The

Mary Michael Machabee

Institute

Newsletter

 July 26th, 2024

Click below to listen to an audio recording of this newsletter.

Augustine vs. Trent Horn

Trent Horn, Catholic apologist and the host of The Counsel of

Trent Podcast states,

"We should believe... that faith and reason are complementary. They don’t contradict each other. So if science tells us the universe is 13.7 billion years old, our faith does not contradict that scientific finding. We don’t have to entertain a conflict. Otherwise, if we do, Saint Augustine in his commentary on Genesis, he criticized Christians of his day who were arguing for a literal creation theory, saying that they become a mockery to non-Christians, claiming to be experts in astronomy and the sciences when they actually are not experts in these things."

Trent Horn, author, apologist, intellectual

Trent Horn claims that when science tells us of a new discovery, then clearly our faith cannot and must not contradict that discovery.

But Mr. Horn misses the crucial distinction between scientific discovery and scientific interpretation.

It is one thing for scientists to reveal that they have discovered a bone of an animal, but what bone it is, what animal it belonged to, and when the animal lived are all interpretations that can vary widely among men, even within the scientific establishment.

However, even more interesting is Mr. Horn’s assertion that, as Catholics, “We don’t have to entertain a conflict…” with any factual claim descending from the scientific industry through its media apparatus. This assertion has oft been echoed decade after decade since the advent of the post-modern age in the late 19th century.

Trent Horn, a senior scholar and well-known Catholic intellectual of the apostolate, Catholic Answers, follows modern man’s maxim to a tee: to always ensure that the Faith and the Church align with whichever current trend or fashion “science” sets forth.

We can turn our minds to a 20th century saint to confirm this analysis.

In his 1907 encyclical, Pascendi, Pope St. Pius X, states this about the modernist:

“Hence we have the Modernist axiom that the religious evolution ought to be brought into accord with the moral and intellectual… and the believer therefore feels within him an impelling need so to complement faith with science that it may never oppose the general conception which science sets forth concerning the universe.”

Pope Pius X in the Vatican Gardens in 1913. (photo: Giuseppe Felici / Wikimedia Commons)

This complementing or balancing of “Faith with Science” manifests itself in the mind of the modern Catholic believer, who is constantly pressured to compromise Catholic doctrine, revealed by God, confirmed by the Church, in order to reconcile it with the philosophical interpretations, revealed by Man, confirmed by the media-science ivory tower complex.

St. Augustine clearly refutes this claim of Trent Horn. In fact, St. Augustine knows the danger of this inversion of the sciences, where theology, with its source in revelation, loses ground to the lower sciences.

”But more dangerous is the error of certain weak brethren who faint away when they hear these irreligious critics learnedly and eloquently discoursing on the theories of astronomy or on any of the questions relating to the elements of this universe. With a sigh, they esteem these teachers as superior to themselves, looking upon them as great men; and they return with disdain to the books which were written for the good of their souls; and, although they ought to drink from these books with relish, they can scarcely bear to take them up. Turning away in disgust from the unattractive wheat field, they long for the blossoms on the thorn.[1]”

It is not only St. Augustine who knows and warns Catholics of the evil use that can be made of the physical sciences, to the detriment of the proper interpretation of revelation and the faith of the Catholic.

Pope Leo XIII states:

“[W]e have to contend against those who, making an evil use of physical science, minutely scrutinize the Sacred Book in order to detect the writers in a mistake... Attacks of this kind.. are peculiarly dangerous… for the young, if they lose their reverence for the Holy Scripture on one or more points, are easily led to give up believing in it altogether.”

Philip de László, “Portrait of Pope Leo XIII,” 1900 (photo: Public Domain / Public Domain)

Augustine, St Pius X, and Pope Leo XIII reminder us well that false philosophy masquerading as objective science is always dangerous.

“But more dangerous is the error of certain weak brethren who faint away when they hear these irreligious critics learnedly and eloquently discoursing on the theories of astronomy or on any of the questions relating to the elements of this universe.”

- St. Augustine

[1] Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapter 20, paragraph 40, (New York: Newman Press, 1982) 44.