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The Thomistic Institute

Reconciling the Image of God with the Scientific Image of Human Persons | Dr. Daniel De Haan

The Thomistic Institute

The Thomistic Institute

Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Thomism, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Catholicism, Philosophy, Christianity

4.8873 Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dr. Daniel De Haan examines the interplay between philosophical, theological, and scientific images of human persons, emphasizing their complementarity and addressing challenges posed by reductionist scientific perspectives.


This lecture was given on September 28th, 2023, at University of Edinburgh.


For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.


About the Speaker:


Dr. Daniel De Haan is a Research Fellow of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. He is working on the Renewal of Natural Theology Project directed by Professor Alister McGrath. Before coming to Oxford, De Haan was a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge working on the neuroscience strand of the Templeton World Charity Foundation Fellowships in Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Sciences Project, directed by Sarah Coakley. During this postdoctoral fellowship, he conducted research on the intersections of theology, philosophy, and neuroscience in Lisa Saksida’s Translational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge.


Keywords: Aristotelianism, Augustine’s De Trinitate, Catholic Anthropology, Divine Image, Human Dignity, Psychological Analogy of the Trinity, Rational Animals, Reductionism in Neuroscience, Scientific Challenges to Theology

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

0:06.2

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

0:12.7

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

0:19.3

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

0:25.9

So let's first think about some common sense philosophical images of humans.

0:30.2

Then we'll think about particularly a Catholic Christian conception of the divine image of humans,

0:35.9

and then onward into how they might be challenged

0:39.0

by certain scientific images of humans in the world. So a kind of philosophical conception

0:45.7

of humans, but one that is, I think, pretty adjacent to common sense understandings of humans

0:52.5

is not just Aristotle's conception of humans as rational animals,

0:56.4

but humans as developing and dependent rational animals.

1:01.9

So rationality, of course, can be defined in many rival and conflicting ways.

1:07.1

One of the more common ways, I think, it's hard to say this for a point I'll be coming to again,

1:12.1

there isn't, you know, one thing you might think about common sense is that everyone agrees about common sense,

1:16.6

but the fact of the matter is there's lots of varieties of rival and conflicting accounts of common sense.

1:22.6

And that feeds into different theoretical conceptions.

1:26.6

So what I'm giving is a theory about

1:28.1

common sense, a kind of philosophical theory about common sense. But humans as developing

1:33.0

independent rational animals is the idea is that humans are developing mammals, right? We're

1:38.7

born deeply dependent upon others for very long periods of our existence.

1:45.0

In fact, you might say for the entirety of our existence,

1:47.0

we're constantly involved in networks of giving and receiving

...

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