Does God Create Thorough Evolution? The Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective.

Many enthusiasts of theistic evolution willingly accept Aquinas’s distinction between primary and secondary causes, to describe theologically “the mechanics” of evolutionary transformation. They claim that God invites and enables contingent entities to participate in his divine act of creating new natural kinds. However, Aquinas clearly states “it is impossible for any creature to create, either by its own power or instrumentally—that is, ministerially” (ST I, 45, 5, co.) and adds, on yet another occasion, that “To the perfection of the universe there can be added something daily with regard to the number of individuals, not, however, with regard to the number of species.” (ST I, 118, 3, ad 2). On the course of my lecture I will offer: (1) a constructive proposal of the Thomistic metaphysics of evolutionary transformation, (2) an answer to the question of whether God creates through evolution, and (3) a constructive model of the concurrent action of God and creatures in coming into existence of new natural kinds.

MARIUSZ TABACZEK, O.P.

Fr Mariusz is Polish Dominican, theologian (he holds Ph.D. in philosophical theology from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA and Church Licentiate from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland). He currently works as a researcher at the Thomistic Institute in Warsaw, a lecturer at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Warsaw and the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Krakow, and a director of Studium Dominicanum in Warsaw. He published a number of articles on metaphysics and the issues concerning the relation of theology and science in Zygon, Theology and Science, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, and Scientia et Fides. He coauthored two chapters in the second edition of Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (ed. by Gary Ferngren). He is the author of Emergence. Towards A New Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science (2019). His forthcoming second book will refer to the panentheistic model of divine action based on the theory of emergence.

Tickets: Free
Venue: Blackfriars, St Giles Oxford, OX1 3LY United Kingdom Array ( [lat] => 0 [lng] => 0 )