The word within

I am a scientist by profession with a long-standing interest in the interaction of science and faith. Often I find that the sciences can give us remarkable insights into the nature of the world.  Many people think that science and Christian faith are inevitably opposed to one another.  But the two can and should interact fruitfully.  John Paul II wrote that “each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

John Paul II’s reflections on the first chapters of Genesis draw out great riches of meaning from these brief and challenging texts.  This is because, like the ancient Fathers of the Church, he does not put them in either literal or metaphorical straightjackets.  Rather he allows them to speak theologically, as fully relevant to our human situation now, as Jesus did in his answers to his questioners by going back to “the beginning.” And we gain some key knowledge of what it means to be a human being.

We also learn some amazing things about life and human beings from the positive discoveries of science.   In 1953 James D. Watson and Francis Crick were the co-discoverers of the double helical structure of the DNA molecule and later shared a Nobel Prize in 1962 for that discovery. Their work helped trigger a revolution in understanding the molecular basis of life and heredity. The biological sciences now know that information is at the center of life.  Loosely speaking, information concerns how the world is organized into complex, meaningful patterns instead of randomness.

Every cell in your body contains the DNA that functions like an instruction book to tell that cell what it is to do.  The human genome project has been successful in laying out the details in our DNA like a vast encyclopedia of words.   Geneticists now speak of our genes as expressing themselves.   The genetic code in DNA functions much like a language with “letters” and “words” embedded in its amazing molecular structure.   In the view of contemporary biology, we are, in a sense more literal than figurative, embodied words. 

Theologically speaking, each of our individual bodies can be considered as a unique word "spoken" by God!   As the “word” within your particular genome expresses itself and you grow into a living, embodied human being, you are able to respond to God’s Word, the Word made flesh in Jesus.  Perhaps this at least is part of what it means for humankind to be created in the image and likeness of God.  There is an intrinsic relationship written into our being between the individual human person and God.  The word within responds to the Word without.

In a sermon given in 1981, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, had this to say:  Out of that “Let there be” it was not some haphazard stew that was concocted.  The more we know of the universe the more profoundly we are struck by a Reason whose ways we can only contemplate with astonishment. …  In what is most vast, in the world of heavenly bodies, we see revealed a powerful Reason that holds the universe together.  And we are penetrating ever deeper into what is smallest, into the cell and into the primordial units of life, here we discover a Reason that astounds us, such that we must say with Saint Bonaventure: “Whoever does not see here is blind.  Whoever does not hear here is deaf.  And whoever does not begin to adore here and to praise the creating Intelligence is dumb [meaning here, “mute”, “without speech”].” 

Benedict means by “a Reason” the fundamental “Logos” or “Word” by which all things cohere. The opening to St. John’s gospel identifies that Logos with Jesus of Nazareth, the "Word made flesh." As St. Paul puts it in Colossians 1:16-17, “For by him all things were created; things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible … He is before all things and in him all things hold together.”