"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth" – Pope John Paul II

There are both religious and nonreligious people who insist that faith and reason are at war with each other. Christian "fideists" reject the idea that reason may be used to help us better understand God. Modern secularist-atheists dismiss all religious faith as superstition. Whether called "faith vs reason," "religion vs science," or "spiritual vs material," the dispute essentially involves trying to understand what truth is and how much of it is knowable through reason versus how much through faith.

Two wings. There aren't too many "fideists" around anymore so most critics today are the secularists who trace their ideas back to the misnamed "Enlightenment." The 16th century supposedly was the time when man's reason began to replace his dependence on religious dogma, especially as manifested by the Catholic Church. The rallying cry for such people is "Galileo!"

But, aside from the fact that the Galileo story is usually told incorrectly and incompletely, there is the rather odd idea that reason, meaning science, just appeared out of nowhere, unrelated to Christian religious practices (though perhaps with a nod to the ancients) when, in fact, modern science would not and could not have developed without the support of medieval religion.

Science is expensive. As historian J.L Heilbron has written, "The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries … than any other, and probably all other, institutions." This support was done largely for religious, not scientific, reasons. It involved trying to firmly establish the date for Easter that meant figuring out the passage of time; sorting out days, months, and years by studying celestial movements. Indeed, astronomy was long known as "the Jesuit science" because so many astronomers were Jesuits.

But the point is not why religion supported science but that it consistently (faithfully?) did so during the so-called "dark ages." And not just astronomy. Note that support for astronomy also included, indeed required, support for other disciplines such as mathematics, physics, optics, architecture (for building observatories), and the manufacture of chronometers, all of which developed within the earliest universities, beginning around 1200 A.D., which themselves were created and sponsored by the Church. It was within these Catholic universities that the intellectual foundations of modern science were laid down. This support existed precisely because of what Alfred North Whitehead later called "the medieval insistence on the rationality of God," i.e., that human reason was a gift from God that should be used to try to bring man closer to God by studying his creation, the universe.

That is why so many medieval scientists were clerics, a tradition continued later by men like the Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics. All of this implies not a war, but a very close alliance, between faith and reason during the Middle Ages.

Yet it was a particular conceit of Enlightenment scholars that they were enlightened because they had jettisoned the primitive superstitions of religion. Then came Darwin and these men thought they had a "gotcha" moment. But, except for hard core biblical literalists, Christianity looked at evolution and shrugged, recognizing that Darwin's idea might help explain what happened after Creation but could say nothing about Creation itself. After all, Christians said, God created evolution too.

Next came the Big Bang which, secularists say, surely knocks Creation on the head. But the Big Bang theory was first promulgated by Father Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest who saw it as an expression of God's power, not of his demise. Thus, the dispute between Evolution-Science and Creation-Faith is a phony one. You can't fly on one wing.

Despite the shrill sneers of secularists from Voltaire to Richard Dawkins, there is no contradiction between faith and reason. Pope John Paul II was right.