LeMaitre wasn't imposing his superstitions on science. He's not insisting that Genesis is somehow a simplified account of the Big Bang. That kind of "scientific creationism" is mostly for American Evangelicals trying to justify their biblical absolutism.
LeMaitre is a Catholic priest, and despite their anti-science reputation from the late Medieval era, the Catholic Church is quote pro-science. They've accepted both evolution and the Big Bang for a very long time. They treat Genesis as a myth, a spiritually informative story that is not literally true.
They do believe in genuine miracles, but they downplay them substantially (though they're still quite popular with many individual Catholics). But the official teaching is that human beings evolved in a universe that began 14 billion years ago. There were many miracles in it, including the ensoulment of human beings which makes them categorically different from nonhuman animals, but that soul is metaphysical and immune to experiment -- and therefore doesn't conflict with science.
Catholic faith isn't faith in the world, but faith in the soul of humanity and the promise of an afterlife. That faith is unscientific while being compatible with science.
There are many reasons to criticize the Catholic church, but it's not guilty of imposing superstition on science. (Even the Medieval crimes against science are more complicated than the common story is told.) Christianity as a whole seems very anti-science from an American perspective, and that taints our perception of religion as a whole since it's our dominant religious force, but it's not absolutely impossible for somebody to be religiously faithful and a genuinely skeptical scientist.
Like you, I apply Occam's Razor, and tend to dismiss "faith" in that sense as an unneeded hypothesis. Catholicism is all about a "salvation" you and I feel no need of. Especially since, as I said, the Catholic Church has been guilty of so many recent crimes, and does not seem like a force for moral good. But I do think it's important to understand that there are people whose faith doesn't have to conflict with either science or ethics, and LeMaitre is one example.
LeMaitre is a Catholic priest, and despite their anti-science reputation from the late Medieval era, the Catholic Church is quote pro-science. They've accepted both evolution and the Big Bang for a very long time. They treat Genesis as a myth, a spiritually informative story that is not literally true.
They do believe in genuine miracles, but they downplay them substantially (though they're still quite popular with many individual Catholics). But the official teaching is that human beings evolved in a universe that began 14 billion years ago. There were many miracles in it, including the ensoulment of human beings which makes them categorically different from nonhuman animals, but that soul is metaphysical and immune to experiment -- and therefore doesn't conflict with science.
Catholic faith isn't faith in the world, but faith in the soul of humanity and the promise of an afterlife. That faith is unscientific while being compatible with science.
There are many reasons to criticize the Catholic church, but it's not guilty of imposing superstition on science. (Even the Medieval crimes against science are more complicated than the common story is told.) Christianity as a whole seems very anti-science from an American perspective, and that taints our perception of religion as a whole since it's our dominant religious force, but it's not absolutely impossible for somebody to be religiously faithful and a genuinely skeptical scientist.
Like you, I apply Occam's Razor, and tend to dismiss "faith" in that sense as an unneeded hypothesis. Catholicism is all about a "salvation" you and I feel no need of. Especially since, as I said, the Catholic Church has been guilty of so many recent crimes, and does not seem like a force for moral good. But I do think it's important to understand that there are people whose faith doesn't have to conflict with either science or ethics, and LeMaitre is one example.