Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "A scientist will say that there is a programming at a microscopic level... there is a molecule that has 10,000 million atoms and each small group of atoms is one... in some way the entire development of that organism is marked there. [...] How do they know when they have to do it and how does each cell decide what it has to do? We are talking about something that is a true mystery because the important thing in life is not its components but how they are structured."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: Is it logically sustainable, from scientific and mathematical rigor, to affirm that this hypercomplex programming wrote itself by pure chance?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "To say that this happens by chance is as absurd as saying that a computer is going to have the program because it does it itself by chance... And what is chance at the end of all? Well, it's nothing... chance is nothing more than a word to disguise ignorance."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: Let's talk then about the definitive ontological leap. If biological evolution explains anatomical modifications, can it also explain human intelligence, self-awareness and culture? How is our mind radically different from the most advanced brain in the animal kingdom?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "Evolution can only produce either a new organ or a new fixed way of acting. A spider does not change the style of the web with fashion, a bee does not calculate how to make the honeycomb to make it more beautiful, they do things in an automatic, fixed way."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: The human being, on the contrary, breaks that automatic determinism of nature.
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "Man, on the other hand, has freedom, he decides what he wants to do and does it responsibly and freely. And can Don Quixote be explained by pure chance? Pure nonsense."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: This is the great defeat of materialism. Many atheist neuroscientists desperately try to reduce our thoughts, our ethics, and our art to mere synaptic sparks. Is human intelligence an exclusive product of organic chemistry?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "Is human intelligence a chemical secretion of the brain? No, no one says that. Is human intelligence something that can be reduced to the four forces of matter? No. Neither the gravitational force can write a poem, nor the electromagnetic force, nor the nuclear forces."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: So, Father, what does philosophical logic require to explain modern, free and ethical man?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "We must admit that in the human being there is something that cannot come from matter, that cannot simply be the effect of a material evolution and that only a spirit can explain all of man's artistic activity, ethics, the sense of responsibility, freedom."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: Understanding this, many believers still feel uneasiness when science speaks of billions of years, seeming to contradict the "six days" of Creation recounted in Genesis. How should a rigorous Catholic read the Holy Scriptures in the face of astrophysics?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "The Bible does not teach us science, for that we have to do the work. As Saint Augustine already said, the Bible does not tell us how the heavens go but how to go to heaven, which is more important for us."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: What then is the profound theological message of the six days of creation, if it is not an astronomy manual?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "In those six days of creation there are three first days in which the land is prepared, the surroundings for the house and another three days in which it is furnished."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: And curiously, the most cutting-edge science, far from contradicting this vision of a universe prepared as "a house" for us, has formulated theories that amazingly support it, such as the famous Anthropic Principle. What does this principle discovered by physicists themselves reveal to us?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "The anthropic principle tells us that if we study the characteristics of the universe, its forces, its structures, its evolution, we reach the conclusion that nothing can be changed without physical laws immediately saying: we could not exist."