Two decreases in tensions between faith and science

Over the past two hundred years or so, one new tension point arose for the relationship between Christianity and science due to scientific progress—namely, evolution. At the same time, several tension points disappeared due two other instances of scientific progress.

The first instance of this scientific progress was the general abandonment of the Aristotelian eternal world model of the universe with Big Bang cosmology. In the middle ages, Jewish, Islamic and Christian thinkers struggled with the tension between the science/philosophy of the day strongly tending towards a universe that always existed and the theological commitment to a creation a finite amount of time ago. That problem is gone.

The second instance is our scientific understanding of the continuity of organic development from zygote to embryo to infant to adult, which has made quite implausible the old view of discontinuous transition in utero from vegetable to animal to human. This old view was the dominant scientific view of human origins until fairly recently, and it had serious tensions with Christian theology.

The first of these embryological tensions was with Christian moral views about abortion. While traditionally Christians opposed both contraception and abortion, abortion was morally seen as a form of homicide. But on the discontinuous transition view, abortion prior to human ensoulment would only be contraception.

The second embryological tension was a technical problem in Christology. Suppose that in the Incarnation we have the vegetable, mere animal and rational animal sequence. Then Aquinas observes there are two possibilities, neither of which is theologically appealing.

First, it could be that God becomes incarnate as a vegetable or a mere animal. But this seems, as Aquinas says, “unbecoming”. And he seem to be right. The Incarnation reveals to us the person of the Logos, and it would be unbecoming that the Logos become a non-personal being.

Second, it could be that the Incarnation happens only at the beginning of the third stage of development, namely once everything is ready for a rational animal. But then Aquinas says “the whole conception could not be attributed to the Son of God”. Indeed, don’t we even have a tension with the Apostles’ Creed line that Christ “was conceived by the Holy Spirit”? For on this option, Christ was not conceived at all. What was conceived was a vegetable, not Christ. (Indeed, none of us were conceived on this view.) Moreover, one might worry that then there would be a sense in which the flesh of Christ would pre-exist the Incarnation. And that makes it difficult to say that the Word became flesh—for the flesh that Scripture says he “became” would already in a sense have been there, and one can’t become this flesh, since this flesh already has its own identity. (Granted, there may well be some Aristotelian metaphysics one can do to lessen this last worry.)

Aquinas solves the problem by supposing that Christ is conceived fully formed in Mary’s womb, and hence has the rational soul from the first moment of his existence. But this solution is itself problematic. Absent gradual development from a zygote, is this conception at all? If God were to create an adult human either ex nihilo or out of some pre-existing matter, we would not consider that a conception. But neither should we then consider it a conception if God creates a fully-formed fetus, even if he does that out of the pre-existing matter of Mary. So we still have a problem with the Apostles’ creed’s “was conceived by the Holy Spirit”. Moreover, it seems that this deprives Mary of a significant chunk of her motherhood.

But the problem entirely disappears once we think that the human beings begin their existence at conception. Christ is conceived by the Holy Spirit, presumably in that Mary’s ovum is transformed into a zygote by the infinite power of the Holy Spirit, which zygote is the Christ who then grows in utero like we all do.

(Catholics also note that the new scientific understanding of human embryonic development also helps with the doctrine of Mary’s immaculate conception—for only a rational being can be immaculately conceived, since original sin or freedom from it can only apply to a rational being.)