Radu Preda
Bio
Radu Preda teaches at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. He is the initiator and appointed deliverer of the course in Social Theology at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology of BBU. He also delivers master degree courses at the Faculty of Philology and the Faculty of Sociology and Social Assistence of the same university. Visiting-professor at the universities in Florence, Thessaloniki, Rome, Paris, Mainz, Hannover and Vienna. Author of five volumes, approximately one hundred research papers and over three hundred articles and essays on theological topics. Editor of INTER. Romanian Review for Theological and Religious Studies. Member in the management board of European Forum of Orthodox Schools of Theology, Bruxelles.
Position statement on the issue
The Darwin year, which has recently come to an end, has provided one of the rare occasions to revisit the ideological foundation of the European modernity. Yet, one of the most substantial and consistent features of the modern European is the belief in science, the way the ability to explain existential meanings is transferred from religion to science. As the core of the illuminist project lies in this effort to emancipate from the ecclesiastical tutelage, Darwin actually offers the scientific scafold to "uncharm" the world, the argument for emerging from a Weltanschauung, which, in time, has come to be regarded as obsolete. Even if the English author only launched a hypothesis, preceded by and so much more followed by the academic discussion on the topic, his book on the origin of species published in 1859 was soon to be turned into the "Bible" of the new vision upon the world. The conflict between evolutionism and creationism rose to the dimension of a real inter-religious war, with dogmatism and simplisim being present on both sides. Beyond this polarization, Darwin had a direct political influence. His contemporaries and, for a long time, his exiled co-citizens Marx and Engels were pleased with these evolutionist arguments they would use with a view to supporting their ideas of social natural selection, the victory of the working classes thus representing the pinnacle of human development. What is more, social Darwinism was to fuel the conviction, subsequently materialized in the Soviet concentration camps and the Nazi theory on the pure race, that the appearance of "the arian human being" or "the new man" was possible by means of severe education, unsparing and blunt influences on one human's evolution, selection and controlled natality. Darwinism is, independent of its will, an essential ingredient of the totalitarianism in the 20th century. Now, two decades after the fall of the communist regime, facing the new challenges of biotechnology and having overcome, to a considerable extent, the old dichotomy between religion and science, we have to ask ourselves again how valuable and experimental arguments can be brought (back) into discussion. The chances are for an authentic dialogue between religion (which is nothing like obscurantism) and science (which is no longer reduced to scientism) as the necessity to invest science with an ethical meaning of extraction, the theological one included, has already brought about numerous fruitful exchanges of ideas.
