Max Planck - an Adversary of Christianity? The Debate About Planck's Attitude Towards Religion after World War II.

Abstract

Max Planck an Adversary of Christianity? The Debate About Planck's Attitude Towards Religion after World War II. The article discusses a debate which unfolded in the early 1950s and 1960s between East German Marxist philosophers and historians of science and West German theologians and scientists. The subject treated was the attitude towards religion of famous physicist Max Planck who had died a few years earlier, in 1947. The article analyses the different positions of the contributors, mainly with a view to developing a categorial framework usable in descriptions and analyses of the religious attitudes of natural scientists. Moreover the different stages of the debate are outlined in order to exhibit their connections to the larger historical context, i.e. the unfolding of the cold war. In the light of this the debate can be regarded as a religious or ideological war, albeit a cold one, on German soil, which fortunately did not escalate into a hot conflict. It ended, as can be illustrated in a late contribution to the debate, with the collapse of the GDR in 1989 or shortly thereafter.