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Social aspects of the science- religion dialogue in post-totalitarian societies 1. Introduction The dialogue between the two approaches to reality, embodied by modern science and religion, was never a purely academic question; it was relevant not only for the individual scientist but the whole academic community, and also has important consequences for the society as…
Dialog has become a magic concept in the modern world. This corresponds to the appraisal of an interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary approach in science 1. This paper points to a relation between two areas of dialog, between science and religion on the one hand and interreligious dialog on the other hand. The underlying idea is that…
“The main fallacy in this kind of thinking is that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a �constructivist� one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe� (P. W. Anderson 1972) �It is plain that there is…
In the mid-1940s the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan concluded that Catholic theology needed to come to terms with modern thought not only in terms of its content but with its methods and procedures. The immediate trigger was a year-long series of lectures on “Thought and Reality” to lay people in Montreal, where he was then…
MECHANICISM Realism We can introduce the elements of Mechanism in the context of Newtonian dynamics. A Newtonian system is an assembly of particles submitted to external and internal forces. The state of each particle is specified by means of its position and its velocity. That state can be conceived as the state in itself of…
REPLACING METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM Richard Dawkins, during a recent interview about his new book, The God Delusion, proclaimed “[T]he big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism.”1 I agree with Dawkins to the extent that naturalism, whether we are talking about metaphysical naturalism or methodological naturalism, is one of the primary…
Foreword Mircea Eliade, the great historian and philosopher of religions, did not consider the present ‘desacralization’ of modern life as the desirable ending of a necessary progress. “The ‘sacred’ is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness” (Eliade 1978: xiii). In his view, it is rather…
I. IntroductionThe concepts of reductionism, naturalism, and nominalism in their radical form lie at the base of most anti-religious scientific writing, lurking there at such a deep level that even the author in many cases is unaware of the metaphysics they represent. Reductionism, in its most radical form, is the theory (or belief) that all…
The twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, offered this provocative statement in his mature philosophical work, Adventures in Ideas: The teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty.1 This sentence from Whitehead points toward a rich and stimulating conception of beauty—not as mere ornamentation (ultimately as cosmetics), which one can place…
1. From Science to Naturalism A good starting point for entering the discussion of science, religion and naturalism is to start with a short characterisation of science. A first major characteristic of science is its wide scope. Physics is not limited to terrestrial phenomena anymore but one of its sub-disciplines developed into astro-physics. Chemistry can…