1

Dieter Hattrup

Conversations with Darwin 3

– Thomas Aquinas –

New York May, 2011

Charles Darwin, the great evolutionary biologist, held a number of meetings in the 21st century with famous thinkers that are philosophers, scientists and theologians to achieve a new understanding of evolutionary theory. The starting point is the revolution of science by quantum theory in the 20th century.

Total number of characters: 100.000

© 2011 Dieter Hattrup, New York

CONTENT

Thomas Aquinas 4

1. Great theologian and Gentleman 4

2. Border or no border of knowledge 9

3. Definition of chance 13

4. Failed theories of evolution 18

5. The Lamarckism 20

6. All people strive for knowledge 23

7. Knowledge of non-knowledge 27

8. The theological difference 31

9. Dangerous proofs of existence? 34

10. Connection in contradiction 39

11. Theories without borders 42

12. Frightened theologians 44

13. Improvement of Aristotle 48

14. World of things and persons 51

15. The three original creations 55

16. The decimal acceleration 59

17. Christ as an evolutionary theorist 63

18. Anthropology and Primatology 67

19. Descartes abolishes aging 70

20. The origin of language 73

The program 77

Thomas Aquinas

1. Great theologian and Gentleman

Darwin: Come in, brother Thomas, Salve! I am fully aware of the honor you show me by your visit. The great theologian at the small English gentleman! Here in eternity we could have met us even a long time ago. The long tormenting journey in time that is necessary on Earth, we do not suffer of it here any more. But so far we didn‘t had any occasion for a conversation.

Thomas: Well, that's true, there was no a reason. Travel times, are no longer with us here, but a kneaded eternity without structure, we even do not have. There must be occasions, otherwise we do not act, otherwise we run no conversation, even here. Mr Darwin also Salve for you, the honor is all mine. I mean, the great world is now on your side and the small province on my side. I am a theologian, and theologians don‘t have much prestige in the 21th century. You are a scientist, and science is regarded as the enlightenment of an era and your evolution as the sun of all suns.

Indeed, why does the journey from time to eternity last so long? I think it is the walk through the whole history which makes so much trouble to people. Therefore, we see ourselves only today. We need an occasion, otherwise nothing is working at all. Eventually, we are bodily human beings, not mere spirits.

Illustration 1: Death of Socrates

Darwin: I remember the dead‘s conversation of Socrates which he was pleased to run after he had been sentenced by the people's court in Athens to death by the cup. Although, at that moment there was really no reason for having joy. Do you think Socrates even has had an occasion?

Thomas: If the memory doesn‘t deceive me, after the hemlock being in eternity he wanted to speak with Ajax, with Orpheus, with Musaios, with Hesiod, Homer and other heroes of old. What really he wanted to talk to them?

Darwin: Well, for a moment ... But yes, now I have it again, the reason is clear. It was the justice, or rather the lack of justice among the Athenians. Socrates wanted to talk about his fate and compare it to their fate.

Thomas: You see, therefore my favorite saying is, as it was formulated by one of my disciples: ‚We are humans and not mere souls – Homines sumus non solum animae.‘ All things in our life relate to the earth, we are bound by the physical existence; only thereby we are humans, first in time, then in eternity.

Darwin: Even in eternity with a body?

Thomas: Of course, as usual! We, before the World Court, before the last judgement, we are still without a body, but always look back to the earth. Even the fate of these long deceased Greeks is earthy, therefore Socrates will in eternity talking to them about the injustice of the world, therefore also the late Socrates hopes of a body.

It‘s a very earthly reason why I speak to you, Mr Darwin, from a very wordly occasion. There are many fainthearted among theologians of the 21st century who are afraid of the Darwinian theory of evolution as the devil is afraid of holy water. Just as in my time there were many fainthearted die to Aristotle.

Darwin: I understand well. So we have found a very earthly reason, too, for our heavenly conversation. My theory of evolution triggers fear at the theologians? Some or even many? The theory has also made me fear, too, at least the fear that my wife had against this theory. She has always warned me from my dangerous ideas, dangerous for faith. Nevertheless, finally I could not do otherwise, I had to throw the torch in 1859. I had to bring myself to a naturalistic interpretation of nature, I had to stay honest.

Illustration 2: First Edition of 1859

Thomas: Not often does this happen, it is rare, but it happens. I trust you: There is the honest, real, the erring conscience. Because we are terrestrial, I say better, because we are linked to time, therefore the appearance of things can induce in us the wrong opinion of its being.

Darwin: You see, therefore I also have an earthly reason to talk to you. Something has happened. A change, a mutation has occurred, wich no one had expected, least of all me. No, no, not my theory must be changed, it is the interpretation of the theory, that is the theory of theory, this must be transformed. At the beginning of the 21st century it looks very different than in the midst of the 19th century, although the theory is dead richt and has remained one hundred percent the same.

The same and very different, oddly, isn‘t it? My theory of evolution must not be changed by a millimeter in its basics, in contrast to Newton and his theory. Nevertheless, it must be understood differently, as I understood it. This change makes on my part the conversation with you, with the great theologian meaningful. Honestly it was not yet very meaningful.

Thomas: So that is why the synthesis of the process philosophy and of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin did not work properly. Very understandable.

Darwin: Oh, you've heard of this before! Well, I mean, these two theories are based in the humanities, they look at the previous change, I mean the change that my teaching of evolution has triggered in the 19th century. They overlook, however, the transformation of science in the 20th century. Therefore, those syntheses could not work properly.

2. Border or no border of knowledge

Thomas: That is odd. Therefore I'm interested in your transformation theory or evolution theory as it is called today. It is a theory for everything and anything, in any case it wants to explain all of life. Whether it really is clarifying all, we must investigate. But the toughest followers, who appear in your name, Mr Darwin, are very fond of the clarification. ‚Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.‘

By the way, this Theodosius Dobzhansky, from which the word of 1973 stems, is not particularly persistent. He was not a naturalistic ideologue who mixed up desire and reality, but he was always an accessible man. So, why do you want to transform your transformation theory? Can you have a correct theory, without having it understood correctly?

Darwin: Yes, exactly, that‘s possible. The theory of evolution is absolutely true over 150 years, but to understand it correctly, never since one scientist succeeded, not even me. I know of no other example. Only my descent and transformation theory is of this kind. Yes, maybe the quantum theory of the 20th century is of the same type but only because the theory of quantum and theory of evolution is actually the same. It's all up to now been completely correct which I have thought as a mechanism for evolution in the 19th century.

This is not the case with the other theories. Nevertheless, the current transformation of the transformation theory convinces me completely. My theory is composed of chance and necessity. This is an explosive mixture, because I do not know what is is, the chance, only the need is knowable. I have at my time chance considered to be the indicative of not knowing. That was wrong, but my the theory was not affected by this. Only the interpretation must change. Who can understand chance and its interaction with the necessity really?

Thomas: What are you saying? I've also been thinking about chance and necessity. Before we get to the failed theories of evolution, let me tell you how I dealt with chance and necessity. And you can tell me what it is durable and what is not. I mean in the light of 700 years of a huge growth in knowledge.

Darwin: Yes, I like very much to think about the dependence of knowledge from time and from the world view. Especially since I have now realized how much I myself was dependent.

Thomas: I myself once posed the question of chance and necessity, which is in the quaestio 86 of part one of my main work. The question there was: Can reason recognize the contingent things?

Darwin: And what was your answer?

Thomas: It's simple: Direct, no, indirect, yes. I must explain it. There is nothing accidental about it, I said, that does not even have a little bit of necessity. This mixture would then be the indirect recognition of the contingent. I have mentioned Socrates as an example.

Darwin: I still know it from school. All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, so Socrates is mortal.

Thomas: Yes, yes, I know it well. But here we are not dealt with a logical, but with an ontological problem. If Socrates is going, he must move, I said. Whether he goes, that is a random thing, but if he goes, he must move, this is necessary. That was my example of the need in any accident or in any contingency.

Darwin: Yes, I believe here we can do something else. Thus, the primacy of necessary before chance you have already pointed out correctly. The priority of need has been the obsession of the mechanical science in modern times at an extreme degree, until it could go not further on. Chance is a lack of knowledge, therefore it should be expelled completely, so that full knowledge can triumph. The result of the 400-year-old program to the expulsion of chance, however, was the opposite: The accident has settled in all its glory once again besides the need and is sitting there as solid as before, more solid as before.

Thomas: I am eager to hear about it. You may ask me not to neglect of the chance or of the contingents, as I have said. The chance I've linked to the matter, the necessity to the form. So I am followed the usual practice by Aristotle.

Illustration 3: Platon and Aristoteles

Darwin: Well, therefore chance is for you still a residual category. Rather you would have the full need, right?

Thomas: No, Mr Darwin, that‘s not allowed to say. Here at the Socrates-example I explain the accident from the direction of necessity, but at the creation of the world and the relationship of body and soul I give the matter a high priority. Matter creates the unique, the individual, the creative, even though I've never really understood this by myself. Rather, I say the opposite: Full rationality and strict necessity in nature ins‘t appropriate to the reality of humanity.

Darwin: I suspect you have thougt big, when you said, the beginning of creation cannot be proved or refuted. Because, as you say, reason cannot judge reasonably about one-time events.

Thomas: That was my way of limiting the knowledge to get space for the faith.

3. Definition of chance

Darwin: You have vehemently objected to Aristotle, without telling loudly. Well, yes, loud shouting, you had never need of. Your arguments were always very strong.

We want to compare your position with that of one of today. How indeed was your definition of chance or of contingency?

Thomas: I then said, random is a thing, a phenomenon or an event which may be or may not be.

Darwin: A reasonable definition with which we can highlight the difference! Today we would say: Randomness is to be found, if the same causes do not always have the same effects. By the way, the modern age has only thought of the efficient cause.

Thomas: We had always assumed several causes, four it were entirely accurate. Although the efficient cause I already found most important.

Darwin: With your definition you were more attached to the material and formal cause. As you did in your quaestio 86.

Thomas: And why has the modern age tried to determine the cause by the cause of action?

Darwin: Has not. Modern age has tried to eliminate the chance.

Thomas: Like my philosopher Aristotle, for him the nothing was the matter, a dirty residual category into which reason could not enter.

Darwin: Here you find a huge difference. The metaphysics and physics of modern times wanted to have a total overview, really and with all seriousness. And only effective cause can really provide the overview. Assuming you can eliminate randomness so that the same cause is always followed by the same effect. The physicist Galileo declared the matter for rational then applying mathematics to nature. He first began to read the book of nature with mathematics. Initially he had even a huge success, only at the very end, nature once again pulled back reason and mathematics.

If you want to talk with static and dynamic, brother Thomas, your definition is static, because there was not much known in your time of natural and cultural history. And the more recent time is dynamic. When pictures learned to move!

Thomas: What do you mean?

Darwin: Sorry, this is just a saying. It shows the transition from photo to film. The philosophy before the modern times, including yours and that of Aristotle, offers only still images of reality. It describes no significant events in history.

Thomas: Of that you can not accuse me. Creation is a great event for me, then the incarnation of Christ and many others events. For Aristotle, however, your opinion can apply, and I have built on Aristotle. What might this then mean?

Darwin: You are once again right. I must apologize once more. You are starting a dynamic view of reality. But your Nova, your new events, are still no more than certain points. There is no true continuous development, which produces the figures and shapes of history.

Illustration 4: Galileo Galilei

Thomas: Just now you told me that the modern age had wanted to get rid of the chance to win an overview of all reality. This means then also the desire for a surprise-free world, so a static world. Even more than me!

Darwin: You plunge me to think. Yes, on the one hand, the modern age has discovered the historical development of nature. You may even speak of a breakthrough of historical thinking in the 19th century. On the other hand, the modern age was a huge movement, to bring all movements in the world to a halt with the help of a law or perhaps a theory of everything.

Thomas: Very strange ..., but no, I understand well. Overview is just to understand the motion, to set the movements to a halt with the help of thoughts. But that is for me a different movement than that in mathematical physics. The efficient cause of science describes the movement in space and time, and in this case the naturalist feels handicapped by coincidence.

Darwin: And what movement did you describe?

Thomas: Yes, that is the movement of matter between the possible and the real reality. Besides God all reality is for me, of course, accidental or contingent. But elements of necessity mix themself into the accident as we have seen before with the example of Socrates.

Darwin: Such a coincidence is of course not a troublemaker anymore, but the mode of existence of the creature, in contrast to the Creator.

Thomas: And in modern times the coincidence had become a troublemaker?

Darwin: Always and everywhere! Until I've won the new conviction, to recognize freedom in the interplay of chance and necessity.

Thomas: I have always set the need against the free will. Then I said of course, both must not contradict each other. For example, if the evil overtakes his fate, that is necessary. This can be a lightning, a plague or the torment of hell. The mode of punishment is random and contingent, the punishment itself is necessary to bring the scales of justice back into balance.

Darwin: That sounds a little bit connected externally, juxtaposed ...

Thomas: ... extrinsecus we said at our time.

Darwin: Well, let's do it intrinsically. Or the modern era has done it intrinsically, by adopting the necessity of God into nature. Scientists hoped to get all the events of nature into their hands. They have then, horribly or fortunately, encountered the opposite. God as the creator has the very freedom in his hand. Freedom is revealed to the outside, in nature, as chance and necessity. This is a freedom which is intensified and recognized in the humans.

Thomas: That must have been a theologically fruitful time, these modern times, isn‘t it?

Darwin: Yes, the time was fertile, quite against its will. It has made the work of the Creator and the creatures seen in a way, as it was never possible to think of before. This happened by the opposite program that was written on its flag: Drive away God the Creator. My hobby at the moment is to study the major programs that have achieved the opposite of what they have being targeted. Darwinism is one of them.

4. Failed theories of evolution

Thomas: Of this I could hear for hours. But go ahead in the history of your evolutionary theory. You wanted to bring yet an example of a failed biological evolution.

Darwin: I will bring two examples. Of course, many people in the 19th century suspected a movement between species, both in animals as in plants, even in the 18th century. Life couldn‘t always have looked like today. Too many excavated bones, too much fauna and flora on the islands showed a gradual change in the species. That was too much.

The real spectacle of nature was very different than the imaginary sight that, for example, Aristotle had on nature. Aristotle thought the world would be eternal, and in this eternal reality, there were same creatures in eternal immutability. He taught in his ‚Origin of Animals‘ a perpetual breeding of living creatures. They should, he said, go through their eternally repeated reproduction, from eternity to eternity. This was for two thousand years the scientific dogma: The world is in eternal motion, the God in eternal non-motion.

The God of Aristotle was like the world formula of the 20th century: Both are motionless, they move everything, and they know nothing of the world. Therefore, they have a fourth common feature: There is no unmoved mover and no world formula, no theory of everything, but this knowledge has only won in the 20th century.

Thomas: Yes, my great philosopher! He is great in thought, and he is great in error. There is no eternally continuing movement in nature, which comes from a big bang, as now even knows cosmology. My task was to improve Aristotle in important points. For example, in that of the eternity of the world. The philosopher teaches in his booklet about the ‚sky‘ this eternity. A small mistake in the beginning of the world makes a big mistake at the end and of over the whole of the world.

He had missed a single point: My own reason cannot know anything about the beginning of the world, for experience is only available by repetition. One-off events are not reasonable, they do not belong into science. You know, however, the Bible‘s account of creation is already half on the way to a modern theory of evolution, because it knows a certain movement within the species. However, this movement lies in the will of the Creator, not in creation itself. But after all, isn‘t it something?

Darwin: Yes, that's a small step forward. A little step only, but still at least a step. The different direction in opposite to Aristotle can be felt. Maybe you can build upon it as a theologian.

Thomas: Build upon the difference that was my favorite field. Build upon Aristotle while installalling small corrections! Remind me later, please. But first you wanted to tell me of other evolutionary theories that have not fulfilled what they had promised.

5. The Lamarckism

Darwin: Well, I will mention only the two examples of Lamarck and Wallace. The French nobleman Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had come up with a variation of species two or three decades before I had sailed around the world on the Beagle ship. He contended that all creatures would adapt over time to their environment, and then give this adaptation on to their offspring.

How else can we explain the high neck of the giraffe? The trees in the African savannah protect their leaves by growing more steeply into the sky. The giraffes play along the game having their necks growing continuesly to get their food. They acquire knowledge, apply it and as a reward, says Lamarck, they have got longer and longer necks over time. Each giraffe that stretches learns a little, that is how high the trees are with the top leaves most nutritious.

In any case, this applies to the African savannah, isn‘t it? It was not easy to see where the error was lying. Why the French botanist and zoologist did it wrong here? I even have toyed with the idea at first.

Thomas: Finally, you got off of the inheritance of acquired characters, right?

Darwin: Quite soon, although I have dragged the remains of it through my whole life. The cultivation of crops and domestic animals, that was the lesson that got me on the right track. The descendants of fast pigeons are not all fast which they should be with the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Somehow the chance has its hand in this play, was my thought. I did not initially know how it works. Targeted learning? That can not be true, since chance plays no part there. Chance even bothers there.

Thomas: Lamarck therefore failed? Because his theory may be sounding nice, but it has not endured the comparison with reality?

Darwin: Yes, exactly, that what it was. Lamarck had a whole bunch of theories in stock. At first glance they looked quite tempting, then they were all blown up by barrel burst. The more complex a kind was, he said, for example, the longer time it should have existed. Somehow, right, because the giraffes need a little time to develop their longer necks.

But this idea gets very wrong in him, because he knows of no change of species. On the other hand bacteria must be quite young, he argued, and so on and so on. Humans on earth would have to be the oldest living things on the planet, the protozoa the youngest. This is just the opposite as we know nowadays.

Thomas: Threfore, the theory of Lamarck is wrong, proven by empirical research. Or by experience, what does mean the comparison of theoretical ideas with reality. And what about Mr Wallace?

Darwin: Alfred Russel Wallace, the good man. He would have almost snapped me away in 1858 my own idea of the large teaching. Quite with no ill intent, because he in Borneo in the far south-east Asia had the same idea as I had. But he was a noble character, a true English gentleman. In the end we have got on well.

However, I was not happy with him later. Namely he has moved away from the strictly empirical theory. He has presented – how shall I put it – cloudy views. To explain the mathematical, musical or artistic abilities of people, he said, one must depart away from the natural selection theory and introduce supernatural causes. Because mathematics, art and music would offer no selective advantage, so was his argument, therefore they could not be explained by the theory of evolution.

Then he added, in the invisible universe of the mind there have been at least three interventions from the top during natural history: The emergence of life from existence, the manifestation of consciousness in higher animals, and finally the birth of man. This was a spiritualism, and even a fundamentalism that has perplexed me.

The classification is odd: Are there any animals with consciousness? Where is the inanimate nature? I believe that we do not need a spiritual incentive from the top to understand the evolution of life. So I still think today, but I've done wrong to Wallace. We both didn‘t understand the matter very well.

Thomas: This matter interests me very much. How is yesterday‘s knowledge transformed into that of today? Finally, this was my main business, as I was running the wedding of Aristotle and the Bible. I will not be limitless, I do not want to filter out general law of history, I will only compare your art of thinking with my art.

I have a horror of overweight theories, I mean the talk about the paradigm shift and so on. No, not that. I wonder just how the matter was in your case? Why is your theory of evolution strictly correct, but it wasn‘t correctly understood? What did you do wrong to Wallace?

Darwin: Well, with the three interventions from the top Wallace hade somehow a great and real idea, but the form, as he put his idea was impossible. One must always start from the bottom. This supernatural searching for cause is unappetizing. You want to have an explanation on the Earth and you take it from the sky. Maybe I have something to ...

6. All people strive for knowledge

Thomas: No, no, I do understand. That runs with me under the title of the devotion to the palpable experience, in Latin the ‚conversio ad phantasmata‘. I have taken this legacy from Aristotle. Listen to the famous opening of his ‚metaphysics‘: ‚All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.‘

Remember? All knowledge begins with the senses, especially with the vision. In seeing the human being is divine, so I put all perfection in the divine vision, into the ‚visio beatifica‘. To get to the highest, however, one must start at the bottom.

Darwin: That was the fault of Wallace, I mean his future error. Wallace has finally abandoned the experiemental base at the bottom for the gap in science and adopted a simple explanation from the top. I admit, there is a gap, because the chance is real, but we all have not understood this at that time, neither Wallace nor I.

He and I, we were both right and wrong. I mean in the derivation of mathematics, art and music. Even the religion is one of them. The gap is not a gap in research it can not be later filled in by better knowledge, it is ... I do not know what.

Thomas: You know, I have also criticized Aristotle for his attempt to explain nature without gaps. Although we always had held up the principle ‚Natura non facit saltus‘, thus nature makes no jumps, but for the question of whether the world has a beginning or not, the principle is without effect. One-time events, how can you grasp them with reason? Common sense and scientific experience will not really work without repetition.

Carl von Linné (1707 - 1778)

Where there is knowledge, there are no jumps. For the jumps, they jump in this and then into the different direction. The jumps are the death of science. But can you repeat the world? I want to say, can you repeat the whole world? Or can you begin

with the world for the first time, for a second time, a third time and so on? Reality is just a little larger than science.

Illustration 5: Carl von Linné

Darwin: Yes, I think this is a real idea of showing the limits of comprehension: Reason recognizes in itself the limits of reason. The ‚Natura non facit saltus‘ has been expressed in this form of my intellectual ancestor Carl von Linné. But it is of course Greek philosophy since Aristotle, at least the rationalistic side of this philosophy.

Five hundred years after you, brother Thomas, the famous Immanuel Kant in Königsberg has said the same as you did. He has used the same argument: The thinker doesn‘t stand above the universe, he argued. The thinker is living in the world, I should better say, he's stuck in it. He is stuck in the universe, which he should never forget. Therefore, to make the statement: The world is eternal, or: The world is not eternal, ends in an dead end. Kant spoke of the antinomy, but the unequal words mean the same thing as yours. Just for fun, Kant supplied two proofs, one for the eternity of the world and one for the non-eternity.

Thomas: I've heard of it and I nod approval. But there have subsequently been a lot of theologians and philosophers who wanted to play me off against Kant. I would be objective, Kant thought subjective. Kant would have discovered the transcendental thinking and the limits of thinking in a big way, I just did not. Is that true? Not quite, I would say, because at key points I've already done the same. Incidentally, this is just my general reservation to the philosopher Aristotle. I suspect he didn‘t believe in any limits of reason.

Darwin: Then he was no great thinker, because only the border makes borderless. To think still means to think of the mind or to recognize the limits of reason. I should express myself more cautiously. To think of the limits of reason or to think them to be possible, that is because you can‘t possibly recognize them. The positive, that which is there, you can see normally. But what is not there, how do you know about it?

Thomas: Well, we must not exaggerate. Aristotle was a great philosopher, perhaps more a positive scientist than a negative skeptic. By the way, what you say about the positive and the visibility, makes trouble to me until this day. Of course you can not see the nothingness, only the positive being itself is tangible to us. But how can one seriously speak of the frontier of knowledge, if from the nothingness nothing should be seen? This continues to put me in unrest.

Darwin: Here you can perhaps be helped. No, no, not from me, but from the 20th century and from modern physics. Science has proven measuring what can not be measured. So if nature really makes leaps, it is like a nothing in nature. Nature is continuesly and punctually at the same time, science says, sometimes it makes jumps, sometimes it doesn‘t.

This corresponds to the authenticity of chance and necessity in nature. This movement has been conclusively proven at the end of the 20th century. Strange as it may sound! We speak of quantum jumps without cause or just by chance that is real.

7. Knowledge of non-knowledge

Thomas: I'm speechless. In that century, I would have liked to live. True knowledge of nothingness which is logically not possible yet. This is wonderful!

Darwin: Not logically possible, but perhaps ontologically. The reality is perhaps more extensive than our reason wants to permit. ‚There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.‘ This word has placed a famous Englishman once a time into his hero‘s mouth.

Thomas: Very nicely said by your countryman, we can put on him the toga of the philosopher. Now I see Aristotle even more in contrast to Plato, I mean, even more in contrast to Socrates, who in the Phaedrus has done a beautiful saying. ‚I'm learning very much. The fields and the trees will teach me anything, just the people doing this in the city.‘

Illustration 6: Shakespeare

Yes, that was different for Aristotle, who wrote much about the fields, trees, animals and the weather, just about everything in nature. Because he was so interested in the details, he could possibly not stop so long at the borders of thought.

Darwin: I will not be disrespectful, I will not degrade your philosopher, but I mean, to the men of the very large recognition ... He was perhaps more a practical person, right? Or does he belong to the most relevant people are, like Socrates, Buddha, Confucius or Jesus Christ? Or to continue generating founders of thought such as Plato, Augustine, Kant? I once heard a verdict, according to Aristotle and Leibniz that they do not reach to the depth of thought therefore they connot lead to the transformation of the inner man.

Thomas: Well, well, I will not defend myself, this could also be said about me. I have set up not a single new doctrine. What have I done? I have spotted the available material, collected and classified it. If I compare Aristotle with Socrates, with one of the so-called relevant people, then the difference is clear to me. Socrates has invented in the ‚Phaedo‘, where at the end he took the cup of poison, thinking, because he had found the limit of thoughts.

He did so against Anaxagoras, against which he argues that Anaxagoras wanted to believe in no limits of human reason. The piece in the ‚Phaedo‘, where that happens, you may well call it the autobiographical excursus. There Socrates says that he has experienced that limit as a young man. He found this limit, as he considered the claim of Anaxagoras of universal reason. Of this finding, Plato can only reports suggestively, as Plato always loved. He indicates his central insights just so that they are understood only by those who really understand.

Darwin: Then the verdict about the great philosophers will be clear. Perhaps, Aristotle wanted to make the discovery of Socrates undone, he wanted the ideal of Anaxagoras again to take the lead, right?

Thomas: Yes, you could say that. In the theology of Aristotle, when he speaks of the unmoved mover, God is not beyond reality, he is at the forefront of all reality. He is the highest being accessible for us and is registered from us by notion. You could also use the assistance of marine navigation. Plato and Socrates have given up trying to make a great conquest journey to adopt all reality. This was their revolution. As stated in the ‚Phaedo‘ just a second, modest shipping is possible, the coastal shipping, because the real being is beyond being. First shipping is impossible.

,Epékeina tes ousías‘ was Plato‘s famous formula, written in his ‚state‘. No human notion comprehends everything, so there is no highest notion, says Plato. We cannot drive on the endless sea. Or perhaps better to say: There is no endless sea. The philosophy of Aristotle would thus based on the decision to make again the ‚deúteros plous‘, the second shipping of Socrates, to the first ride. That would mean full world conquest. I stress: Would! Consider the steps: Aristotle as a Titan, who would have thought that? Can the philosophy of science can afford it? Can science win the Olympic of all reality?

Darwin: Therefore, there is also huge critics of your own enterprises, brother Thomas, even if your wedding between the Bible and Aristotle was later recommended by the popes and admired by half the world. The other half of the world, I mean, as far as the world is interested in thinking, compares you, brother Thomas, to the German philosopher Hegel.

Here I have it literally: ,It's one of the great and, I think, tragic paradoxes of the history of theology and church because this all eschatology excluding theology of Aristotle has been raised twice, at Thomas Aquinas and Hegel, with such emphasis the basic form of orthodox doctrine. Even the counter-movements could themselves not liberate of the predominance of this thinking.‘

Thomas: Great, this man must have understood something. The accusation against me is not unreasonable, but you must remember, I have become the head of an extended school – after my death. Since I had no longer a voice on earth defense was excluded. The accusation should be directed more against Thomism than against brother Thomas Aquinas.

Darwin: Explain it to me, please, to the narrow gauge theologian from Cambridge, this procedure with an example. How did genuine Thomasian become Thomistic?

Thomas: Yes, I like doing it. At the ,five ways‘ to demonstrate to the existence of God, you can see what means the oblivion of eschatology of which they accuse me. Half of the reproach is right but the other half just not. With these five ways which I have called ‚Quinque viae‘ in my ,Summa theologiae‘ I kept quite literally at Aristotle and at other ancient philosophers. These roads lead without doubt to God as an unmoved mover: The supreme being is to be achieved by comprehension.

This thought I have emphasized five times at the beginning of my ‚Summa‘ and then I used to say: ‚And that all men call God. – Quod omnes nominant Deum.‘ Perhaps the precautions that I installed, were too weak. I have indeed agreed to see God as unmoved mover, but only from the outside. Seen from the inside of God himself, He may very well be in movement, I have emphasized. That is the place where you can use the Revelation, the Trinity or the use of platonic being beyond being. Or the place of the eschatology which omission is complained by some of my critics.

8. The theological difference

Darwin: Yes, it is obvious to me. You thus have installed a difference to the total rationalism of Aristotle. The only question is whether the distance was great enough to discourage future followers of short circuits. Even I notice something. The neutral forms of which you speak of God: Isn‘t even a little bit dangerous? ,Quod omnes ...‘ By the way what would you tell me? Why must there be present in theology such a difference?

Thomas: Well, I admit – once again – a certain weakness in my thinking. Or should I say, I was a little too optimistic and therefore careless? Sometimes I haven‘t distanced myself enough from Aristotle. For example, I am often quoted as saying. ‚I do not see what the explanation of the words of the philosopher has to do with the doctrine of faith.‘

Darwin: What, you can‘t have said this? You have acted quite differently, as you gave the unmoved mover an inside moving. Or when you refused for religious reasons the eternity of the world. This eternity especially, Aristotle did love it.

Thomas: Well, I quoted myself correctly. That was in an expert opinion from the Holy Week 1271, which was to me a little bit annoying. Nevertheless, I have tried to keep the balance in my work. On one hand I wanted to acknowledge the arguments for the unmoved mover, so I have left unchanged the philosopher. On the other hand, I have created a space for an internal movement within God.

Darwin: Hm, yes, it's really hard to decide whether the correction is sufficient. At this point, I might confess my own difficulties. I mean the mechanical world view that had a firm grip on me the 19th century. The rationalism of modern mechanics is as broad as that of your Stageira philosopher, I should say, the rational claim is total. Mechanics has not the slightest room for God, for man or for freedom.

Here, the conflict was still very hidden. People rarely know what they actually fight, otherwise they would not be so angry. The famous theological rabies, the ‚rabies theologorum‘, that is really. But in this sense, the philosophers and scientists themselves, we all are theologians, if we speak of God. A few weeks ago I had myself to convince who was the most violent theologian in the 20th century with the most raving rabies. It was Albert Einstein who wanted to prohibit God to play at dice.

Thomas: Violently and raving you say?

Darwin: Well, I mean, Einstein wanted to hold a property of God, namely his facelessness and determinism in nature. What did this jump in nature, I mean this dice, doing a tremendous effect, I discovered in these days. In the 19th century my rabies was a depressed and gloomy anger. It did not come out, shouting was nothing to me. So I was constantly ill.

Thomas: What does it mean, the depressed and gloomy anger?

Darwin: I think the big point in your 13th and in my 19th century, well that is freedom in nature. The freedom in nature, that is the question of God. Only with freedom in nature, God can be a person and can be genuine. As well as a finite person can be real only in this way. But no one has talked about it. Or rather, all have talked about it, but no one has noticed what he was talking about when he was excited about the topic of God.

Thomas: Well we have spoken about eternity or about the beginning of the world. Or about the unity of the intellect, that is whether there is only one spirit or one soul in all men. Or about fatalism which means that a person has involuntarily his own fate. These three errors of the famous Aristotelian Averroes, I have corrected them all, and if I consider this right it is all about freedom so that God and man can be real. The five ways to God as unmoved mover who is at the forefront of existence, I have maintained. They cannot show freedom and personality anyway, I must admit.

Darwin: Exactly, that‘s the concealment, the neutral tone already shouts it: That they all name God: Quod omnes nominant! The ‚Five Ways‘ do not show God as he is, but as he appears, if we want to seize him. These ways hide his face under a large veil. But also a veil still shows some contours.

Thomas: Thus my five ways have shown something of God. The essence of God that they could not show. I knew it well. As says the first epistle of Timothy: ‚God resides in inaccessible light.‘

9. Dangerous proofs of existence?

Darwin: Well, right! But your method, isn‘t it dangerous? Later, after your death, brother Thomas, if the church, the theology, or an individual seeking man wanted to be sure about God, what did he do?

Thomas: He took the proofs of God, as I suspect, mostly the mine, which originate in the core of Aristotle. But I have not called them proofs, rather five ways, but these were often dubbed as proofs, especially by the opponents.

Even after five centuries, Kant was appointed and raised to be the ‚Alleszermalmer‘ of these proofs, the destroyer of everything. What he himself found completely ridiculous. Kant, like me, created a new place for the faith through his thinking. His famous phrase from the preface to the second edition of his main work has become known to me: ‚I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief.‘

Illustration 7: Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)

Darwin: Belongs all into the broad stream of fog and concealed question of God. This question is a question of freedom. I was dazed in my life, but now I see it clearly. Any spoken word about freedom excites the opposition.

Thomas: What do you mean? Of God we can still see a lot very well, in a natural way, as I have always said. Then comes the faith that has a better knowledge and offers more security because it does not rely solely on human power of thought. A lot is even detected only in a supernatural way, by the revelation. Even well those items which you have so much demanded for as freedom and personality of God.

Darwin: This can be well said. Nevertheless, there lies an abyss, I would say from your century in the Middle Ages to the present day after the end of modern times. The God of Aristotle or the God of Einstein, that would have been the formula of the whole world. That would have been the anti-God who makes all freedom impossible.

But now applies: There is no metaphysics of the unmoved mover, because there is not even a world formula of physics. However, there are a lot unmoved ideas in mind which determine the movement in the world, for example, physical laws. The idea of the unmoved mover of Aristotle has thus its value, but we can not remain at its post.

Thomas: We have treated the supernatural knowledge as an additional source of knowledge through which the natural knowledge is surpassed in quality and quantity.

Darwin: Yes, that is the abyss between then and now, in which the mind easily slips. This does not work, or rather, that's not good, it's dangerous. In these ways, God is not thought well. But if God is not thought well, this generates atheism. That is only a recognition of the late-born in the 20th century. I fell into this trap in my lifetime.

Not God as the supreme being, which eventually gets higher and more different properties, ... no, it does not work. But God is a freedom that is detected in a natural way, namely in the shadow of chance and necessity. And that is also not detected! Because chance and necessity cannot be adequately recognized by us, even if we find it as fragments of freedom in nature.

Thomas: You state that the unmoved mover of the ancient thinkers plays the same role as that of the hoped-for world formula in modern times?

Darwin: There are certainly some differences, but in the structure, in they essence, I think they are the same. They should both fulfill the same task, once in metaphysics, once in physics.

Thomas: So I would ask you to give me the substantial equality and the accidental difference. Excuse my speech of substance and accidence.

Darwin: That is immediately evident. The world formula as the Aristotelian God would be unmoved, all motion, however, of the world would be guided by them and controlled. This is also the task, I mean the function in both systems is the same. This God and the world formula, the theory of everything, would guarantee full comprehensibility, full rationality, whereas the difference is negligible.

Thomas: Give it to me anyway, please.

Darwin: It‘s mathematics. The role of mathematics is hardly to overestimate in modern times, I mean the role of mathematical physics. Generally speaking, the mathematical science has been proven from century to century to be the hard core of modern Europe and the Western world.

Rationality here means anyway, to calculate the future, that is, to anticipate the movements of the body in the mind. In this way, science wins its power, as in Galileo's gravity law

s = g/2 . t^2,

Because this law can predict the future.

Thomas: We have of course not thought of this, neither I nor Aristotle. Do you still hold up the fundamental equality of the modern ideal of TOE with the Aristotelian God?

Darwin: Yes, I mean, that seems reasonable. I mentioned the difference, but in common the two positions have the inability to conceive a living God, freedom, person, and so on. Because Aristotle did not think of it, and Einstein expressly not desired it. He even thought he could rule out any personal God by mechanistic causality. He has not succeeded.

Thomas: Freedom in my thinking has played no great problem, it was accidental. It was not a problem in the doctrine of grace, the possibility of freedom was granted. Only what man has made of it, that was the issue. The sin and then the restoration of the fallen man by the grace of Christ, that were my subjects, I have acted of freedom in this way.

Darwin: This is understandable, I raise no objections. Presumably we are dealing here with communicating tubes. Because the modern time thought so mechanically and had theoretically no place for freedom, now there will be, after the end of modern times, freedom one of the great themes of philosophy and theology, even in theory.

For the practice of freedom modern times has done a lot. Revolution was followed by revolution, everything should serve to liberty. A revolution gave the other the torch in its hand, but only in a political sense. And now this love of freedom has degenerated. I mean, when freedom means only mere leisure, like the abuse is in Western cultures, then ...

Thomas: Freedom is threatened by exaggeration as by understatement. Man is not completely free as God is bounded only by his freedom. That is to say: Freedom is free due to freedom. And man is not as unfree as a stone, which can serve only as a material to freedom. In the middle is the final freedom that ...

Darwin: You give me the key word, the middle. You're famous for compensation and for balance in thinking.

Thomas: My balance weight on the rope between Aristotle and the Bible is known, it reads: ‚Gratia supponit naturam et perficit eam – The grace presupposes nature, and completes it.‘ Translated into the 21st century this could be read as: ‚What science prepares that is completed in faith, by giving it sense.‘

Darwin: Well, Brother Thomas, here I have a slight concern whether the formula still works. For the harmonic Middle Ages or the harmonic Antiquity, I mean harmony in thought, the sentence may be true. In modern times something discordant entered to the thinking by science. How can I say it? The dialectic has invaded, or nature has become contradictory to itself. All because the chance is real.

But perhaps your famous phrase is suitable to describe the transformation that leads from the theory of evolution into theology. Of course, your formula will be first transformed itself. How about: ‚Natura destruit naturam, et gratia sanat et perficit eam.‘ The self-destructive nature, then I think of course especially at the struggle for survival, at my life topic. With a constancy of species, it would be more harmonious.

Thomas: Now I see clearly your requests, I mean your program. My sentence is transformed now: ‚The nature is destroying nature, only the grace heals and perfects it.‘ Well, I have to think about it. Or the theologians of the 21st century should think how far this formula may reach. Just as I did during the Middle Ages, when I choosed Aristotle with some corrections as the basis of theology, the theologians of the 21st century should choose Darwin's theory of evolution, I mean, your theory of evolution, as its basis. Of course, with some corrections, which science in the 20th century has adapted itself. Do you think so, Mr Darwin?

10. Connection in contradiction

Darwin: It sounds too easy, if I now would answer simply Yes. Here we are dealing with huge formations: On the one hand there is the venerable theology, on the other hand, the ambitious biology. I nevertheless answer: Yes, it should be. This could be the seminal program.

Thomas: Well, I've been working on Aristotle, I can and I won‘t do the work once more on evolution. We should only name the principle of connection in contradiction.

Darwin: Yes, and then I'm interested in the question: How definitively is the theory of evolution. Can there be a serious progress that goes beyond the quantum theory and the theory of evolution? The question I ask in general, not necessarily to you, rather to me and to anyone who wants to think ahead.

Thomas: Your question surprises me. My principle is that we think today. Those who think too much about tomorrow, soon are old news. I thought in my century only what was at the time and thus achieved an almost timeless synthesis between faith and knowledge. A ,Philosophia perennis‘, some enthusiastic supporters of mine say until to this day, an all time permanent form of thinking. I never thought of it.

Darwin: Yes, yes, the fear of the future is included my question, too. But not only! In a certain way, I suppose, is my theory definitively the theory of evolution. It developes a framework, and only within the framework of mutation and selection or of chance and necessity, there is progress in life and in knowledge.

The same has happened in the quantum theory. The frame of chance and necessity has been finalized for decades and only between chance and necessity, there are images of life to see – but this in abundant and increasing extent.

Thomas: Then we just need to understand these two frames, and we have the real and final ,Philosophia perennis‘.

Darwin: Yes and no. These two frames of animate and inanimate nature are, on closer inspection, only a single frame. It arises when we look at nature. The frame is for the non-animated for the non-animated nature only chance and necessity.

Thomas: Congratulations, Mr. Darwin, in your century, I would like to have lived. Oh, your 19th century still was even wrong.

Darwin: Yes, of course, I wonder how the belief in the personal God could survive from the 16th to 19th century. That was the winter for the church, but hardly anyone has noticed it. In theory, that is from the view of science, faith had been completely implausible. The people are just not consistent, which in this case ...

Thomas: ... was even greater wisdom. Yes, in the 21st century one should live, then one would have the most beautiful and rewarding tasks in thinking you can ever imagine. Why could Aristotle or Newton not offer this frame? That interests me now. That is one question. My second question would be this: What urged me to change Aristotle‘s philosophy and what should urge a theologian of the 21st century the same business?

Darwin: And I add the third question: How can we understand Wallace's three steps to life, consciousness, people better and explain them? The step would actually require a zero-step which leads to existence itself. This would, of course, explain the origin of mathematics, art, music, and especially the origin of religion.

Thomas: The first question: Why had the physical and metaphysical world systems of Aristotle and Newton to be improved later?

Darwin: Well, if I may try out an answer? I have for some time practiced in the paradoxical situation of science in the 20th century. My attempt: The world systems of Aristotle and Newton have their limits outside of themselves, the quantum theory and the evolution theory have their limits in themselves. This counts for the big, huge difference.

When Aristotle speaks of form and matter, he tries to explain everything, the model has no limits in itself. The same position is occupied by Newton‘s universal gravitation, which should determine all movements of all bodies. This was a very successful model, so we could keep the model for almost the whole of reality. Newton tried to explain mechanically even the appearance of light. The attempt failed.

11. Theories without borders

Thomas: I suspect what you're talking about. To uncover the inner boundlessness of a system that seems to be a good idea. For example in the systems of Aristotle and Newton. Then Plato, who let Socrates in the ‚Phaedo‘ discover the limits of notions, stands on the side of the border, which runs within every thinking? Or Immanuel Kant stands there with his antinomy of reason. I understand: The concept of reaching the thing itself is not entirely justified because it is a notion, and notions have borders. The transcendental thought is one with an internal border.

Darwin: Absolutely, as I would suspect. Therefore, I estimate philosophers with a limited line in thinking for less limited, therfore a bit brighter.

Thomas: Because they have voluntarily accepted a limit? The free willingness to be small, makes bigger? Yes, the thinking here touches religion, the good religion.

Darwin: Voluntary is good, very good, the keyword, we must not lose it again. For involuntarily Newton and Einstein and Aristotle and all the many, many others boundless seekers were catched up by their borders, just because they wanted to set up theories without internal borders.

Thomas: Historically, I think, this not quite right, but in the line of these three there is already lying the Infinity. Aristotle, for example, has spoken of the matter; once he has called it the first, then the last matter, and he declared it unknowable. And Newton ...

Darwin: ... yes, yes, I rather say it himself. My dear fellow countryman had designed in 1700 a boundless world system, which he himself was at most frightened of. Therefore, he has incorporated a few mistakes, some people even think that he had miscalculated on purpose, to to keep God a place free. In his system, the planets regularly plunge into the sun. But because in nature they circulate on stable orbits, Newton has only one explanation: God the Creator must always help His creation to prevent this disaster.

Thomas: Yes, yes, that is the same limit as for the intelligent design theorists in the 21st century. After all, your fellow countryman knew whereupon he had to be careful. But this did not work well, of course, this artificial, outward bound for the reason. You feel the intention and are out of tune.

Darwin: That was not good either. With the death of Newton 1727 science became atheistic, and with it, most scientists became atheists. The later Newtonians have simply wiped away the artificial error of Newton. They wanted to understand the universe completely, for which the Newtonian system is eminently suitable. To understand all means to take the place of God.

Thomas: Although the error must be inserted in any system of nature! Of course, not as an error but as a coincidence, as the limit of notion.

Darwin: True, but that has become clear only at the end of the 20th century. With many birth pains for decades. The researchers have suffered of genuine trauma, and many of them still don‘t have overcome the grief about the lost overview. The overview was expected and always dreamed of, never realized. I fear that most scientists have not even started with their grief because they did not even notice the loss, or they hope for a new causal overview.

Thomas: Well, the theologians of the 21st century have no longer to care about them. I hope the theologians are brave enough. How do you assess the situation, Mr Darwin?

12. Frightened theologians

Darwin: Ambiguous, or rather unique. Still many theologians seem pretty intimidated. So I see the situation. The two lost major battles against Galileo and against me can still shake the bones in the body of the theologians. One of the most famous in the 20th century meant, ‚theology and science may never come into contradiction with each other, because both differ from the start in its scope and its method‘.

Thomas: This theologian must be related to me. These are all the same words I have just used, I mean in 1271 when I separated the thought of the philosopher from the doctrine of faith.

Darwin: What has happened in those days has happened to this theologian: The principle cannot be maintained long. We live in a consistent world, so every thought affects every other. When a baby throws his dummy out of the pram, it shakes the moon, even if only a little.

We have the big examples at hand: Aristotle into its original version and the mechanics in its original form are deadly for theology. Who can speak of fundamental non-contradiction!

Thomas: Of course, in practice I have not kept myself to my principles. I have a moment ago just admitted this. By the way I have an idea. We could walk in search of clues in the realm of the spirit. What about this?

Darwin: What do you mean? What should we look for?

Thomas: It's just an idea that has just come to me. Perhaps the idea is something wrong and needs to be improved. I just think what you said about the situation in the relationship between faith and knowledge, or even between theology and science. This has has changed significantly in the 21st century. It might be that the science is slowly coming into the defensive position which we theologians held for centuries, say we have suffered since Copernicus.

Darwin: Yes, I can not only imagine this very good, I even know a lot of scientists who have abandoned the project. The highly acclaimed Richard Feynman: ‚Physics has given up. We do not know how to predict what would happen under given circumstances.‘

Illustration 8: Richard P. Feynman (1918 – 1988)

Thomas: Surprisingly honest. Have many researchers followed him in this opinion? I would be surprised. Outdated views died in my time not because people changed their minds, but because they grew old and died out.

Darwin: Of course, it has remained the same until this day. The most famous in the 20th century was Einstein. He was not an ideologue, he has not confused desire and reality, but he has just become old and died with the fervent wish that the accident in nature may not be genuine.

Thomas: Then my thought experiment is now this: Whoever is in the defensive, is trying to protect himself. Not by arguments but by the administration. There are thought controls, condemnations, inquisitions and so on. The Watch at the Tiber has always had its place, but it shows the weakness of the arguments, if they can not fully convince. What need not be the fault of the guards!

Darwin: You think such thought control would have to exist even today, just across the side?

Thomas: Yes, exactly, this is my guess.

Darwin: Let me see ... Right, there are people who are convinced of the asymmetry between science and theology. They say that the physics can do without any theological argument. The science is in view of theology completely free. The theology, however, should not be free, it is tied to that which dictates the physics and natural science to her. The model in mind: the science is right without interpretation, but theology is an interpretation – with all the risks of such a doing.

Of biological side I have it more violent in the head: ‚If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.‘ Therefore, this biologist concludes: ‚Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline‘

Thomas: You see, here you have got the inquisition of today. The theology is made dependent on, it is placed under guardianship. In my day it was vice versa, there were philosophy and science dependent on since they were the handmaiden of theology, and should add the train.

Darwin: People think of course to have very strong arguments, namely the success of sciences. But we know now, the natural sciences do not provide a total and in particular an objective description of reality, because the chance is real. So ...

Thomas: So is the argument from the administration. The sentences will happen to those that can remain completely unchanged, one must only use science to theology and theology of science.

Darwin: We are now finished with the investigation, we can actually formulate a response to the first question. Aristotle and Newton are pushed from the outside to borders because their theories had no borders from the inside. This has become different at the evolutionary and quantum theory. They are limited from the inside, so they come to no limit from the outside.

Thomas: What are you saying? This is now however a statement which triggers a border.

Darwin: Border, yes, but from within. These world designs don‘t reach any limit, they carry the border themselves within the explanation of the world. Therefore, they are no theories of everthing, even if they explain everything: That is not a full explanation, but even more full ist not possible.. Here the door is thrown open to a reality that can not be closed. Not all reality is objective or describable by causal mechanics, not all reality is nature. This should be encourage the theologians of the 21st century, right?

13. Improvement of Aristotle

Thomas: This will lead us to the second question about what brought me to modify Aristotle? I would say, from Aristotle to me the inner the reality in Europe was changed into a personal manner. In between lies the baptism of Europe. It is the faith experience of the person, of freedom, of the unique dignity of man, by which the system of Aristotle had to be reshaped. Science describes the world in that what you can seize, faith recognizes the affection that comes before of what you are seized.

Darwin: What indeed tastes a little bit stale, because it belongs to external criticism. This criticism stems from the outside, if you don‘t like the presented opinions and views of the system ...

Thomas: Well, Mr Darwin, so externally or so amateurish you may not call my work.

Darwin: Oh, excuse me, I had not thought of you. I have the highest admiration for you and your synthesis. What could be done that has been done by you.

Thomas: You think more could not be done? Because the time was not yet ripe?

Darwin: The inner experience of course has its place, the experience of faith. But it gains much more weight if it is not only grafted on the science and thus shows its vitality, ....

Thomas: ... but develops and grows as a branch from the tree itself.

Darwin: Yes, and that has now happened in the 21st century. Or better aid, one must make it happen in cognition. Actually, the theologians can't believe their luck, although a better offer they have never got for theology. Freedom in nature, which is the precondition for any belief in a personal Creator, is the first time conceivable.

Thomas: Watch out, you will surely soon got even the title ,Church father‘ if you do so on. But I understand. Science restricts itself, the frontier of knowledge is itself a knowledge, opening up a view to a new reality. This is strange: The recognition of the impassable border passes the border to a new reality. That is, the recognition of the border is also a crossing of the border and thus the opening of a new perspective.

Illustration 9: St. Bonaventura

Maybe my age was not ready for such a synthesis, or rather, not yet ripe. What have I done? I have pruned the tree of Aristotle and grafted on it several branches of Christian experience, inoculated just probably to say. Therefore, my synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible always smacks a bit of a marriage of fire and water.

Darwin: You have done what you could do. You have linked the objectivity of Aristotle with the personality of revelation as good as it was possible at that time. I hear that your Franciscan friar Bonaventure has handled the same problem, but solved it by other means. Or may I not call him brother?

Thomas: Yes, yes, although we black and white Dominicans have always gone into distance from the brown Franciscans, and living in unity and diversity is always stressful. We still have a lot in common, Bonaventura and I. For example, we have both become masters in Paris in 1257 and 17 years later, we both died on the way to the Council of Lyon or in Lyon itself.

Darwin: Bonaventure has also tried a marriage of the Bible and Aristotle. What do you think of his solution, brother Thomas?

Thomas: Well, the answer? He gives it himself. His synthesis was complete, so afterwards there was nothing left to do. He has changed in the same year, in 1257, from the theoretical theology to the practical religious leadership.

He has completely reversed the seizing of Aristotle into the be-seized by God. Thus there was nothing left to do, neither for him nor for any science. Therefore, he has fought all inclinations to science in his order violently. You understand, how might fit the secular science to the charismatic Francis and the Franciscans?

Darwin: An immersion into the finite, as in modern times, it thus would happen with St. Bonaventure, when in the 13th century the Church would have followed his example?

Thomas: Probably not. He later received the title, ‚Prince of the mystic‘ or ‚princeps mysticorum‘. But mystics do not invent printing, not the telescope nor the steam engine. This all requires a desire to finite life and the growth of the finite. This was very, very far away of Francis. But fair enough, his age may to be come ... Science and technology may not always grow. I limited the mysticism to Sunday and to liturgy, the everyday life I set free to work.

Darwin: Of the Franciscan preference to love I have heard, however, and of the Dominican‘s devotion to the intellect. This shows again and again the rupture between the tangible and the personal world.

Thomas: Competition or resolution into the one or the other side – more was not possible up to this day.

14. World of things and persons

Darwin: Yes, and that has been changed completely at the discovery of evolution. More specifically, with the discovery of chance and necessity: They are the building blocks of reality. The tangible world of biology and physics is no longer the enemy of the person, this world has become its indispensable prerequisite. In a natural way the freedom of personality emerges from the basic elements of nature, from chance and necessity.

Thomas: Well, tell me again! That's my own idea in a new variant of form and matter, I remember gratefully. Perhaps the best formula that has occurred to me at the marriage of Aristotle and the Bible was the fusion of soul and body, ‚anima forma corporis‘, the soul is the form of the body.

We have now reached the third question which stems from you: How can we improve Wallace‘s development of life, consciousness and man? What distinguishes man from beast? Why has he got language, music, religion?

Darwin: Here we first come to an offshore, to a formal problem with many thorns. No definition is perfect. Although it establishes boundaries, which cut sharply. But that is precisely the problem. At all logical cleanliness a border can never be ontologically quite clean. Then, if an interpreter of events in nature makes any definition that differs between human beings and animals, there raises an army of amateur thinkers and will cry: That doesn‘t work, that do animals alike.

Thomas: What can animals do, too? Do they speak, sing, write books? They are flying to the moon and return back? Write a sum of theology or bury their deads?

Darwin: Yes, these are the questions. You can find really always some people which contend animals to do the same.

Thomas: How? Also flying to the moon? Even burying the deaths? Are even animals doing this nowadays? That's a real advance. The first and last project of the people now in the hand animals, I mean the burial and space flight?

Darwin: You do quite right, Frater, to make your jokes about it. The problem is not technical, it is to address linguistically or philosophically: For each property of mankind that will distinguish him, a property of the animals is given, which shall mean the same.

Thomas: Even the moon flight? What are the rockets, built by monkeys?

Darwin: Yes, even the moon flight. It is the use of a tool, for example, by a chimpanzee. Taking a branch from the ground and so fishing with it a banana is the same art, as to rise from the ground with the rocket and landing on the moon. So say the critics of a distinction between man and animal.

Thomas: Yes, sounds convincing. Then of course you can continue the same way on, and the descent down knows no limits. The chimpanzee is similar to the cow, this is similar to the crocodile, as both demand for food. Then we can move on to the plants, because just like the animals they have a metabolism. Then we can still take the relationship to the inanimate stone, and man is nothing but a ...

Darwin: Very nice, I also like to make fun in this way of reductionists. For not forgetting to think in concepts, I help myself sometimes with a story of Niels Bohr, the great physicist.

Thomas: Yes, my friend, please tell.

Darwin: The great physicist Niels Bohr found it not beneath his dignity, to put a hand on and even occasionally to wash dishes if it was necessary. So once in a little ski lodge with little hygiene. There he had an idea while washing:

‚With the washing up it's just like with the language. We have dirty dishwater and dirty towels, and yet it succeeds in getting the plates and glasses clean. So we have unclear terms and within its scope an unknown, limited logic, and yet it manages to bring clarity to our understanding of nature.‘

Illustration 10: Heisenberg und Bohr

So the story is told by his disciple, the equally significant Werner Heisenberg in his autobiography.

Thomas: If you would tell this to a philosopher, he would not believe it. Yes, against the fruitless formalism of concepts which will first prepare an absolutely solid foundation to make only clear and accurate statements, I had to fight already.

I then just called the 4th Council of Lateran in 1215: ‚Between the Creator and the creature cannot be found any amount of similarity without finding even a greater dissimilarity. – Quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda.‘

Darwin: I think we have now become free to use the terms as we need. We know the ever-present difference between concept and reality. We are therefore on the one side full of caution. But on the other side we don‘t stop thinking as demand the fanatics of cleanliness.

I know there is the theological doctrine of the creation out of nothing, the so-called ‚creatio ex nihilo‘. To this unique emanation theology joins constant creation, the ‚creatio continua‘ on its site. I will not vote for this idea of the creation, or even reject it, but I never felt very well at this point.

Thomas: I always had a problem with creation out of nothing because my philosopher taught clearly: Nothing arises from nothing, ‚ex nihilo nihil fit‘. Thus his world should be eternal. But the theology says that creation was created out of nothing. I have repeatedly called this same council of 1215, confirming the theology of Irenaeus of Lyon thousand years ago. But also theology of course, presupposes something, namely the Creator. So now we have the nice job to think something that is in middle between nothing comes from nothing and the whole comes from nothing.

Darwin: Of course, now we can do a better work than ever before. We name the nothing as chance, then nature arises from the chance, as some physicists even say: The world is caused by a quantum fluctuation. Since there is of course a lot of need in the world, we can interpret chance and necessity as a continuous chain of free events, which stands at the beginning and the end of the cosmos, and always in the middle. There was not one, but there were at least three original creations: the emanation of existence from nothing, the revival of life from the being and the birth of man.

Thomas: Great, the difference between unique creation at the beginning and continuing creation in time is respected, while his meaning becomes clear: creation is a free event, at the beginning, in the middle and in the end. For this purpose one needs the authenticity of chance in nature, it requires the physics of the 20th century.

15. The three original creations

Darwin: The three original creations are in all three cases genuine in their ‚originality‘. After all, scientifically speaking, chance plays a real and above all the same role at the big bang, as at the firing of neurons in the brain.

Therefore we can interpret anywhere in nature the existing intersection of chance and necessity as freedom action of the Creator with his creature.

Illustration 11: Echo des Urknalls

Thomas: Above all, we can get away from the gray ‚Analogia entis‘. I had to use it as universal remedy for the relationship between Creator and creature, but very happy I was not in my skin. The ‚Analogia entis‘ offers information for the case when all cats are gray in the dark.

If we put freedom in the place of analogy, all will be brighter. Then there is indeed still a difference between finite creature and infinite creator, and the freedom of both is also different. But we can watch them as descended from the same source. What analogy ever wanted to say, but never really got on the tongue, was the difference between taking and been taking.

Darwin: My congratulations to you, Brother Thomas. The theology is making progress, even with the help of modern times which was so hostile to theology. ‚Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.‘ So you could shout loudly with Psalm 8. I am particularly interested in the unity of these three spontaneous generations. Of course, one could start with four, seven or nine origins as you want, though, I think, after the humans nothing new will come up in nature. We must immediately say why man is the desired goal in nature, nevertheless he still seeks his goal.

Thomas: Yes, please, here I am very curious.

Darwin: The being, life, man, these are three continuously increased machines to storage freedom. Machine is of course a bad word because it sounds so mechanical and leads to think of a determined necessity. I choose it anyway. Because with machines the human imitates nature, and full of such machines is nature, so to speak.

The mere existence of the inorganic nature is a very poor storage, a very rough machine. The mere matter can not remember very much. That is why it produced so few characters, but a few characters yet. Yes, of course, the background radiation of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, we measure today, and their asymmetry. Or the impact of the Earth and Moon 4.5 billion years ago, we see every day when we look to the moon at the sky. But when thousands of people shuffling through a stone slab, then one track is blurred by another. A video surveillance would have got much more power of memory.

Thomas: Interesting, the turn to the sensual phenomena, my ‚conversio to phantasmata‘ just keeps getting richer. The ultimate reality, called God, is expressed not only in the sensible nature, it takes shape in history. Yes, freedom is the bond that connects God and man, between the two there is lying nature and history: the history of nature, if it is given and we consider it as a spectator, and the nature of history, if we act as players in it.

Darwin: My second step now is this: It is the emanation of life. The step is clear, yet it remains mysterious. Life is a big jump in nature in order to store better the jumps in nature. The emergence of life on Earth three or four billion years ago, speeds up the history tremendously, so, nature had previously little history because its playing was hardly stored.

Thomas: The second step is as original as the first step, though it comes later. Theologically, we have tried to understand this by Christology. The reality goes out of itself and yet remains within itself, as the logos for eternity emerges from the Father, so comes in time the creation out of God. Now we must continue: So arises life out of the inorganic being.

Darwin: You see, this is only possible with the theory of evolution, it brings a new spring to theology. You had got formerly a big gap between creation in Christ and the birth of Christ as man, right? The theory of evolution fills in this gap.

The life, from protozoa to the highly mobile mammals, is a way out and at the same time a collection. It has naturally no goal and is nevertheless running always faster. The rates of acceleration are breathtaking. First three billion years, only single-celled organisms, then since 550 million years, the rapid multicellular organisms. The acceleration accelerates the acceleration.

Thomas: That is, we could still number many other steps within this generation and we could name them original creations?

Darwin: Yes, of course, why not the multicellularity? Or in advance the invention of free oxygen? Everything serves to accelerate nature to become a history. In philosophy, the concept of complexity is controversial because some people fear the return of the hated teleology. But if we speak instead of complexity of simply acceleration, we have found a good replacement that satisfies everyone, at least, if they are of good will. This evolutionary acceleration seems to be directed towards a goal, yet will never arrive. This is the secret of the new teleology.

Thomas: You even become more mysterious, Mr Darwin. But before you give the aimless destination a name, please, give me still some intermediate stages of acceleration.

16. The decimal acceleration

Darwin: Yes, with pleasure, I'm starting with the free oxygen about 2 billion years ago and thus the oxygen breathing. The oxygen was by then an evil poison for life, now it serves him for speeding. Then the invention of the mammals, that is the animal with the equally warm blood about 200 million years ago. 20 million years ago, the separation of pre-human from the animal, 2 million years ago the first signs of consciousness. 200,000 years ago there were first signs of reflection, 20,000 years ago first abstract thoughts, 2,000 years ago the beginning of the systematic science. And 200 years ago there was the discovery of nature as part of the story or history as part of nature.

Thomas: My God, I'm speechless. Now we should nominate only one final stage, which happened 20 years ago, then the law of decimal acceleration would be complete. Do you have a candidate?

Darwin: Yes, quite simply, take the computer, it has as a device the desired age of about 20 years. It accelerates the complexity, oh, one moment, we wanted to say, it accelerates the speed to keep the past with enormous efficency.

Thomas: I see now a little difficulty. You have hidden the humans somewhere in the decimal range acceleration. How do you want him to have the third major spontaneous generation? How do you do with the self-awareness of man to be the crown of creation?

Darwin: At the first glance, it looks difficult. But we must not stop here, to look at the steps only on the outside, we need to look at the content itself. And the content ...

Thomas: It is probably the aimless goal you keep locked in your bosom. Besides, we could still make a discovery two years ago, right? We think of something?

Darwin: Right, now I will reveal the secret which connects the theory of evolution with theology, you can also say more descriptively, the evolution with faith: It is the struggle for survival, along with the survival of the fittest. Here you find the aimless aim: survival. That is also the last discovery in the dezimal acceleration, perhaps not older than two years.

Thomas: How? That is a real goal, survival, not aimlessly ...

Darwin: A goal that is never reached, or only for a short time. Neither the species nor the single individual in the species will survive, although the theory of evolution has declared the survival as the sole object and purpose of evolution.

Thomas: This opens up an abyss of questions, but perhaps also a door to a great treasure house. The whole evolution brought on for billions of years to finally produce in it an creature, the man who understands the futility of the whole enterprise. Outrageous! Dead is all teleology!

Darwin: Dead is even more all causality! One would like to commit at first glance an intellectual suicide how this biologist Jacques Monod did.

Thomas: From whom do you speak, who was that?

Darwin: Oh, that was a French molecular biologist. He is shattered on the theory of evolution. Perhaps because he was a very good biologist and also because he had a very clear mind. ,The cornerstone of the scientific method, that is the postulate of the objectivity of nature.‘ That was his favorite phrase, with this method, he has taken the reality and, unfortunately, failed in her.

The objectivity of nature and the authenticity of chance do not fit together, and Monod has noticed this. Then he could see no way out of the dilemma. He has expressed his grief in tragic tones and has called the human a ‚gypsy on the edge of the universe‘. I would better say, he has insulted him with this dictum. With the praise of rational objectivity, he begins his book, with the tragic song he closes it.

Illustration 12: Jacques Monod (1910 – 1976)

Thomas: Really, it sounds like a mental suicide. My God, he could not accept his situation because he wanted to hold on in this world, probably because he was not religious. Religion is faith in the reality, even if it does not please you.

Darwin: In any case, the high religion contains more than what I used to call the religion of the dog: worship as life saving, as a continuation of the struggle for survival from this life into the hereafter. Confidence in the unpopular reality that is extreme, because the disease begins as well begins the redemption.

Thomas: That would be actually the right religion, because ...

17. Christ as an evolutionary theorist

Darwin: I know, the good religion is included in the word of Jesus: Who wants to preserve his life will lose it, ...

Thomas ... and whoever loses it will preserve it. That's the incredible result of evolution: Everything in nature wants to ensure the survival and yet cannot manage it. Then follows the moment of awakening, which is this: The Human realizes his death ...

Darwin: ... and will agree if he has the right religion, the good religion. Yes, that was not acceptable to Jacques Monod, he did not agree. How could he as Cartesian be in agreement with life? As a philosopher, he called for an overview, as a biologist, he saw swimming away all his treasures.

Thomas: What would be the opposite position? I want reflect a moment ... Yes, that would be this: If the apocalypse would invade tomorrow, for example, if a new 12-mile chunk appears as 65 million years ago, then life would not be in vain, or? Isn’t it true, then life would not have been pointless, Mr. Darwin, or what do you think?

Darwin: We are thinking the same, Frater. I call that the consent to existence, love of life, the knowledge of God. Or better yet, the reconciliation with finitude. I think now we can put man the crown of creation on his head. Man is the only living being that is aware of his death and who is living his life out of this knowledge. The knowledge of death is his large capital, the death is the source of music, language, religion and mathematics: ,Be glad of life because the light still glows.‘ This could only stem from the heart of a true man, it comes from the Swiss poet Johann Martin Usteri.

Illustration 13: Johann M. Usteri (1763 – 1827)

Thomas: The knowledge of mathematics derived from death? My God, it will be still difficult for you, Mr Darwin. The other human characteristics, it may be easier to handle them. You just said that critics of sharp distinctions stand rifle ready at hand if you ascribe to people particular properties which can’t be found at animals. I think these people are now in the process of taking her rifle at hand and aime at you. Take care! They are shooting sharp.

Darwin: I named humans a short time ago the only animals that know of their death. There was a man recently who took me down with a flock of elephants.

Thomas: Such as Hannibal drove the Romans with his elephants in the parade?

Darwin: With thought-elephants. What was the argument against the definition of man? ... I remember: The elephants were coming again and again to the spot at the water hole where their leader had died weeks or months ago. One feels like the monkey, hitting with his stick after the banana and therby rehearsing the moon flight.

Thomas: Yes, that's a fruitless argument, I call this the denial of thinking. The tiny memory of death at the elephants is in men the outstanding cultural achievement. The simple case of religion, I will take myself. To test whether I have understood Darwin, Mr Darwin!

We have these two sentences and thoughts to connect: ‚Who wants to win his life, etc.‘ ...with the ‚Survival of the fittest‘. The connection is clear, it is obvious: The human agrees to which goal nature will lead him in any case, to death. This is the intimate connection between biology and theology.

Darwin: My God, of course, and in this way people use their freedom. They say yes to themselves, to the world and their situation in this world. Even to the origin of the world, whom they now encounter in freedom. For they might even say no, and thus missing their lives in this election. That was probably the decision of modern nihilism.

Thomas: What is that? Did the modern people have a preference for the creation out of nothing, für the ‚creatio ex nihilo‘?

Darwin: No, no, quite the opposite. Nature was supposed to be eternal and should occupy the place of God. Just this idea makes certain difficulties. It steals life its sense. If all reality is just nature and would be described by science in causality, then man would not appear in the world. As a person he would be, under such circumstances, completely dead, wiped out and eradicated. Life would be meaningless. All an illusion, and fog. This was the modern nihilism.

Thomas: Yes, if man refuses to use his freedom, if he will not accept his situation, in which he lives, he should not be surprised if life slips through his fingers without any joy.

Darwin: At the conclusion we should treat the remaining question why there is nothing in nature beyond man, no more spontaneous generation, although we have named so many individual steps even for the time after the birth of the humans.

Thomas: Yes, I could then, in my time, just point to the Bible what means to use an authority argument. Man appears at the end of the six days of creation. He is the only creature addressed by God, he must them give their names, all cattle, the fowls of heaven, and all animals. He gets a mandate to rule and so on, finally, God appears in Christ himself, what all contributes to the special position of man among living things. I mean, there is put a lot of self-awareness behind this. Already the very early person remembers something. He is no longer quite at home in nature, as in animals are or seem to be.

18. Anthropology and Primatology

Darwin: The more it annoys me if biologists of the 21st century want to explain the human with a fast ,nothing but‘ as a strange animal, as a trained monkey or of similar nature. Primatologists they call themselves, and in my name! However, I admit, these people have something to say, they can rightly point the finger at me because I didn‘t manage it differently in my time.

Thomas: Well, that's the difference. You, Mr Darwin, in the 19th century could not do anything else, even though you might have wished. The biologists in the 21st century can do it differently, and many won‘t. Although they know better, although the arguments from the science have become very weak, they still talk as if your merits would lie in the development of a purely causal explanation for the origin of species, Mr Darwin.

Darwin: As I myself was captured in my days by the causal thinking, so are still today the most natural scientists and philosophers captured by causality. But let's return to our theme, we return to the humans!

I imagine the fear and the strangeness of early humans as they sit there as a group in a cave hidden of bushes and tall trees. Just this anxiety indicates the gap that is placed between man and animal. Earlier in my life I have rejected this gap in nature, because I had to refuse. At that time I have always spoken for gradualism, for the slow growing of one species from another. At that time it was over with the difference between man and animal. This was called primatology.

But now, with the real chance, I can see it differently. Growing is always just a mix of new and old. Also animals have fear, because fear is the perceived danger in the present. But anxiety, only human persons can have it who can imagine a future of which in the present moment is nothing to sense. Therefore, the early people squatting in their cave were so afraid, even though the sun was shining, all have been well fed in the meal and not a bear could be seen far and wide.

Thomas: Threat, illness, loneliness, aging and death – humanity has always recognized this as related. So also the Bible brings together all the horrors to a single evil and looking for a reason of this evil. And what is the reason? Yes, faith calls the evil to be the sin. The revelation wants to tell us about redemption and salvation, this can only happen by self-accusation and confession of sin is the readiness of self-accusation.

Darwin: Although not with sociobiology, which looks at life only from the outside, but with our true biology, we can justify the religious experience of sin. Sin is the wages of death, says the religion, says the Apostle Paul, right? That‘s good, this is the self-experience of man if he casts off his fear of which he was at first glance completely penetrated. For this purpose he must take part in life. To acknowledge oneself as a sinner is the very large particapation, the liberation of man. There he will be an actor of his own life because he is elsewhere more treated or traded.

Thomas: That is probably the right idea here: We should not look for positive features that should belong to man alone, so as the intelligence or physical superiority. That does not work. The search should be quite negative, then we'll find it. Death is the inability to play the game of life over time. But until then we should play. Only man recognizes this invitation, and I dare to say he alone.

Darwin: And the beasts?

Thomas: The traces we found in animals, we can leave them easily. The true religion is not jealous, it has done with life. According to Paul‘s epistle to the Romans, the creation yearns eagerly for the revealing of the sons and daughters of God.

Darwin: Also this may be understood really well by the evolutionary biology. This word of Paul sounded so far only as a general animal- and plant-friendly word, because everything should come from the one hand of God and is on its way back to him. But how animals can yearning, yet no one has said so far.

Thomas: We then used the analogy. As the animal relates to man, so relates man to God. And as God is man‘s goal, so the humans for organisms.

Darwin: You see, the analogy achieves indeed something. We only need to transfer it in our present knowledge. Let's say instead of analogy just freedom, then we find traces of freedom everywhere. Because God's personality, his liberty is seen in nature in the footsteps of chance and necessity. We only need to reassemble ...

Thomas: ... and we have achieved the real equality between the creator and the creature with the small difference of the finite and the infinite. Where the finiteness can assume all possible shapes.

And the uniqueness of human beings? I mean his high position, after which no super-human is to be expected, what shall we do with it?

Darwin: Yes, it should be now no longer a problem. Our negative approach makes it possible. To be a human being means, to have recognized the finiteness of existence, my mortality. Can we still improve this knowledge?

Thomas: Well, maybe. For example, titanic brains could come up with the idea of using science to prolong life, and why not an endless renewal of my life?

Darwin: This hope, this promise, this plan has been around a long time. Everything has already happened. In medicine, science and technology they have made a covenant for life and have already prolonged life in an extraordinary way. I would estimate in comparison with your middle age, at the three-fold.

Thomas: Then the 21st century has got many seventy, eighty and ninety years old people? We had them in the 13st century, only in very exceptional cases. My teacher Albertus Magnus was eighty years old, when he died. He was the absolute exception. I did not even reach to fifty years. Now, with all due congratulations, the problem is not solved. Whether I have reached fifty or eighty years, when I retire from the stage of life, that changes nothing at my mortality.

19. Descartes abolishes aging

Darwin: There have always been some titanic people who would not accept their death. A philosopher named René Descartes, has around 1640 already promised the abolition of age. And a philosopher named Nietzsche wanted to prevent 150 years ago humans from death, using my teaching of evolution, with the return of all things. They both, Descartes and Nietzsche, have become not even sixty years old.

Thomas: What even are the benefits of progress then? It should serve life, but it can not prevent death.

Darwin: The keyword is: The finite life can celebrate his finitude. This includes the growth, the increase of the standard thirty years before the present days, where life goes to eighty, ninety or hundred years. This, however, also includes the reverse of life, the disaster. The sudden misfortune, sickness, loneliness, death, even they celebrate life, its possibility, its reality, its finitude itself.

Illustration 14: Descartes teaches Queen Kristina

Thomas: Shall we understand in this way the stages of development since the incarnation of life? Life does indeed continue in the same decimal acceleration, but there is no further development towards humanity, there is a movement within humanity. Also the movement in himself has God inherited to man. Who would have thought this? Since we had no idea of history in the Middle Ages, I was far from this thinking.

Darwin: Yes, why not? This gives life a new value: Life has no longer its development outside of itself, but since the awakening of man the sense of life lies in man himself. Perhaps the most important moment of freedom? I have not thought about it very much, because that's hardly a biological question. But now we must first face the old challenge: How come the human beings to language and music?

Thomas: Louder than with the mortality now the critics come back to word. They hold up here the birds and the wonderful singing of the songbirds. How complex, how verse-like, how rich in variety isn‘t this singing!

Darwin: And the language! There are highly developed structures of communication among animals, which are not different from man in quality, right? Better dogs are able to distinguish up to 300 or 400 words.

Thomas: Does not produce the sheer quantity in the humans a new case, a new quality? Here I have an idea. We should connect language and music of man with his death, I mean connect to his knowledge of death. The man sings and speaks, if he is essential, about his death ...

Darwin: ... and by the time he has left, until then, precisely because he is breathing as long as light still glows. Here my mind touches a word of the baroque mystic Angelus Silesius:

‚Man be essential, because if the world passes away,

falls away the appearance, the essentuial being that remains.‘

Thomas: Well, well, now that I hear again the song of my old master Aristotle. The entity that is the substance, and the appearance, that is the accident. I mean, this Silesian Angel knew something bigger, as his time allowed him to say. If chance is real, as far as I've now learned, then the appearance belongs even to the essence, because in the colorful reflection we have life. The history of nature is the appearance which pushes man to keep the essence.

Darwin: You see, Frater, then the mystical saying is still correct. After a little transformation it means the invitation to take the finite life very seriously, perhaps even very cheerfully, at least to consider it for genuine, although slippage is always possible. The slippage would be the loss of a dimension. So, if one relies only on the accident or only on the need, or who disconnectes the two elementary forces, this person wastes its time and life.

Thomas: I have also made poems, spiritual chants for the feast of holy body and blood of Christ that are sung until today in the church. The sounds do not stem from me, but the words. And you're right: I sing of life until death, but then also beyond life.

Darwin: Here I see two minor issues that we should treat yet. What about the language on the marketplace or in the office? There will still be spoken, and the music rings out of all channels from morning to the evening. How stands this daily life to death if death should be the mother of all language? And then, what hope does man have beyond his death?

Thomas: It's a good idea, to explain language and music together. No wonder that they are celebrated in hymns and in the opera. That shows their deep connection. In the language man tells of his taking of things, let us say, from his grasping of reality, although the affection precedes. And with music the affection comes first which of course is looking for a shape that results from the taking by man. After all, he invents the tunes, he builds the instruments, he rehearsels the singing and playing and finally brings the music to be heard.

Darwin: Well, I can agree with your wonderful explanation. But what about the death? Deals even the language of death?

20. The origin of language

Thomas: Here we look at the content of what is spoken. We are dealing here, of course, with a chicken-or-egg problem. What was there first, the chicken or the egg? The one has its existence not without the other, right?

With language, there face each other the sound of nature and the imitation. Do people initially used only exclamation words? Or have they initially imitated sounds? In between, there can surely not be a great abyss yawning, one might think.

Darwin: Typical chicken and egg: Without any natural sound no imitation, and without imitation dies every natural sound. The exclamation words were probably very useful in early hunting, because only the horde of early humans could be safe from wild animals or could even hunt them. And with the imitation? It gives me a light. Strong members of the horde or bright people make an inner experience and give this inner light a natural sound, and then the others use that experience more or less skillfully.

Thomas: And with natural sound and in imitation, how are we dealing with death? Yes, in the hunting horde you can see it immediately, because the hunting shall in one way or another save from death. And in the imitation of the inner experience? Wait a minute! Oh, yes, I see it. What do they express and what are they feeling, the early men? These have only recently made the discovery of death. They talk about it, because that is the inner experience, the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of man – today and of that early time.

Darwin: The development of language by cries and cheers was probably forced by the need of really hunting. A beautiful theory shouts: To kill dangerous animals needed a precise order, the form of communication had to be as quickly as possible. It had to work even when the listener didn‘t look upon the speaker because he kept his eyes on the chased animal. To substitute the lack of intuition the acoustic sounds became a descriptive content: The sounds were slowly transformed into language. Without sensible intuition the speaking will become a form of inner vision that not only bridges space but also time. Strange, is n‘t it, Frater Thomas?

Thomas: At first glance, probably, but we knew this fact even in our time. We theologians have said, faith is transformed at the end of time into a vision. Faith comes from hearing, that's one thing, speaking and listening, and the completion of faith will be looking, because hearing is the beginning of seeing. Only a minor thing that just comes to my mind: If man is the essence of language, and if the language bridges the time, so far as it can, then it just touches the death.

Darwin: Wonderful, namely his own death which man otherwise never gets to see. Between grasping and be grasped lies the moving of life, between death and life, life itself is moving. Now I would like again to quote the poet, this time Goethe:

‚And as long as you do not have that / This: Die and become!

You are but a dull guest / On the dark earth.‘

Thomas: This leads us to the last question: What hope has man beyond the grave? Entirely of its own, entirely of his nature or his wisdom he can probably get no real answer. Otherwise we would have to assume, man has created himself, or he would be the ‚causa sui‘ of his own salvation. How in the case of the famous Baron of Munchausen, who has drawn himself out of the swamp by his own bootstraps.

Darwin: I do not know if the biology, if science is here to make any contributions. At most negative, as we have found to be very positive. Because this idea has led us most. I mean, the taking of life is part of life and is necessary for science. If all reality were mere nature, then science could exclude all hope beyond death.

Thomas: And the theologian, who I am, says: Here we have been very lucky, because the mechanics of the overview that's over now. The affection is more original than the taking. And the most violent forms of being grasped for man may be birth and death. In this cases he is more passive than passive ...

Darwin: ... and he can only believe the other side of reality that is not nature, he can only assume it when it's given him. Well, in this act of freedom man finally recognizes the freely acting God, and then there is space available for revelation. Because disclosure is a previous action before the person acts, so in the classic manner of speaking, revelation of a self-revealing God. Only there is one tiny problem left.

Thomas: Yes, I suppose, where the small problem is hiding. The problem is: Where are the results of life? Where are the final settlements, and the harvest, if life on earth will come to an end through a final disaster? It will be probably a cosmological disaster. ‚In those days the sun will darken, the moon will not further shine and the stars shall fall from heaven.‘ Thus in the Apocalypses the Holy Scripture. This is also modern astrophysics in the 21st century, is n‘t it? I wonder where are the results? The finite life of the creatures would have to be found somehow in the infinite life of the creator ...

Darwin: Here I see no rational solution: We can see nothing that would somehow masquerade as knowledge. At most negative again, but then very effective. Evolutionary biology comes once again to help for theology. We know, the storage in nature, we have described the history of the collection jokingly with three machines: Inorganic, organic life, then consciousness. Well, you may conclude from this the results of life.

Thomas: Oh yes. The stages of life are acknowledged in retrospect, but never by the look in the future. The future is for every single living being closed by the death, even if life passes through this death.

Darwin: Yes, just as I imagine it, or exactly how I imagine my withdrawel from imagination. The finite freedom of man, moves itself even in time within the infinite freedom of God, it mustn‘t get there, because it is always with God. You only have to experience the conversion by yourself, making the experiences of being grasped. This is probably known the classic transformation of life through death and resurrection. How much can the evolutionary theory help theology to deeper insights! Thank you from the heart, Frater Thomas.

Thomas: My God, Thomas Aquinas and Charles Darwin in one breath! That is, be careful. One day you will be appointed to be a church father, or at least doctor of the Church, as it has happenend to me. Because this is our result: Darwinism is perfect Thomism, ...

Darwin: ... as Thomism was a great impetus to Darwinism. Ad Dei gloriam majorem! Thanks alternatively you, too, Frater Thomas, for the nice conversation.

The program

The program of these Conversations with Darwin shouts: Sesquiistique. Settled between monism and dualism, the theory of evolution rises up to the Prima Philosophia for our time!

Nowadays many writers want to put the theory of evolution on the throne of a first philosophy; they mean they can proclaim with such a philosophy in backgronud the end of spirit and religion. Their mistake shouts monism with which principle they regard ‚chance and necessity‘ as full knowledge of nature. In case of the Darwinism of the 19th century their verdict may apply. Although Charles Darwin was and is still dead right with his theory of evolution and with the his ‚struggle for survival’, he was unable to understand his own theory in his days. Randomness or chance in the mutation is simply a lack of knowledge and not another form of knowledge besides necessity.

Dualism, too, on the other side, which assumes a dual coding of reality does not provide what is needed, because the claimed independence of mind from matter is always in danger of being displaced as a merely epiphenomenon. In the middle between monism and dualism stands sesquiistik, and this form of thinking accomplishes the connection between mind and nature.

At the beginning of the 21st century the change in physics supplies us with tools to help to understand the evolutionary theory as a preparation for the realization of freedom, of liberty in nature. What the late Darwin could not perform can be performed by the new Darwin, and he is announcing: Freedom in nature is possible and likely, because freedom is the shadow play of chance and necessity. This is also a new kind of freedom, it is finite not infinite.

After Platonism, Aristotelism and Kantianism we find a new Prima philosophia in teaching the theory of evolution to which theology can be tied on; much better than on the previous figures. The Darwin of the 21st century is preparing a new springtime of theology and proclaimes it in his personality.

The book is written in Simple English, by a non-native speaker. Dieter Hattrup