By ARTHUR HIPPLER
(Editor’s Note: Dr. Hippler is chairman of the religion department and teaches religion in the Upper School at Providence Academy, Plymouth, Minn.)
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Many Catholic schools have tried to make themselves more marketable by offering rigorous class in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). These are perceived as surer routes to college and future employment.
What this decision often overlooks is the way in which this emphasis can compromise the Catholic mission of the school. While in the abstract, there is no conflict between true science and divine faith, the faith can be undermined by the common assumptions and opinions of many who devote themselves to science.
Even sixty years ago, the bishops at the Second Vatican Council noted that science was becoming more dominant in education: “Intellectual formation is ever increasingly based on the mathematical and natural sciences and on those dealing with man himself, while in the practical order the technology which stems from these sciences takes on mounting importance” (The Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, n. 5).
They did not view science as the enemy. Indeed, the council fathers recognized the achievements, indeed positive contributions, of science: “Advances in biology, psychology, and the social sciences not only bring men hope of improved self-knowledge; in conjunction with technical methods, they are helping men exert direct influence on the life of social groups” (ibid).
At the same time, the council fathers warn the faithful about attitudes that accompany the enthusiasm for science that are not required by the scientific method as such. “[T]oday’s progress in science and technology can foster a certain exclusive emphasis on observable data, and an agnosticism about everything else. For the methods of investigation which these sciences use can be wrongly considered as the supreme rule of seeking the whole truth” (n. 57).
This point is reiterated in the Catechism: “Science and technology are precious resources when placed at the service of man and promote his integral development for the benefit of all. By themselves however they cannot disclose the meaning of existence and of human progress” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2293).
This is the most basic challenge for the Catholic STEM school. Will it give a priority to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, while emphasizing the essential limitations of these fields? Will not the students feel that STEM offers knowledge that is certain and provable, while others forms are merely “belief” and “opinion”? Will not STEM classes provide their own narrative of the “meaning of existence” or “human progress,” whether that is “mastery of nature” or “environmental awareness” or some other agenda popular in STEM curriculum?
The response will surely be that the religion courses in the Catholic school will provide the necessary correctives. But who believes this? Who for a moment thinks that the religion course with its textbook of therapeutic platitudes will engage science and mathematics as an equal intellectual partner?
The General Directory of Catechesis (1997) insisted that “religious instruction in schools appear as a scholastic discipline with the same systematic demands and the same rigor as other disciplines. It must present the Christian message and the Christian event with the same seriousness and the same depth with which other disciplines present their knowledge” (73§5).
But is the rare school that lives up to this requirement. It is even harder to picture this happening in a school devoted to STEM.
What course of study would provide the intellectual resources for faculty to sort out what natural science and its technological applications can demonstrate from evidence in contrast to the “common opinions” of contemporary scientists that pretend to “fact status”? For the college science course and the high school science text will blur these together. Statements based on evidence and experience will be intermingled with speculation, educated guesswork, and mere prejudice.
To choose one central matter as an example, does evolution somehow “prove” that man developed from earlier primate species? Can it explain the origin of art, speech, tool-making — in other words, all the actions we associate with rationality? That there is a linear progression from lower primate species to higher primates to man himself seems supported by the fossil record. But that the distinctive traits of man — knowing, choosing, loving — are based on some material, biochemical development is not based on any empirical finding at all.
It is simply “assumed,” because otherwise some agency above and beyond nature would have to be invoked.
Will Catholic students in a STEM school read the precise language of Pius XII on this point, distinguishing the origin of man’s body from the origin of his rational soul?
“The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter — for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God” (Humani Generis, n. 36). Or will they merely hear that “the Popes say that evolution is okay” without any qualification?
Who will form the faculty in Christian anthropology from the Church fathers, from St. Thomas Aquinas, from Gaudium et Spes, such that they can sort through the issues at stake from modern science? Most Catholic school teachers have not attended Catholic colleges, and know nothing of these matters. And since most Catholic colleges merely ape their secular counterparts in forming teachers, teachers formed in these institutions are not much better off.
The Catholic STEM school is doomed at best to be a chimera, a mix of heterogeneous elements that do not harmonize. Its graduates will be schizophrenics, full of scientific and mathematical rigor on one side, religious sentimentality and social consciousness on the other.
At worst, it will simply be another school where, once more, “scientism,” the belief that science provides the only certain and necessary knowledge, reigns supreme. If the goal is to “save” Catholic education, the STEM school can only do so at the expense of what it wishes to preserve.
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