ABSTRACT
Between 1997 and 2006, Vesely took part in the Religion, Science and Environment symposia, in which gatherings of theologians and scientists strove to find common ground within the deepening appreciation of climate change. This essay was written some years after his participation in the symposia, as a brief review of the nature of the problem. He begins with the Medieval Christian notion of scientia as knowledge of sensible things leading to knowledge of intelligible things, or theology. Late seventeenth century transformations in theology eventually led to the emancipation of the mathematical sciences, in an effort to identify a horizon of certainty outside the religious conflicts of the time. With the diversity of areas of study, if less of method, arising from the experimental sciences, we arrive to the present problem of striving to recover a properly universal understanding of ‘environment’ in which, following Werner Heisenberg, there is fruitful communication between the languages of science and of religion, which neither alone presently is able to provide.
