Abstract

The debate between science and Christianity about the origin of man in the thought of Mariano Artigas: One of the main intelectual concerns of Professor Artigas was to make clear the relationships between science and faith in bordering fields such as the nature and the origin of mankind. At this point, there are some researchers who have seen in science the intelectual basement of nowadays unbelief, the legitimous basement of modern atheism, which would find support in the objectivity of the scientific knowledge; especially the evolution theory, which would have been useful, from Darwin’s times, to prove that it was legitimate intelectually speaking to be an atheist. I mean, science would have made useless the hypothesis of the existence of God. Artigas dedicated a lot of extensive essays to refute this modern affirmation, explaining how the terms of evolution and creation are not opposite, and how the existence of chance in nature doesn´t deny the theology through the action of a divine plan, in a way that there’s no contradiction in reassure a biological origin for mankind with the existence of espiritual faculties which lead to transcendency. Once reported the ideologic manipulation of the theory of evolution for spurious objectives, Artigas deals with the same honesty and braveness the complicated questions of monogenism and poligenism. Our brief article presents a concise review on the development of all these questions based on his thoughts.