p>VATICAN CITY — Is religion to save scientists from excessive belief in the virtues of science, and is science to rescue Christians and other religious believers from superstition? This appears to be the hopeful prospect of a three-year Vatican-coordinated project that aims to bring science and religion into greater harmony with each other.

Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest is a triennial program involving the Regina Apostolorum Athenaeum, as well as the Lateran and Gregorian pontifical universities. The course, financed by the Templeton Foundation and coordinated by the Pontifical Council for Culture, has just completed its first year in which more than a thousand students took part.

Speaking at a Vatican press conference March 11, the president of the Pontifical Council, Cardinal Paul Poupard, said the project is hoped to “contribute to an organic vision of knowledge and to a reciprocal understanding not only between science, philosophy and theology, but also between the Church and science.”

Prof. Vicenzo Cappelletti, president of the Italian Society for the History of Science, underscored that STOQ is of “very, very great importance” aimed at “reopening and restarting dialogue between science and religion.”

The program is a product of the renewed spirit of dialogue between Catholic theology and science, a spirit first inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council and which reached its zenith in the conclusions of the “Galileo Commission” — an 11-year investigation initiated by Pope John Paul II and headed by Cardinal Poupard that looked into the controversial case of Galileo Galilei, the 17th-century astronomer.

So far, the program has proved to be highly popular with renowned scientists taking part in “ardent and avid debates” with religious and lay students. The director of STOQ, Prof. Gianfranco Basti, told the press conference there had been a very positive response to the project that had been “much beyond our expectations.”

Why Now?

But why is this closer collaboration taking place now, and what does it entail? According to Basti, the era that Martin Heidegger defined as Weltanschauungen — the era of opposing “visions of the world” — is at an end. In the third millennium, Basti explained, the world is said to be witnessing the “sunset of ideologies,” meaning that science and humanism are no longer the polarized, opposing forces that battled each other in the 20th century, but are now in a position to dialogue with one another.

In light of ecological and bioethical issues, this dialogue is also seen not only as a moral necessity but, after years in which dialogue has led to blindness on both sides, it is viewed as a logical development.

“Science and religion need one another,” wrote Pope John Paul in 1988 in an open letter to Jesuit Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw each other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

The Holy Father went on: “The uses of science have on more than one occasion proven massively destructive, and the reflections on religion have too often been sterile. We need each other to be what we must be, what we are called to be.”

For Cappelletti, since science has become fragmented and broken after the Weltanchauung, only faith can put it back together. The Church, he says, is offering science a way of “rebuilding its own unity” through the Christian message, providing an ethical approach through ontological research.

This is in line with the final aim of the project, which, as the cardinal explained, is “to contribute to dialogue between areas of research and study that, in the modern age, have slowly become separated.”

But, according to Prof. William Carroll, Aquinas Fellow in Theology and Science at Oxford University’s Blackfriars College, the success of this intellectual quest depends on the amount of study scientists, theologians and philosophers are willing to invest in the other’s discipline.

“Without beginning to think about first principles of science and first principles of religious belief, there’ll be confusion,” he explained. “And without a sound philosophical background, you can’t have much dialogue between science and religion.”

Carroll said that each has to learn the other’s “intellectual habit” to avoid making “naïve philosophical claims.” But at the same time, these habits have to be distinct.

“STOQ must at least aim to realize those distinctions but that does not mean each theologian, philosopher or scientist has to become an expert in other’s field,” Carroll continued. “A sign of the educated man is not to be an expert but someone who can evaluate the arguments of experts,” he added, quoting Aristotle.

Each of the universities currently involved is developing a specific theme: the Gregorian University is concentrating on the problems of the foundation of philosophy of science and nature; the Lateran University is devoting itself to the systematic formalization of the relationship between science and humanism, paying particular attention to an “anthropology for the third millennium”; and the Regina Apostolorum University, meanwhile, is dedicating itself to deepening relationships between theology, philosophy and biological sciences, with particular reference to bioethics.

Before 2007, the program plans to publish the final results of these research programs as an integrated collection of six books (two for each university), edited by the Pontifical Council for Culture. There is also a STOQ International Conference on “Infinity in Science, Philosophy and Theology” planned for November, in which physicists, mathematicians, logicians, philosophers and theologians from all over the world will discuss these issues over three days of debate.

Through the project, philosophy and theology curricula in pontifical universities will be able to renew their former tradition, lost in the 20th century, of incorporating mathematical and natural sciences. Further afield, it is hoped that scientific faculties in universities around the world will follow the project, and achieve a “corresponding openness” toward the students of philosophical and theological disciplines.

By doing so, the project is renewing a tradition lost during the last century in which pontifical universities played a significant role in modern science. It is also, according to Cappelletti, “initiating a rebirth of what universities were understood to be up until recent times.”

Edward Pentin writes

from Rome.