The struggle for truth, hope and human dignity

Ctirad V. Pospíšil's monograph significantly expands on previous research into the relationship between Catholic theology and the findings of natural sciences in the last and penultimate centuries. In the first part, the author presents the attitude of contemporary theology towards astronomy, finding no conflict whatsoever. The second part discusses theology's position on the evolution of fauna and flora. Here, too, a considerable openness to the fact of evolution is evident, though not to its materialistic interpretation. The main area of friction was the vision of the evolutionary origin of humanity, which sparked heated discussions not only in the field of theology but also among representatives of other scientific disciplines. The author captures the positions not only of Czech theologians but also of those who were connecting this concept of the origin of humanity with the Christian theology of creation and anthropology as early as the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth century. br> This topic, which has been completely unexamined in the Czech context until now, offers numerous contributions to international research as well. It demonstrates that the attitude of theologians was by no means unequivocally negative and that, from the 1920s onwards, the acceptance of the human body's origin through evolution was a fairly common standard in the Catholic theology of creation, especially in German-speaking countries and, in connection with this, in Bohemia and Moravia.