to explain?

In each case, notice that the scientific explanations emerge undamaged by a surgical attack on the only, the merely, the nothing but. The questioner sees something real that we can affirm and see with them. “When we want to correct someone usefully and show him he is wrong,” Blaise Pascal once observed, “we must see from what point of view he is approaching the matter, for it is usually right from that point of view, and we must admit this, but show him the point of view from which it is wrong. This will please him, because he will see that he was not wrong but merely failed to see every aspect of the question” (Pensées, I.9).

Here are some questions my students never think of, but are questions I suggest we want those in our classrooms and parish halls to consider:

● Can something be paradoxical to the human mind but also be real? Science has discovered physical realities, such as the wave-particle duality of light, which are essentially strange and unimaginable. We cannot imagine light as both a particle and a wave at the same time, and yet somehow it is both. In such cases, as Albert Einstein often noted, we know reality better when we relinquish distinct ideas and claims of complete comprehension. If we allow this, then we must dispense with the assumption that when a limit to understanding is reached, anything beyond that limit must be false. The dogmas of the faith—God as One and Three, Jesus as fully God and fully man—stand beyond that limit. We can defend them with reason, but reason cannot make them imaginable to us. The difference is that, unlike wave-particle duality, the mysteries of faith could never be discovered through reason unaided by faith.

● Must there be only one kind of causality, the physical kind, in which A causes a physically measurable change in B? Could there be a causality that is not change, but the causing of existence itself, which is necessary for there to be any changes? If so, then it is not absurd to say, with St. Thomas Aquinas, that God and creaturely causes are together wholly responsible for all that we see. God causes all things to be, and to be causes of each other.

● Is God one more explanation, or the ground of all explanations? For St. Augustine, God fills all things not by dwelling in the universe. He fills all things by containing them. If so, then what they can do is to his greater glory and majesty. Here we may have some inkling of what Ben Sira meant in the enigmatic declaration he places at the end of his recounting of the wonders of nature: “Though we speak much we cannot reach the end, and the sum of our words is: ‘The LORD is the ALL.’ Where shall we find strength to praise him? For he is greater than all his works” (Sirach 43:27-28).

The ideal outcome of this more modest apologetics is not to give answers. It is to turn premature answerers into questioners who realize that there are more questions than scientific ones to be asked.

But if the catechist or evangelist were to halt here, her work would remain propaedeutic. In catechesis and evangelization, engaging the deepest spiritual realities should be the goal, and arguments ex convenientia, from “fittingness,” are most suitable for inviting questioners into the heart of the Christian mystery. St. Thomas Aquinas explains that the verb convenire “refers primarily to the bringing together of various things”; the greatness of arguments from fittingness is that they draw various assets together for the same end. For example, in response to the objection that God should have not added Christ’s Passion as an additional means to his divine will to save, St. Thomas uses a biological example, noting that “even nature uses several means to one intent, in order to do something more fittingly: as two eyes for seeing” (ST III.46.1 ad 1). Fittingness arguments that engage science, therefore, make it an ally in coming to contemplate the One True God, and Jesus Christ whom the Father has sent.

As St. John Henry Newman once observed, “If the Author of Nature be the Author of Grace, it may be expected that . . . the principles displayed in them will be the same, and form a connecting link between them” (Essay, Chap. 2, sec. 1.17). If he is right (and he is!), it was fitting for God to create a world in a process of development, a world which never finds a still point at which we can mislead ourselves into thinking that “it (nature) is all there is,” rather than “He (God) is the ALL” to nature. It is fitting that he causes a universe that can never, on its own terms, be everlasting. The development of the biosphere and human evolution are fitting instances of salvation prehistory, and have certain ways of rhyming with revelation, the history of the Church, the liturgy, the Incarnation, as Dan Kuebler showed us in his presentation. They are fitting to the greater realities of grace and salvation.

Consider this proposal: It is fitting that the universe contains God’s image as a creature with a natural evolutionary history that unites it to every stage of the cosmos’ development, but also with a spiritual soul that transcends the cosmos.

Why humanity? Without humanity, the universe would still be an expression of God’s goodness. It would still communicate God’s goodness to the angels. But that subtle shift in the First Creation Account at the end of the sixth day, where God ceases calling each thing he creates “good” to calling all things “very good,” happens only after he has created human beings. Does this not suggest that until there is a creature within the visible creation who can rejoice with God over all of it, something is missing? The human being unites the realm of atoms, amoebas, and apes with the realm of angels. Great theologians like Maximus the Confessor have always seen this, but now we can see it in staggering detail.

Of course, God could accomplish this unity in diversity seamlessly if he chose to specially create humanity de novo, body as well as soul. But that unity would be imposed and extrinsic, rather than integral and organic, were humans simply to have been added to the universe without sharing the universe’s history. AI, which deals in the stuff of rationality without being a rational agent, is an artifact imposed by humans on the cosmos. And without an evolutionary history, humans would be artifacts added to the cosmos. Of course, God could have done it that way. But it is fitting that God chose to give his creation an essential part in producing his image, so that not only the elements, but the universe’s history, would be reflected in the human person in an essential way.

Just as the Trinity is integral in its unity and diversity, it is fitting that the beings to whom the cosmos is given as a gift share a history with that cosmos in an analogous way to the way in which the divine Persons share an eternity—through begetting, procession, and relation. For human beings who are produced in part by the natural world, and produced naturally, every act of scientific understanding will be, to some degree or other, a threshold to self-understanding. To praise God for my own life will always be incomplete without praising him for creation, for my neighbor, for everything that lives, for sun and moon, stars of heaven, and you know the rest.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally given as a lecture at “The Relation between Science and Faith as a Pastoral Issue in an Age of Disaffiliation,” a Symposium for Bishops and Archdiocesan and Diocesan Catholic Educational Leaders sponsored by the USCCB Committee on Doctrine and the McGrath Institute for Church Life, on February 25, 2026. Part II was offered by Heather Foucault-Camm PGCE, MSc, MA, Program Director for the Science and Religion Initiative.

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