| Volume 8, Number 4, October 2011 |
A Spirituality For Scientists
Historical Overview
by François Euvé 弗朗索瓦·欧维
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| NOWADAYS it is a common assumption that scientific work entails an “atheistic methodology”. Although somewhat provocative, this formula expresses what the Second Vatican Council called the rightful “autonomy of earthly affairs”.(1) The scientific investigator is free to construct any scenario likely to explain phenomena without needing to have recourse to some “supernatural” element which would intervene as a special complement to a series of “natural” causes. Such an attitude is justified not as an example of tolerance which avoids challenging modern secularisation, but as the outcome of a reasoned theology of creation. The act of creation consists in handing over to creatures “their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order”.(2) Thus, according to their “species”, each acquires the capacity to move by its own power and to enjoy a certain autonomy from the environment; in the case of the human species, this takes the form of freedom. On this understanding, the intellectual process of knowing belongs to a different order from the personal choice of faith, which involves liberty.(3) |
Such an outlook helps to explain why, from the early development of modern science at the start of the seventeenth century, the attitudes of scientists to religion have been very diverse. There are those who deliberately separate science from the quest for meaning, either because they set aside the latter as without interest, or because they consider the two tasks to be unrelated. However, today such attitudes—which could vary from indifference to a prudent distancing—are less common than they used to be. Advances in science, particularly in the domain of bioscience, raise questions about human destiny—about what it is to be properly “human”. These are questions which the positivistic approach had resolutely ruled out as irrelevant, given that there was only one enterprise worth undertaking—the investigation of scientific truth. In this article, I would like, with the help of a number of significant figures, to distance myself historically from today’s attitude to the “spirituality of scientists”. Clearly these figures are special cases, but their influence, extending beyond the limits of... [ Read more ] |
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| Issue 8.4 |
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The Double-Ten
Uprising
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