Religion, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft – serie

In this thesis, the phenomenon of fundamental hope is understood as atmosphere. As a metaphor, hope as atmosphere finds a new expression of hope other than the light-metaphor that dominates the discourse of hope. Hope is not only the light that illuminates the dark moments of life, but also, more fundamentally, in the air, it lies in the sphere in-between and saturates each life experience and every living moment. As an existential reality, hope as atmosphere reveals our hopeful way of atmospheric co-existence. Communal love constitutes the ground of this hopeful co-existence, it keeps the hopeful co-existence constantly refreshed and open, guaranteeing more possibilities of hope. On the basis of communal love, hopeful co-existence shows its ontological meaning as a way towards life. The thesis of hope as atmosphere finds resonance and expression not only in Christian trinitarianly based understanding of hope, but also in the most central doctrine of co-humanity in Confucianism.

A reductive-naturalistic view of nature, which has become increasingly widespread in recent decades and draws its plausibility from the successes of the natural sciences, medicine and modern technology, and most recently from the successes of brain research in particular, represents a Christian as well as a humanistic image of human beings, to whom freedom (of will) and responsibility belong. Philosophers and theologians who nevertheless cling to (libertarian) free will often resort to just one philosophical paradigm for argumentation. Hildegard Peters integrates a broad range of different philosophical and cognitive-scientific approaches to an overall perspective on the subject of free will, which represents an innovative and convincing counter-proposal to the reductive-naturalistic view of man.