Moonbase

After a number of recent conversations related to science versus religion, and consequently the inerrancy of scripture, I’ve realized that I don’t necessarily have an adequate understanding of Church teaching in that regard.

As a result, today I’ve been reading (among other things) Providentissimus Deus, an encyclical (circular letter) by the 19th-century pope Leo XIII, which touches on all of the above.

I’m still absorbing it, but one passage in the eighteenth paragraph seemed pertinent for sharing.

There can never, indeed, be any real discrepancy between the theologian and the physicist [scientist], as long as each confines himself within his own lines, and both are careful, as St. Augustine warns us, “not to make rash assertions, or to assert what is not known as known.” [...] the Holy Ghost “Who spoke by them [the sacred writers], did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe [...]), things in no way profitable unto [relevent to] salvation.” Hence they did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time [...]