HAMBURG, Feb. 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hilmar Lorenz's book "Facing the Environmental Crisis. Consequences for Scientific and Religious Communities" tackles the unavoidable side effects of technologically successful scientific theories that have been caused by their technical applications of an industrial scale. These side effects altogether have led the world into the environmental crisis we already live in, which jeopardizes human civilization's future.
The author argues how scientific and religious communities are co-responsible for not acknowledging their historic role in the genesis of this crisis. While claiming to contribute to the common good, scientific communities have proceeded exclusively by theorizing and its applications on an industrial scale. According to Lorenz, they have ignored its side effects for a much too long time since they are not part of their perspective to be technologically successful. Apart from individuals trying to fight the environmental crisis, religious communities have not acted in this regard beyond mere declarations from their leaders.
Through Lorenz's lens on the crisis, readers will understand the critical condition the world is already in. He shines a crucial light on theories suggesting that nature, economic markets and human bodies focusing on medicine need to be treated as mere mechanisms, which contradicts human dignity. Instead of treating them as mechanisms, he believes, society should primarily view them as fields of human interaction meant to serve the common good for humankind and life. According to Lorenz, scientific and religious communities should actively direct those interactions towards helping the common good rather than the financial interests through factually exploiting mere mechanisms. If these communities started taking the right steps, they might significantly impact shaping a better world.
"The environmental crisis needs to be faced by scientific and religious communities in particular," said Lorenz. "Historically, the scientific communities have become co-responsible for the crisis because, methodically, they have restricted themselves to mere theorizing instead of contributing thereby to the common good. And religious communities only talk about preserving God's creation from human destruction and do not follow it by actions showing that they mean it by constantly denouncing the costs of the ongoing environmental destruction in public and organizing non-violent resistance against it."
Ultimately, the book showcases steps that need to be taken not only by politicians but rather by societal communities as well, in order to overcome the environmental crisis in the interest of preserving what is known by many as God's creation from human destruction.
“Facing the Environmental Crisis: Consequences for Scientific and Religious Communities”
By Hilmar Lorenz
ISBN: 978-1-5144-1623-5 (eBook)
Available at Xlibris, Amazon and Barnes & Noble
About the author
Hilmar Lorenz was born in Germany in 1940 during the Second World War. In Hamburg, Germany, Lorenz studied Protestant theology, some mathematics and physics, and philosophy before he published his doctoral dissertation in philosophy on Immanuel Kant in 1967. Then he served his church as a Scientific Employee at the Evangelical Academy Hamburg, being in charge of the sector of the sciences, and as a Lutheran parish pastor until 1981. After his sabbatical, in which he studied Gestalt psychotherapy at Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, he became a prison chaplain and civil servant of North-Rhine Westphalia State of Germany in 1984. Since 1992, he lived close to Ottawa, Canada, until the death of his wife in 2018, which caused him to return to Germany. After some other publications on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Lorenz has now finished a book in German to be published on an academic internet platform. It is titled "Kant's Distinction between Theoretical and Practical Cognitions. Methodological Consequences."
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