Scienza e Religione: due diversi sistemi di conoscenza con una radice comune

Abstract

The comparison between faith and reason has always been developed within the “compatibilityincompatibility” paradigm. Different positions range from “credo quia absurdum” (I believe just because it’s absurd) to the refusal of any religious experience as a needless by-product of mind activity, claimed by the so-called new atheists movement. Anyway, the predominant stance in western thought about this problem is a separation-based one. As clearly stated – among the others – by St. Thomas Aquinas and Galileo, theology and science deal with different kinds of problems. In this paper the whole of the argument is seen under a different perspective instead, focusing on the common epistemological and anthropological roots of the two kinds of knowledge. In fact, science and theology do not overlap in the object of their study but they do have similar syntactic structures, show strong semantic analogies and are both deeply rooted in the very same primary human need.