Science and the Church

Daniel Sullivan in Policy Review on The Church and Galileo, edited by Ernan McMullin, essays on the report of Pope John Paul II's Galileo Commission

By accepting a historical approach to its past, the Church makes a significant accommodation. It declares that one can explain why and how men -- even churchmen -- acted the way they did in purely human terms. In other words, academic history elucidates the past without mentioning God: Men in every time period act within the context of that period and from the spectrum of conflicting human motivations. Of course, the Church would not consent to such a notion if it seemed inherently to compromise Providential history. In other words, the history of mankind, in its view, can consist of both the complex back-and-forth of limited men in their particular lifetimes and the constant working of an eternal God.