Science, Atheism, Ignorance and St. Thomas Aquinas

 

Right now I'm listening to Professor Peter Kreeft's series of lectures on the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. It's very accessible, but even so, it will take a few times through to understand most of it. St. Thomas Aquinas was so brilliant and so deep that it's impossible to comprehend him in a single pass.
Tangent: Many years ago, I was part of a scientific working group on modelling atmospheric noise. One group of credentialed researchers from a well-known university presented a paper discussing modifications to their model of global atmospheric noise. It was my first time at one of these meetings and I hadn't seen their work before.
It was horrendous.
They had data points for certain spots, but the values their computer models had come up with for points in between made no sense at all. That is, if I knew that there was 37 dB of noise in Tampa and 43 dB in Miami, then the spot in between Tampa and Miami ought to be between 37 and 43. With their model, it was something like 80. When asked to justify that value, they got all flustered and it was clear they had never thought about it before.
They were scientists, doing science, from a famous university and they were not just wrong, but wildly wrong. Had they been theologians, Bill Maher would have gone on a 10-minute comedy rant about them, claiming that people who believed what they believed were idiots.

Back to the point: St. Thomas Aquinas brilliantly married science, philosophy and faith. You can't work your way through his thinking and claim he was superstitious or believed in the Easter Bunny or was a simple-minded twit, no matter how many creationists you think can dance on the head of a pin. In fact, having engaged with science-based atheists several time on this blog, I can't see how any of their objections work against the teachings of Aquinas. I can see how you might respectfully disagree with him and cling to the belief that God does not exist, but I don't see how you could ever mock him.
The researchers I described above had a dreadful model of the world. It clearly failed the simplest tests of reality. If I wanted, I could have based my perception of science on their work. It's obvious, I might say, that scientists don't really know anything at all and they're only goal is to obscure what they're doing in fancy words and equations so they can fleece us out of money to continue their ridiculous research. They're not advancing Man's search for knowledge, they're actually retarding it!
That analysis would have been wrong. Those researchers were intelligent, educated and well-meaning. Their blunders didn't invalidate science, any more than the fellow who used the Bible to predict the end of the world invalidated Christianity. All we have to do to assure ourselves that scientists aren't all scam artists is look at Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler.
And all we have to do to take Christianity seriously is look at St. Thomas Aquinas.

http://ktcatspost.blogspot.com/2011/07/science-atheism-ignorance-and-st-thomas.html