Faith and science meet in Rome
The Vatican announced this morning the upcoming conference on “Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A critical appraisal 150 years after ‘The Origin of Species'”.
This is the year of Darwin, the bicentennial of his birth and sesquicentennial of the publication of that famous work, and the Church sees it as the right time to bring to the culture work they’ve been doing for decades on advancing the mutual work of science, theology and philosophy.
Archbishop Ravasi pointed out that the forthcoming congress responds to the need “to re-establish dialogue between science and faith, because neither of them can fully resolve the mystery of human beings and the universe”.
“Science can purify Religion from error and superstition; Religion can purify Science from idolatry and false absolutes.â€
And Benedict XVI continues to emphasize that and promote these interdisciplinary studies.
In recent years, Pope Benedict has stressed the urgent need for intellectual clarity now that our technological reach threatens to exceed our moral grasp. “The new dialogue between faith and reason which is needed today cannot come about in the terms and ways it did in the past,” Pope Benedict said in June 2008, addressing university professors in Rome. “If it does not want to see itself reduced to the status of sterile intellectual exercises, it must start from the current real situation of mankind, and upon that build a reflection that embraces man’s ontological and metaphysical truth.”
So look at these little gems dropped in that Vatican gathering today to announce the evolution conference.
Like…
this congress represents an opportunity, neither propagandistic nor apologetic, for scientists, philosophers and theologians to meet and discuss the fundamental questions raised by biological evolution – which is assumed and discussed as a fact beyond all reasonable doubt…
How many people, Catholics and Evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians, don’t know the Church believes that?!
For his part, Fr. Tanzella-Nitti highlighted how “from the perspective of Christian theology, biological evolution and creation are by no means mutually exclusive.
Important statement. So is this, if you parse it…
None of the evolutionary mechanisms opposes the affirmation that God wanted – in other words, created – man. Neither is this opposed by the casual nature of the many events that happened during the slow development of life, as long as the recourse to chance remains a simple scientific reading of phenomena”.
“I hope”, he went on, “that the natural sciences may be used by theology as a positive informational resource, and not just seen as a source of problems.
As many prominent people see it now, unnecessarily.
I do not believe biological evolution is possible in a materialist world, without information, without direction, without a plan. In a created world, the role of theology is precisely that of talking to us about nature and the meaning it has, of the Logos which, as Benedict XVI likes to say, is the uncreated foundation of all things and of history”.
Now the Pontifical Council for Culture needs to reach the modern culture with the exciting news of what’s really going on in the meeting of science and faith. I’ll be doing my share through the media. I’m attending that conference in Rome, and will have firsthand reports here and on radio.
