Original scientific paper
Freedom and Rationality in the Light of Evolutionism as a Total Worldview or: Question about Man in the Light of Creation and Evolution?
Tonči Matulić
; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The author engages in polemics with the idea of evolutionism as a total worldview in the light of Christian understanding of man as a person created in God’s image. The author does not controvert the postulates of the theory of evolution within the strict borders of natural science, but rather with the theory of evolution that is emerging as an ideology with hegemonic pretensions on the ultimate truth about the origin of life and man. For greater clarity of presentation the article is divided into five parts, not including the introduction with some epistemological explanations and the concluding thoughts. The first part unmasks the fallacy of evolutionism as a total worldview, with emphasis on the clear distinction of levels of reality and modes of cognition. The second part puts emphasis on fear caused by evolution and the need to free oneself from that fear for the reason of sober and rational distinction between fact and fiction, true and false. The third part brings some polemical accents against evolutionism as a total worldview, and the fourth part narrows and specifies the problem further, regarding the interpretation and understanding of the nature in general, and human nature in particular. After that, in the fifth and last part, the author gives a short account of the Christian view of man as a being created in God’s image in the light of biblical revelation and then explains in detail the Christian understanding of man as a person in the light of its irremovable metaphysical nature, i.e., spiritual-corporal or transcendental-immanent unity. On grounds of these considerations the author moves on to remind that man as a biological species homo sapiens indeed grows from below, but as a human person with its specific metaphysical nature they are born from above. Because the subject belongs to the challenges and problems between “the law of evolution” and “the law of creation” in the context of necessary dialogue between faith and reason, that is, theology and natural science, the author in the end explains the theological understanding of the beginning, in terms of the creation of the world and the cause of creation, in terms of God’s causality in the act of creation and/or through mechanisms and processes of evolution.
Keywords
evolutionism; the theory of evolution; natural science; nature; creation; theology; human nature; freedom; rationality; man; human person; the image of God
Hrčak ID:
79953
URI
Publication date:
26.4.2012.
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