Reviews
Reviews
Werner J. Schwemmler
On the True Nature of Evolution
Between Science and Religion
Review
Institute for Medical Physics in the Medical Center Berlin-Buch, Germany
Associated member of the Free University Berlin, Germany, 18.07.2002
Prof. Werner Schwemmlers reminds us of the unsettling fact:
Everything was different after Galilei and Newton. Philosophy was no longer the handmaiden of theology. In the emerging empiricism, experiment was the method used to question nature directly and the answer given by experiment was different from the dominant sources of knowledge up to that time, experience and divine revelation. Science, which was based on quantitative, mathematical analysis, led to open conflict with theology. The resulting dilemma, which still exists today, has its causes on both sides:
* The Church went beyond its competence (in Galilei´s case), failing to recognize its incompetence in questions of science.
* The incompetence of the empiricists showed itself in their presumption that they could explain completely the cosmos and its history by means of quantitative materialistic methods, i.e., that evolution since the Big Bang exists in and of itself. Indications of the limits of human cognition are not taken into account. Among these are the ontological, cosmogenetic, moral and teleological so-called proofs of God, as well as individual divine revelations (e.g., the Marian visions of Katharina Labouré in 1830; the events in La Salette in 1846; in Lourdes in 1858; in Fatima in 1917; and in Medjugorje since 1981).
The author deserves credit for his attempt to bring about a reconciliation between the two sides. He does not believe, however, that the least common denominator of the world religions can provide an answer.
Eminently readable are the analyses of the trialic principle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in philosophy whith its analogon in the trialic principle information, mass and energy of material evolution. If creation - which reaches its pinnacle in the human being - is a reflection of the trinitarian God, then the trialic principle must be visible throughout.
One example for this:
The whole of the material world, all of the animate and inanimate cosmos, consists of the triad protons, neutrons and electrons. For higher-level triads the reader will have to read the book. I am convinced: The dialogue for "reunification of the sciences to a universal science" will be advanced by the publication of this work.
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