- Article (book excerpt, PDF)
- 1200 words
- Level: university
An excerpt from the 1966 Theological Highlights of Vatican II, by Fr. Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). The topic is the third chapter of the first part of Gaudium et Spes (“Man’s Activity throughout the World”), which treats science and technology. Fr. Ratzinger notes:
The objectivity of science is much more in line with the idea of creation than a false divinization of the world which science and faith equally reject…. The scientific view of the world, which presupposes both the world’s non-divinity and its logical and comprehensible structure, is profoundly in accord with the view of the world as created (and thus non-divine): the world as produced by the Logos, God’s Spirit-filled Word. Thus, like the Logos, the world is rationally and spiritually structured. One might even say that only such a basic attitude makes natural science possible in its full scope.
Click here for a preview, courtesy of Google Books.
Click here for Part I, Chapter III of Gaudium et Spes.
[Click here to download PDF]THOVII
