Science

SCIENCE. - By the term s. (Lat. scientia = knowledge, Gk. ἐπιστήμη) has always been meant a knowledge (v.) different from and more perfect than ordinary knowledge: different and more perfect not so much in respect of its object as in respect of the mode of knowing. The nature of this particular knowledge has come to be defined differently according to the various mentalities and the various ways in which knowledge itself has extended and deepened. According to the ancient acceptation, the typical s. is philosophy (v.); in the modern acceptation, the typical s. is physics (v.), to whose methods and characteristics the other disciplines that aspire to the dignity of s. must conform. It is clear that only the modern acceptation adequately distinguishes scientific knowledge from philosophical knowledge, and that therefore only with the birth of s. in the modern sense (with Galilean physics) did one acquire the conscious possession of the various articulations of knowledge: ordinary, scientific, philosophical knowledge. The distinction among these three forms of knowledge can be expressed by saying that the first resolves itself into ascertainment, the second into lawful description, the third into explanation and evaluation. In this formula is also expressed the autonomy of s. with regard to philosophy, even if such autonomy must not exclude collaboration.

The definition of the ancient concept of s. is under the influence of Plato and Aristotle (v.). For the former, s. is the knowledge of authentic reality (intelligible, ideal) and not of that spurious reality which is the sensible world. S. is thus constituted by emancipating itself from the ministry of the senses. S. is not induction (v.), physics, hypothesis (v.); but is only deduction (v.), philosophy (v.), dialectic ([v.] cf. especially Respubl., VI-VII, in particular 510-34). Aristotle definitively theorizes the ideal of scientific knowledge as deduction and syllogism (v.) that unfolds within the sphere of necessity and universality. The syllogism that concludes necessarily from necessary and universal premises is the unique instrument of s. Every breach of necessity and universality is a breach of the scientific character of knowing. The deductive syllogism provides, in the premise, the reason or cause of the conclusion: therefore scientific knowledge can also be defined as causal knowledge (efficient cause cient, final, material, formal; cf. especially Anal. post.). « Scientia de universalibus », « scire per causas » are the formulas that handed down for centuries the essence of the Aristotelian concept of s. Unlike Plato, who denies it, Aristotle acknowledges that a s. (philosophy) of nature is possible insofar as the universal (the form) is found in nature, on which the syllogism can be founded.

The concept of s. as necessary syllogism lasted throughout the Middle Ages. Even St. Thomas makes a classification of the sciences in the Aristotelian spirit, with the doctrine of the three degrees of abstraction (v.) which, successively prescinding from individual, sensible, intelligible matter (matter is the antithetical element of universality), found physics, mathematics, and philosophy.

While the reflexive concept of s. remained that of a demonstrative, deductive, necessary and universal knowledge, human knowledge in fact kept enriching, complicating, and specifying itself along a path different from the one theorized. A most important fact, because it was precisely along that path that those new ways of knowing were being attempted which, having acquired certainty and consciousness of themselves, were to become s. in the modern sense. Moreover, Aristotle already presents accurate descriptions of natural history (cf. De part. animal.; De gener. animal.; Hist. animal.); and in the Hellenistic period inquiries (such as biology, astronomy, medicine) kept developing which, unable to fit within it, remained on the margins of philosophy: experience, the great matrix of the modern sciences, is therefore present from that time onward. It is true that in the centuries of the early Middle Ages the scientific value of experience was misrecognized, with an allegorical and mystical interpretation of nature being superimposed upon it (continued sporadically well into the seventeenth century, with Kepler, for example); but with the thirteenth century (Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste [v.]), and even more with the fourteenth century (Ockham [v.] and the Ockhamists such as Buridan [v.], Oresme, Albert of Saxony [v.], etc.) the authentic sense of nature and the value of experience were again surely, though slowly and confusedly, reconquered. It was precisely from this tendency, which may be called naturalistic, that the new concept of s. was to be clarified, even if in the centuries of the revived influence of the ancients (fifteenth-sixteenth centuries) it would still be contaminated with the animistic and magical reveries of the pseudosciences (Telesio [v.], Paracelsus [v.], Cardano [v.], Agrippa [v.], etc.).

Finally Galileo (v.) concludes the effort of so many centuries by creating, with dynamics, the first s. in the modern sense and at the same time confidently formulating its new concept. Science, according to Galileo, must abandon the search for essences, for the why, for value, and limit itself to the lawful description of phenomena: the law, that is, the constant relation among elements of experience, is the object of scientific inquiry, and induction is its proper method. Galileo clearly traced the essential moments of the method: observation, hypothesis, verification. Observation, of which not the quantity but the manner matters. Hypothesis, which is the anticipation of the answer to the problem posed. Verification, which is the ratification or rejection of the hypothesis, brought about by nature itself through experiment (cf. Lettera a Liceti, in Opere, ed. naz., XVIII, especially pp. 208, 249; Saggiatore, ed. cit., VI, especially pp. 232, 348-49; Massimi sistemi, ed. cit., VII, especially pp. 60, 64-65, 126, 128, 171, 273). Science thus acquires its full autonomy by defining itself according to its own object and its own method. It is important to observe that this structure of s. is made possible by the fact that reality is considered under the quantitative aspect alone: hence the valorization of mathematics (v.) as an indispensable element of s. Only through mathematics is experience rationalized and necessitated; and therefore without mathematics there is no s. In this especially appears the distance between Galileo and Fr. Bacon (v.), often considered as the founder or co-founder of modern s. Bacon (cf. especially the Novum organum) suspects neither law nor mathematics nor experiment. He still moves within the ambit of qualitative and essential inquiry, although he has the merit of clearly denouncing the sterility of the deductive method and of calling for observation and experience. Denunciation and call which, however, had already been made by the Renaissance philosophers, such as Telesio (v.) and, more adequately, by Leonardo (v.), an authentic precursor of Galileo.

The history of the concept of s. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries again presents oscillations around the balance of experience and reason, so admirably defined by Galileo. Philosophers, whether rationalists (such as Malebranche [v.] and Spinoza [v.]) or empiricists (such as Locke [v.] and Condillac [v.]), re-propose the by then outdated concept of s. as deductive and a priori knowledge, which in the latter resolves itself into a nominalistic and tautological systematization. Descartes himself (Discours, part 4; Medit., III; Principia, pref. and bk. I, in particular bk. III § 43-44; moreover Regulae, III, V), for that matter, conceived physics as a deduction from the concept of intelligible extension, even if precisely this allowed him to accept mathematical treatment and therefore to valorize the Galilean principle. Rather, among scientists, along with the legacy of Galilean s., the legacy of its concept continues; with an accentuation of the experimental aspect. Thus Newton enunciates the canons of a methodical procedure in which the anticipatory and rational moment is somewhat minimized («hypotheses non fingo») in favor of an extension of the orienting and conclusive efficacy of experience (cf. in general Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, especially bk. III, beginning and scholium, and Optices, bk. III, especially qq. 28 and 31). The Newtonian tendency predominates in the eighteenth century just as the Cartesian one had dominated in the preceding century.

With an entirely new approach Kant (v.) seeks to reproduce the Galilean balance: autonomy of s. with regard to philosophy, synthesis of experience and reason, rationalization of experience. The autonomy, however, becomes exacerbated in the dualism of phenomenon (v.) and noumenon (v.); the synthesis of experience and reason no longer remains methodical but becomes structural; and the rationalization of experience becomes (universal) subjectivization of it. Thus the way is opened to Romanticism (v.) which, on the basis of idealistic subjectivism, transforms, by taking it up again, the univocal concept of knowledge, in which s. becomes a moment, more or less authentic, of philosophical (deductive, a priori) knowledge. Positivism (v.), while accepting the same thesis of the univocity of knowledge, it reverses the position by seeing philosophy as a moment of authentic knowledge, which is scientific knowledge (experimental, a posteriori). Positivism, by vindicating the experimental and inductive character of science, has more rigorously reaffirmed its descriptive and lawful nature. In it one may say that there begins that critical purification of scientific procedures which is directed above all at the care to avoid problems that exceed the bounds of descriptive lawfulness and to eliminate from the meanings of words the metempirical or approximate content that they unconsciously carry. But the narrowness of its epistemological premises prevented positivist science from justifying itself as universally valid knowledge, and prevented the positivist law from positing itself as a formula of necessity; while the pride — moreover not entirely unjustified — in the marvelous scientific progress of the 19th century drove the less cautious to canonize the whole body of the scientific theories of that time as the true and absolute representation of the universe, and to define, consequently, the processes and methods of science as the only valid use of the instruments of knowledge.

A reaction could not be long in coming that would bring science back to a more exact awareness of its own nature and its own limits. This occurred toward the end of the century on the part of philosophers and scientists who, against the positivist claim, formulated the new thesis of the practical and not theoretical value of science (cf. E. Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature, Paris 1874; E. Mach, Analysis der Empfindungen, Vienna 1886). This thesis, extended to mathematics by Poincaré (v. La Science et hypothèse, Paris 1902; id., La valeur de la science, ibid. 1905), and to knowledge in general by pragmatism ([v.] Peirce, James, Dewey), became one of the characteristic epistemological theses of present-day thought, put forward again by modern irrationalist and anti-intellectualist philosophies, and also by rationalist and idealist ones (e.g., B. Croce). The most audacious and most current developments of the new concept of science occur, also under the influence of the most recent revolutions in scientific theories (relativity, quantum theory, probabilism), in the formalist and neopositivist schools (R. Carnap, Logische Syntax der Sprache, Vienna 1934).

According to the formalist tendency (Russell, Hilbert, etc.), science must strive, as toward its goal, to formalize itself, that is, to constitute itself as a hypothetical-deductive system, in which the principles of deduction renounce every intuitive content and the very procedure of deducing is resolved into pure rules of transformation. Thus science loses the concern for content and truth, while the demand for form and exactness is exalted instead, to the point of arriving at perfect scientificity in the perfectly empty and perfectly exact schema, in itself signifying nothing. Parallel to this tendency, in force especially among mathematicians and with regard to mathematics, is the tendency of physicists with regard to physics. They too (physicists like Heisenberg, philosophers like the Vienna Circle), while on the one hand, aspiring to perfect systematic rigor, incline to nominalism (v.) and to science as coherence, or at least to the resolution of physics into mathematical formulas, on the other hand cannot however cut the bridges with experience and consequently propose an operational criterion that ensures the maximum rigor by delimiting the domain of the physical entity as that of the entity definable by experiment (real or ideal), that is, finally, as that of the measurable entity and insofar as it is measurable. And this could be seen as a development of Galileo's concept of science if such a doctrine were not founded on empiricist-nominalist epistemological presuppositions that neglect the non-measurable and non-experimental elements involved in every moment of science.

The theoretical value of science is nevertheless still defended in an idealist sense (e.g., B. Varisco, Scienza e opinione, Rome 1901; L. Brunschvicg, Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale, Paris 1927), in a relativistic sense (e.g., A. Aliotta, L'esperimento nella scienza, nella filosofia, nella religione, Naples 1936), in a rationalist sense (G. Bachelard, La formation de l'esprit scientifique, Paris 1938), in a realist sense (E. Meyerson, Du cheminement de la pensée, ibid. 1931; E. Orestano, Verità dimostrate, Naples 1934, especially chaps. 3-5; J. Maritain, Les degrés du savoir, Paris 1932, especially part 1, chaps. 2, 4).

However one may judge the various positions of contemporary thought just recalled, one cannot fail to recognize that at least one of Galileo's conquests has generally remained in them: the autonomy of science with regard to philosophy. And, consequently, also with regard to religion (v.): and therefore today most are persuaded of the futility of the supposed conflict between science and faith (v.), which so preoccupied the generation of the last century. There is perhaps reason to fear, on the contrary, that autonomy may become extraneousness and indifference and incomprehension, threatening the unity of the spirit and the harmony of the subject. Besides the references already indicated, see also: CONOSCENZA; ESPERIENZA; IDEA; METODOLOGIA; NEOPOSITIVISMO; VERITÀ.

Franco Amerio

SCIENCE AND FAITH

The question of the relations that exist between faith and s[cience] - relations of harmony or of conflict - had quite combative periods during the 19th century; nor can one say that it has ceased to be vigorously agitated even in the 20th century, down to our own days. The cause is to be sought in the influence exercised by the various philosophical theories that rose one after another into vogue (idealism, historicism, existentialism, positivism, relativism, scientism) and in the impulse derived from the emergence of ever new hypotheses in historical and scientific matters, too hastily and greedily accepted and endorsed as unshakable theses, through ingenuousness, ignorance, craving for novelty or other aims, open or implied, but always outside the strictly scientific field.

The alleged conflict between s[cience] and faith would derive from the fact that faith, with its method of authority, its dogmas intolerant of progress, of evolution and of adaptation to modern thought, and its immobile fixity, ill accords, indeed cannot accord at all, with s[cience], always in motion with its procedures of free research and free criticism, wholly and anxiously bent on progress, on the revision of outmoded positions and on ever broader and deeper investigations. Consequences: the Catholic who wishes to remain truly such can never be a true scientist; a kind of dichotomy of the Catholic is necessary, in the double personality of the believer and of the critic or scientist; and the conflict between s[cience] and faith must issue in the integral realization of the Voltairian motto: « ceci tuera cela », meaning naturally by « ceci » s[cience] and by « cela » faith.

1. The position of the Church

The Church's taking of a position regarding this alleged conflict and the nebulousness of the terms in which it is draped is extremely simple and straightforward and was clearly expressed in the Vatican Council (sess. III, De fide catholica, cap. 4 [Denz-U, n. 1799]): a) faith and reason can never disagree with one another: but they lend each other mutual help: reason rightly applied demonstrates the firmness of the foundations of faith; faith frees and preserves reason from error and enriches it with much knowledge. b) The Church is so far from hindering the study of the arts and the s[ciences] that on the contrary it helps and promotes them in many ways. c) Nor does it at all forbid each s[cience] to employ and follow in its own field the principles and methods that are proper to it. d) But, while it recognizes this just freedom in s[cience], it forestalls and prevents it from accepting errors contrary to divine Revelation and from overstepping its own boundaries to invade the field of faith and cast it into confusion. The position of the Church, therefore, is wholly in favor of agreement and harmony between the two fields, against every presumed and absurd dichotomy, because its starting point is clear: God, author of the natural and supernatural order, of Revelation and of s[cience], absolutely cannot contradict himself, nor reveal a truth that is contrary to s[cience], when this is true s[cience].

2. The position of the adversaries

Not so clear and limpid, on the other hand, is the position of the adversaries, given the confusion that reigns in their starting points, although they all converge in arriving at the assurance that it is impossible to be Catholics and at the same time lovers of a free and modern culture. Here we touch on the principal objections, following them with the confutation.

a) S[cience], say the upholders of the alleged conflict, must be entirely free, not obey preconceived ideas, nor accept imposed solutions. Now the Catholic scientist, if he wishes to remain such, will necessarily have to approach history, philosophy, ethnography, etc. with ideas already imposed and determined (the dogmas and doctrines of the Church) and therefore preconceived; which deprives his research and his conclusions of all scientific value. The answer is easy: these same adversaries, who so delight in vaunting the full freedom of their investigations, are themselves victims of a prejudice, of a preconceived idea, because every rationalistic procedure is dominated (whether one wishes to admit it or not) by a negative and absolute premise of theirs: the exclusion of the supernatural and of the possibility of a real transcendent being, the impossibility or unhistoricity of a divine Revelation. The materialist, who denies God because transcendent and not immanent in the universe, the rationalist who wants to demonstrate how God does not enter into the government and the history of the world, the evolutionist who affirms that man derives soul and body from the beast, etc. obey principles that they have accepted as unshakable; they follow or create a philosophy of their own; in other words, they obey preconceived ideas. Moreover, it must be said that every scientific work must necessarily presuppose a certain number of preconceived ideas: the historian must after all have a certain conception of the world and of life; the philosopher cannot disregard the truths proclaimed by common sense; the scientist must start from positions already scientifically proved by other earlier scientists, on pain, if he wishes to retrace the whole path from the beginning, of not advancing s[cience].

Nor is the scientific character of a work to be judged a priori from its conclusion being favorable or not to the adversary's ideas; but to determine whether it is scientific or not, one must examine the method according to which it was composed, that is, whether it was conducted according to the principles and laws of that particular s[cience].

To anyone, then, who might observe that the impossibility of the supernatural is by now a philosophically acquired certainty, one can reply that for the Catholic the possibility of it is also a philosophically acquired certainty; here everything depends not on the aprioristic affirmation about the value of a particular philosophy, but on the documented and sifted proofs on which it is founded.

b) The Catholic, it is observed, is never merely a scientist, but is also an apologist; he does not seek truth for its own sake, but in function of the defense of his beliefs, and this apologetic preoccupation falsifies his judgment. One may concede that some Catholic scientist also has apologetics in view, as indeed also happens in the opposing camp, where proofs and facts are blithely bent to the defense of a particular theory, e.g., Marxist or monist (it suffices to think of the heap of fables collected by Draper and proposed as true historical facts, or of the famous falsifications introduced by Haeckel in the series of embryos); but not all Catholic scientists are apologists; they take care instead to prove and document the facts, leaving truth to defend itself, merely by appearing in the clear light of their exposition. Here too it will suffice to observe whether the particular methods and principles of the s[cience] have truly been followed, and to deduce the scientific character or otherwise of the work from the result of this ascertainment.

c) The Catholic is not free in his research, because his conclusions are already imposed on him beforehand by an external authority. The answer requires a distinction. First of all, it must be noted that Revelation has by no means the task of substituting itself for scientific procedures, as though depriving them of their reason for being; nor of positively teaching the sciences, fixing their principles and methods; but only of making known, and therefore rejecting as errors, insofar as they are contrary to the infallible testimony of God, many positions and conclusions that the philosopher or the scientist might be tempted to accept as scientific truths or at least as hypotheses awaiting a future proof (cf. the encyclical of Pius XII Humani generis of 12 Aug. 1950, in the part concerning polygenism: AAS, 42 [1950], p. 579). "The Catholic scientist must keep divine Revelation before his eyes as a star that directs his path, whose light will serve to warn him of the reefs to be avoided" (Letter of Pius IX to the Archbishop of Munich of 21 Dec. 1863 [Denz-U, n. 1681]).

And when the Church intervenes in these cases, she does not sit down in the midst of scientists as one of them: but she speaks with the authority of God the revealer, as one charged from on high to preserve from error and from deviations. Now, there are conclusions that belong exclusively to the domain of pure science, and then the Church does not intervene (for example, she does not lay down laws for the scientist who studies electricity or biology) in the field of their competence; but there are also conclusions that belong to a mixed domain, that is, of science and of faith (for example, the origin of man, the spirituality of the soul, the descent of the human race from a single primitive stock: Adam and Eve, etc.) and then the Church intervenes to prevent errors and deviations.

Nor does the scientist, as a Catholic, accept the fact of Revelation and of the authority of the Church without well-founded and unshakable reasons, nor are arguments lacking to prove it in a certain and sure manner; and neither does he confuse what is dogma with those philosophical, exegetical and historical proofs produced in support of dogma, when the Church's magisterium has not pronounced on them. In this way he possesses perfect unity in his thought and is not obliged to split himself unnaturally into two persons foreign to each other: the believer and the scientist.

d) A final objection: the Catholic, when he undertakes the examination of religious facts, not only admits from the outset the possibility of Revelation, but already acts on the basis of its reality; in other words: the facts that he wishes to adduce as rational proof of assent to dogma, he already sees in the light of this. One must answer that nothing forbids dogmas, already accepted by our mind, from influencing or being able to influence in some way the orientation of our research; for why cannot the believer also strengthen his faith by way of a purely rational and autonomous process, when it is possible? Why can he not start from purely rational principles and arrive at rational conclusions that perfectly coincide with his faith? In fact, the existence of God, which is a dogma of faith, can and must be admitted also by a purely rational process; therefore the Catholic scientist is in no way diminished if he already knows beforehand by another way, the way of faith, the goal to which he must arrive.

3. The religiosity of science

In the two discourses on scientific subjects, delivered by Pius XII to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (22 Nov. 1951; AAS, 44 [1952], pp. 31-43) and to the World Congress of Astronomy

(7 Sept. 1952; ibid., pp. 732-39), the Holy Father wished to set out clearly yet another problem as well; that of the religiosity of science. On the one hand, in fact, scientific investigations, by bringing to light the intrinsic mutability and the structural and functional contingency of the cosmos, reaffirm the objective validity of the Thomistic rational arguments concerning the existence of God, which can be rethought today on a broader, more critical and deeper empirical basis; on the other hand, the conquest of cosmic space has demonstrated the limitedness of scientific knowledge, the finiteness of the investigating spirit and of the cosmos investigated, so that man must also stop before insurmountable frontiers; whence the necessary affirmation of the existence of God, eternal creative spirit.

Science is therefore "religious" because it is "bound to God," both by the object of its investigations (the cosmos) and by its cognitive search (the human spirit); cosmos and human spirit are, albeit on essentially different planes, finite beings, sprung into being through creation, which therefore point back, by a causal deductive process, to God. Consequently the reconciliation between faith and science presupposes two principles: "the first, that the method of the sciences is valid only within the sphere in which they are really competent, that is, the sphere of the senses; the second, that beyond physical cognitions and realities there are other realities, the metaphysical ones - for example, causality - which do not depend on the data of the senses, but on universal ontological laws. And these, far from being inferior in certainty to the laws of sensible nature, are superior to them, since they hold for every being as such. Now they lead with an irresistible force to the natural knowledge of God" (His Holiness Pius XII to the students of the Studium Urbis, 15 June 1952).

Celestino Testore

SCIENCE AND TECHNIQUE

By the expression "scientific-technical progress," understood very widely and in various ways, what is meant here is "the ever-growing heritage of scientific discoveries and technical applications, won over time by humanity." From the moral point of view, in order to answer the central question — "whether it is good that men enjoy an ever more considerable quantity of scientific discoveries and technical applications" — certain clarifications and distinctions must first be laid down.

First of all, a distinction must be made between s. as such, that is, profound and disinterested investigation of natural phenomena in order to know their causes and laws, and technique as quantitative knowledge and the practical and economic utilization of the forces and goods of nature. Even when one speaks of "men" who can "enjoy" technical progress, it must be made clear whether a few men or the greatest possible number are meant, a few nations or all peoples, a few social classes or all, and whether this as a simple right or also as effective realization.

At least tendentially, when one speaks of men one must mean all men: every discrimination goes against a demand of social justice which must be realized not only as regards access to economic goods, but also access to s. and to the use of technical means. Today immense sectors of humanity still lack scientific knowledge and technical possibilities, because of economic deficiencies and disproportions, but also because of the scant interest of public authorities and of individuals or communities themselves, who do not understand their importance and urgency. There is not for scientific and technical knowledge the same enthusiasm that exists, for example, for other remunerations, for the possession of economic goods and also, to a lesser degree, for literary and artistic culture; whereas "humanistic" culture itself today cannot prescind from scientific and technical knowledge, inasmuch as both together form the environment in which the "real man" of today lives.

This premised, a few observations will facilitate the proposed moral evaluation: 1) every cognition and technical-scientific device is by its nature a means and must never become an end; 2) s. and technique have their own intimate autonomy: their laws are in themselves reality and truth and as such, if kept within their own sphere, have their own proper absoluteness which fears no external influences or corruptions.

From the first observation it follows that on technical progress as such no moral judgment can be given, except in relation to the ends it is made to serve: neither electrical energy, nor a new metal alloy, nor an ingenious mechanism, nor even the atomic bomb is susceptible of moral judgment: everything depends on the use made of it, that is, on the ends toward which such means are directed.

From the second observation it follows that s. and technique contain laws that cannot be changed by the will of man, and cannot be hidden or falsely presented without failing in a basic honesty. Especially s., as disinterested search for truth, is a commitment of man, endowed by God with intelligence and with a vocation to research. Under this aspect, every discovery is always a good and a reason to give glory to God. As for technique, since its problems are always common to economic ones, the moral judgment on a technical application must take into account the economic effects: in particular, whether it yields an honest or dishonest profit, individual or social, immediate or future.

When, then, in the judgment on technique one passes to that on "technicians," a third observation must be added: 3) every scientist or technician is always and above all a man. Although technique is a means, the technician, as a man, must never, by himself or by others, be lowered to the rank of an instrument. At no moment can he be indifferent to the results of his work: if as a technician he has the duty to provide his work with scrupulous objectivity, as a man he must take a position regarding the free choices that men may make of the possibilities offered by technique.

A fourth and last observation can be made in defense of technique against the pessimists: 4) it is in itself a means to free man, all men, from material necessities and to allow him to occupy himself ever more with the needs of the spirit. If this does not seem to be happening today, the blame cannot be laid on technique but rather on the will of men.

In substance, as the means in man's possession increase, so too do his temptations increase (understood as external trials; the interior problem evidently remaining not necessarily bound to such external trials). And although this does not constitute, in itself, a worsening of the situation, because it also increases the merits of those who resist, it is necessary to concern oneself intensely with the necessary moral strengthening of man, on the natural plane and on the supernatural one, so that he may be able to resist the stronger solicitations to which he is subjected. It is necessary, that is, that moral progress proceed in step with technical progress.

Andrea Ferrari-Toniolo