Stichwort: Evolution

Autor, Quelle: Byrne, Patrick, Beitrag zur Konferenz: World Views: Environment, Culture, Religion 7: 1-2 (March 2003)

Titel: Evolution allgemein: Lonergan - Darwin

Index: Evolution: Lonergan - Darwin; Materialismus - Intelligibilität

Kurzinhalt: While Lonergan's account is evolutionary in the broad sense, he carefully distanced himself from Darwin's version of evolution and the reductionistic, materialistic biases that characterize much of neo-Darwinian thought.

Text: Ib Those efforts reached a mature culmination in his classic work, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. There he gradually develops his account of the dynamic processes of the created order, characterized by what he called "emergent probability." While Lonergan's account is evolutionary in the broad sense, he carefully distanced himself from Darwin's version of evolution and the reductionistic, materialistic biases that characterize much of neo-Darwinian thought. In Lonergan's view, materialism assumes that ultimate reality is known through sensation, especially through sight and touch (i.e., the "real" as what resists physical contact). By way of contrast Lonergan argues that what is known through sensation is only a component of reality; it is intelligibility (what is known through human insight and judgment) that is the heart of the natural reality. Natural science, he argues, is fundamentally concerned with discovery of the intelligible relationships and orders that make up the natural world. Where a materialistic worldview regards something like physical impact as the ultimate explanatory cause, Lonergan argues that it is intelligible relatedness that explains why things are as they are and why they behave as they do. Nowhere is this more evident than in Lonergan's account of "emergence." In the following paragraphs I offer a brief sketch of Lonergan's account of "emergent probability." (Fs)

Stichwort: Evolution

Autor, Quelle: Schindler, David C., Jun, The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: Evolution - Schöpfung

Index: Kausalität 6i; Ewigkeit der Welt (Aristoteles) - Thomas; Nicht-Sein nicht zeitlich "früher" als Sein (Ordnung der Zeit d. Natur); Substanz transzendiert Zeit: Th.: Ewigkeit unterschieden von Zeit durch Prinzip der Ganzheit

Kurzinhalt: This means, ironically, that not only are creation and evolution not opposed in principle, but in fact evolution requires creation to be intelligible at all as the gradual coming to be of real beings. Chesterton captures this point quite well:

Text: 160a The second point to make is a more speculative development: it is true that no substance can exist merely temporally; the sheer multiplicity of time is incompatible with any sort of subsisting being. A fortiori a subsistent being does not come to be merely in time. Once we recognize this we are able to say that, if there is a subsistent being at all, its conditions of possibility were not given merely in the temporal moment prior to its actuality, but rather that its possibility is given simultaneously with its actuality, which transcends time by definition. What this means is that we cannot think of the coming-to-be of substances merely "horizontally," but must rather think of them "vertically" as unfolding in time from above. We will explore this notion more fully in the following chapter. The condition of possibility, in any event, does not precede in time but rather in nature, and the reference point for understanding the process lies not in the first moment, and then each succeeding moment thereafter, but in the form that lies above the temporal process altogether. At the same time, of course, the form reciprocally depends on the temporal process for its coming to be in reality, but this dependence is asymmetrical: the substance's dependence on its history lies so to speak inside the history's dependence on the substance. The passage we cited above expresses this point quite nicely: God gives time to the effect that he creates, which we may read as generously allowing it to develop gradually into what it has always been meant to be. (Fs; tblStw: Evolution) (notabene)

160b The inclusion of the horizontal dimension of being within the vertical dimension allows the possibility of a kind of evolution in the biological sphere, even though it precludes a purely mechanistic account of that evolution. It should be noted that, despite claims to the contrary, evolution cannot in any event be accounted for in wholly mechanistic terms insofar as mechanism excludes the possibility of natural forms and therefore of genuine substances.1 This means, ironically, that not only are creation and evolution not opposed in principle, but in fact evolution requires creation to be intelligible at all as the gradual coming to be of real beings. Chesterton captures this point quite well:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."2

161a The reason that there cannot be evolution without creation is because, as we have seen, there can be no intelligibility of any sort without the absoluteness of substance, which the supra-temporal and indeed the supra-formal act of creation alone — if one does not affirm the eternity of species — makes possible. As we have come to see, this acknowledgment of intelligibility requires an inversion of our normal way of thinking that limits physical being to the flux of time, and demands instead that we see time as belonging to things, as unfolding from above in reference to what transcends things. The physical world does indeed exist in time, but not reductively so: all real beings "stick out" ec-statically into the eternity of the God who made them from nothing and "continues" so to make them. The dis-integration of causes is a natural result of the failure to interpret creation thus metaphysically and the subsequent temporalization of being. A recovery of their integration, a restoration of the wholeness of things and thus the basis of any thinking whatsoever, will therefore require a restoration of a proper sense of being as created. (Fs) (notabene)