On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century by Jorge Mario Bergoglio & Abraham Skorka

Author:Jorge Mario Bergoglio & Abraham Skorka
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Christianity, Judaism, Catholicism
ISBN: 9780770435066
Publisher: Image
Published: 2013-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

58 Shabbat 88, a

17. ON SCIENCE

SKORKA: Religion had served as a disseminator of culture in the broadest sense of the word until the Enlightenment. Whatever knowledge one had about any field of study was connected to religion in some way. That is why we find so many Jewish rabbis and Catholic monks who were dedicated to the various sciences. Maimonides, Copernicus and Mendel were some later examples of this ancient tradition. As an aside, scribes were typically monks as well. The Talmud is full of ideas related to sociology, anthropology and medicine. Religion was the channel through which culture and clarity of language were transmitted. It provided responses to the fundamental questions of life I mentioned earlier—What is Man? What is Nature? What is G-d? Even today, whenever important questions arise we still turn to religion—and these issues are tremendously important. For example, we had to redefine death in order to do organ transplants. Over the centuries, death was defined as the cessation of cardiopulmonary activity. When the rabbis were asked if one could save a life by performing a heart transplant incorporating the removal of an organ that is still beating, they found that the concept of brain death already exists in the Talmud. One could say, “Look at what visionaries they were!”

Today we have arguments about when human life begins. Should we treat the inseminated ovum in its first stages of development as a person? According to the criteria of one of the Talmud’s sages, it has already received a soul—the divine breath. Science has determined that a zygote already has all the necessary genetic information to develop into a new human being; but is that enough of an argument to conclude that it should be treated as a person?

When science reaches its limits, man turns to the spiritual—to the existential experiences of centuries past. Science and religion are fields that work in parallel and should be talking to each other. The scientist that tries to refute religious phenomena based on their studies is the same as a religious person who tries to refute science based on their faith—they are both foolish. Only through dialogue that starts by each recognizing their own limitations can debate develop between the two, which is absolutely necessary for humanity to move forward in its search for a base level of ethical conduct.

BERGOGLIO: It is true. On the one hand, as you said, Rabbi, there is everything that you mentioned about education, all the wisdom of the ages accumulated through reflection, by the Torah, by the Gospels, and it is offered to all of humanity. There is also another interesting thing: religious truth does not change, but it does develop and grow. It is like with the human being, we are the same as a baby and in old age, but in the middle there is a whole journey. In this way, as was explained before, something that was once seen as natural, is not seen like that today. One example is the

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