Robert Spaemann

"

"You can describe the evolutionary process, if you so decide, in purely naturalistic terms. But the text that then appears when you see a person, when you see a beautiful act or a beautiful picture can only be read if you use a completely different code."

Cited by Lennox in God's Undertaker, p 191, to tell the story of a hidden code in the "Violin Partita in D-minor" by J. S. Bach. This code was discovered by musicologist Helga Thoene as a double coding of the music. By assigning letters to a formal scheme of numbers applied to the musical piece, you come up with a proverb whose English translation is "In God we are born, in Christ we die, through the Holy Spirit we are made alive." Spaemann reflects upon whether it could be purely chance that the message popped out from such a scheme.