Interdisciplinary International Conference:
“Pain and Suffering: Evolutionary and Theological Perspectives”,
Torun, 14-15 April 2023
Friday, April 14
9:00 Opening address
9:15 Mats Wahlberg
(Umeå University, Sweden):
Natural Selection, Scarcity, and Evil:
Reflections on the Fittingness of Evolution as a Divine Instrument of Creation.
10:00 Lluis Oviedo
(Pontifical University Antonianum in Rome, Italy): Evolutionary explanations of pain and suffering: a ‘gift to theology’ or a challenge?
10:45 Coffee break
11:15 Saša Horvat
(University of Rijeka, Croatia):
Pain, life and God – facing perplexity and paradox
11:45 Ruben Herce
(University of Navarra, Spain):
The perception of the suffering of the weak, the innocent and the marginalized from the perspective of evolution and Christian theology.
12:30 Award ceremony for participants of poster competition
13:00 Lunch
Break
14:30 Michał Oleksowicz / Grzegorz Karwasz
(Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń):
Suffering and struggle as a motor of progressing.
15:00 Gabriel Turkiewicz
(Pontifical University Antonianum in Rome, Italy):
Contemporary Conceptions of Original Sin Relating to the Theory of Evolution.
15:30 Paweł Orzeł
(Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń):
The transhumanist point of view to the evolutionary indifference to pain and suffering.
19:30 Dinner – 10 th Anniversary of the journal “Scientia et Fides” (Hotel Filmar)
Saturday, April 15
9:00 Anne Kull
(University of Tartu, Estonia):
Sexual violence: a complex web of failures for God or nature?
9:45 Michal Valco
(Comenius University, Slovakia):
The pain-riddled world as a workshop of the soul: St. Irenaeus and Martin Luther on the purpose of suffering in God’s good creation.
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Martin Montoya / Giménez Amaya
(University of Navarra, Spain):
A God who saves. The relevance of Philosophical Anthropology in Humanistic Biomedical Sciences for a Dynamic Theodicy model.
11:30 Piotr Roszak / Tomasz Huzarek
(Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń):
God, nature and evolutionary evil. Revisiting the Thomistic dual causality approach.
Small coffee break
12:15 Adam Jeszka
(Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń):
The struggle for existence as a process of awakening self-consciousness in Miguel de Unamuno’s philosophy.
12:45 Arkadiusz Gudaniec
(The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland):
Pain and suffering in the personal perspective. Reflections inspired by the philosophical method of Karol Wojtyla.
Lunch
Guided tour Torun
