Earlier this week the Catholic League issued a short statement concerning Bill Maher’s new documentary, “Religulous.” I have not seen this documentary, so I cannot comment on that specifically, but I would like to comment on a few points that the statement makes with regards to other issues. Click the link above to read the full statement in context.

On the other hand, it is pure nonsense to play Catholicism off against science. After all, were it not for the role of the Catholic Church, there would have been no Scientific Revolution and no early breakthroughs in astronomy.

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It is not at all clear what “role” the Catholic league imagines that the Catholic Church so intimately played in the so-called Scientific Revolution (roughly the period from 1500-1700) – let alone which “early breakthroughs” in astronomy they had in mind. As a graduate student studying the history of science and, presently, the scientific revolution (just keep an eye on my reading list), I can say with some confidence that this is pure nonsense. Of course, some of my readers may find the equation of nonsense with the Catholic League to be, well, unsurprising.

To be sure, there were a number of well-known Catholic scientists (to use an anachronistic term) who contributed to the scientific revolution in a number of significant ways. Nicolaus Copernicus was a Catholic and a Church Canon, and he even dedicated his book on heliocentrism to Pope Paul III. Galileo and Descartes, too, were committed Catholics. One can find many more. However, merely putting together a laundry list of Catholic scientists does not support the statement that the Catholic Church as a monolithic entity was therefore instrumental or somehow key to the science these men were advancing. In fact, if you would examine such a list, you would find that about all they had in common was that they were Catholic – and a bit more progressively minded than most. In other words, there is nothing about their “Catholicness” that predisposes them to revolution making science.

It is well known, of course, that the Catholic Galileo was convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church in 1633 and played an indirect role in the Church’s condemnation of and censorship of Copernicus’ book in 1616. In general, the science that made the scientific revolution, including the most important astronomical breakthroughs, was performed entirely outside of the context of the Church by people like Galileo, Kepler (a Protestant), and Newton (an Anglican). On the contrary, the Church tended to favor the very Aristotelian philosophy that the scientific revolution was trying to overturn. The most active Catholic order in scientific matters at the time, the Jesuits, ultimately made only minor and peripheral contributions to the scientific revolution.

The revolution rolled on, largely leaving the Church behind.

Swiftly moving into another topic altogether:

Equally dumb is the assertion that the Ten Commandments are flawed because they don’t speak to child abuse, rape and torture. Had Maher gone to more religion classes, he would have learned that the central taboos listed are umbrella strictures that cover a host of subsidiary sins.

The Ten Commandments cover a host of subsidiary sins. Where are these subsidiary sins listed? In an appendix? They are not. Presumably you have to try and figure them out on your own or spend a few years in religion classes. And we all know how good humans are at coming to a consensus on biblical interpretations of anything. A wise Creator might have just simply told us.

Not to mention that elsewhere in the Bible you will find God-sanctioned child abuse, rape, and torture! What do religion classes have to say about that?

And why did he bother to take out of context statements from people like John Adams that make the Founding Fathers sound anti-religion? Adams has often been quoted as saying that the Constitution was made ‘only for a moral and religious people.’

Ah, the founding fathers. I do not know what quotations Maher uses, but it is not so much that they were ‘anti-religion’ in any sense but that many of them were not Christians or were not Christians in any sense similar to the Catholic League. And, even more importantly, that, as John Adams himself affirmed: “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” (Treaty of Tripoli, 1797).

Finally, for kicks:

More important, if Jesus is not the Son of God, as Maher contends, then why does he waste time—and make himself look silly in the process—by invoking Jesus’ name to give homosexuality a pass? In the flick, Maher argues that homosexuality couldn’t be so bad if Jesus never mentioned it.

He invokes Jesus name not because he considers Jesus an authority but to make a point. It works like this: If you (the Christian) believe that Jesus was the Son of God (and therefore knew a thing or two), and you believe that homosexuality is a dreadful sin, then why did Jesus never bother to condemn it?

See, that wasn’t so hard.