A Contemporary Scientific Account of the Origins of Life

Lesson 37 –
A Contemporary Scientific Account of the Origins of Life

If a convincing scientific theory of the origins of life emerges, this would not remove God as the creator of all living things, but rather reveal the precise secondary causes he used to transform non-living matter into living beings.

Only God can call beings into existence out of nothing. We hold that God created the whole cosmos in this meaning of the term. But within this created reality, scientific inquiry can reveal the secondary or instrumental causes through which God, as the primary cause, has acted to develop his creation.

Course Reading

What is Reason? | Fr. James Brent, O.P.

How does God Creation Through Evolution? | Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P.

Excerpt from What is Reason? by Fr. James Brent, O.P.:

[T]here is no need to embrace a narrow or reductionist account of reason. We should return to another account of reason that is more ancient, richer, and more open to reality as a whole. Reason, on this account, is sapiential. Reason here is the capacity for wisdom. Wisdom is an all-embracing understanding of reality as a whole in light of ultimate causes, especially in light of the end or goal of all things. In order to be capable of such wisdom or such an all-embracing understanding of reality, reason must be receptive to reality in all of its aspects: the quantifiable and the non-quantifiable, the measurable and the immeasurable, the observable and the non-observable, the tangible and the intangible, the sensible and the intelligible.