Especially since science has not, so far, been able to disprove any Christian dogma; at most, it has challenged a simplistic and literalist reading of Genesis.
And that was by no means a foregone conclusion. Science could, for example, have shown that the Gospels lack any real historical foundation (as history is a science albeit not a “hard” one), and that belief in the New Testament and in the Church’s teaching rests on nothing more than blind faith and wishful thinking. But it hasn’t done so. On the contrary, the findings of the Third Quest have pointed in the opposite direction.
Science could also, in theory, have demonstrated that consciousness has purely material origins (which would have entailed far more than the revision of a few minor points: it would have disproved one of the central Christian dogmas, one taught by Jesus himself in the Gospels, and it would have undermined the credibility of any supernatural account of encounters with the dead, including the apostolic witness [ Even if their claim was different, namely, that he had actually risen from the dead and that they had not merely seen his spirit, if the brain were shown to be so deceptive as to mislead billions of people, there would be no rational reason to believe that, in this particular case, no such deception had occurred.] This doesn’t mean that one would, in such a case, be logically compelled to reject the Resurrection accounts, as one could believe, in principle, that the resurrection accounts were real; but there would be no rational reason to believe that they had truly occurred rather than being merely fabrications of the apostles’ brains, just as the billions of people who have claimed to interact with spirits would, in that scenario, have been deceived by their own minds).
Yet it hasn’t, in fact, an increasing number of neuroscientists today argue that materialism rests on shaky foundations.
What I mean is that science has had, and still has, the theoretical capacity not merely to reshape certain Christian interpretations of Scripture (for example, by challenging a literalist reading of Genesis—which does nothing to disprove that God may at some point have endowed two human beings with souls and that they subsequently sinned), but to disprove some of the most fundamental dogmas and doctrines proclaimed from the very beginning. Yet it has not been able to do so, nor will it ever be able to do so.
And this is simply because the Bible and the Church teach the truth. Not that they are intended to convey literal truth in every particular, but they do faithfully teach the truth in matters fundamental to faith and morals.
