The following comes from an interview by Jim Graves published Nov. 4 on Catholic World Report.
Father Robert Spitzer, SJ, Ph.D., 62, is president of the Magis Center (www.magiscenter.com), headquartered in the new chancery office of the diocese of Orange, California. The center’s goal is to demonstrate that faith and reason and science are compatible, and to combat the increasing secularization of society, particularly among young people.
Father Spitzer was born and reared in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father was an attorney and businessman; he was one of five children. His father was Lutheran; his mother a Catholic and daily communicant. He attended college at Jesuit-run Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, initially pursuing a career in public accounting and finance.
He went on a retreat led by Father Gerard Steckler, a former chaplain for Thomas Aquinas College, and “he got me very interested in theology and the Church.” He began attending daily Mass and taking classes in theology and Scripture. He bought a copy of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica from a used book store and began reading it. “I saw the solidity of faith in the light of reason,” he said, “and once that happened, I was ready to go.”
He joined the Society of Jesus in 1974, and was ordained a priest in 1983.
Father Spitzer is the author of several books, including Healing the Culture (Ignatius Press, 2000), Five Pillars of the Spiritual Life (Ignatius Press, 2008), New Proofs for the Existence of God (Eerdmans, 2010), and Ten Universal Principles (Ignatius Press, 2010), as well as numerous articles for scholarly journals, and has delivered hundreds of lectures. He is a teacher, and served as president of Gonzaga University from 1998 to 2009. He continues to produce an enormous volume of work despite suffering from poor eyesight throughout his adult life (he has not, for example, been able to drive a car for 30 years), which has gotten worse in recent years.
Father Spitzer recently spoke with CWR.
CWR: Prominent atheists often frame the debate between themselves and religious people by saying you either believe in “science”—however they may define it—or what they call the fairy tales of the Bible. What response would you offer such a viewpoint?
Father Spitzer: To start, I wouldn’t let them get away with saying faith and science contradict one another. We’re privileged to live in a time when there is more evidence from physics for a beginning of the universe than ever before. I made this point to [atheist scientist] Stephen Hawking in 2010, when I appeared along with him on Larry King Live. Stephen knows this. (Watch the discussion online.)
The debate centered on what was before the beginning of the universe. If you say “nothing”, then there has to be a God. You can’t move from nothing to something. Even Larry King got that. He asked another physicist on the program, Leonard Mlodinow, “How about that Leonard, how can you make something from nothing?” All Leonard could do was to equivocate on the term “nothing.”
CWR: Speaking of Stephen Hawking, he made the news recently when he officially declared himself to be an atheist. Do you find atheism widespread among the scientific community, or do a handful of atheist scientists receive a lot of publicity?
Father Spitzer: About 45% of working scientists are declared theists. Another vocal group, let’s say 20%, describe themselves as atheists. A third group is the agnostic naturalists. They’re not sure whether or not God exists, but they don’t what to compromise the naturalistic method by believing in God. I wouldn’t describe them as atheists.
CWR: Scientists often marvel at the intricacies of what Christians call Creation, but seem to suggest that these things developed on their own without a Designer outside the system to create them. Do many scientists have blinders on when it comes to God?
Father Spitzer: I’m the executive producer of Cosmic Origins, a film which features eight physicists talking about their faith. Owen Gingerich, a well-known astronomer at Harvard University, for example, says, “I can’t prove to you that mathematical intelligibility comes from God, but I’m psychologically incapable of believing otherwise. So, I call it God’s universe.”
Scientific atheists view it differently, but it has nothing to do with science. It never did. Science can’t disprove God. Scientific evidence has to come from observation of things within the universe, and God is outside the universe. How can you use evidence from within the universe to disprove a Being that is outside it? It doesn’t work. It’s impossible, any more than a cartoon character within a cartoon can disprove the existence of a cartoonist outside the cartoon who created him.
No scientist can know the universe so sufficiently to know it doesn’t need a Creator. What Hawking says is pure hogwash. Science must remain open to new discovery. It’s an inductive discipline. It works from particular observations, and we unify those observations with our theories. But we don’t know if our theories have enough data to be complete. Why is that? Scientists don’t know until they have discovered it….
To read the entire interview, click here.
Great interview!
I’ve always admired Fr Spitzer’s tremendous energy and the zeal of the true teacher as he strives to teach the blockheads most of us are about physics and Gods beautiful design. I enjoyed his show on EWTN but I confess he was always over my head…he made science entertaining and fairly understandable for the nonce but i don’t remember anything! Sigh. What I do remember was his utter joy…it was catchy. I hope poor sick and gloomy Mr Hawking ( whose autobiography was still very amusing) will catch some of Father’s joi de vivre and delight in God’s creation.
There is no contradiction between believing that in the beginning there was a Creator or a primordial soup. Scientists make observations from which theories derive that can be then tested by experiment. It does not matter whar the original cause was, we only need an universe ruled by laws that we can understand with our human brain. On a day to day basis it matters little whether God or the Big Bang started it all. All that matters is that we can make new advances through our experimental tests. Christians will say that a creator is needed because if we have no creator we can have no Redeemer, Son of God, who has done so much good to our Western civilization. On the other side of the coin, atheists will say, science improves the human condition so much and we therefore do not need the notion of God. It is not the original cause but rather the proximal one that determines whether we learn something new from science.
Well, what Fr. Spitzer says is certainly true, and Stephen Hawkins is certainly false. The Church should loudly object to the theft of the media, and academia, by pagan modern scientists, mathematicians, and the like. Yet, aside from what appears on Traditionalist media and print — that is immediately dismissed by mainstream Catholic media — there is little said. So, what Fr. Spitzer — a Jesuit!! — says is doubly important.
Too bad Fr. Spitzer issues his views from the Diocese of Orange. This has always been a troubled place, and its Protestant-Catholic worldview is clearly in evidence with the truly awful, if not scandalous, embrace of anti-Catholic architecture in its “redo” of “Crystal-Christ Cathedral”. Not much Catholic here.
Still, Fr. Spitzer does a valuable service with his film, and other statements, about the complementarity of Faith and Science.
Thanks for passing along this interview. I hope to eventually get my hands on a copy of the Cosmic Origins video.
A very well written and thought out article and organization.
I encourage those who still ‘believe’ that a Child can have Two Mothers or Two Fathers – denigrating the knowledge of those who reject the political genetics of the ‘Turkey Baster Creationist’ movement (each child has only Only 1 Biological Parent ea -of the Two Complimentary Genders – XX & XY)…
– to review Gregor Mendel’s works with Genetics – as well as the Donor Sibling Registry http://www.donorsiblingregistry,com for a Realty Check.
Truly – as Galileo said: “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.” And Chesterton observed quite correctly that – an Atheist is one who believes that Absolutely Everything came from Absolutely Nothing.
‘Science’ can only take us back a few hundred billion years or so, and then they give up and admit they don’t know what anything was like before any bangs went off – although Eternity tells us there was something going on both before and for ever after.
And God Alone Knows What.