This was the first time that I spoke publicly since becoming a Franciscan friar. It was a chance to articulate what it meant for me to make sense of science in my Franciscan context.

“The possibility of using [science’s] rational structure towards the betterment of human life led me into biomedical research. These were the driving forces that propelled me to become the best scientist that I could be: the desire to understand and to use this understanding in beneficial ways. You can see right away that there, already, the facile separation of ontology and ethics, or what is and what ought to be, or facts and meaning, is already breached in the choices that I made. Truth and goodness in knowing and acting tend to go together.”

Influenced by a philosopher whom I consider of great importance, Robert Spaemann, I emphasized how science and what scientists describe cannot be neatly separated from human experience. The human person is never the detached observer of nature that is assumed by scientistic theory. We, too, are phenomena within nature, and we cannot really step out of them. When we try, then the human person is alienated from nature. And such alienation necessarily results in a limited, incomplete understanding.”

This led me to some conclusions that got me into deep and troubled waters:

“[The cosmological history described by physics] is an abstract and incomplete past. The uniqueness of individuals was abstracted in the mathematical formalism of this science. You and I are not part of this past. It is not the kind of past that already contains the unique features of present beings as a teleological necessity. It is much less than this, as it is just an abstraction from the present, and it merely reveals the physical underpinnings of the world of our perception.”

And a little later, I said what resulted in very spirited discussions for the rest of the conference:

“We do not have to make a commitment to realism in physics beyond human existence. We certainly do not have to relativize our self-understanding in response to contemporary cosmology and the apparent size of the universe. If our understanding is always by analogy with our existence, then reality beyond our existence is simply outside the scope of meaningful speech. It can be considered within the context of God’s reality, but not our reality. Whether he created it before us or with us is really a distinction for the angels to ponder, but not for us to know.”

In other words, I expressed skepticism that just because I could see dinosaurs in the fossil record, I needed to conclude that dinosaurs once existed just as much as I exist now. Many philosophers in the audience agreed, but it was too much for some of the scientists. It sounded much too close to Young Earth Creationism.

But before the discussion about what I might possibly have meant by these words began, I concluded my talk with a few less controversial points, but insights that guided my further philosophical work.

“What scientists must do is remind people how much science has learned that is new about the world, but also how much has remained the same. The human person, in his or her individuality and unique dignity, just by virtue of being an individual person, is prior to scientific inquiry. The context of our lives provided by science is an abstraction from our understanding, and it reveals conditions under which we exist and a framework within which we exist, but it is not the same as our existence. The value of life, the value of the individual living being, and, most importantly, the value of each and every human person is something that we know before we begin to do science. And only by recognizing these values at the outset that science truly make sense.”

When I read this today, I am happy to see that I had begun by asking some really good questions. But my answers needed more work. Values and being were closely connected, and why this is so is what I discovered a few years later in studying Edith Stein’s works. This allowed me to give a much better response to the being of, for example, the elementary particles of theoretical physics and beings that I know only indirectly, by interpreting the scientific evidence rather than direct experience, such as dinosaurs.

Two videos resulted from a visit to Notre Dame University in May, 2018. Before the talk, my hosts recorded an interview with me so that I would tell my story.

(0:05) Can you tell us a little bit about your biography?

(13:28) Did you experience awe and wonder in the encounter with nature as a biomedical scientist?

(17:49) Stephen Hawking has said, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.” How does he get to this view, and where has he gone wrong?

(22:55) You mentioned in your talk to the Society of Catholic Scientists that you struggled to make sense of the size of the universe. Why is this so?

(26:20) How do you understand the difference between science and scientism?

(28:28) What is missing when we just look at the physical?

(30:40) What do you encounter when you encounter a human person?

(34:20) Scientists are persons, but science is impersonal. What does this mean?

(38:40) Are we just a bag of atoms arranged in a particular way, governed by nothing but the laws of physics?

(42:20) If we start with a person as a bag of atoms, how does the characteristically personal get into it?

(44:46) There’s an account of the history of the universe that seems like the big picture, even all of it. What do you think is mistaken in this big picture?

(50:47) So much of the universe is inanimate, fully described by physics. But what happens when inanimate matter becomes animate?

(55:37) Can I ask you about the soul?

At the time of this interview, I had not yet found a way to speak of how life differs from the inanimate. I only say that life is more meaningful. I had not yet figured out how to put physics into the knowledge of all else. In the last minutes, I speak of different languages to speak of the different ways of knowing life. That’s not all bad (and I remember that I was quite tired by then). However, since we cannot mix languages, this does not help me in reaching my goal: Bringing them together and acting with knowledge of both.

In the lecture, I introduced my specifically Franciscan perspective on faith and science and discussed the philosophy that I need to understand its insights and apply them in ethical acting. It starts with my disappointment in Thomism and the difficulty of equally well explaining both the successes and the failures of physicalism. My take in this lecture is to deny that physics is a true description of a living being. But I try to do this without denying the truth of what we learn from physics. My excitement when encountering, a couple of years later, Edith Stein’s philosophy of being was that she offered a way to speak of this in a philosophically sound way.

The Word on Fire Institute wants to reach out to as many intellectually curious people as possible. As the conference was not meant primarily for an academic audience, I spoke freely with just a few notes.

In this talk, I try to tie together the abstract language of science, the concrete language of life, and the ethical language of natural humanity as we can speak of nature only when we know all three of them. But the question remains: How can all these three languages speak of one reality in which it all comes harmoniously together? This is a question that I have now addressed in my philosophical writings with help of the philosophy of Edith Stein, but I have yet to record a video in which I speak of it.