With his Statuten aus dem Land Wolfaria, Johann Eberlin von Günzburg is the first author to imitate More’s Utopia, even though Eberlin’s proposals for religious, social and political reform are addressed directly at contemporary Germany, in the style of the pamphlets that characterize the first years of the Reformation. Often acknowledged as the first Lutheran utopia, Wolfaria has in fact little in common with the subtle Humanistic game played by Erasmus and More, yet it still is an extremely (...) interesting work, precisely because it allows us to perceive, in all their unresolved issues, the enthusiastic moments of fervent Lutheran propaganda of the beginning. (shrink)

Marcos Eberlin is a chemist and mass spectrometer who advances in a new book a refined Intelligent Design theory hinging on “foresight,” or the apparent teleology and purpose discernible in biological, chemical, and other complex life systems. Repurposing older ID arguments, such as those of “irreducible complexity,” and introducing new examples of phenomena pointed to by other ID theorists, Eberlin makes a strong argument for mindful creation by a “superintellect”. But is ID sufficient to answer Darwinism? Does “foresight” (...) go far enough in providing an alternative view of the origin of complex lifeforms? I argue that Eberlin, and other ID theorists, does not have a robust-enough definition of science to counter non-theistic theories of biology and biochemistry. An Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of science allows us to go beyond the divide between ID and a-theistic theories and move the science-and-faith debate onto more solid ground. (shrink)