Augustine and the Role of Science in Religion

I'd like to talk about this passage from Augustine's The Literal Meaning of Genesis:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

So, even non-Christians understand things about scientific matters.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

Augustine says here that Christians talking nonsense about the scientific content of Scripture is 'disgraceful' and 'dangerous' and that all Christians should both refrain from such things and well as encourage other Christians to do the same—in essence, it's embarrassing.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

So, it seems that Augustine thinks that it isn't about any damage to the individual, but to Christianity itself—such behaviour holds Christianity up to ridicule for no good reason. Non-christians are liable to misunderstand and think that the 'sacred writers' held these nonsensical (pseudo-)scientific positions. Christianity is going to lose souls because of it.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Augustine has a keen sense of the psychology of credibility: if someone is utterly wrong and insistent on speaking outside their areas of expertise, that person will lose credibility with respect to topics where she might indeed be an expert.

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.

Here then is the crux: being embarrassed in public by professional scientists damages the respect, credibility, and integrity of Christianity. In effect, christians,who insist upon their nonsense in matters of science, marginalise the entire religious community.

For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

The ultimate result of this is to compound the embarrassment and shame of being called out and shown to be ignorant on scientific matters by trotting out Scripture. I suspect that Augustine is quite right. We can see the marginalisation of religion in scientific matters everywhere in the West except the United States. Augustine was canonised in 1303, but getting American fundamentalists to honour the difference between science and religion would be the real miracle.

God has no place within these walls, just as facts have no place within organized religion. -- Superintendent Chalmers