A reader over at the Register writes

“Science without God has no purpose. Faith without science degenerates into Fundamentalism.”

I know what he’s trying to say, but in fact, neither of those statements is true as formulated. Science has all sorts of purposes, regardless of whether or not the person doing it is a theist or not. If your purpose is to discover the average airspeed of an unladen European swallow, science is your tool for discovering that. Sure, you may not be able to relate this discovery to some grand meaning of the universe, but you can still be filled with burning purpose in discovering that much. Lots of people fill their lives with short term goals that consume them with a sense of purpose: I must finish this crossword puzzle! I have to land that deal with Dewey Cheatem and Howe. I must complete my country’s quest for a Doomsday Device. You can, in fact, be filled with purpose (as Satan is) to destroy God and his creation (if only you could). A sense of purpose can be directed toward wholly absurd ends.

Similarly, faith can exist without science just fine. The Church was born into a world where science as we know it did not exist. The reality is not that *without* science degenerates into fundamentalism. It’s that faith *against* science tends to degenerate into fundamentalism. That’s because science is a species of reason and our faith is in the Logos or reason of God. So faith and science can never really oppose one another since God is the author of all truth. Fundamentalism is a failure of nerve: the jittery fear that some discovery about the physical world is going to show that the God in whom we have placed our faith is not real or (just as often) is not Love. To be sure, there are a lot of people practicing science who say all sorts of things that are ridiculously beyond their competence (“The universe is all there is or ever was or ever will be.” – Carl Sagan) but the fact remains that there is no discovery the physical science could ever conceivably make that could disprove the teaching of the Church.