On today's post, Father Steve talks about the role of the social media, not to mention Providence, in what he likes to call, "unintentional evangelization." His reflection serves as a wonderful reminder for each of us to do what we can do wherever we are, for we can never predict how God will use our efforts for His purposes.
Last week, two articles on the Word on Fire blog generated a great deal of interest. The first was a post concerning science and religion written by Robert Mixa, the second was by Father Barron concerning novelist Anne Rice’s repudiation of Christianity, while at the same time testifying to continuing her relationship with Christ. Both posts drew a lot of new people to our website, many of whom would not have considered visiting on their own.
Robert Mixa’s article was a commentary on a piece written by Lawrence Krauss in the August issue of Scientific American. Krauss is a secularist and a materialist. In his essay, he takes issue with religion in general and Christianity in particular for its alleged deficiencies, not only in terms of what Krauss believes to be the truths of science, but in terms of the failure of religion/Christianity before the expectations of the secular worldview. Mixa debated the insufficiencies of Krauss’ position, and for this he received a great deal both positive and negative appraisal. The comments section of this blog post were buzzing for days as folks went back and forth arguing the Church’s position in regards to the relationship of faith and reason, religion and science, even venturing into the claims of atheism. In an act of intentional evangelization, Robert Mixa linked his blog post to the Scientific American website which, as a result, extended the invitation to its readers to visit our website. This had the effect of not only increasing traffic on our site, but exposing many new people to the work of Father Barron and Word on Fire Catholic Ministries...
Robert Mixa responds to Lawrence Krauss's recent article in Scientific American which makes the popular claim that religion and science are at odds. Read below for Mixa's fact-filled rebuttal.
The myth that science and religion are irreconcilable is a hardy perennial among contemporary “intellectuals.” Lawrence Krauss’s recent article in Scientific American (“
Faith and Foolishness,” August, 2010) is just one more example of the trend.
Dismayed by the perpetuation of this myth, I sent a link of the article to my friend, who is working on his PhD in philosophy. Since his dissertation research deals extensively with the philosophy of science, he was able to give me a lot of insight into the problems with Krauss’s argument.
As we discussed the article, we began to realize that Krauss’s construal of all religion as fundamentalism is, in fact, itself a fundamentalism which is not capable of understanding the unique Catholic synthesis of Faith and Reason, and which arrives at its anti-religious conclusions through selective use of evidence...