In Faith, Reason and the Natural Sciences: The Challenge of the Natural Sciences in the Work of Theologians the author attempts to go beyond Non-overlapping Magisteria, showing why the sciences constitute a fruitful challenge for theologians’ work, and the insights of Judaeo-Christian Revelation constitute a source of understanding for scientists’ ultimate questions.

The author’s intent is not to convince non-believers to believe in God, but rather to help them better evaluate the motivations for their unbelief— motivations that may rely upon an erroneous judgment about what science is or says, or what faith in God is supposed to be or teach. The intent is, rather, to help all—believers and non-believers alike—to practice a sincere intellectual honesty, recognizing that the questions we address to this incredible universe will always exceed the answers we receive.

Without a doubt, the discoveries of science and the rapid development of technology have not only changed our way of life, but have also shaped our minds. While technology is bound to change our future at an exponentially increasing pace, the physics concerning the "very big" (macrocosm) and that of the "very small" (microcosm) are coming together in a more coherent way, now providing a consistent and exhaustive view of the whole of reality. Thanks to the results from many different fields of research, whose successful applications are often seen as an implicit proof of their validity, contemporary science is supposed to offer a fairly complete answer to the fundamental questions concerning the existence of the universe, the origin and evolution of life, the place of humans in the cosmos, and the care we have to take for our environment. Moreover, technology, which today includes biomedical sciences, is able to improve our health and life-conditions, leading to the conclusion that even things that are not yet achievable today will surely be available in the foreseeable future. The influence of science seems, then, twofold. It supplies both a knowledge and a philosophy of life, a picture of our cosmic and biological history, and a framework to manage our choices in our daily circumstances. Some currents of thought go as so far as to insistently propose that science itself should be considered a philosophy, that is, as a specific source of culture and decisions, destined to substitute the old humanistic perspective.

On the other hand, religion is also supposed to offer precise answers to those same fundamental questions, and to inspire our every day choices. Regardless of the different language of the various religious traditions, a number of basic tenets about the origin of the world, essential truths concerning human nature and destiny, as well as a number of moral ideals, those traditions are also able to generate an explicit world-view. If science is capable of producing both a knowledge and a philosophy of life, for a believer, religion is sufficiently competent to do exactly the same. This challenging and somewhat embarrassing situation can be expressed by a comic strip, one I like to show to the public during the numerous talks about science and religion that I have been called to give in the course of the last few years. It represents a lab, probably in Baltimore or in some other place devoted to receiving data signals from the Space Telescope. On the lab’s walls, pictures of distant galaxies and nebulae hang all around. A couple of bearded scientists look at a computer display, where a bespectacled technician puts on the screen a well-known detail of one of Michelangelo’s frescos on creation painted on the Sistine Chapel. And a comment is whispered around: "The Hubble telescope is providing us with incredibly distant images of a very early universe!" Indeed, in the popular way of thinking the scientific and religious views seem to remain mutually exclusive. This makes many people feel confused, disorienting those who wish to put together, and possibly harmonize, the tenets of their own religious faith and the images of the world, of life and of the human being, supposedly conveyed by today’s science.

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A dialogue between the natural sciences and the human sciences seems today less unfathomable or perplexing than in the past. The overcoming of reductionism and mechanism, the discovery of the intrinsic incompleteness of any formal scientific language, the mathematical unpredictability of the great majority of physical phenomena, the role of complexity in physics and biology, as well as the increasing value attributed by scientists to analogy, tradition or beauty, are all bridges built (or at least envisaged) across the old rift that separated Naturwissenshaft from Geistwissenshaft. Scientists, philosophers, artists and even theologians, listen to each other, thus allowing for the organization of interdisciplinary events or the edition of books that study the same complex topic from the perspectives of different branches of knowledge. And, in the mind of many intellectuals spurs an opening up towards the big questions, never quenched, which are expressions of the human dignity and one of the best characteristics of the uniqueness of our species on the biological landscape of our planet. In other words, it keeps alive the desire for a kind of unity of knowledge....

Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti took his university degree in Astronomy at the University of Bologna (1977), and his doctorate in Dogmatic Theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, (1991). Italian C.N.R. fellow (1978–1981), he has been appointed Astronomer of the Astronomical Observatory of Turin (1981–1985). He is now Full Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce in Rome. His fields of interest and research include Theology of Revelation, theological and philosophical images of God, the dialogue between scientific thought/contemporary culture and Christian Faith, and the Unity of Knowledge. He served as general editor of the Interdisciplinary Dictionary on Religion and Science (Dizionario Interdisciplinare di Scienza e Fede), a two-volume encyclopedia published by Urbaniana University Press and Città Nuova, Rome 2002. He directs the web site "Documentazione Interdisciplinare di Scienza e Fede", http://www.disf.org and is editor-in-chief of the "Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science", at http://www.inters.org. In April, 2004 he was awarded the ESSSAT Communication Prize from the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology. He has published 13 books and over one hundred scientific articles.