Abstract

A major challenge confronts our world today: Will science and religion contribute to the integration of human culture or its fragmentation? What is needed is a community of interchange, a relational unity, which encourages its members to expand their partial perspectives and form a new unified vision. Yet the unity we seek is not identity. The Church does not propose that science should become religion or religion, science. On the contrary, unity always presupposes the diversity and integrity of its elements. We are asked to become one. We are not asked to become each other. In sum, both religion and science must preserve their autonomy and distinctiveness, while developing a common interactive relationship in which each discipline is radically open to the discoveries and insights of the other. Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.