Saint Albert the Great and the Natural Sciences | Fr. Conor McDonough, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2020

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on October 14, 2020 at University College Dublin.

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His handout can be found here: tinyurl.com/yxep832k

Speaker Bio:

Conor McDonough, OP is a Dominican friar from Galway. He studied science and theology at the University of Cambridge and taught theology at secondary school before joining the Dominicans in 2009. He was ordained priest in 2016 and undertook further studies in theology at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), focussing on the writings of St Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. He is currently based in Dublin where he teaches theology to the students at the Dominican House of Studies in Dublin.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:09.4	Brothers and sisters, it's a real joy for me to be addressing the University College Dublin chapter of the Thomistic Institute this evening.
0:18.2	I wish I could be with you in person, but this online lecture
0:22.8	will have to do for the moment. I'll be speaking tonight about St. Albert the Great and the natural
0:28.6	sciences. He's a figure who's close to my heart for two main reasons, and they're the two reasons
0:36.3	I'm keen to give this lecture this evening.
0:39.8	Firstly, because along with other medieval naturalists, he shows how false is the idea that science
0:47.6	went extinct during the Middle Ages. I was a science undergraduate some years ago myself and as a practicing Catholic I had to get used to challenging my friends on this topic.
1:01.0	And in doing so, I had to read up on the history of science.
1:05.0	Now, nobody who has studied this subject seriously could buy the old model of the middle ages as an age of ignorance, an age of authority, an age during which curiosity was stamped out.
1:20.6	But these ideas, even if they're debunked by scholars, they're still very common at a popular level. Just to give you an example, a few months ago, I met a young man, a graduate, in fact, of
1:33.3	your university, so very well-educated young man, who calmly told me in the course of conversation,
1:39.3	informed me that the idea of evidence, backing up a claim with evidence, only occurred
1:47.0	to the human mind at some point in the 19th century.
1:51.0	And you can imagine my reaction at the time.
1:54.0	And as well as this history textbooks in Irish schools, they still peddle the idea, easily debunked, that everyone in the Middle Ages
2:03.1	thought the Earth was flat, and they were terrified that Christopher Columbus would sail off the edge
2:08.5	of the planet.
2:10.6	Taking a look at the life and works of Albert the Great is an excellent way to show how
2:16.7	ignorant these contemporary claims are, and just how little they are backed up by evidence.
2:23.3	So that's the first reason I like Albert. It's for the apologetic power of his example.
	...

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