Volume 64, Issue 2

The essay exposes, recognizes the astonishing originality, and showcases the shortcomings of Christoph Türcke’s Philosophy of Dreams, which offers a theory of the origin of religion inspired by both psychoanalysis and critical theory. Among the objections raised are the speculative nature of the enterprise, which is not sufficiently based on empirical data, the lack of knowledge concerning the transition from apes to humans, the impossibility for hallucinations to be the basic doxastic act, the exaggerated focus on dread, which is only one form of the numinous experience, and on the repetition compulsion, which could hardly prove as creative as the author assumes particularly concerning the origin of sacrifice, and the confusion of genesis and validity.

Zusammenfassung Der traumatische Wiederholungszwang ist kein primum movens, sondern eine reaktive dialektische Bewegung. Sie hat zwar die Menschheitsgeschichte eröffnet; aber deren Verlauf lässt sich aus ihr nicht deduzieren. Hösles Verdacht, dass meine Philosophie des Traums genau dies versucht, entspringt seiner Neigung, meine dialektische Konzeption dualistisch zu lesen. Während mir eine Fundierung negativer Dialektik von der Psychoanalyse aus vorschwebt, bleibt er bei der positiven Dialektik des objektiven Idealismus. Daraus ergeben sich auch unterschiedliche Vorstellungen über die Leistungsfähigkeit der Mentalarchäologie, die ich betreibe.

Humans are now entering a post-human era. Through technological advancements and their applications for humans themselves, humans as homo sapiens might change into a different species. Depending on individual decisions about whether to embrace certain technologies, the co-existence of humans and post-humans is also possible. Christians and theologians must ponder this trajectory for the technology will affect all domains, including religions, in society at large. In this regard, this article introduces and examines transhumanism. Transhumanism is a movement based on the convergence of ideology and scientific technology which aims to liberate humans from their biological constraints (i. e., disease, aging, and death), thereby bringing about human well-being. This article argues that the transhumanist ideology should be critically examined while its technology can be embraced and even supported from a theological perspective because this ideology determines the direction of technological advancement and application. Regarding ideological problems, I highlight transhumanists’ disembodiment propensity, optimistic belief in the progress of human civilization, and individualism. These features are embedded in and originate from transhumanism’s succession of classical humanism and the Enlightenment. If these features are not rectified, transhumanism and its technology might repeat disastrous incidents in human history such as eugenics and exacerbate social inequality. As a theologian, I critically examine the ideological features of transhumanism, proposing an alternative understanding with regard to human beings and existence. This effort helps to remedy potential problems of transhumanism in the future, relieve anxiety relating to these problems, and prepare a dialogue between transhumanism and Christian theology. This dialogue will eventually contribute to the robust development of transhumanism and the opening of a new era of the post-human.

How can the immense amount of suffering and waste inherent in the evolutionary process be reconciled with the existence of a perfectly good and omnipotent God? A widely embraced proposal in the area of “evolutionary theodicy” is the so-called “Only Way”-argument. This argument contends that certain valuable goods – in particular, creaturely independence and human freedom – can only come about through a genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled process of evolution. In a previous article, I have argued that the “Only Way”-argument can be defeated by a “Twin Earth”-thought experiment: If God is omnipotent, he could have created – directly, without evolution – creatures that are molecule-for-molecule identical to those that he actually created through evolution. If the creatures that he actually created have freedom and independence, there is no valid reason to deny that the non-evolved “twin creatures” would also be free and independent. Recently, Eikrem and Søvik (ES) have suggested a way of blocking my Twin Earth-argument by appealing to the distinction between type-values and token-values (or type-goods and token-goods). While ES admit that the Twin Earth-argument shows the non-necessity of evolution for the existence of certain type -goods, they argue that an evolutionary creation can be justified by appeal to valuable token -goods (unique particulars) that could not have existed without evolution. In this article, I respond to ES’s token-goods argument by showing that it is incompatible with a basic presupposition of “Only Way” evolutionary theodicies, namely the claim that the evolutionary process is genuinely indeterministic and partly uncontrolled.

In this paper, I aim to retrieve insights from the philosophy of the polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, which he referred to as pragmaticism. What Peirce is perhaps best known as is being the father of pragmatism. In order to differentiate his project from other thinkers such as William James and John Dewey, who likewise referred to their projects as pragmatism, he renamed his pragmatism to pragmaticism.Peirce’s pragmaticism has much to offer theologians, especially concerning theological method. I demonstrate this claim by showing the usefulness of three of Peirce’s pragmaticist concepts. The first section of this paper briefly explicates the foundational concepts of pragmaticism, which are the pragmatic(ist) maxim, the semiotic nature of understanding, and fallibilism. The second section of this paper provides a sketch of the benefits these three concepts have for theological method.