Author Topic: Aleteia their GOD OF EVOLUTION (Read 952 times)

cassini · « **on:** January 18, 2026, 12:40:14 PM »

https://aleteia.org/2024/06/22/catholic-scientists-promote-harmony-of-faith-and-science/

God's two books

Barr pointed toward the ancient Catholic stimulus of scientific discovery and advancement. He suggested that “God wrote two books," namely the book of Scripture and the "book of nature," and that scientists of faith can learn of God from both.

‘Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that we can refer “not improperly” to the initial singularity [the Big Bang] as an act of creation. What conclusions can we draw from it? That a Creator exists? Suppose still, for the sake of argument, that this, too, is conceded. The problem now is twofold. Is this creator theologically relevant? Can this creator serve the purpose of faith? My answer to the first question is decidedly negative. A creator proved by cosmology is a cosmological agent that has none of the properties a believer attributes to [the triune] God. Even supposing one can consistently say the cosmological creator is beyond space and time, this creature cannot be understood as a person or as the Word made flesh or as the Son of God come down to the world in order to save mankind. Pascal rightly referred to this latter Creator as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” not of philosophers and scientists. To believe that cosmology proves the existence of a creator and then to attribute to this creator the properties of the Creation as a person is to make an illegitimate inference, to commit a category fallacy. My answer to the second question is also negative. Suppose we can grant what my answer to the first question intends to deny. That is, suppose we can understand the God of cosmologists as the God of theologians and believers. Such a God cannot (and should not) serve the purpose of faith, because, being a God proved by cosmology he should be at the mercy of cosmology. Like any other scientific discipline that, to use Pope John Paul II’s words, proceeds with “methodological seriousness,” cosmology is always revisable. It might then happen that a creator proved on the basis of a theory will be refuted when that theory is refuted. Can the God of believers be exposed to the risk of such an inconsistent enterprise as science?’--- Marcello Pera The god of theologians and the god of astronomers, as found in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.378, 379.
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Author Topic: Aleteia their GOD OF EVOLUTION (Read 952 times)

cassini

Aleteia their GOD OF EVOLUTION