faith and reason

The Genome and the
presence of a Loving Creator
The new developments in genome engineering are an opportunity to broaden our reason, reaching out toward the recognition of what makes life life.

by Lorenzo Albacete

What exactly do we mean by proclaiming that God is the Creator of heaven and earth? In a discussion about the relation between science and faith, we should not assume that the word “creation” has the same meaning for all. For our part, the question is this: What does the Catholic Church mean when, in the Creed, we say we believe that God is the Creator? 
When reflecting on this question, it is crucial to keep in mind the words of Pope Benedict XVI: “Faith in God’s creation is not concerned with mere theory or with the question about a very distant past in which the world came into being. This faith is concerned about the present, about the correct attitude vis-à-vis reality. For Christian faith in the creation it is extremely important that the Creator and the Redeemer, the God of the origin, and the God of the end, be one and the same” (cf., The God of Jesus Christ, by Joseph Ratzinger, Ignatius Press, 2008). 
The temptation to separate the two has plagued Christian thought since the beginning of the history of the Church, and in this essay Ratzinger gives a brief but very clarifying summary of the history of this temptation and its different manifestations. 
When we say that God is the Redeemer, we are of course referring to the revelation of God in and through Jesus Christ: His Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and gift of His Spirit. This comes first: our encounter with the living Conqueror of death who shares His victory with us, responding thus to the demands of the heart that make us human. Creation for us cannot mean anything but existence with and through Jesus Christ. 
This faith in Christ, however, is linked to reason, precisely through Christ’s correspondence to the desires that make us human. Indeed, reason itself is a manifestation of our creation in Christ. This is what broadens our view of reason beyond its current arbitrary restrictions by the rationalism of the dominant secularist ideology. 
At the roots of this rationalist temptation in us is the deadly separation between faith in Jesus Christ and the experience of the human, that is, what Father Giussani calls the “absence of the human.” 
In his essay, Ratzinger writes about this in terms of the relation between faith and conscience, that is, the inextinguishable thirst of the heart for truth. This is the conscience that is in every human person, no matter what are his or her religious convictions. It is this, which we all share, that serves as the basis for a dialogue about science and faith. 
The broadening of reason is one of the greatest gifts given to humanity by the Christian faith, “precisely thanks to the fact that (man’s) Redeemer is none other than his Creator” (ibid.). 
Therefore, instead of reacting to the recent developments with panic, or with a dualistic lack of interest and concern, or with a search for a theoretical synthesis between the concerns of scientists and believers, we should see this as an opportunity to discover more and more what it means that the Creator God is the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ.