Religion and Science: Is It Worth Relating?
It would seem that science and religion are really engaged in different things: the first studies this world, the second believes that even theoretically cannot be studied. Galileo Galilei's famous phrase that the Bible does not teach how heaven works, but teaches how to get there, is true today just as it was when it was spoken.
He echoes Galileo and M. V. Lomonosov, saying: “The Creator gave the human race two books. In one he showed his majesty, in the other his will. The first is this visible world, created by him so that a person, looking at the enormity, beauty and harmony of his buildings, recognizes the divine omnipotence, to the extent of the concept given to himself. The second book is Holy Scripture. It shows the creator's favor for our salvation."
And, it would seem, everything is simple - faith leads to salvation, science - to knowledge. But if we look closely at the state of affairs in today's world, including the scientific one, we will easily notice: much of what science does not only does not lead to salvation, but sometimes contradicts the possibility of true knowledge.
In the previous sections, we covered the question that salvation is possible only through the realization of the eternal nature of the human soul and its divine calling. That many modern paradigms and scientific hypotheses will not stand before the judgment of eternity.
Science and its true purpose
The purpose of science is service, it is called upon to satisfy the human need for knowledge and to answer the question “how”. How to achieve success in growing plants, how to travel long distances with less time losses, how to cure a particular disease, etc.
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In order to answer practical questions, it is necessary to have a certain methodological basis and tools that allow you to come to certain conclusions faster and be sure of their correctness. Philosophy, mathematics and other fundamental sciences are engaged in the methodology and development of the general concept of scientific knowledge, which by themselves are not capable of solving practical problems, but are able to indicate the direction of solving these problems and provide tools.
Scientific knowledge has always been and remains rational, devoid of an independent idea of its own moral and ethical limitations, which implies a personal approach that is completely absent in the scientific approach.
Thus, science that answers the question "how" becomes completely useless in answering the question "why", which is the key area considered by religion.
Modern science is at the stage of forming its own answer to the question "why", trying to deal with goals, while its task is to deal exclusively with means.
This happens for several reasons:
- It is convenient to use science as an ideological weapon in the hands of opposing power parties. It is easy to see how this happens every day in the field of fundamental and practical sciences. Convenience lies in the fact that scientific knowledge for many people is quite reasonably authoritative, while the “consumer” of scientific knowledge does not often think about the compliance of a particular theory with the criteria of scientific character. In a sense, what is happening could be called falsification, the substitution of real scientific knowledge for its popularized interpretation, which can easily become the basis of ideological theory.
- In a society that does not practice traditional values, a certain ethical vacuum is gradually forming: we no longer remember how we should, and still do not quite understand how it could be otherwise. Attempts to get out of this disinformation field lead to the search for a moral foundation where it cannot be a priori. For example, in science.
- Science strives to learn as much as possible - this is its nature. Lacking an initial value system within itself, it still needs to be justified in some way. Despite the fact that science is rational and not personal, it is impossible to cancel the desire for the personal in the person himself, who is the subject of scientific knowledge.
Science today is trying to take a place that was not originally intended for it. The place that faith has occupied for centuries and has occupied it by right.
The inability to be part of the ideological apparatus and be responsible for goal-setting is inherent in science internally, systematically. First, science is always temporary. Karl Popper put forward as one of the criteria of scientific character its falsifiability, that is, the theoretical possibility of being refuted. The entire philosophical thought of mankind has proved from time to time the impossibility of absolute knowledge, and in the variability of science, in its ability to make mistakes, there is a mechanism that allows you to constantly strive for this absolute, never reaching it. In addition, the ability of a scientific theory to be refuted suggests that it exists within a certain and strict logical framework, and if knowledge about the initial data is changed, the theory based on them will also change.
Secondly, science itself has only one goal - to recognize and discover this world. Outside the context of morality, these discoveries can go arbitrarily far, because science is not capable of self-restraint. Self-restraint is born by the answer to the question "why", and it belongs to religion.
Why does the question “why” receive a full answer only within the framework of religion, and not within the framework of, for example, secular ethics? Because secular ethics is also a set of pseudo-scientific concepts, and it is as changeable as science is changeable, and as ideologized as any practical set of pseudoscientific methods and paradigms.
Religion. Purpose
Religiousness is a natural form of attitude and behavior for a person. Religious feeling is a component of a human being, regardless of how its origin is interpreted.
Thus, L. Feuerbach described in his work "The Essence of Christianity" religious feeling as a person's desire to feel his own immortality through reunification with all of humanity. In other words, according to Feuerbach, a person is in a constant sense of his own finiteness and experiences a fear of death, the salvation from which is the realization of participation in infinite humanity. This feeling is deified, in his opinion.
Despite his frankly atheistic views, Feuerbach did not deny the existence of a person's religious feeling as a component, in the absence of which existence is not always possible.
For a religious person, regardless of confessional affiliation, the feeling of faith is not just an awareness of oneself as a part of the whole, but a feeling of a supernatural nature. What is in a person, because he was created by God, his birth, life and death are not ordinary events, but part of something larger.
And since, from the point of view of religion itself, Creation in the broad sense of the word is the fruit of a supernatural act, the laws by which the world exists remain unchanged.
Moral categories within the framework of the religious worldview are also constant, because the answer to the question "why" is always the same. Every religion, whatever it may be, has an idea of why a person came to this world, what he must create in it and, most often, what awaits him after death. Within the framework of these ideas, the norms of human behavior are also developed, the criteria according to which this or that action can be considered as bad or good.
This is what distinguishes religion, for example, from ethics, the moral norms of which are changing to please the current ideological course.
That is why religion helps to keep within the framework of the moral norm - as a social institution, it is the only one that leaves its laws unchanged for centuries, and sometimes for millennia. As Voltaire said, "If God did not exist, he should have been invented." Why? The reason is simple: the purpose of religion is not just to keep society within a framework that ensures adequate interaction, but also to form an ethical basis on the basis of which all other spheres of social development can develop.
The purpose of religion and belief is to set goals and set boundaries, and this is so, even without looking at religion through the eyes of a believer.
This is precisely the mistake of science - in trying to take the place of religion, to engage in goal-setting instead of looking for means of solving problems.
Science and religion … Dispersed?
How could it happen that scientific knowledge ceased to correlate its conclusions and actions with the moral priorities of religion?
Let's start with the fact that this situation was not always observed. Syncretic thinking was characteristic of humanity in the early stages. For people of antiquity, there was no difference between a phenomenon, its causes and effects. This is evidenced by the myth, the formation of which began in those distant immemorial times, as well as the individual development of a person - a child up to a certain age also thinks syncretically, ontogeny and phylogeny coincide. The period of syncretism in the history of mankind is one of the most striking episodes that demonstrate personal, non-rational thinking and perception. In this way of personal cognition, mankind comprehended this world for many centuries of its existence. Personal perception involves relying on some kind of dogma, norms, rules. Knowledge within the personal should be limited,not everything can be allowed to the one who comprehends this world, provided that it is perceived “through oneself”.
The most significant period for the formation of science was the period of the Middle Ages, and at that time the nascent scientific thought was localized in Europe. Byzantium suffered one after another downfalls and losses, therefore it quickly lost its spiritual superiority along with the superiority of Orthodoxy. The Catholic Church was at the forefront, controlling the minds of Western Christians and the finances of large feudal lords and entire states. Therefore, when we talk about the development of science in the Middle Ages, it is more correct to understand precisely medieval Western Europe.
It was within the framework of Catholic scholasticism that the idea was formed that science and religion may not always coincide. The famous Dominican monk Thomas Aquinas, who wrote his many-page work "The Summa of Theology", did a lot to adapt ancient philosophy in general and, in particular, Aristotle. However, this is not only an adaptation, it is also a step towards uniting science and religion into a single whole, at the same time placing religion in a subordinate position. Thomas Aquinas, as it were, indicated: we will justify our views with the previous, more scientifically grounded ones.
By placing religion in a position of subordination to science in the Middle Ages, European civilization provoked a kind of "explosion" of thought in the Renaissance. The revival is considered the time of the dawn of anthropocentrism, but in fact, Christianity is also as anthropocentric as possible - the Word became human flesh, and not someone else's. And the Old Testament, even in the Book of Genesis, speaks of the supremacy of man, its creation is "very good" in contrast to other "good".
Therefore, from the point of view of Christian ethics and dogmatics, the Renaissance can be considered “selfish anthropocentrism” in contrast to the balanced anthropocentrism of Christianity, where a person, being a loved creation, nevertheless remains a creation obliged to coordinate his actions with the Creator.
It was this break of Christian morality with science, provoked by Catholic scholasticism, and led to the current state of affairs.
Bottom line: why science and morality should correlate or our main axiom
You and I have studied in detail what is the true purpose of science and the true purpose of religion. The conclusion of our thinking can be only one thing: science solves problems, religion and faith - set goals, and nothing else. The substitution of one for the other leads to deplorable situations of abuse of knowledge in the scientific environment, when the mind does not see its limitations, turning knowledge into an end in itself, forgetting that the main goal is a person, his well-being, including spiritual. Only by facing the prospect of eternity, science is able to make truly valuable discoveries leading to peace and prosperity.
Standing at the blackboard, the teacher of mathematical analysis says to his students: "Let's take it for granted …" and further expounds some principle from which a whole science is derived, and some areas of life are transformed. Are we ready to recklessly accept all these scientific axioms? Especially in a situation where many scientific disciplines are subordinated to someone's narrow commercial interests. Indeed, in fact, through scientific axioms and subsequent logical constructions, new religious or anti-religious principles are being introduced to us. In the future, they are legalized through academies, Nobel prizes and school textbooks, and under the guise of secular education they are introduced into our consciousness.
Each science is based on axioms that are taken by scientists as a given on faith, unprovable from the point of view of science alone, but later find confirmation in practice. At the same time, practical confirmation is also found in contradicting axioms: we simultaneously apply both Euclidean geometry and Lobachevsky's geometry.
Taking on faith the postulates of the natural sciences (not directly related to humans), we see no religious connotation in parallel lines or the prohibition of division by zero. Most likely, this is due to the weak development of science in this direction and our primitive idea of the endless variety of the surrounding world. In this regard, science is a reflection of our mind, using the funny 3% of the brain.
As far as the social sciences or those directly related to humans, such as anthropology and medicine, are concerned, it is much easier for us to accept or not to accept something on faith, since we can compare the initial postulates of sciences with the thousand-year spiritual experience of world religions, the revelations of the prophets and holy books. After all, no matter how they disown the religious context and disguise their axioms in different words, they invade the interpretation of the divine program embedded in a person (from the point of view of faith). And by rejecting the existence of the Creator, they only form a religious concept without his participation or with the participation of Satan as the antipode of the Most High, and these issues are also well studied by all world religions.
Thus, the relationship between the religious foundation and the axioms of the social sciences is clear enough, regardless of how scientists are aware of this. Different axioms will be taken from different religious foundations and various social constructions will be built on them. What is acceptable to Protestantism may turn out to be false from the point of view of Islam, Orthodoxy, or Vedic tradition. In the future, we will consider economics in more detail from this point of view, but here it is necessary to formulate a general rule governing these relationships, and we will call this rule the MAIN AXIOM.
Science only meets its purpose when all of its axioms and the ideas, hypotheses, theories and conclusions that follow them are consistent with the Divine axiom (God's plan for the world and man). Or in other words: ALL SCIENTIFIC AXIOMS ARE A CONSEQUENCE OF THE DIVINE AXIOM.
Thus, we get a clear axiological criterion for the "truth" and "falsity" of scientific activity: if scientific activity conflicts with the values given to us by God, then this activity is pseudoscientific. And if some branch of science completely contradicts the Divine Axiom, then such a "science" can be directly called pseudoscience.
Divine axioms are given to us in Revelation (Bible), Church Tradition, the Koran, the Book of Veles, Avesta and other sources, depending on the accepted religious platform. In world religions, Divine Revelation and our knowledge of God were given to us with a specific purpose - to open the way of Salvation to man.
Divine Revelation does not give us knowledge about all the physical and other natural-scientific laws of our world, since this knowledge is not necessary for the salvation of the soul, but we are given genuine knowledge “about man”, about the meaning of his life, about the laws of the spiritual life of a person, the path of transformation and degradation. In other words, the divine axiom reveals, first of all, knowledge about a person, and not about the world.
Therefore, we can confidently check for truth using this axiom only those sciences (or subsections of sciences) that are associated with a person and relations between people.
Regarding the fundamental theoretical sciences (for example, mathematics, physics) and sciences that are not connected with a person, their axioms and laws, we can say that they will also obey the Main axiom, but so far our knowledge, as a rule, is not enough to establish clear relationships between the religious (or anti-religious) foundation and scientific axioms, therefore, we can check the data of science for truth and falsity only in that part of them that is directly related to practical application in human life. And this truth or falsity will depend on a religious (Christian, Islamic), Vedic or other fundamental principle.
For people who believe in God outside of religion, who deny the need for a mediator and religion as such, the function of interpreting the divine axiom will be performed by conscience as a direct dialogue between man and the Creator.
The most difficult situation occurs among atheists. Not believing in God, they have to “take on faith” something. They can slide towards pure Satanism, they can deify nature, they can be in the Vedic tradition, or, without realizing themselves, accept some kind of religious concept. As a rule, such people have an ideological hodgepodge of different approaches in their heads, which the voice of conscience brings to a common denominator.
So, to summarize: If we are talking about the sciences related to man, then all scientific axioms flow from the Divine Axiom, therefore, in order to check the truth and falsity of science, it is necessary to compare its axioms and provisions with Divine Revelation, in the interpretation of your confession or the voice of your conscience (in the absence of pronounced religiosity).
Author: Poluichik Igor
