TABOR - Tradition and Contemporaneity in the Romanian Orthodox Church
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Science and Religion in the Mentality of the Contemporary Man. The Risks of Ideologisation


 

The mentality of the 20th century man has undergone significant mutations and re-evaluations with regard to the relation between science and religion and their place within culture and civilization. Here are some of the aspects of this paradigm`s change:

  1. Specifying the limits and what the scientific knowledge involves, both in theoretical, fundamental works of epistemology, gnoseology and science philosophy, as well as by the means of an axiological evaluation of the consequences and of the risks of science applications. Besides the ethical, ecological and genetic-anthropologic risks, the danger of extrapolating the scientific way of thinking to all levels of human life - which would impoverish and lead the man astray from his own humanity - became apparent. Furthermore, the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century have resorted to ideologically confiscating the science of their period, walking in the footsteps of the ideological currents which had dominated the previous centuries: the illuminism, the evolutionism, the scientism, the anthropocentric humanism etc. Nowadays, the globalist ideologies are threatening to confiscate science and its applications.

  2. The obvious failure of any reductionist, presumably scientific, theory.

  3. Being aware of the crisis science is dealing with: it has, on the one hand, lost its orientation towards life, and on the other hand, it stands as a substitute for faith, as the new embodiment of magic, and as an expression of the will for power and domination.

  4. The attempts of having science (especially cosmology and quantum physics) and the metaphysics underlying the major religious systems (especially the oriental ones, but also the Christian-Orthodox metaphysics of the uncreated energies) communicate and reconcile.

  5. The emergence and development of the so called scientific creationism, as a reaction to evolutionism, and the more or less successful attempts of finding an intermediate solution, among which, the most provocative is the „theistic evolutionism" - able to assimilate and interpret in a christian manner almost all the theses of the contemporary sciences.

 

The issue of the science-religion conflict is a false issue, as long as neither one are ideologically and politically confiscated and manipulated. From the Christian point of view, the reason for a fruitful dialogue between science and religion, resides in the world rationality thesis (common to both), and the elementary assertion that there can be no conflict between the natural and the supernatural knowledge, between the natural and the supernatural Revelation; there can merely be a distinction between two complementary levels of reality.

Keywords: science, religion, ideology, creationism, evolution


 

GRIGORE DINU MOŞ