A Reason Open to God

7. Science, Technology, and Theology

t 7. Science, Technology, and Theology Love Alone Guarantees the Humanity of Research From Address to The Catholic University of the Sacred Heart on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic, Rome, May 3, 2012 On this occasion I would like to contribute a few thoughts. Our time is one in which the experimental sciences have transformed the vision of the world and even man’s understanding of himself . The many discoveries and the rapid succession of innovative technologies are a well-founded reason for pride, but they are frequently not without disturbing implications. Indeed, against the background of the widespread optimism in scientific knowledge extends the shadow of a crisis in thought. Rich in means but less so in their aims, the men and women of our time are often conditioned by reductionism and relativism, which lead to the loss of meaning of things; blinded, as it were, by technical efficiency, they forget the fundamental horizon of the need for meaning, thereby relegating the transcendent dimension to irrelevance . Against this background thought is weakened and an ethical impoverishment that blurs valuable norms of reference gains ground. 261 What was the fertile root of European culture and progress seems to have been forgotten. In it the search for the Absolute— the quaerere Deum—included the need to deepen the knowledge of the profane sciences, the entire world of knowledge.1 Scientific research and the question of meaning, even with their specific epistemological and methodological features, in fact flow from one source, the Logos, that presides over creative work and guides the sense of history. A fundamentally technological and practical mindset generates a perilous imbalance between what is technologically possible and what is morally sound, with unforeseeable consequences. Thus it is important for culture to rediscover the vigor of the meaning and dynamism of transcendence—in a word, to present the horizon of the quaerere Deum decisively. St. Augustine’s famous sentence springs to mind: “you have made us for yourself [O Lord] and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”2 It may be said that the impulse of scientific research itself stems from the longing for God that dwells in the human heart: basically, scientists, even unconsciously, strive to attain that truth which can give meaning to life. Yet, however enthusiastic and tenacious human research is, it is incapable merely with its own efforts of reaching a safe landing place, for “man is incapable of fully explaining the strange semi-darkness that overshadows the question of the eternal realities.... God must take the initiative of reaching out and speaking to man.”3 To restore reason to its native, integral dimension, one must rediscover the source that scientific research shares with the quest for faith, fides quaerens intellectum, according to Anselm’s intuition. Science and faith have a fruitful reciprocity, an almost complementary need for understanding the real. Paradoxical262 Science, Technology, and Theology 1. Cf. Benedict XVI, Address to Representatives from the World of Culture at the “Collège des Bernardins” in Paris, Apostolic Journey to France, Paris, September 12, 2008. 2. Augustine, Confessions Bk. i, 1. 3. Joseph Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, translated by Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 100. Science, Technology, and Theology 263 ly, however, the positivist culture itself, excluding the question on God from scientific discussion, determines the decline of thought and the enfeeblement of the ability to understand this reality. Yet the human quest for quaerere Deum would lose itself in a maze if it were not to meet illumination and reliable orientation, which is the way of God himself who, with immense love, makes himself close to man: “In Jesus Christ God not only speaks to man but also seeks him out.... It is a search which begins in the heart of God and culminates in the Incarnation of the Word.”4 As the religion of the Logos, Christianity does not relegate faith to the sphere of the irrational, but attributes the origin and sense of reality to creative Reason, which, in the crucified God, is expressed as love and invites us to take the way of the quaerere Deum: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Here St. Thomas Aquinas comments, “For the destination of this way is the end of human desire. Now human beings especially desire two things: first...