THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE IN DIALOGUE. SIGNPOSTS AND PERSPECTIVES
THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE IN DIALOGUE. SIGNPOSTS AND PERSPECTIVES

Summary/Abstract: One can note that science tends to turn man into a master of the external and material, yet atthe cost of turning him, on the level of his inner and spiritual life, into a slave of instinctsaltered by sin. All these, without a moral norm, become a power of destruction for man andrepresent issues addressed not just by bioethics, where the opinion of ‘theologians’ isconsulted as well, but especially by the Church and by the Orthodoxy. The pressure of eventsimposes the issue of the recognition or, according to some, reformulation of the bases ofethics. Yet, this ethics ought to be constrained to a revision founded neither just on theprogress of science, whose truths are partial, nor on the principles of rationalist or positivistphilosophy, which try to convince man that he is no different from all the other living beingsand needs to be treated in the same way as them, but on the reality of the religious fact, and,moreover, on the evidence of God’s Revelation and, implicitly, of Christian anthropology,based on the fact that man bears God’s image, not the image of man himself, as a societyattempting to exclude God in an absolute manner wills to herald. According to the HolyChurch Fathers, one must pursue not a concordism or discordism of theology and science buttheir dialogue from a theological and, implicitly, eschatological perspective. The first, namelytheology, relies on the knowledge of God and the receiving of the supernatural gifts by theaction of the divine uncreated energies, by means of man’s collaboration with God, whichsupposes man’s commitment to advance on the steps of the spiritual life: cleansing,illumination, deification. The second, namely science, relies on knowing the surroundingworld and on putting to use the natural gifts, also given by God to man, and by which maninvestigates the reasons of things, recognising God’s power, wisdom and presence. Therefore,to theology correspond the spiritual knowledge and wisdom from Above, while to sciencecorrespond lay knowledge and the wisdom from the outside or from below. At the basis ofthese acts is the difference between Uncreated and created, between Uncreated and createdenergies. Thus, the Holy Fathers distinguish between observations from natural sciences andtheir consecrated philosophical interpretations, yet which they signal and condemn if theseinterpretations do not converge with the theological perspective, in other words, with thedivine Revelation, because the texts of the Holy Scriptures are inspired by God and what isincluded in them is situated at a different depth of knowledge than what belongs to humanknowledge

• Details
• Contents