The Lost Soul of Early Hominins: Humility, Wisdom, and Technology

Speaker(s): Celia Deane-Drummond
Date: Spring 2018
Length: 46m
Product ID: RGDL4802R

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Description

This lecture addresses several recent archaeological discoveries about early hominins, discoveries that help us think theologically about their probable inner mental world. One of the features that must have arisen in deep evolutionary time was humility, that ability to exercise self-constraint in the context of a community of others. I will address what humility means in biblical terms and compare this with humility as discussed in the work of medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. There are also traces of expressions of compassion and wisdom in the hominin archaeological record, raising intriguing questions about human origins, the encounter with God or a sense of the divine, and the capacities of humans as they began to create distinctly social worlds.

See All Audio by Celia Deane-Drummond

Celia Deane-Drummond is joint editor of the international journal Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences. She has been Chair of the European Forum for the Study of Religion and Environment since 2011 and is honorary visiting Professor in Theology and Science at the University of Durham. Dr. Deane-Drummond's research interests are in the engagement of systematic and moral theology and the biological sciences, including specifically ecology, evolution, genetics, animal behavior, psychology and evolutionary anthropology. She has published over two hundred scholarly theology and scientific articles or book chapters and twenty five books as editor or author. She has most recently published Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred, ed. with Sigurd Bergmann and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2015), Ecology in Ju00fcrgen Moltmann's Theology, 2nd edition (2016), and Religion in the Anthropocene, edited with Sigurd Bergmann and Markus Vogt (2017).