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God

Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti

I. The Notion of God and the Problem of God. 1. Notion of God and Ultimate Questions. 2. God as the Object of Religion, Philosophy and Revelation. 3. Thinking Philosophically about the Absolute and “Ways” for a Natural Knowledge of God. - II. The Question on God in the Context of the Natural Sciences. 1. Contexts in which Contemporary Science Refers to God. 2. Scientific Thought as a Field of Historical Confrontation between Affirmation and Negation of God. - III. The Possibility of Speaking of God in a Way Meaningful to Scientific Rationality. 1. The Epistemological Meaning of a Discourse on God. 2. Scientists' Faith in God: a Statistical Outlook. - IV. The Image of God as Revealed in Jesus Christ: its Relationships to the Question about God Raised by Philosophy and the Sciences. 1. The Existence of God, Creator of Heaven and Earth can be known starting from the Created Realities. 2. The Biblical Image of the God of Israel revealed by his Son Made Man. 3. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God of Philosophers and Scientists as well.

I. The Notion of God and the Problem of God

1. Notion of God and Ultimate Questions. In the course of the development of human culture, two crucial issues surfaced and questioned human reason: the existence of the world and the rise of humankind over all other visible realities. Philosophical and scholarly reflections on the two issues have generated what are called the cosmological problem and the anthropological problem . The first involves reason inquiring whether the world has a cause that transcends it and what this cause may be; while in the second problem, reason inquires whether human life has any meaning and if it is the bearer of a plan. These questions are also called ultimate questions , since they seek the ultimate meaning and reason of things. In spite of the fact that in the course of time they have acquired new connotations, such questions have actually remained very much the same in their substance (examples in Gaudium et spes , 10; Nostra aetate , 1; Fides et ratio , 1-4, 26-27). These two problems, as a threshold, lead to a third problem, which is the problem of God .

Philological and semantic analyses of the words “God” or “divine, divinity” does not provide us with any indication since they are common nouns, and cultures and religions originally prefer to make use of God's proper names. The etymon for the Greek word Theós is not well known. Some feeble clues indicate that the Latin for God, Deus, divinus , derives from the Indo-European root dyeuh (daylight or sky, as in the Latin word dies ), while God or Gott seem to be connected to hud (to worship). The notion of God is often associated with the research for an answer to the ultimate questions on the world and on humankind, but it cannot be considered as the fruit of the highest manifestations of speculative knowledge (theoretical philosophy). Indeed we also found it within a kind of knowledge based on simple existential experiences (practical philosophy, religion). In any case, the reference to God and to the divine is present throughout the whole development of human culture, making it a fundamental anthropologic constant ( RELIGION; MAN, ORIGIN AND NATURE, IV). Any philosophical and theological reflection on God always deals with a certain pre-comprehension of the idea of God, as if this idea were a notion which human thought is naturally drawn to. Without discussing its origin, even Thomas Aquinas seems to hint to this very general understanding. The philosophical itinerary of his so-called five ways actually ends with the words: «...and this all men speak of as God»: intelligunt (first way), nominant (second way), dicunt or dicimus Deum (third, fourth and fifth ways) (cf. Summa Theologiae , I, q. 2, a . 3 e a. 2, ad 2 ^um ).

At a religious and existential level, the notion of God appears together with the perception of moral awareness, the experience of a limit, and a sense of dependence; at a philosophical level, it comes to mind as an exercise of rationality. At the former level, it comes in order to support concepts that allow the human beings to direct themselves towards a supreme and personal Being, while at the latter level, the study of the access of reason to such a notion presents greater difficulties. Religion addresses the idea of God through the categories of sacredness, transcendence and mystery (horizon of knowledge and superior life), through the research for answers to questions of meaning and through the hope for a remunerative justice. Philosophy approaches the notion of God through categories such as the Absolute, the Unconditioned, ordered rationality, etc. At the same time, it tries to approach this notion through the study of the beginning and the end, the whole and the foundation, and finally, in a reflection on freedom and on the responsibility which comes with it. The consequence is a variety of coexisting “images of God” that do not necessarily contradict one another. However, it is indispensable to chose and discern among them for the debate with science, since during the years the role played by these diverse images has partially affected the results of that debate.

2. God as the Object of Religion, Philosophy and Revelation. Both at a religious and a philosophical level, the idea of the divine comes from the experience of astonishment and wonder (cf. Plato, Theætetus , 155d; Aristotle, Metaphysics , I, 2), which stimulate philosophical learning and lead one into the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of religious experience. Thus, any question on God is philosophical and religious at the same time. At the academy of Plato, philosophical research for the truth was always joined to the religious practise of justice and goodness. Religious thought de facto came before philosophical thought, nourishing it continuously with its categories and motives. The category of transcendence, for instance, stems from a typically religious experience. Without such an experience, philosophy would not even be capable of conceptualizing it. The ultimate questions philosophy critically deals with are questions that human religion sought to give an answer to, as well. The name of God is not only the object of theoretical speculation; it is also the addressee of an invocation. It expresses the name of a “link” (lat. re-ligo ) between humankind and the foundation it seeks as an answer to its existential questions. Access to the Absolute, therefore, involves all a human being's dimensions, not only his or her intellect, but also his or her freedom and responsibility, ethical behavior, psychological and moral attitudes. If the problem of God arises within a philosophical reflection on scientific knowledge, in order to let it be understood coherently, it should cover all these dimensions.

In Classical Greece, though making use of almost the same language, the religious dimension associated with the practice of philosophy was not the same as with the practice of popular religiosity. The religious dimension of philosophy expressed its relationship to the divine through the search for truth and for a higher moral law. In popular religion, the connection to the sphere of the divine took place within the domain of immediate existential necessities, such as everyday life and feelings. One of the novelties introduced by Christianity was that the image of God as revealed by Jesus Christ had a correspondence with both truth and life (cf. Ratzinger, 1990). Once it came in touch with the Greek-Roman world, Christianity made use of philosophy's access to the divine, rather than using the polytheist approach of popular religiosity. In fact, the philosophical approach gave stronger guarantees of universality and it referred to a cosmos everybody could see (cf. Acts 14,8-18; Acts 17,22-31), two requirements that the Christian message considered necessary for reason to be adequately appealed to by faith (  JESUS CHRIST, INCARNATION AND DOCTRINE OF LOGOS, II).

Just like philosophy and religion, theology too, which according to its original Platonic sense means “discourse on God or the divine” ( theo-logos ), has its own language on God. As specific source for its knowledge, it uses a unique content, i.e. the personal self-communication of God to humankind. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, this communication has the form of a historical revelation, which is also a source for original religious and philosophical categories. From its very start, it was characterized by the economy of a word uttered by God and addressed to humanity. It starts with a revelation through a cosmic word (cf. Gn 1,3.6.9; Ps 33,6.9), followed by a word of alliance offered to an elected people (cf. Dt 4,7-40), whose historical memory was entrusted to the ministry of the prophets, and, finally, fulfilled with the entrance of the Word itself into history, the incarnation of the eternal Son of God. Though we shall speak more extensively of this in the last section of this article (see below, IV), we must first of all point out that the language with which Revelation and theology speak of God, requires a notion of God that humankind previously reaches through religious experience and philosophical reflection (cf. Fides et ratio , 36, 43, 73, 77). Otherwise, the understanding of a divinely revealed word would be definitely vague and imprecise. In general terms, the historical revelation of the God of Israel, that reached its fulfilment in Jesus Christ, presupposes a knowledge of God (spontaneous or reflected one) coming from nature. The historical word of alliance and salvation presupposes and requires a cosmic word, or at least it is understood in relation to it.

3. Thinking Philosophically about the Absolute and “Ways” for a Natural Knowledge of God. Starting from the reflections stirred by the cosmological and anthropological problems, philosophical thought formulated several arguments known as “proofs of God's existence”. Those proofs dealing with the cosmological problem usually begin with the necessity to postulate a ground for any causal chains (origin of movement, passage from potency to act, etc.) which avoid a regressum ad infinitum . Also, they may start by trying to solve the problem of contingency (to seek for a necessary foundation for something that is not) or, finally, they may feel the need to explain the origin of the order and finality observed in nature. The other proofs, dealing with the anthropological problem, begin by considering personal self-awareness and freedom, which imply moral imperatives whose origin is sought outside the human being. They may also start by experiencing human self-transcendence, which requires an explanation if compared to other living beings; or by searching a moral warrant for one's want of justice and truth; finally, as an attempt not to fall under the scandal of evil by resorting to a superior logic or good, capable of giving meaning to suffering, pain, or death. Since this is not the place to develop and evaluate these proofs critically (they are presented, for example, in Alfaro, 1989; Fabro, 1989; Gonzalez, 1985), here I simply want to hint to some of the relationships they have with the world of science.

One of the reasons why scientific rationale showed some perplexity with regard to these proofs, often a cause of misunderstandings when dealing with philosophy, is the use of the word “proof” itself, which science reserves to logical and formal proofs based on experimental facts. For their very nature, these have to be considered (and always have been presented) as “ways”, “arguments” or “issues”. These proofs differ from what proofs mean in the exact sciences, firstly because they resort to philosophical abstraction and require the access to a form of knowledge that transcends the empirical facts, and secondly because of the object itself sought at the end of the argumentation, which is God. Not to grasp the passage from sense experience (usually causal effects) to some foundation that transcends experience, a passage that nearly all these “ways” require, often leads to a misunderstanding of their meaning. Confining certainty of knowledge to the sole ambit of pure reason, Kant himself believed it was not possible that experience could lead to something that transcended it.

It would be a mistake, for instance, to interpret the first of the five ways proposed by Thomas Aquinas (cf. Summa Theologiae , I, q. 2, a . 3), which appeals to the origin of movement as expounded by Aristotle ( Metaphysics , XII, 6), within experimental scientific categories as if it were mere physical movement. The origin of material movement would then involve a source of energy, and in turn the geometry of space-time it comes from, making the causal chain behind it hard to describe and understand. For a scientific mind to grasp how and where the passage to transcendence takes place, beyond experimental causality, it is necessary to consider how a chain of efficient causes eventually flows into an unyielding quest for a formal cause. It is a matter of asking “why” the properties of time and space or of the energy associated with them are exactly as they are and not otherwise. This second kind of causality lies at the foundations of the empirical world, but at the same time, it is not justifiable within it.

The third way suggested by Aquinas starts from contingency but it requires a passage to transcendence as well. In this case, though, it leads to ask oneself not “why things are this way and not otherwise” (a question on formal causality), but simply “why things exist, since they may not” (a question on contingency). This passage presents no ambiguity when compared to scientific thought, since it identifies an ambit of reflection that does not interfere with the plan of empirical analysis. The question of the world's contingency is indeed present, and acknowledged as significant, in the reflection of many scientists (cf. Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , 6.44). Far from ever making use of a metaphysical approach, Stephen Hawking asked himself: «What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? [...] Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?» ( A Brief History of Time , New York 1988, p. 174). From the point of view of its relationship to scientific thought, Aquinas' second way is similar to the first, and proposes a regression along the lines of efficient causality. In this respect the fifth way, which starts from the observation of the order and finality of the cosmos, does require a further analysis. The fifth way is an example of a broader vision of the physical and teleological argumentation that even Kant, who was critical towards all other proofs, looked at with respect. Within today's vision of a universe in continuous physical and biological evolution ( EVOLUTION , I), where order and coordination are the result of the natural development of forms, the probative capability of this proof could be deemed as banal. The action of physical or biological laws, constructive or selective, it is true, may give an explanation to this order, but they do so only from a phenomenological and descriptive point of view. They cannot, however, deprive questions placed at a higher level of abstraction, about the meaning of order. What manifests itself as rationality, numerical coherence, the effect of gradient or the fruit of symmetry at the level of physical analysis; what appears as the result of functional coordination or adaptability at the level of biological investigation: all that may be recognized as the effect of a final causality at the philosophical level, and at the theological level connected with the quest for answers on the ultimate meaning and sense of all things.

In general, a critical judgment on the cosmological proofs of the existence of an Absolute is not possible using scientific experimental methods. Nevertheless, these proofs do not seem in contradiction or senseless when seen from the perspective of these methods, since the existence of an order of knowledge going beyond the empirical data, by analogy, abstraction or transcendence, is certainly compatible with the analysis of science (see below, III.1). With regard to the anthropological proofs, they do not stir specific perplexities in the field of natural sciences. According to Wittgenstein: «we feel than even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all» ( Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , 6.52). It would be possible to criticize the soundness of the anthropological problem, and its correspondent access to God, only within a reductionist philosophical (and thus not strictly scientific) vision. In such a vision all manifestations of the human being open to transcendence: from freedom to conscience, from the necessity of finding a ultimate sense to uneasiness in face of moral evil, would not be only (obviously) described, but (much less obviously) reduced, to the phenomenological bounds of physiology or neurobiology. This last reduction, however, would not be performed by science, which, on the contrary, does perceive how the experience of the mind cannot be reduced to the physiology of the body or, at least, it considers the question as an open problem ( MIND-BODY RELATIONSHIP ). It would be done by a philosophy denying the transcendent nature of humankind, placing itself on a path of thought that easily ends by endorsing nihilism. It would therefore require critical comparison with other philosophical perspectives, and not with science.

The use of ways for a natural knowledge of God is not a philosophical argument to determine the nature or essence of the Absolute. The best philosophical thought faces the Absolute with humility and openness to listening, which characterizes any perception of the mystery. To know what or who God is, remains a necessary, but unsolvable problem for philosophy. In order to understand the Absolute, the idea of God is often limited by human customs, misconceptions or prejudices. Attempts, made by pre-Socratic philosophers, identified the divine principle of every existing thing in water, air, in the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) or in numbers. Anaxagoras, but especially Plato and Aristotle, tried to conceptualize God as intelligence, supreme good or spiritual life. In modern philosophical systems, we meet Spinoza's absolute Substance, or Hegel's absolute Spirit. Those who wish to deny God all face the problem in a similar manner: philosophies that do not remain open to the novelty of reality or to the possibility of mystery, end up introducing or conceptualizing other absolutes, such as “chance”, “matter”, “nothing”, “life” or “death”. Philosophy then gives way to ideology, that is, to the temptation to place a human idea at the peak of the reasons for one's understanding and living. The task of true philosophy is to distinguish between authentic mystery and what is not. In its “speech on God”, Christian theology maintained a special relationship with metaphysics in its Platonic and Aristotelian sense. The proper object of metaphysics —the being in so far as it is being, and the ultimate causes for being— enables it to remain open to reality, without determining the Being of God, but simply indicating it. In meeting with the Greek culture, the first Christian writers recovered the attempts made by the best philosophy and were capable of reading them as “attributes” of the Being of God, without reducing His transcendent image to them, nor ending up dissolving the mystery: «[For the One] is without form and name. And if we name it, we do not do so properly, terming it either the One, or the Good, or Mind, or Absolute Being, or Father, or God, or Creator, or Lord. We speak not as supplying His name; but for want, we use good names, in order that the mind may have these as points of support, so as not to err in other aspects. For each one by itself does not express God; but all together are indicative of the power of the Omnipotent» (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata , V, 12, 82).

With regard to its relationship with faith, natural knowledge of God does help reason to understand Who or what the Christian Revelation is talking about when it speaks of God. Yet, by itself it remains insufficient to generate the choice of faith, which comes from a freely given love for the personal being of God. Such a choice comes from welcoming the Revelation as a personal word of God, recognizing it as significant for reason and for one's personal existential experience. The insufficiency of the natural knowledge of God based on some kind of philosophical proof, is a constitutive insufficiency, one incomplete also for a believer: it is a knowledge of God which is necessary, but insufficient .

II. The Question on God in the Context of the Natural Sciences

1. Contexts in which Contemporary Science Refers to God. The question on God has never been completely foreign to science. In response to Richard Bentley, who wanted to find in the mechanics of gravitation systematised in the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687), useful hints for his conferences on science and religion, Isaac Newton answered: «When I wrote my Treatise about our System, I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity, and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose» ( Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy , edited by I. Cohen, Cambridge 1958, p. 280). Starting from the foundation of the scientific method and throughout the whole Modern Age, the natural sciences have hosted many aspects of the question on God, often as a chance for philosophical debate. Even in our contemporary age, where language and formulations are proper to today's vision of the world, there are ways in which the sciences continue to appeal to the notion of God: «Through my scientific work, we read in a page by Paul Davies, I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, e a deeper level of explanation. Whether one wishes to call that deeper level “God” is a matter of taste and definition» (Davies, 1992, p. 16).

In the transition from the second to the third millennium the question on God, or at least some reference to a notion of God, can be found in several branches of science. Biology and medicine host debates on matters connected to the ethics of human life ( BIOETHICS ). When discussing the problem of the Mind-Body relationship —the interdisciplinary literature devoted to such an issue is comparable only to that on cosmology, in terms of bibliography and researchers involved— reference to God is mediated by the discussion on the non-reducible nature of the individual being; whose personal identity and transcendence over matter can be grasped, allowing a further philosophical step, in relation to Someone who is other than, or in front of, the Self. Also the issue of evolution has been a traditional source of debate between scientific thought and religion. Originally associated with anthropology and biology, it has now moved to the field of cosmology, which has absorbed the historical perspectives brought about by those disciplines within a new, even more totalizing, vision. Because of their stronger genetic connection to philosophy and the analysis of language, logic and mathematics host other reflections on the Absolute, generally dealing with the problem of their foundations. In the first half of the 20th century, quantum mechanics had already initiated a debate with the metaphysical and religious vision of the world by discussing the value of the principles of causality and indetermination. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, quantum mechanics wishes to propose specific ideas for the understanding of God's action in nature, the same as what the new non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the sciences of complexity also seem to be doing.

In the area of physics, however, especially in cosmology, the question of God arises with the greatest insistence. A simple look at the amount of books of popular science published in the last few years easily shows how reflections on nature and on God are tied even more closely together. Numerous scientists have published popular works or studies on philosophy and science with titles explicitly addressing that connection: God and the New Physics (P. Davies, London 1983), The Mind of God (P. Davies, London 1992), Beyond the Big Bang. Quantum Cosmologies and God (W. Drees, La Salle 1990), Fearful Symmetry. Is God a Geometer? (I. Stewart, M. Golubitsky, Oxford 1992), The Physics of Immortality. Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (F. Tipler, New York 1994), The God Particle. If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? (L. Lederman, D. Teresi, New York 1993), etc. The use of such titles easily responds to reasons of editorial success ( POPULARAZATION OF SCIENCE , III); however, it also testifies to the existence of a new sensitivity, which is the main reason for such a specific market. In many works, the word God may not be present in the title, but it has made its way into the Index of Concepts, unexpectedly finding a place between Geometry and Grand Unified Theories .

Cosmology and physics seem to imply a question on God in three main intertwining themes. The first refers to the problem of the origins , also called the problem of boundary conditions. Reference to the possible role of God the Creator, reductively formulated when compared to the image of God in philosophy or religion, is invoked, or at least discussed, in order to give a foundation to the primeval expansion of space and time. Furthermore, this role is taken into account in order to assign the correct values to the constants of nature, to solve the non-deductibility of the physical laws of the cosmos from the topological properties of space, and vice versa. In different ways, the notion of God enters the typical context dealing with problems of logical or ontological incompleteness. From an epistemological point of view, if this first theme has the value of shedding light over the impossibility of any empirical science offering itself as a complete “science of the whole” ( UNIVERSE , IV), it very often overlooks or misunderstands the content of the theological concept of creation and its manifold implications at a philosophical level ( CREATION , III). Furthermore, it runs the risk of “mythologizing” the problem of origins, loading it with the burden of explaining, perhaps even revealing, the sense of the whole of history.

The second theme refers to the so-called Anthropic Principle and the interdisciplinary discussion deriving from it. A few interpretations of this Principle try to support a return to the famous Argument from Design , familiar in philosophy, with alleged experimental results at a cosmic level. The presence of many physical and mathematical coincidences that have enabled a calibrated evolution of the cosmos and its fine tuning on parameters that later produced the proper chemical abundances necessary for life in environments where its development was possible, would give evidence in favor of the existence of a God who was “planning” or “programming” the world. As an issue which, starting from the last decades of the 20th century, has progressively concerned the branch of theology in dialogue with science, the Anthropic Principle bears interesting seeds of revision of the presently ruling ideas of the cosmos. However, it is not foreign to leaps between different levels of abstraction while consequences on philosophy and theology are claimed. In showing how the constants and the physical properties suitable for life are original and congenital properties, the Anthropic Principle has caused a change in the vision of the place of humankind within the universe. The name itself, “Principle”, is not perfectly correct, at least in its weak formulation, since it is not proposed as a deductive key, but as a way of indicating events to be read in terms of coordination and coherence. The paradigm of an evolution that used to consider the progressive blind game of chance, plus a sufficiently long timing, as the main responsible for the appearance of life, has revealed its limits. What actually happened in the first 10 -6 seconds from the beginning of the expansion of the universe was much more decisive in creating a chemical niche for human biology than all the subsequent in the rest of the cosmic evolutionary process. The observations and results on which the Anthropic Principle is based, however, do not constitute a scientific experimental proof of the existence of a project of the cosmos aimed at giving rise to life, nor of the existence of a Creator: they simply reveal a “consonance” with this hypothesis. This is, firstly, because the delicate physical and biological conditions for life are actually necessary, but far from being sufficient for the appearance of life as such; and secondly, because empirical analysis, equipped with the sole methods of science, cannot reveal the existence of a purposeful final causality, and even less that of a God Creator. At the same way, a chess-player's strategy (intentional creative plan) may be understood only by ascending to a higher degree of abstraction than the one identified by the rules of the game (anthropic conditions), where empirical analysis may shed light only on the lawfulness or coherence of the chess-player's moves.

The third theme of scientific research where authors appeal to some notion of God regards the intelligibility of the universe. In the debate on the ontological status of natural laws, one line of thought more inclined to realism has progressively underlined the objective value of such laws as something external to the knowing subject. The question on the rationality of the cosmos and on nature's “mathematical interpretability” —a rationality that cannot be taken for granted (Maxwell, Einstein, Wigner)— has been re-opened. The issue of intelligibility occasionally is posed as the question on why the elementary “blocks” of the material universe (elementary particles, strings, coupling constants in fundamental laws, etc.) do have formal specificities; why unification criteria in physics act so successfully; or, also, why elementary particles and the constants of nature are rigorously identical on a cosmic scale. The reductionist interpretation was accustomed to consider intelligibility as the banal result of a necessary tuning of cosmic laws and the laws regulating the human mind, since they were both forged by means of the same evolutionary process (including the effectiveness of its selection mechanisms). Today this interpretation seems to be overcome, and the issue is acknowledged to be meaningful (cf. T. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order , Oxford 1981; J. Barrow, Pi in the Sky , Oxford 1992; P. Davies, The Mind of God , London 1992; LAWS OF NATURE, IV.2 ). Explanations resorting to the postulation of meta-mathematical and meta-physical levels, usually involves an occasionally indirect reference to the notion of Logos , or universal rationality; empirical analysis, of course, does not possess the instruments necessary to discern if such rationality is immanent within the cosmos or transcendent to it.

The reason why cosmology and physics give rise to references to the notion of God derives from the fact that these disciplines today are capable of placing us in front of the universe in its entirety. The discovery of the Hubble flow and the cosmic background radiation, success in applying the nucleosynthesis of chemical elements to explain the evolution of the stars, mutual confirms among microphysical and astrophysical scenarios, today's theories of a great unification and its experimental successes with energies now accessible to our accelerators, all provide sufficient grounds to treat the universe within a strongly unitarian picture, as a unique, intelligible object, ordered by the same logic on a large scale ( COSMOLOGY, II, IV). We know it has one history capable of connecting the past with the future, of associating what happens at a local level and what happens, or has already happened, at a cosmic level. This state of things allows the scientist to spontaneously (and often unconsciously) pass from the level of efficient causality, typical of the natural sciences, to the level of final causality (problem “of the whole”, in macrophysics) or formal causality (problem of specificity and fundaments, in microphysics), which are typical of metaphysics, a discipline studying the ultimate, foundational causes for being ( METAPHYSICS, I). The fact that the natural sciences are not methodologically equipped to conceptualize similar ascents to transcendence, or to perform them in the indicated ambits, does not prevent scientists from taking a look at these higher level questions from within their research domains, nor from being able, or rather having to speak, about them. It therefore is not surprising if an astronomer states that «cosmology is nothing more than the search for the meaning of our existence and of our destiny» (P. Benvenuti, in “Corriere della Sera”, 10.4.1990, p. 23).

I should also point out a last way, different from the previous ones, of some sectors of contemporary science to show their opening to broader forms of knowledge and interpretation of the reality, where new forms of spiritual and divine find place: it is the “mysticism” of physics. The main source to approach this subject remains the work of Fritjof Capra ( The Tao of Physics. An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism , 1975) and the movement initiated in Princeton (cf. R. Ruyer, La gnose de Princeton. Des savants à la recherche d'une religion , 1974). The new mystic vision of science rises from the desire to understand a number of paradoxes in particle physics and quantum mechanics by resorting to Eastern religious philosophies; mainly Hinduism and Buddhism, whose vision of the world provides useful logical forms, apparently not traceable in Western thought. Later on this quest ended up by assuming the core of their religious vision of the cosmos, making it the ultimate key in understanding the relationship between humankind and nature. This path from science to spirit, however, shows evident signs of ambiguity. True contemplation —which the study of nature certainly gives rise to— is reduced into a mere sensation; the “Otherness” of the Absolute, a character necessary for the logic and the ontology of the world have a non-ambiguous foundation, practically denied, being such a vision incapable of accessing an image of God or the divine Other-than-nature ( PANTHEISM, III). The proposals of New Age certainly connect to this perspective of “mysticism of physics”. A very broad movement, now rising in US, is active in rediscovering a spiritual dimension of science (cf. for example the magazine Science and Spirit ). Without selecting any specific confessional religion, the movement acts as spokesman for the new overcoming of scientism and reductionism and it intends to open science and scientists to the dimensions of the Spirit, however generically it may be intended ( SPIRIT, IV, 1). Also, I would like to stress that among the new interpretative paradigms proposed by the mysticism of physics there are some enjoying growing success, due to their superior explicative capability in some problems left open by science. They are for instance the behavior of the universe as the subject-object of global interaction, the non-conflictual composition of apparently opposite properties, the metaphor of the “cosmic dance”, close to replace mechanism and vitalism (cf. Del Re, 2000). Some of the new proposed paradigms, such as the complementarity or the coincidence of opposed poles, were already present in Christian thought (think of the mystery of the Incarnate Word, for instance), though not recognised as such due to the greater amount of reflection it would have required.

2. Scientific Thought as a Field of Historical Confrontation between Affirmation and Negation of God. In an historical perspective, we can easily recognize how nearly all scientific disciplines have hosted debates on the role to attribute to God in the understanding or the justification of the existence of the world, life and humankind. From the beginning of the Modern Age, first of all with Humanism, but above all after the methodological foundation of the natural sciences, the study of nature became a field for critical reflection on the question of God and the debate for his affirmation or negation ( ATHEISM ). The passage from the geocentric to the heliocentric system gave rise to an inevitable confrontation between the image of the cosmology offered by the theological and cultural establishment (with the religious truths associated with it) and the new image of the cosmos. Thanks to the success achieved by new scientific discoveries, the Enlightenment sought out the empirical sciences as their privileged interlocutor, gradually conveying an idea of nature where reference to God might be still present, but separated from revealed religion and the traditional ways religion used to speak of God ( DEISM ). The natural sciences soon become the field where debate first takes place between the earliest forms of modern non-belief, such as rationalism and positivism, and the attempts, made in that same period, to affirm the existence of God starting from the order of the cosmos.

With regard to this last approach, the movement denominated “Physico-Theology”, born in an Anglican environment at the end of the 17th century, was certainly interesting. Its program consisted in proving the existence of a design in the works of creation ( Argument from Design ). The physiology of human beings, the biology of inferior beings, and the order of the universe as a whole, were all used as a starting point to establish the existence of a divine Intelligence, an Architect of the world. This current had influence on the work of great scientists, including Newton. The books published in those years bear titles explanatory of the intentions of their authors. Amongst them: A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688), by Robert Boyle; The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation (1691) and Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1693), by John Ray; Astro-Theology: or a demonstration of Being and Attributes of God from a Survey of the Heavens (1715), by William Derham; Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and the Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), by William Paley.

The relationship between the notion of God supplied by these authors and what other authors will later critically indicate as the God of the gaps , is subject matter for historical studies. The use of the latter expression referred in particular to some remarks present in the works of Newton. Criticised by Leibniz, the author of the theory of universal gravitation does indeed mention God as a cause intervening in the mechanics of the planets, when there was no way to interpret some aspects of their motion by means of natural causes only. Nevertheless, the approach the physical-theologians had was not necessarily the same as his. They believed that if the world was the work of an Intelligent Cause, this Cause must have visible effects on the creatures. The natural sciences, therefore, ought to be a source for knowledge of God. In this regard, despite of their ingenuousness, they represented an interesting attempt to use the results of science in philosophy and theology ( NATURAL SCIENCES IN THE WORK OF THEOLOGIANS ). Today it would not, but at the time their way of arguing was quite common and easily acceptable: in the 18th century, science and philosophical reflection on science were both branches of a single discipline, namely “natural philosophy”. The proofs given by the physico-theologians for the existence of a divine Artificer were tainted, however, by a degree of naiveté in insisting excessively on details of organization, harmony and coordination, especially in the structure of living beings, details that apparently could not be ascribed to the mere action of the forces of nature. Some of their argumentations, like the marvellous complexity of the human eye, were destined to survive for a long time within 19th-century apologetics. As the empirical and metaphysical levels of their arguments were not properly discriminated nor satisfactory explained, the physico-theological approach certainly did bring support to the idea of a God of the gaps . As soon as a natural justification and a complete experimental description of many of those physical or biological well-organized structures were available, this easily enabled the progress of science to remove the Architect or Clock-maker God.

From an historical point of view, among the consequences that Physico-Theology readily produced, two repercussions are of great importance in relation to the question of God within a context of science. First, the debate between theism and atheism gradsually restricted itself within a rationality only associated with empirical analysis, dramatically denying other important areas of human reason and their capability of accessing God (cf. Buckley, 1987). Secondly, Darwin's evolutionary interpretation of the forms of living beings necessarily assumed a precise anti-religious character. It invaded a religious, intellectual and even, linguistic context, ruled by the argument from design , wiping out these foundations with the rules of natural selection and adaptability to environment ( EVOLUTION , III). In a different philosophical and theological context, had the question of God been associated with other arguments, or had the distinct degree of abstraction involved been better explained, the theory of evolution would not have caused such a huge fracture. In such a milieu, theology would have found a better philosophical climate to comprehend the theory of evolution in the light of those seeds already contained in its biblical, patristic and medieval sources.

One example of how the natural sciences were a necessary step in the historical progress of the debate on God's affirmation or negation is represented by 19th-century mechanism. In a philosophical climate in which deterministic and rational laws of nature were considered as the effect of an intelligence and the source of all determination for the whole cosmos, theology was unwittingly led to think of and present mechanism as an image of harmony and order existing in the will of God. The permanence of laws and permanence of the Creator were to stand or to fall together. When the dependence on nature of such laws was progressively emphasized, at the same time neglecting every philosophical question of their origins or formal specificity (this question would have required a higher degree of abstraction, unavailable to many scientists of that epoch), mechanism itself became a thesis against God's existence. Once it was clear that the world could work quite well thanks to its own autonomy, the hypothesis of God became superfluous, a remark inscribed in history by the well-known answer given by Laplace to Napoleon. Moreover, the idea that science could successfully make use of notions such as transformation, development or evolution, easily shattered the idea of a God, dator formarum , responsible for the multiplicity and harmony of the forms existing in nature in the inorganic world as well as in the world of living beings. Lacking an adequate theology of creation and a correct image of God, the discovery of intrinsic dynamisms of nature explaining the origin of properties and forms both in chemistry and in biology, did favor the vision of a world with no God.

In the 20th century, scientific circles continued to host important philosophical debates on the “question of God” and to a certain extent, they determined its later evolution. The attempt to remove the question of God through the Marxist program described in Dialectics of Nature (Engels, 1875, published in 1925) appealed, for instance, to “scientific” materialism. Psychoanalysis, as well, attempted to contextualize the relationship between religion and science. Though partially belonging to the field of human sciences, psychoanalysis willingly chose to qualify itself as a knowledge empirically originated ( FREUD). In mathematics and logic, Neo-Positivism by restricting the value of knowledge to what is empirically verifiable and expressible within the formal language of science, tried to deny the notion of God any meaning. It was also the agenda of Neo-Positivism to promote that non-completed program of systematic reductionism of all science to logical empiricism as set forth by the International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science (1938) edited by Neurath, Carnap and Dewey ( POSITIVISM , II). I want to underline that these philosophical visions, whose implications for metaphysics and theology were clear from the outset, were later overcome by criticism coming from within the world of science and not from the outside.

However, the issue, which dominated the debate in the second half of the 20th century, without a doubt was the relationship between chance and finality, a paradigm capable of incorporating dimensions of the problem coming from many different areas and disciplines ( DETEERMINISM/INDETERMINISM; FINALITY ). The issue reached the public especially with the biological theses expounded by Jacques Monod ( Chance and necessity , 1971) and Richard Dawkins ( The Blind Watchmaker , 1986), though there have been a few well-known representatives also in the area of physics and cosmology (e.g. S. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes , 1977; P. Atkins, The Creation , 1981). Another example of a reductive interpretation of the question of God within a chance-finality paradigm is the alternative between two different kinds of universes. One is a universe born by chance from nothing, where dependence from time can be eliminated (S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time , 1988); the other, a universe born from a space-time singularity , whose definite boundary conditions would reveal a plan, and eventually a Creator. In the context of the Anthropic Principle, this general paradigm operates again, discriminating between a single finalist universe oriented towards the appearance of life, and an infinite ensemble of universes with parameters set by chance, and among which only one had, again by chance, the right parameters to allow the birth of intelligent observers, so displaying an apparently finalist orientation ( MANY-WORLDS MODELS , III).

Just like the previous examples of debate on affirmation and negation of God, the debate on chance and finality also transposed philosophical categories to an empirical level. Words like chance, finality, necessity or freedom belong, de facto , to a philosophical dictionary, just like other notions such as probability, consistency or coincidence, belong only to that of exact sciences. A debate presented as being the scientific frame to decide whether a Creator exists or not, actually constituted a debate between different philosophies. One philosophy is open to a notion of knowledge capable of transcending the empirical order, the other philosophy is limiting knowledge to the world of phenomena and appearance; one is open to the transcendent foundations of reality responsible for the meaning of it all, the other is engaged in self-referential immanent foundations. Behind the alternative between chance and finality, we can discern the everlasting philosophical struggle between realism and idealism. In front of a science necessarily open, where problems of descriptive or ontological incompleteness arise, the knowing subject may just “listen to reality”, without saying any more than he or she possibly can, or, alternatively, the subject may yield to the temptation to eradicate incompleteness by resorting to a priori visions, that often bear the character of “philosophies of chance”. Differing from the debates of the past, the novelty stands in the fact that alternatives such as these, whose main field for encounter/clashing had always been philosophy, now originate in the field of the natural sciences, and then they move towards the field of philosophy, the only domain where an epistemologically meaningful confrontation may take place.

The idea that the world of science should be the chief field for proving or denying the existence of God, or the best terrain where belief and unbelief should confront themselves, answers to quite a narrow and limited vision. The notion of God receives actually its full meaning by the pondering of many other contexts, and God's image must be evaluated and understood integrating anthropology and gnoseology in the background, without being merely reduced to, or projected on, the language of science. At the same time theology cannot neglect the quest for understanding coming from relating the discourse on the world and the discourse on God, even when this quest comes from the context of scientific knowledge. Theology is called to put such a search for unity on its right epistemological track, acknowledging the philosophical soundness of not a few reflections coming from science. Theology is also definitely stimulated to recognize which are the cosmological contexts of their tenets and formulations. Some of them are certainly a heritage of the past, but the history of the relationship between the discourse on nature and the discourse on God may assist theology in examining these contexts again, and even changing them at the light of the new physical image of the world. In doing this, theology favors the contemporary intelligibility of those formulations, and betters serves the dignity of their object ( NATURAL SCIENCES IN THE WORK OF THEOLOGIANS, IV-V).

III. The Possibility of Speaking of God in a Way Meaningful to Scientific Rationality

1. The Epistemological Meaning of a Discourse on God. In any confrontation between theology and science, it is not sufficient to emphasize that the question of God preserves an everlasting relevance. We should also analyze what kind of discourse on God, can a culture mainly shaped by science and technology, deem significant (cf. Gaudium et spes, 5). Indeed, today any discourse on God is critically evaluated, on the grounds of categories belonging to science and rationality. The technological success it furthered now increases the scope of the criticism, since the notion of a Creator God, Almighty and Provident, also implies His dominion over the world and its visible, material effects, which technology demands to hold under its increasingly sophisticated control, acknowledged by all. At a philosophical level, the notion of God is required to indicate a significant, semantic area of intelligibility, tested also in the context of the scientific interpretation of the world and of the language expressing such a vision.

The idea of accessing transcendence and referring to the notion of God are impossible to any scientific enterprise has its most influential starting point in Kant's critical philosophy. Only pure reason , with its theoretical rationality nourished by the experience of empirical sciences, would enable true knowledge. With this basis, to affirm or to deny something transcendent is impossible: the idea of God is an antinomy, since it is not a possible object of experience. The notion of God, furthermore, would make sense only in terms of practical reason , since it would become the object of a practical postulate and not an object of knowledge; God is something thinkable, presumable, or it can even be an object of invocation, but not knowable. Kant's position does not deny any meaning to the notion of God, but it does determine that scientific reason is completely barred from it. At the same time, Kant's intention was to erase in this way any so-called scientific proofs for atheism, opening to faith, intended as the incapability of philosophical reason to express God. Nevertheless, the profound separation of pure reason from practical reason prevents the philosopher from Königsberg from seeing science as a source of human questions connecting the world of experience to the problem of existence. As a heritage of Kant's vision, any discourse on God makes sense only in the sphere of values and purposes, which today, is often justified on a purely subjective basis. Since these discourses on God refer to non-communicable assertions, which lack any objective validity and are impossible to falsify, they are deemed neither true or false. According to a more rigorous judgement, this time, a heritage of logical Neo-Positivism, these assertions would make sense in no context at all , since there is no knowledge at all, except what can be empirically verifiable.

I believe that contemporary scientific thought has overcome both Kantian and Neo-Positivistic visions. It directs our attention to an area of sense and intelligibility which is meaningful also for scientific reason —a semantic area where reasoning is initiated by a reflection beginning from within its own research activity. It is in this field that a logos on God finds its place with sufficient guarantees of universality and significance. I will try to illustrate this point following some progressive levels.

First of all, there is now a broad consensus in denying that the only sensible assertions are those limited to the “facts” of natural sciences treated within formal language. Wittgenstein took an important step in this direction. He was persuaded that it is not possible to deny the problem of sense, even though it should be qualified formally as a pseudo-problem, since it is not expressible “within the world of facts”. If, only, we could distance ourselves from the logical world of facts belonging to science while looking at this world “from outside”, we would soon realize that the problem of meaning does exist. We cannot define it in terms of a formal language; the problem of the meaning of it all is something mystical . The philosophical path opened by the Viennese philosopher overcomes the conclusions of Kantian pure reason, because the question of sense and the opening to the inexpressible rises from an analysis coming from within scientific knowledge, and not from outside it. In other words, the problem is meaningful within a wider logic but it cannot be expressed. The resort to a meta-language is then a necessity rising from the very limits of language as they are acknowledged by language itself. Wittgenstein's step surpassed the neo-positivists as well. Just like them, Wittgenstein drew a line between what we can speak of and what we must remain silent about. The important difference is that the neo-positivists had nothing to keep silent about. Indeed, for the positivists only what we can speak about is important in life. Wittgenstein, on the contrary, passionately believed that what is important in human life is what, according to his vision, must be kept in silence. Therefore, Wittgenstein's thought constitutes a point of arrival and a starting point: it concludes the parable of logical empiricism and lays the foundation for a philosophy capable of recovering the sense of the problem of God. It is a God we still cannot speak about, something or someone we can only show. Later, the theorems of incompleteness of Gödel and the philosophical implications of complexity, made it clear that any project to confine a complete and coherent knowledge of reality within the limits of formal logical assertions related to sensible and measurable objects is no longer scientifically feasible. It would lead to a mounting conflict with two physiological problems: the logical incoherence of self-referentiality in a system open to the real world, and the accomplished mathematical unfeasibility of many “facts” of the natural sciences.

Secondly, today it is easier to acknowledge that at the basis of the world of facts, and beyond the language of science, there are some metaphysical requirements implicit in scientific knowledge, which are necessary for the existence of science itself ( AUTONOMY, IV.1; COMMON SENSE , II, III). Notions such as “being” and “nature”, “essence” or “existence”, are all metaphysical concepts, preceding and founding any formal observable determination: they make science possible, but their justification lies outside the methods of science. The notion of God as the cause of being and the source of the formal specificities of all natural reality (that is the cause for why the world is as it is, and not otherwise) is before any scientific description of the world, though making the world intelligible. It is a metaphysical cause which gives reason for the world, without interfering with it. It is worthwhile to associate this epistemological clarification with the “appeal to the mystical” suggested by Wittgenstein and Popper, here quoted one following the other: «There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical – Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is» (L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.522 and 6.44); «How the world is —that it has a structure, or that its vastly distant regions are all subject to the same structural laws— seems to be inexplicable in principle and thus “mystical”, if we wish to use this term» (K. Popper, The Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery , Hutchinson & Co., London 1982, p. 151). The establishment of a conceptual space for a logos on God, mystical and significant even in the context of science, is consistent with the evidence that the universe exists, and it exists with properties that science does not entirely deduce from its methods, since it receives them and discovers them by means of induction.

Finally, the possibility of a discourse on God meaningful also for scientific rationality, is witnessed by the openings to transcendence recorded in the personal reflections of several contemporary scientists. Many of them consider the endeavors of science as a search for truth involving one's whole being. It revelas and does not preclude an access to the Absolute, or a logos grasped as an area of intelligibility and sense. The scientist seems to perceive physical reality as a coherent objective alterity, characterized by formal specificity. The connection between this personal perception and the philosophical notion of the Absolute relies on two aspects of great importance in scientific activity: the “experience of the foundations” and the “experience of the sacred” (cf. Cantore, 1977).

The scientist is surprised at his or her capability of dialoguing with the universe. He or she knows it can be understood in terms of mathematics, that its behavior depends on stable laws in time and space, that it is made of rigorously identical elementary particles and of compounds having physical and chemical properties following rigorous ordering structures, all things that reveal a kind of “underlying foundation of rationality” that the researcher necessarily comes in touch with. This is how Albert Einstein put it: «You find it surprising that I think of the comprehensibility of the world[...] as a miracle ( Wunder ) or an eternal mistery ( ewiges Geheimnis ). But surely, a priori, one should expect the world to be chaotic, not to be grasped by thought in any way. One might (indeed one should) expect that the world evidenced itself as lawful only so far as we grasp it in an orderly fashion. This would be a sort of order like the alphabetical order of words. On the other hand, the kind of order created, for example, by Newton's gravitational theory is of a very different character. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by man, the success of such a procedure supposes in the objective world a high degree of order, which we are in no way entitled to expect a priori. Therein lies the miracle which becomes more and more evident as our knowledge develops. And here is the weak point of positivists and professional atheists, who feel happy because they think that they have preempted not only the world of the divine ( entgöttert ) but also of the miraculous ( entwundert )» (A. Einstein, Letter to M. Solovine, 30.3.1952, Eng. transl. quoted by S. Jaki, 1978, pp. 192-193). Similar reflections, forty years later, are offered by the words of Paul Davies: «However successful our scientific explanations may be, they always have certain starting assumptions built in. For example, an explanation of some phenomenon in terms of physics presupposes the validity of the laws of physics, which are taken as given. But one can ask where these laws come from in the first place. One could even question the origin of the logic upon which all scientific reasoning is founded. Sooner or later we all have to accept something as given, whether it is God, or logic, or a set of laws, or some other foundation for existence» (Davies, 1992 , p. 15). We face here a kind of “experiencing of the foundations”, or a “perception of the Being as the ultimate foundation”, recognized as something lying beyond scientific rationality, but pointed out by people reflecting within it. It is not science's task to prove if the intelligibility and coherence of the cosmos correspond to a design containing the meaning of the world, because this proof would imply reference to a final, intentional causality, inaccessible to the analysis of empirical sciences. It is, however, highly significant that such questions arise on the extension of empirical analysis, and point to a semantic area of meaning, to a logos grasped in science but open to a logos on God.

In his or her activity, the scientist encounters the physical reality as if it were an alterity open to dialogue. According to Heisenberg, scientists can become aware of the central order of the world with the same intensity as of the soul of another person (cf. Positivism, Metaphysics and Religion , 1952, in Physics and Beyond , New York 1971). Nature is recognized as worthy of being studied, capable of motivating the necessary intellectual efforts, because it is capable of binding to truth and beauty existing independently from the knowing subject. The attitude of the researcher, therefore, can go as far as to become an attitude of religious reverence. Scientist's activity places him or her in front of the perception of the Absolute. That is why there are many scientists who compare scientific experience to experiencing the sacred, and consider it capable of linking (re- ligo ) and leading to the threshold of mystery (cf. Cantore, 1977; Pedersen, 1988, pp. 125-140; MYSTERY , IV). Likewise to what Wittgenstein noted in the analysis of language, and Popper did in the epistemology of science, physicists and astronomers, as well, may run into the mystical : «Sometimes, through a strong, compelling experience of mystical insight, a man knows beyond the shadow of doubt that he has been in touch with a reality that lies behind mere phenomena. He himself is completely convinced, but he cannot communicate the certainty. It is a private revelation» (E. Hubble, The Nature of Science and Other Lectures , San Marino - CA 1954, quoted by Pedersen, 1988, p. 133). We face a vision of scientific activity that looks very much like a dialogue between the researcher and the Absolute.

The image of the Absolute as perceived by scientific rationality and the way scientists speaks of it are of course philosophically imprecise, often these are mixed with ambiguity, and frequently with a shade of pantheism. Einstein's religiosity, for instance, was certainly distant from the personal God of the Scripture, that the father of relativity erroneously saw as charged with anthropomorphism. At the same time, however, it gives testimony a perception of the sacred connected to an aesthetic experience, a mystery containing the hidden sense of the world. Here, the gnoseology involved refers to an implicit metaphysics, open to the reality and available to learn from nature and its laws. In the end, to think that the influence of scientific rationality on philosophy and culture were to necessarily narrow down or banish the discourse on God, would do justice neither to the meaning, nor to the essence of true scientific mentality (cf. Tanzella-Nitti, 1996). True scientific mentality is an activity involving the whole person, capable of stirring philosophical questions, even though it does not possess adequate instruments to find an answer to them within its own methods. Even in the context of today's scientific rationality, the world continues to manifest itself as paradox and mystery and it continues to be reasonable to ask oneself if the world has an explanation. Any search for this explanation calls for a notion and for an area of broader intelligibility that cannot be considered nonsense, therefore opening to the possibility of a meaningful discourse on God.

2. Scientists' Faith in God: a Statistical Outlook. Chances for a meaningful discourse on God in the scientific world have their existential side in scientists' personal faith in God, suggesting ways to bring what they know into dialogue with what they believe. From an historical perspective, it should be stressed that the methodological autonomy of science did not necessarily imply the denial of God, a refusal that neither the scientists of the first Modern Age, nor their medieval predecessors thought it necessary to make ( AUTONOMY, IV). Professing a religious faith and making a scientific activities coexisted without clashes within the lives of nearly all researchers, at least until the end of the 19th century. The gradual estrangement from God of a significant part, not the majority, of men and women of science at the end of the 19th and during most of the 20th century is due primarily to the process of secularization investing Western societies and not to reasons inherent in science itself.

The percentage of scientists who played an institutional role in their Christian Churches, as secular or regular clergy for instance, has always been quite high. In the Dictionary of Scientific Biographies (edited by C. Gillispie, New York 1970-1980), containing about five thousand biographies of scientists, this percentage is as high as 10%, but until the beginning of the 19th century it used to be closer to 30%. The documentation offered in the Appendix of the Dictionary edited by I. Tagliaferri and E. Gentili ( Scienza e Fede, I protagonisti , Novara 1989) catalogues about 150 Catholic priests and religious persons born after the 17th century, whose scientific activity is deemed of international significance. And in the Modern Age other 80 ecclesiastic mathematicians, famous researchers, have brought important contributions to science (cf. P. Pizzamiglio, Religiosi matematici , “L'insegnamento della matematica e delle scienze integrate” 21 (1988), pp. 410-438). The presence of these ecclesiastical figures in the laboratories and in scientific training cannot be directly used for an analysis of the faith of scientists (faith, of course, is not confined to the clergy), but it does point out that there was a consolidate open-mindedness in the relations between believing thought and scientific activities.

According to the data provided by a survey among Italian researchers (cf. Ardigò and Garelli, 1989), about 55% of them say they believe in God, and 23% of the interviewed identify their faith with the explicit content of the Catholic belief. Among all of them, however, believers and non-believers, 60% believe that scientific activity and religious belief have no significant points in common. It is interesting to see how the majority of them (85%) think that the growing scientific mentality and technological progress have modified the call for transcendence in society and culture, revealing the influence that scientific rationality exerts on the common way of thinking. A similar research in France, though on a more limited sample of people (cf. Magnin, 1993), shows how half the scientists profess themselves as believers, while among the remaining 50% the majority declare themselves as “searching”. Quite a high number of them are convinced that science does not provide an exhaustive understanding of reality (80%) and more than 60% of them believe scientific activities at least provoke a question on the existence of God. Similar surveys in the United States (cf. E. Larson, L. Witham, Scientists are still keeping the faith , “Nature” 386 (1997), pp. 435-436; G. Easterbrook, Science and God: a Warming Trend? , “Science” 227 (1997), pp. 890-893) indicate a general stability in the percentage of scientists who are believers, a steady 40% from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. Most of them, furthermore, report a true interest for religion.

Beyond the differences and different shades in the data briefly presented above, the scientists' image today is not of people entrenched in atheist or anti-religious positions. When not yet explicitly believers, scientists seem to be quite open to dialogue, as people conscious of the cultural weight of their scientific activity. Scarce religious formation prevents them from thoroughly integrating their faith in God (or their search for Him), with the knowledge coming from their studies, or from possessing an image of God adequate to accomplish such an integration. This causes sort of a gap between a religious creed and that creed's ethical requirements, especially in the fields of medicine or biology, or between a religious creed and its doctrinal or theological contents. In any case, interest for religion reawakens, visibly in the increasing frequency of interdisciplinary activities of science, philosophy and theology. Many associations now exist at an academic or university level, expressly dedicated to the dialogue between science and theology. Here we mention a few of them for the sake of information, among the most important ones, belonging to the English language area: The John Templeton Foundation (Radnor, Pennsylvania), The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (Berkeley, California), The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (Star Island, New Hampshire), The Zygon Center for Religion and Science (Chicago), The American Scientific Affiliation (Ipswich), and The European Society for the Study of Science and Theology . Today, there is no lack of clergy working in scientific research, as well. They are certainly less than they were in the 18th century, but their numbers are sufficient for The Society of Ordained Scientists , founded in Cambridge by Arthur Peacocke, to count more than three thousand members throughout the world. Henry Margenau and Roy Varghese (1992) published a stimulating anthology, reprinted several times, containing interviews of important scientists describing their personal position on the problem of God.

Just like any other human beings, people of science believe that the God he or she has chosen to be faithful to, is the God of everything and everybody. In order to preserve the notion of God intact in its meaning, this God's image must adequately represent the Cause of the whole of reality. At the same time, in order to preserve the cognitive dimension of faith, the contents of any specific religion, to which people adhere by faith (these contents Christian theology systematically tries to breach starting from the Revelation), must dialogue with the rest of the knowledge a person acquires, including scientific knowledge. To recognize God as the First Cause and ultimate explanation of humankind and the world, must lead the subject towards a kind of unity of knowledge. The research for this unification is certainly harder for persons of science, due to the richness of the sources they have access to and the depth with which they explore reality. Nevertheless, for this very reason, this research of theirs becomes all the more necessary. The fact that scientific rationality has influenced our way of understanding transcendence or what is transcendent, a fact that scientists and non scientist substantially agree upon, must not lead to a model of dialectical interaction or to the idea that the progress in scientific knowledge increasingly undermines the contents of faith. We need the courage to continuously read one in light of the other, once and once again, just like every other trial open to reality. This requires an effort of synthesis and unity, sought at the heart of the knowing person. Symbiosis and stratification are simply not enough.

IV. The Image of God as Revealed in Jesus Christ: its Relations with the Question of God Raised by Philosophy and the Sciences

A complete account of the contents of Judaeo-Christian Revelation and of the nature of God's Biblical image is the concern of the theological treatise on the Mystery of the One and Triune God (cf. Auer, 1978; Kasper, 1984; Courth, 1999). In this section, I shall synthesize only a few of those biblical contents connected to the previous interdisciplinary remarks.

1. The Existence of God, Creator of Heaven and Earth can be known starting from the Created Realities. The Judaeo-Christian Revelation often describes the possibility of asserting the existence of God, the Creator, by starting from his creatures (cf. Wis 13,1-8; Rom 1,18-20; Acts 14,16-17). The teachings of the Magisterium of the Church have often expounded this (cf. Dei Filius , DH 3004; cf. also DH 3475, 3538; Dei Verbum , 3 and 6; Donum veritatis , 10; Fides et ratio , 36, 53), without imposing any specific way among the ones indicated by philosophical thought. All the statements made by the Church's Magisterium generally refer to a causal path, tamquam causam per effectus , presented in different contexts. Beyond the theological discussion on how these teachings should be interpreted, they do, however, convey the basic idea that the notion of God is a notion accessible to human knowledge. When the Bible speaks of a Creator as the cause of all that exists, it introduces a category known to reason, a concept that human intelligence may grasp with its own endeavours, starting from the reality of the world. If the revelation of God as Creator is associated with that of a Lord as Savior of His people, it is because the former may help to understand who is the subject of the latter.

From the perspective of faith , the teaching on the natural knowledge of God states that faith in God presupposes such a knowledge, one accessible to reason, therefore guaranteeing an accord between the universality claimed by the God of faith and the universality of the philosophical problem of God. In discussing whether this knowledge truly is accessible to us, in our historical conditions, the moral attitude of the subject, and the wounds inflicted by sin (original and actual) to human reason, must be taken into account. The biblical passages traditionally associated to the doctrine of the natural knowledge of God constantly refer to the “chiaroscuro” (light/darkness) this knowledge lies in and a kind of historical failure in achieving it due to sin (cf. Wis 13,1; Rom 1,21; Acts 17,27). In their apologetical works, the Fathers of the Church clarified this point: humility, justice, and rectitude are necessary to understand the presence and the work of God in the world (cf. St. Augustine, Confessiones , V, 3). The same idea is present in the Teachings of the Church, as well (cf. DH 3005).

From the perspective of reason , we already dealt with the natural knowledge of God (see above, I.3). As we said, the recognition of God's existence cannot correspond to the scientific notion of experimental proof. This is not only due to the fact that, obviously, scientific experimental proofs are valid for objects that are perceivable by one's senses and then formalized in quantitative terms. It is also because knowledge of God calls for a much more explicit degree of involvement of the subject, loaded with consequences at an existential level, other than the one involved in exclusively experimental proofs. In a natural knowledge of God, reason must be able to abstract from what is measurable, and grasp the causes of the existence of things, as the end of a realist and ascending metaphysical path. «In speaking of the existence of God we should underline that we are not speaking of proofs in the sense implied by the experimental sciences. Scientific proofs in the modern sense of the word are valid only for things perceptible to the senses, since it is only on such things that scientific instruments of investigation can be used. To desire a scientific proof of God would be equivalent to lowering God to the level of the beings of our world, and we would therefore be mistaken methodologically in regard to what God is. [...] It can neither affirm nor deny his existence. From this, however, we must not draw the conclusion that scientists in their scientific studies are unable to find valid reasons for admitting the existence of God. If science as such cannot reach God, the scientist who has an intelligence, the object of which is not limited to things of sense perception, can discover in the world reasons for affirming a Being which surpasses it. Many scientists have made and are making this discovery» (John Paul II, General Audience , 10.7.1985, n. 1). Philosophical proofs, whether anthropological or cosmological, do not cause faith directly, they simply have the capability of preparing the subject to consider the content of the Revelation as intelligible and reasonable. They prepare the subject for a personal option for truth, and to recognize the Face hidden in the mystery of Being. Only Biblical Revelation may unveil the ultimate sense of this option: the answer to a call, the free gift to a Person, the entrance to a communion of life.

2. The Biblical Image of the God of Israel Revealed by his Son Made Man. The image of God unveiled by Christian Revelation, although being continuous to the notion of God accessible from the observation of nature and from the meditation of philosophy, conveys quite an exceeding content. It places us in front of new categories, overcoming the expectations of reason and somehow proving they belong to an original, revealed thought, which does not come from the anthropological, hermeneutic or linguistic horizons within which human words are usually confined (cf. Ratzinger, 1990; Gilson, 1961). We face a God whose role is not confined to solve the “problem of the beginning”, but extends over the whole horizon and meaning of all history. Bible obliges us to move from a God which humankind speaks of, to a God who speaks to humankind; from a God humankind wishes to interpret, to a God humankind may let itself be interpreted by.

Among the characteristics of the revealed image of God, the coexistence of an idea of familiarity and a concept of cosmic breadth is a novelty far exceeding any human expectation. The former is characterized by the use of the name Father and His desire to enter into a relationship with humankind (by revealing His name, and the offering of His Covenant, and through the Incarnation); the latter is related to God's omnipotence, His “being in heaven”, and the fullness of His Being. The idea of familiarity, made clear by the “visibility” and the humanity of the Son, exists alongside the cosmic breadth the Word-Logos possesses as the Son who is completely equal to the invisible Father (cf. Jn 1,18; Jn 10,30). The accessibility of Jesus of Nazareth and the eternity of Christ —the Incarnate Word— belong to the same and one identical Person. The closeness of God to humankind and God's availability to enter in communion with human beings —reaching unprecedented extents in the New Testament, according to which we are called to become adoptive children of God by means of our incorporation to the eternally generated Son and the co-possession of His same Spirit (cf. Gal 2,20; Rom 8,10-11)— does not diminish the universality, otherness or transcendence associated to God as Absolute. If scientific thought is attentive in preserving the cosmic characteristics of God when dealing with an Absolute, understood as truth and foundation; it is reassured nonetheless that these characteristics keep intact in the revealed image of the Christian God, in spite of his overwhelming proximity to humankind and history.

In the God of Judaeo-Christian Revelation, transcendence and immanence cease being alternative notions and become correlative concepts. The novelty of this kind of relationship essentially depends on the novelty of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo sui et subiecti ( CREATION , III.1, IV.1). The simultaneous transcendence and immanence of God in relating to the world, is indeed implicit in the conception of a God who is at the same time , Uncreated (and therefore transcendent) and a Creator (and therefore immanent, just like any cause is present into its effect). Greek philosophy was not capable of uniting these two properties. It affirmed the eternity of the Being, its immutability, its being without a principle, but its relationship with creatures (and in creatures) was entrusted to a first-created Demiurge. The Fathers of the Church described the difference of the Christian God from the pagan gods, stating that the latter could not comply to the condition of being uncreated and creators at the same time. Only a God transcending the world as an uncreated Creator can truly be immanent in all things. Only such a God will relate to things with the intimacy derived from being the founding reason for everything that exists: «Deus interior intimo meo et superior summo meo – Thou were more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest» (St. Augustine, Confessiones , III, 6).

Scientific reason, too, has its difficulties in joining these two poles together, since it grasps the concepts of transcendence and immanence only at a cosmological level, within the frame of space and time. In this light, transcendence can only mean detachment, separation, while immanence means a presence supporting from within; the first is likely associated to an idea of overcoming (historical dimension), the second to an idea of permanence and stability. The two concepts, therefore, look quite irreconcilable, and the very notion of transcendence is misunderstood. By understanding transcendence only as God's distance from His creatures, one ends up placing the two terms —God and creation— at the same level, in the space and time. God's transcendence, on the contrary, has a richer range of meanings. It does not only recall God's separation and incommensurability. It is principally an indication of His moral holiness and of the inscrutability of His ways. This is a superiority “by essence”, and not a simple spatial transcendence. Divine immanence, on the other hand, is not limited to giving metaphysical support to all that exists. It involves the intimate knowledge of things, encompassing their most hidden intentions, as well as the providence towards the smallest and apparently most insignificant among things. It is not a dimensional presence/immanence, it is the “loving eyes of God” on every creature (cf. Ps 139).

Finally, the Christian God reveals Himself as a fullness of Being and as a Communion of love. These two aspects coexist because His Being consists in an inter-personal communion, professed as the mystery of Trinitarian life. The cosmic characteristics typical of the Absolute and the characteristics of persons being the subject of freedom and relations coexist within the intimate core of divine life. From the point of view of the relationship that creatures establish with God, the existence of true relations of Fatherhood and Sonship in God's immanent life, makes it possible for free rational creatures to call the Absolute, You , without impoverishing the transcendence of His image. Religion can therefore engage in a real “I-You” dialogue with God without falling into myth; this way of addressing God is now possible by elevating the creature's relationship with God through a participation in a pre-existent immanent relationship between God-Father and God-Son, so becoming “children through the Son”. Even the relationship between the Absolute and its creatures, which from an ontological point of view must be considered a simple “relationship of reason”, acquires new realism at a dialogical level. God's movement towards human beings is as real as a true dialogue of a father with his son. This movement is supported by a logic of love, and is not a mere expansion of God's being towards something He constituted outside Himself ( ad extra ) through of the act of creation. God speaks to the world because of His love for His Son, because the Father eternally pronounces this Word within Himself ( ad intra ) and He possesses it through the love of His Spirit ( SPIRIT , II).

Aristotelian logic set forth that substance was the bearer of meaning and foundation, while relation was a mere accident. It is, therefore, quite a novelty to say that at the heart of God's Being there is dialogue, and alongside substance is relation. According to the Platonic thought, perfection was associated to indivisible unity: multiplicity meant deterioration, the fruit of the fragmentation of what used to be pure and simple. Conversely, according to Christian Revelation dialogue is necessarily set beside the divine substance, and relation is intended as an original form of being. The mystery of Trinitarian life suggests that unity attained through mutual donation, through self-giving in the freedom of love, “is greater” than the unity of what remains One undivided, incapable of relating to anyone or anything. In the intimate life of the Christian God, multiplicity does not impoverish unity, but founds it.

3. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God of Philosophers and Scientists as well. In examining the relation between the image of God offered by Revelation and the feeble image of the Absolute or the “mystical” perceived by philosophy and the natural sciences, theology faces two opposing risks. On one side, emphasizing too much the excess and the novelty brought about by the Biblical message and their associated philosophical contents, there is the risk of regarding the first image as if it had nothing to do with the second. This position is in accord with a totally (and exclusively) apophatic approach to the Absolute, which understands philosophy as merely the “knowing of not knowing”, and the mystery of Being as the “impossible subject” for any statement. Such a God may be invoked only, with the expectation that he may reveal himself; there is nothing reason can say about him, nor do to ascertain his existence. On the other hand, theology runs the risk of considering reason's weak determinations of the Absolute as the rules for regulating and interpreting all that a divine revelation could reasonably say. It would, therefore, revive the rationalist program reducing religion within the limits of pure reason, or the pretension (and illusion) of a branch of Neo-Scholastics to transform the ineffability and unavailability of God's Being into the availability of a Super Entity. It may even end up evaluating the meaningfulness of any discourse on God within the closed horizons of mere anthropology, as theology tried to do when setting an equivocal “anthropological turn” on its methodological agenda. Considering its direct relationship with the scientific thought, I believe that theology should navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, avoiding the two risks described above. After making a necessary epistemological clarification, theology should examine courageously the question on God rising from the context of scientific rationality and the feeble image that rationality may associate with the Absolute. Thus, being based on the firm conviction that if the universe science studies is real, then it must necessarily be the same universe God created.

Though extremely demanding, this kind of navigation guarantees theology a minimum, but all the more important, link of intelligibility , so that its discourse on God —whose ultimate justification lies exclusively within the Revelation— may be meaningful also for the rationality of science. An indirect proof of the importance of not neglecting this connection is provided by the fracture that many scientists notice between the image of an unconventional God , which they slowly perceive in their reflections, and the image of the conventional God , associated to traditional religions. When theology presents an image of God detached from that ascending itinerary that starts from nature and that every search for truth incarnates and expresses, not only does it run the risk of becoming a new fideism, but also pays the price of a new deism, since this remains the only way out left for reason. What I am trying to state without ambiguity is that the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” is also the “God of philosophers and scientists”. I do not mean to contradict Pascal's aspiration, who, using these same words, he affirmed precisely the opposite meaning. When this matter is approached correctly, we find that Pascal, arguing from a mystical rather than a theoretical level, spoke of the God des savants (of the “learned”) (PASCAL , I.2). The interlocutor Pascal distrusted was the God of Descartes and his purpose was to criticise the pride of reason. Fides et ratio seems to agree on the convenience of bringing together these two poles, and embarking on such a demanding navigation: «The unity of truth», says John Paul II, «is a fundamental premise of human reasoning, as the principle of non-contradiction makes clear. Revelation renders this unity certain, showing that the God of creation is also the God of salvation history. It is the one and the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order of things upon which scientists confidently depend, and who reveals himself as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ» ( Fides et ratio , 34).

A notion of God grasped as «one who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order» would operate on a metaphysical level, but not imprisoned within an onto-theology characterized by an image of Being as substance. It would remain open to discovery, by progressively and constantly unveiling new levels of intelligibility and dynamical depth, in accord with the limitless character of the analysis of natural truths. This notion would always make one think of nature as a gift, something that science receives as given, open to induction and discovery, not as a closed physis possessing in itself the ultimate reasons for its being. Likewise, the notion of God rising in science from the “perception of foundations” and from the “experience of sacred” is not in line with the concept of a God-of-the-gaps or of a Deus ex machina . Rather, it is connected to an area of meaning transcending scientific rationality, a logos that cannot be reduced to the sole traits of ratio , since it also possesses those of verbum . It is comparable to what happens in the divine Logos , where the rational Word that sustains the world ( logos ut ratio ) is inseparable form the Word that reveals and summons ( logos ut verbum ; JESUS CHRIST, INCARNATION AND DOCTRINE OF LOGOS, II). The appeal made by this logos rises from nature but ends in the human being because it is capable of stirring, at least in principle, existential questions and intimate experiences.

Once accurate epistemological soundings have been taken, theology's navigation may continue on a more properly dogmatic route until it finally flows into the ocean of the mystery of the Incarnate Word. This is the true verbum behind nature, the Logos , which involves and attracts every research for truth —whether it comes from science, from philosophy or from theology. Since the world of scientific culture considers the canons of universality and generalization decisive, theology must also convincingly explain the relations between the Christian Logos and the universality of truth, between the discourse on the God of Jesus Christ and the discourse on God present in other religious traditions. This means to accept unconditionally the risks and the scandal of stating that this Logos on God is fully visible and accessible through the human face of Jesus of Nazareth. It means to accept the risks and the scandal of saying that all what in God is universal , it admits in Jesus of Nazareth a historical and personal concretum . It is the astonishing proclamation that the truth is a Person, the good new capable of definitely clarifying why we can speak of love for truth, and why truth, to be known, must be loved. «To evangelize is first of all to bear witness, in a simple and direct way, to God revealed by Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to bear witness that in His Son God has loved the world —that in His Incarnate Word He has given being to all things and has called men to eternal life. Perhaps this attestation of God will be for many people the unknown God whom they adore without giving Him a name, or whom they seek by a secret call of the heart when they experience the emptiness of all idols» (Paul VI, Evangelii nuntiandi , 8.12.1975, n. 26).

There is no doubt that without the hermeneutics that the paschal mystery offers us, as the ultimate reason for why “God so loved the world”, we would never be able to reach a true understanding of the mystery of the world. In fact, the world is not an outcome that simply depends of a philosophical Absolute to provide a foundation for its existence and the key to its ultimate sense; the world is also the expression of a filial gift . Since the creation was desired and accomplished in the mystery of Christ (cf. Col 1,16-17), full understanding of all that originates from creation is possible only through the action of the Spirit of Christ (cf. 1Cor 2,1-14). However, the very correspondence in Christ of creation and salvation, suggests that paschal hermeneutics, whose keys are the exclusive possession of the Spirit, would include the possibility of approaching the sense of the world by seeking its natural foundations, by means of a scientific knowledge capable of remaining open to the mystery and to the logic of a gift.

Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti
(translated by Matteo Bruni)

See also: CREATION; FAITH; JESUS CHRIST, INCARNATION AND DOCTRINE OF LOGOS; NATURE; REASON; RELIGION; SPIRIT; THEOLOGY; TRUTH .

Documents of the Catholic Church related to the subject:

Bibliography :

Philosophy and Theology: E. GILSON , God and Philosophy , Yale University Press, New Haven 1961; J . DANIELOU, La Trinité et la mystère de l'existence , Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1968; J . DANIELOU, God's life in us , Dimension Books, Denville (NJ) 1969; C. FABRO , L'uomo e il rischio di Dio , Studium, Roma 1975; E. CANTORE, Scientific Man. The Humanistic Significance of Science , ISH Publications, New York 1977; J. AUER , Gott, der Eine und Dreieine , F. Pustet , Regensburg 1978; W. KASPER , The God of Jesus Christ , Crossroad, New York 1984; A.L. GONZÁLEZ , Teología natural , Eunsa, Pamplona 1985; M. BUCKLEY , At the Origins of Modern Atheism , Yale Univ. Press, Yale 1987; J. ALFARO , De la cuestión del hombre a la cuestión de Dios , Sígueme, Salamanca 1989; C. FABRO , Le prove dell'esistenza di Dio , La Scuola , Brescia 1989; J. RATZINNGER , Introduction to Christianity (1968), Ignatius Press, San Francisco 1990; G. LAFONT , God, Time, and Being , Saint Bede's Publications, Petersham (MA) 1992; JOHN PAUL II , Crossing the Threshold of Hope , Jonathan Cape, London 1994; F. COURTH , Le mystère du Dieu trinité , Éditions Saint-Paul, Luxembourg 1999.

God and Natural Sciences: R. JOLIVET , Le Dieu des philosophes et des savants , A. Fayard, Paris 1956; V. MARCOZZI , Il problema di Dio e le scienze , Morcelliana, Brescia 1974; S. JAKI , The Road of Science and the Ways to God , The University of Chicago Press, Chicago - London : 1978; P. DAVIES , God and the New Physics , Dent, London 1983; R. RUSSELL, W.R. STOEGER, G.V. COYNE (eds.) Physics, Philosophy and Theology. A Common Quest for Understanding , LEV and Univ. of Notre Dame Press, Città del Vaticano 1988: spec. E. MCMULLIN , Natural Science and Belief in a Creator , pp. 49-79; O. PEDERSEN, Christian Belief and the Fascination of Science , pp. 125-140; J.F. HAUGHT , God in Modern Science , in “New Catholic Encyclopedia” , The Catholic Univ. of America Press, Washington 1989, vol. 18, pp. 178-183; A. ARDIGÓ, F. GARELLI, Valori, scienza e trascendenza , 2 voll., Fondazione Agnelli, Torino 1989-1990; P. DAVIES , The Mind of God. Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning , Simon & Schuster, London 1992; H. MARGENAU, R. VARGHESE (eds.), Cosmos, Bios, Theos. Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origin of the Universe, Life and Homo Sapiens , Open Court, La Salle (Illinois) 1992; T. MAGNIN , Quel Dieu pour un monde scientifique , Nouvelle Cité, Paris 1993; S. MURATORE , L'evoluzione cosmologica e il problema di Dio , AVE, Roma 1993; G. TANZELLA-NITTI, Il significato del discorso su Dio nel contesto scientifico-culturale odierno , in “ La Teologia , annuncio e dialogo”, Armando, Roma 1996, pp. 61-82; R. TIMOSSI , Dio e la scienza moderna , Mondadori, Milano 1999; G. DEL RE, The Cosmic Dance. Science Discovers the Mysterious Harmony of the Universe, Templeton Foundation Press, Philadelphia 2000.