Listening to Infinity E-Book

Marcelo Gleiser

• Herausgeber: PUCPRess
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 57

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

(...) People have a very distorted view of science, religion, and the relationship between them. They immediately put science and faith as antipodes in constant confrontation. My vision is a little more historical and cultural. I see science as a manifestation of human effort to engage in the mystery of existence. And religion is also a manifestation of human effort to engage in the mystery of existence. In a certain way, both come from the same source. Refusing to talk is refusing to look at one side of our life, human existence, which is part of who we are. It's a perfectly natural conversation. Marcelo Gleiser Dossier Courtyard of the Gentiles

Leseprobe

Original title in Portuguese: À escuta do infinito. Estamos mais perto de Deus?

2018, PUCPRESS. Translation authorized.

Copyright for the English edition

©2019, Fabiano Incerti

2019, PUCPRESS

This book, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced by any means without the express written permission of the Publisher. Opinions, assumptions, conclusions, or recommendations made in this material are the responsibility of the respondents.

PONTIFICAL CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF PARANÁ

Rector

Waldemiro Gremski

Vice-Rector

Vidal Martins

Pro-Rector for Mission, Identity, and Extension

Brother Rogério Renato Mateucci

Director of the Science and Faith Institute

Fabiano Incerti

Institutional Identity Manager

José André de Azevedo

Collection Curator

Fabiano Incerti

Technical review

Douglas Borges Candido Mariana Vidotti

Translation

Juliana Vermelho Martins David Martin Palmer II

PUCPRESS

Coordination

Michele Marcos de Oliveira

Edition

Susan Cristine Trevisani dos Reis

Art Edition

Rafael Matta Carnasciali

Text Preparation

Juliana Almeida Colpani Ferezin

Proofreading

Elisama Nunes dos Santos Paula Lorena Silva Melo

Cover and graphic design

Rafael Matta Carnasciali

Layout

Eduardo Ramos

Produção de ebook

S2 Books

PUCPRESS

1155 Imaculada Conceição Street - Administration Building - 6th floor

Campus Curitiba - Zip Code 80215901 - Curitiba / Paraná / Brazil

Phone: [phone]

[email protected]

Publication Cataloging Data

Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná

Integrated Library System - SIBI / PUCPR

Central Library

Incerti, Fabiano

I36e 2019

Listening to the infinite: are we closer to God? / Fabiano Incerti, coordinator; Translation: Juliana Vermelho Martins and David Martin Palmer II - Curitiba: PUCPRESS, 2019.

60 p. ; 21 cm

ISBN 978-85-54945-71-8

ISBN 978-85-54945-72-5 (e-book)

1. God. 2. Religion and science. 3. Dialogues I. Gleiser, Marcelo II. Ravasi, Gianfranco. III. Title

CDD 20. ed. – 231

SUMMARY

Cover

Title page

Credits

Presentation

Preface

Marcelo Gleiser

Gianfranco Ravasi

Dialogue

PRESENTATION

The evening of April 11, 2016 will be remembered at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná. On the University Theater (TUCA) stage, one of the greatest intellectual and influential Catholic thinkers, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, sits for a frank and transparent conversation with one of today’s most respected agnostic astrophysicists, Brazilian professor Marcelo Gleiser. The theme that provokes and approaches them is the question for God. From different and equally profound perspectives, as the conversation progresses, they give an example of what seems to be the urgency for our times: we need to dialogue. And both teach us that, before being a concession, dialogue is an exercise that requires openness, learning and the recognition that the other, while picking me apart, is the one that completes me.

This is the spirit of the Courtyard of the Gentiles, project from the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture: believers and non-believers dialoguing on fundamental issues for human existence, regarding culture, science and faith. Held in symbolic spaces in different cities around the world, it brings together personalities from the universe of arts, economics, science, politics, and academia. Those are Benedict XVI’s words to the Roman Curia in December 2009 that inspire this creative and thought-provoking initiative, which has since generated real encounters and active listening: “Today, in addition to interreligious dialogue, there should be a dialogue with those to whom religion is something foreign, to whom God is unknown and who nevertheless do not want to be left merely Godless, but rather to draw near to him, albeit as the Unknown”.

It was the partnership with the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), the Archdiocese of Curitiba and FTD Education that made it possible for the PUCPR Science and Faith Institute to hold the first edition of Courtyard of the Gentiles in Brazilian lands and released, with the publication of this work, its first collection of books.

May the following pages be inspiring to new times, where the simple gesture of sitting at the table for good conversation is the sign of the most powerful human and spiritual convergence.

Good reading!

Fabiano Incerti and Rogério Renato Mateucci Curitiba, summer of 2018.

PREFACE

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

John 8:32

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

S. Kierkegaard

The conviction that knowledge leads us to the best of worlds is reckless; most of the time, it is based on critical judgment and ideological choices that tend to eliminate differences. The best of all worlds assumes a kind of eugenic and biased purity, the condition of a desired emancipation of man at all costs. From this perspective, the well-informed reason decides about right and wrong, creates and destroys, emancipates and condemns. History has given us enough grounds to prudently distrust progress reduced to products of objective rationality.

Our time, based on hegemony of a triumphant reason, dominated by a technoscientific vision, has specialized in the descriptive understanding of the world and loses, day by day, the primordial intimacy with enchantment. Today, the world shares a conviction resulting from the triumph of the lights of Reason, definitely pushing back myths, superstitions and religions. The “free” man experiences prophetical certainties like that of Spinoza showing that he, taken by his fears and hopes, no longer behaves “as if he made nature delirious”, he undertakes the task proposed by Bacon to turn his Knowledge into Power and commits himself to the project suggested by Descartes to be a “master and possessor of nature.” This same man was convinced by Hobbes that “thinking is calculating” and by Planck in the certainty that “real is only what can be measured”, and everyone sees the pledge of a supposed human emancipation believing in a sovereign unquestionable power of science in this programmatic framework.

Knowledge, however, must lead us rather to unsurpassable sense of man and this is, in essence, mystery. Before relegating us to the limits of impotence, the mystery is the first condition of our search. Our thirst for knowledge is never satisfied with possession, but with the discomfort provided by what we are not yet and do not yet have. The cultivation of the spirit is by its nature opposed to the logic of selective profits, and therefore the knowledge that praises itself for alleged possession of the truth is the same that carries its funeral.

Certainly, the starry sky appears to both poet and scientist; definitely not more to the latter than to the former. A physical-chemical-mechanical description of a starry night does not take away its enigma of ecstasy. There is no supremacy of the scientist over the poet, but exceptional greatness in the meeting of both. Knowledge, speaking to the mysterious essence of man, resists the reductionist and arbitrary compartmentalization so claimed by this disenchanted and secular time, dominated by what is instrumental and functional.

In a 1904 essay entitled The Value of Science