Separate Magisteria

It is deeply disappointing to read that Cardinal Schoenborn accepts the idea of independent magisteria.^[1] Such a view accepts that science and theology can at times be at odds, and yet somehow both can be "right," by accepting that science can be functionally materialistic, and provide only materialistic/naturalistic explanations. I believe such a view is disordered, because only one of the two explanations can be True for any given topic. What we seek with science is not the best materialistic explanation for a given phenomena, but the most useful model for it. Note well the change from "best" to "most useful." A model which ascribes everything to direct Divine intervention may be most True, but is not particularly useful as it allows for no prediction and no manipulation. It provides no means for the will to be exercised intelligently. Alternatively, the materialistic explanation will often be the most useful, providing as it does solid equations, but will fail in the face of the exceptional. I would argue, as does the Intelligent Design movement, that life itself is one such exception, that the materialistic explanation simply fails and that no other explanation except design (and thus Divine intervention) is even adequate. On the other hand, I find gravity a more useful explanation than the idea that angels push the planets, though the later may be more True (we cannot know).

The limits of scientific inquiry and of a scientific theory are indeed a crucial element to the co-existence of science and theology, the good Cardinal and I agree on that. Science has as its goal the "saving of the facts,"^[2] and can in only very few circumstances legitimately claim to know what is True, if at all.