So, If the Authentic Magisterium Says We Should Believe Science, Should We?

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Jimmy Akin on one of his videos, in order to examplify what we owe the magisterium when it's authentic but not infallible, examplifies, about in these terms: if the magisterium says we should trust Science, we are not absolutely obliged to do so, but we need to have a very good reason before even disagreeing. Plus the disagreement should not take the form of public dissent.

Well, I happen to hold that the magisterium is not with "John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis" but with Michael I and Michael II. Hence, I do feel perfectly free to publically dissent from what isn't the magisterium, fallible or infallible.

That said, I do have some very good reasons to not "believe Science" or "trust Science" ...

• There is no such thing. People with names ending in "-son" are not a category, and disciplines labelled as sciences are also not a category. You could as easily ask me to trust every "son" as ask me to trust all of Science.
  
  A little explanation is perhaps due on this point. St. Thomas Aquinas certainly on occasion speaks of "scientia" in the singular. In the most general sense he gives the term, it's definitely broader, potentially also narrower than the modern concept of Science. It can also mean "a science" as in "one of the sciences" ...
  
  
  • A) It definitely is broader, scientia means any knowledge a man can have from personally verified experience or thought through reasoning. If I know from experience that 3 to 3.5 cl. of pure alcohol, like a pint of certain beers or a half pint of wine, taken in the evening some time after meals or with a light meal will make me pee well and then sleep through the night, this knowledge examplifies "scientia" perfectly, even if there is no scientific principle that says that it has to be precisely that quantity, could be a quirk about my own bladder.
  • B) On the other hand, some would consider History a Science, and St. Thomas would not call it "scientia", but we have more like "Fides" that George Washington lived and helped to found the United States of America.
  • C) Even excluding history, some disciplines now thought of as "science" might not meet his criteria for "scientia" — like "de contingenti praeterito, futuro, longinquo et abscondito non est scientia" ... sounds like he's not a fan of historic sciences like Theory of Evolution, futurology like Climate Science, nor of Astrophysics or of Psychology.
  
  
  
• The non-thing erected into a thing, Science, functions as an idol. One of the gods, and more precisely the oracle divinity of Atheists, is Science. Don't get me wrong, there are Atheists who are UFO-logists, who are Spiritualists (but believe in equality and eternity of all spirits, like each human soul, no real God above them), who believe in no spirits but in impersonal magic, but the Atheist Community is usually Science Believers.
  
  
• Some of the things labelled Science are opposed to Bible and Tradition, and get in conflict with good theology on more than just that level. Psychology and psychiatry is practised in ways usually at odds with moral theology and Evolution as well as Heliocentrism and belief in Galaxies conflict with Catholic anthropology and with Eschatology, or even with the Eucharist.
  
  
• Arbitrarily, I'm supposed to trust Donald Prothero over Tas Walker or when it comes to possibility of Abiogenesis, Miller and Urey over Jonathan Sarfati.
  
  
• Finally, the side labelled "Science" in these conflicts, as opposed to "Pseudo-Science" (a label I disagree with) or "Alternative Science" for Creationism, even has scientific reasons against itself.

In order to support the Heliocentrism and Evolution sides of certain conflicts, some people will claim older pronouncements of the magisterium are not valid, since the Church is not per se competent in Science, but at the same time, I'm being asked to go against both my theological and my historic and my epistemological and scientific intuitions because of a magisterium equally not competent in the matter. Or, at least equally.

You see, the questions of age of the universe or why heavenly bodies move could be theological ones, making the previous and well known magisterium actually very to the point of the magisterium's own subject, revealed and to some extent natural truths about God.

Excuses to the people who know the term "Magisterium" only from Philip Pullman, would you mind looking it up in the wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magisterium

For those who don't know what Michael I and Michael II refers to, here is the site:

Welcome to the Vatican In Exile Website
https://www.vaticaninexile.com/

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Barnabas
11.VI.2024

Salaminae, in Cypro, natalis sancti Barnabae Apostoli, qui, natione Cyprius, cum Paulo Gentium Apostolus a discipulis ordinatus, multas regiones cum eo peragravit, injunctum sibi opus Evangelicae praedicationis exercens; postremo, Cyprum profectus, ibi Apostolatum suum glorioso martyrio decoravit. Ejus corpus, tempore Zenonis Imperatoris, ipso Barnaba revelante, repertum est, una cum codice Evangelii sancti Matthaei, ejusdem Barnabae manu descripto. [Salamina antiqua est civitas, non longe ab oppido Famagusta]

PS, it so happens, even apart from theology and philosophy, Young Earth Creationism has a side that's about history (and obviously what kind of information and information collections that count as history), and history is a better go to than science. If we accept the Flood was 5000 years ago, as per LXX chronology, the Chinese historiography accords better with my version of Young Earth Creationism than with mainstream, since that's about the time of the first emperor, and he's supposed to have lived in a hunter-gatherer society, before they "invented agriculture" (according to the Chinese) / rediscovered agriculture after the Flood, if you ask me./HGL