A brief assessment of the dialogue between science and faith over the past four decades shows some very encouraging consolidation and progress. Nevertheless, some difficulties have arisen, triggering an in-depth review of the contents and proceedings that are at stake in this dialogue. One of the authors committed to this analysis, perhaps the most prominent one among Spanish-speaking writers, is Mariano Artigas. His death at the end of 2006 in the middle of his career implies, for his followers, the obligation of recognizing his work not only by disseminating his ideas but also, and above all, by continuing and deepening his main lines of thought. In order to achieve this, I would like to present schematically Artigas's contribution to the understanding of the problems inherent in the science/faith dialogue. I shall refer specifically to his insistence on stressing the mediating function of philosophical wisdom as the suitable environment for orchestrating a fruitful exchange between disciplines.

Problems of the Dialogue between Science and Faith

Artigas identifies three predominant difficulties that hinder the dialogue between different kinds of knowledge. The first one is specialization, a phenomenon that involves an increasing dissemination of, and deepening into, the details of the knowledge of nature. This specialization has had the negative effect of a growing fragmentation of knowledge into incommunicable compartments. Artigas reminds us that specialization was already shaped in the nineteenth century with the comparison between ‘two cultures’: the scientific and the humanistic.