Creation

Schwarz provides a critical investigation of science, scientism, and knowledge acquired from reason or divine revelation concerning creation. He considers themes germane to (1) scientific theories and methods, (2) modern and post-modern philosophies of science, and (3) texts about creation, along with various interpretive traditions, that are sacred to Jews and Christians. The book excels at making a dense topic approachable to scientists, philosophers, historians, theologians, and many more disciplines. Readers with little or advanced knowledge of the topic(s) can discover gems in this book. Libraries should own copies, as the book will occupy a place of esteem for many years to come, even though it is already almost ten years in print. The book should serve as a primary text for courses in the philosophy of science, religion and science, post-Enlightenment cosmology, evangelism, faith and spirituality, revelation and reason, social-science theory development, and many additional inter-disciplinary courses. Professor Schwarz (b.1939) is a member of the faculty in the Institut fuer Evangelische Theologie [Lutheran/Protestant] at the University of Regensburg (Bavaria, Germany--near Munich) and visiting professor at several English-speaking seminaries. A prolific author, his more recent publication in English, 'The Theological Autobiography of Hans Schwarz: A Multi-Cultural and Multi-Denominational Christian Ministry' [Edward Mellen Press, July 2009], explores the author's religious and academic journey to build bridges of dialogue among academic disciplines, cultures, religions, and nations. The book's goal of identifying how nature became separated from any "God hypothesis" [xii], and objectivism grew in post-Enlightenment gardens of science, philosophy and theology [1-84: Chapters 1-3], would have made a significant contribution on its own. In fact, his treatment of the "genetic foundation of evolution" [42-8] and "unity and evolvement of the living species" [48-54] set a direct course toward his conclusion that divine order has become acknowledged as fundamental to life. God--or at least divine "order"--has been rejoined to creation for everyone who discovers that science and religion are like non-identical twins; they share the same parents and proximity in time of conception. Schwarz reaches his conclusion in the first three chapters by sticking close to what representative scientists, philosophers and theologians have written over the past five centuries. Ideas concerning creation from Augustine figure prominently in these chapters [72-3], as do those of Copernicus and Galileo [3-4], Isaac Newton [5-6,37,70], Herbert Spencer [17-19], Ernst Haeckel [7-8,19], and Charles Darwin [12-9, 42-4]. Exploring the influence of philosophical materialism on politics, Schwarz also introduces Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels [10-2] early on. The author builds a stage to explain why post-Enlightenment theologians and scientists became sometimes hostile,

This is the fourth (and final) book on Creation/Evolution that I've finished this past week or so, and it feels a bit like I'm just leaving a whirlwind. The other books that are on my mind as I review this book are Darwin's The Origin of Species, Denis Edwards' The God of Evolution, and Ted Peters' and Martinez Hewlett's book "Evolution from Creation to New Creation" (all which I'd recommend). As with how I'd imagine virtually any book on these topics would be structured, Schwarz starts out his excellent book by giving an overview of the scientific worldview, of what he titles "The Dawning of Modern Science." He then (in the first Part of the book) goes on to discuss "The Attack of Materialism" and the "Attack of Evolution." It's important to note that these titles imply much more violent sections than they really are. What Schwarz is really doing is talking about the perceived attacks of the pair of materialism and evolution. Part II of the book is perhaps the most fascinating to someone interested in science, but I must confess that I personally had the most difficult time with it (my dad has a PhD in the field of Chemistry, but my knowledge of science is pretty minimal - but I feel like I learned a lot from this book, even in survey form). Part II of the book is "The World in Scientific Perspective" and gives an excellent survey of 1. The Universe - discussing such things as Matter and Antimatter, Steady State Theory, Quantum Cosmology et. al.; 2. Life - discussion such things as the Genetic Foundation of Evolution, The Origin of life, et. al.; and 3. A Relativistic Understanding of the World - looking at such issues as the Dissolution of Matter, the Relatively of Space and Time, et. al. I found that section 3 was the most compelling and fascinating. I remember learning in systematic theology about the shift from Newtonian thought over to much more recent advances in the sciences, but Schwarz really does an amazing job of laying this transition out - showing how the workings of the Universe are nowhere near as `set' as they were once assumed to be. "Contrary to classical physics, the state of a physical system is not just a catalogue of actualities that is simply so, `but is also a network of potentialities'" (p. 72). Part III of the book the looks at the massive topic of "Regaining a Christian Faith in Creation" - the section that takes up the largest part of the book by far. The two major headings in the section are "The Gradual Rediscovery of the Created Order" and "Developing a Christian Understanding of Creation." People of note discussed in this part of the book are Charles Hodge (who Schwarz points out is largely responsible for the evolution = atheism idea - see p. 92ff), von Weizsäcker, Hawking, Tipler, Barth, Pannenberg, and Moltmann. Most interesting I found was that he also included a section on Special Providence: Miracles and Prayers (213ff). Schwarz's overall idea in the book is first to show that theo