> Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god
That quotes needs some unpacking, because many people have caricaturish notions of things like "faith" or "science" or "religion".
> Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality
To make this more comprehensible, I will render this as "Faith needs reason to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality" or "to make faith actually faith, not wishful thinking or superstition". That is the Catholic view.
True faith, pace pop culture, is never blind. Faith concerns what is beyond what is knowable through reason. This is the reason for the parental analogies in the Bible. A child cannot understand why a parent is guiding him a certain way, but he trusts the parent to guide him well. By analogy, human reason cannot know certain things in its present condition, but some things have been revealed on authority established by other evidence or truths (hence why Christ argues from the Torah, etc. and performs thousands of miracles, with the resurrection at the pinnacle, to demonstrate his identity and his authority). So, faith is no substitute for reason; instead, reason puts faith in its place. In the beatific vision, faith is no longer necessary, analogously to how when a child becomes an adult, he no longer needs to trust his parents in the way he used to. He himself knows the things his parents did when he still did not.
> to protect it from creationism
I don't know what this means. Partly, this is because "creationism" is equivocal and means various things.
The Catholic position accepts creatio ex nihilo, which is to say that the universe is created/kept in existence by God - the first cause - out of nothing, i.e., not as a mutation or transformation of some preexisting being. It has no official position on "evolution" per se (which is also equivocal), but it does reject evolutionism which is a metaphysical position. There is no official position about the details of how the first parents came to be, but it does hold that there were first parents from whom all other humans descend. The intellect and will (usually called the "soul") are taken to be the result of special acts of creation at each conception, and therefore not something generated by the parents.
Catholics are permitted to believe in a range of evolutionary explanations (like adaptation and selection) and they are permitted to believe that the universe was created in 6 days (though blanket Biblical literalism is not traditional and rather modern; note that the Catholic Church compiled the diverse genres making up the Bible in the first place). Most Catholics probably accept the general prevailing cosmological view of an old universe, a figurative 6 days, evolutionary explanations in relation to the human body plan, etc. This may seem odd to those who come from certain American evangelical circles, which tend to get more attention in the American media.
Those with a taste for speculation about how modern biology and Biblical accounts might be reconciled will find Ed Feser's posts [0][1] on the subject interesting.
> which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god
This is interesting, because one thing that is characteristic of paganism is that the gods are of the world. They are beings like us, or personifications of natural phenomena. But God in the Catholic sense is not a being among many, but Being Itself by which all beings are.
I'm not sure what Br. Guy's definition of "creationism" is here, though. A web search doesn't really give me a coherent picture of what he means either. I suspect he may be attacking a mechanistic metaphysics in which secondary causality doesn't really exist and God is some kind of cosmic occasionalist puppet master. In that sense, I you could argue it sounds more pagan - or pan(en)theistic - rather than Christian.
I can’t say I manage to convince myself of any supernatural argument, but I often find them fascinating, and the philosophy and theology in Christianity is a lot more complex and interesting than many other atheists give it credit for (although I tend to agree it is “complicated” rather than “complex”, making knots for itself to untie, but I think this about secular philosophy too).
How did you build this understanding of theology? Any book you’d recommend?
> In the beatific vision, faith is no longer necessary
Many traditions argue that faith and hope are temporary, since in God's presence all is revealed. But on the basis of Paul's statement "these three remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love", others argue that faith and hope remain within the culminating beatific vision, since even the saints in his presence know him truly but not fully in the infinity of his nature. Faith and hope are at that point an enduring confidence that he will continue to be and do what is ultimately for his glory and our good throughout the "ages to come."
A miracle, by definition, transcends the nature of the thing in question. The cause is not attributable to the power of the thing effected or anything in the world.
If God is distinct from what is created, then a miracle cannot be said to be a manifestation of what is created. Pantheism, on the other hand, must deny miracles, because God and the universe are one, and so all apparent miracles are merely unaccounted for manifestations of reality and perhaps explainable by "some future human theory of reality".
Since Jesuits (ostensibly) hold to a Catholic view in which God and the created order are distinct, they must therefore believe that miracles are not only possible, but do happen. The question is then largely whether a particular effect is miraculous or not.
I love this quote!