Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti

"The Christian faith does not seem to have any prejudicial arguments against the presence of life and intelligent life in the cosmos (how could it, since these are events that belong to the factual order?), but neither can it be considered anti-scientific to consider reasonable, in the absence of compelling data, the “classical solution” that envisages the uniqueness of the human being... Even the Incarnation of the Word has a revelatory value that is universal, not just local. Its primacy over angelic creatures may ultimately be an expression of its primacy over all possible creatures, a Christocentric primacy, not geocentric or anthropocentric, even if we do not know how it is exercised. The final word on the subject of life in the cosmos does not belong to theology, but to science. Theology, like the rest of humanity, can only wait."

"Most media outlets present us with the image of scientists as atheists or, at the very least, people who are not inclined to see nature as the work of a creator God. However, this image only partially corresponds to reality and is not representative of scientists as a whole."

"Contemporary philosophy has considered the subject of God and the meaning of life too “strong” to be addressed, thus settling on positions of weak thought. Science, on the contrary, has not been afraid to address these questions, as can be easily seen in the popular works of many scientists. The fact that the scientific method cannot provide a comprehensive answer to these questions does not prevent them from arising and continuing to attract those who study nature."

"The physical and mathematical sciences now have a mature epistemology, which protects them from ideological drifts because it has made them touch in a formally rigorous way on the foundations, and also the limits, of knowledge. The biological sciences, on the other hand, are younger and have not yet encountered the problems of formal and ontological incompleteness that the physical and mathematical sciences are well aware of. This can lead biology to want to offer its own exhaustive and sometimes self-referential “worldview,” considering any discussion of the foundations of being, and therefore of the origin of things, to be superfluous. In reality, when the problem of foundations is closely examined, and biology is beginning to do so as it strives to delve deeply into the origin of DNA, the problem of Logos, rationality, and the meaning of things reemerges, and with it the question of God. The career of a researcher such as Francis Collins is sufficient proof of this."

"When Christians no longer live according to their faith, history will not fail to show the consequences, reserving for them a necessary purification."

"I believe that fundamental theology should promote unity in the intellectual life of believers by helping them to reflect on the reasons for their faith—certainly with the help of pastoral care and catechesis. Secularism and secularization have an easy time of it when there is weakness of thought, even among believers. The fact that the Christian faith has its foundation in Jesus Christ does not exempt us from looking to philosophy, history or sciences to show our interlocutors that the Christian message does not contradict the knowledge of these other fields of knowledge, but rather reveals their ultimate meaning. A believer who works as an intellectual must be able to explain what Jesus Christ has to do with philosophy, history, medicine, economics, law, and even mathematics, as Monsignor Luigi Giussani loved to repeat."

"Interviewer: What is meant by “theology of credibility”? Tanzella-Nitti: By this expression we mean a theology that reflects on the reasonableness of believing in Revelation, first and foremost in the Revealer par excellence, Jesus of Nazareth. Classical apologetics, which accompanied us until the dawn of the Second Vatican Council, did not have a fully theological status, but developed its arguments mainly on the logical and philosophical side. The first theology of credibility is given to us by the Gospels, when they declare, with St. Luke, that they were written so that we might realize the solidity of the teachings received, or with St. John, that those things were transmitted to us so that we might believe in Jesus Christ and so that, by believing, we might have life in him."

"Every step forward in our certain knowledge of nature is always a step toward the truth of things and, ultimately, toward Truth with a capital T."

"The standard model that organizes the properties of elementary particles is highly symmetrical and elegant, but it is not the only example. Just think of Mendeleev's Periodic Table of Elements, or Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetism. Good science seems to have a privileged relationship with order and symmetry: it is not a relationship that we only read about in our intellect, it must also have sufficient objective confirmation in things. The news that the Higgs boson seems to have finally been revealed confirms us in the same idea. We now know that the 24 fundamental particles and the four forces of nature can be brought together in a single grand theoretical framework. Some may wonder where this rationality and elegance come from and, more boldly, whether they have any connection with the idea that the physical universe is the reflection of a creative intelligence... Put this way, the question goes beyond what the scientific method can tell us, which is based on measurable quantities and does not question the ultimate causes of reality. It is nevertheless significant that scientists, as human beings, are surprised by this and seek an explanation. The question then becomes philosophical or perhaps even theological: we cannot answer it by asking for new measurements from the Large Hadron Collider, but it is interesting that, as a question, it is now also being raised by scientific research and is arising in our laboratories."

"The horizon of our knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is open to being, to totality. And this is simply because knowledge is a dimension of our spirit, unlimited because it transcends matter. The material world may one day end, but our knowledge of it, insofar as it participates in the knowledge of God, never ends."

"In my opinion, those who believe that a weak science, aware of its own limitations and its own continuous provisional nature, dialogues better with faith because it is incapable of “challenging it” are mistaken. Quite the contrary is true: a science that recognizes itself as a quest for truth is more open to the questions that matter, the truly important ones, which point to the origin and meaning of things, thus making itself ready to listen with interest to the answers that theology and faith offer to these questions. The worst enemy of the Christian faith continues to be ignorance and superficiality, certainly not science."

"It is often believed that defending the dignity of the human person and his transcendent dimension requires revenge against the reasons for scientific progress, which should therefore be scaled back, slowed down, or even rejected. Little thought is given to the fact that the true subject of technical and scientific endeavour is the human person, and that this endeavour, in addition to expressing a vocation to seek the truth, has a value of promotion for man and for the whole society in which he lives."

"From the point of view of scientific analysis, the term “finalism” should not be too surprising, if it does not refer to an intentional purpose, but only to an interpretative strategy. The action of finalistic principles, in fact, is not new to other fields of science. Mathematical physics knows the principle of least action, which indicates how a physical system always takes the most advantageous path. The principles of classical thermodynamics are essentially finalistic principles, and chemistry also uses them when explaining chemical bonds, starting from the principle that each atom tends to complete its eight fundamental electron orbitals."

"To do science, you need commitment and passion. You need to have at least an implicit belief that nature will not behave capriciously towards us, but will remain faithful to its laws. Above all, you need to believe that there is a truth out there, and that it is worth seeking. Every scientist has his or her own “worldview” and within that worldview employs the categories he or she finds most congenial. It is this personalistic aspect of scientific research, now highlighted by many authors, that deserves to be explored. The reasons why a scientist “embraces” one worldview rather than another also deserve to be explored."

"The Christian faith is a friend of reason, and a God without Logos cannot be the Christian God. The world responds to a creative plan, and this plan is in a certain way glimpsed by the man of science, who is capable of perceiving this Logos because his intelligence is the image of God. Theology must take an interest in scientific knowledge in order to be a better theology."

"The story of Galileo Galilei, on closer inspection, was not an exegetical dispute but a great philosophical and cultural confrontation, which had a positive influence on the Catholic Church, spurring it to distance itself more and more from an instrumental and unenlightened use of the Scriptures.... If they are true knowledge of the world, Catholic theology has nothing to fear from scientific knowledge: it may be rightly challenged by it, but, for the sake of the one truth, it must accept the challenge with intellectual honesty and epistemological rigor."

"I believe that Darwin was good at helping us understand the past, but I wouldn't invoke him too much as a prophet of future scenarios. The biological evolution of human beings seems to have stopped precisely with the emergence of freedom and culture."

"Saying that Christian theology provided the cultural and philosophical ‘humus’ for the birth of science is of little interest to anyone, while saying, impertinently, that science and theology are eternally at war, or that Christianity is irrational, sells books."

"Evolution, after all, is the way God creates."

"The idea of evolution is at home in Christian theology. For the cosmos and life to evolve, a positive amount of information is necessary. I do not believe that biological evolution is possible in a materialistic world, without information, without direction, without a plan."