THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE IN DIALOGUE. SIGNPOSTS AND PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

One can note that science tends to turn man into a master of the external and material, yet at the cost of turning him, on the level of his inner and spiritual life, into a slave of instincts altered by sin. All these, without a moral norm, become a power of destruction for man and represent issues addressed not just by bioethics, where the opinion of ‘theologians’ is consulted as well, but especially by the Church and by the Orthodoxy. The pressure of events imposes the issue of the recognition or, according to some, reformulation of the bases of ethics. Yet, this ethics ought to be constrained to a revision founded neither just on the progress of science, whose truths are partial, nor on the principles of rationalist or positivist philosophy, which try to convince man that he is no different from all the other living beings and 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 society attempting to exclude God in an absolute manner wills to herald. According to the Holy Church Fathers, one must pursue not a concordism or discordism of theology and science but their dialogue from a theological and, implicitly, eschatological perspective. The first, namely theology, relies on the knowledge of God and the receiving of the supernatural gifts by the action of the divine uncreated energies, by means of man’s collaboration with God, which supposes man’s commitment to advance on the steps of the spiritual life: cleansing, illumination, deification. The second, namely science, relies on knowing the surrounding world and on putting to use the natural gifts, also given by God to man, and by which man investigates the reasons of things, recognising God’s power, wisdom and presence. Therefore, to theology correspond the spiritual knowledge and wisdom from Above, while to science correspond lay knowledge and the wisdom from the outside or from below. At the basis of these acts is the difference between Uncreated and created, between Uncreated and created energies. Thus, the Holy Fathers distinguish between observations from natural sciences and their consecrated philosophical interpretations, yet which they signal and condemn if these interpretations do not converge with the theological perspective, in other words, with the divine Revelation, because the texts of the Holy Scriptures are inspired by God and what is included in them is situated at a different depth of knowledge than what belongs to human knowledge.