The Mystery of Rationality. Interface in the Dialogue between Theological and Scientific Knowledge

  1. Lemma
  2. The Mystery of Rationality. Interface in the Dialogue between Theological and Scientific Knowledge
  3. English
  4. Delli, Eudoxie
  5. Modes of interaction - Concepts of knowledge and modes of reasoning > Orthodox gnosiology - Scientific theories and disciplines > Modern physics :QM - Orthodox theological tradition and practice > Patristic studies
  6. Lemeni, Nicolae Adrian [Author]. The Rationality of the World and Human Reason as expressed in the Theology of Father Dumitru Staniloae: Points of Connection in the Dialogue between Theology and Science
  7. International Journal of Orthodox Theology
  8. epistemology - Giannaras, Christos - uncertainty principle - discontinuity principle - Nicolescu, Basarab - Bohr, Niels Henrik David - D'Espangnat, Bernard - intuition and scientific investigation - Stapp, Henry Pierce
  9. |urn:nbn:de:0276-2012-3040
    1. <p>Lemeni, A. N. (2012). The Mystery of Rationality. Interface in the Dialogue between Theological and Scientific Knowledge. <em>International Journal of Orthodox Theology, 3:3</em>, 69-85.</p>

    1. According to Adrian Lemeni, the paradigm of contemporary science provides crucial epistemological mutations. Especially, the epistemological implications of the quantum physics, overpassing the mechanistic and determinist model of the past, valorise the rationality as a mystery, bringing to light analogies with the  gnoseological conceptions elaborated in patristic thought. Nowadays, there are significant representatives of international scientific community that reject absolutist positivism and recognize that it is impossible to exhaust the truth about the world and human being through pure analytical and empirical approaches.

      In this perspective, the author states that the recognition and assumption of the limits of human reason within the act of knowledge could bring the savant closer to the truth than a self-sufficient consciousness that pretends to analytically understand and predetermine everything. In this sense, the awareness of limitation could offer chance and openness, but surely not something that would limit the knowledge.

      According to Lemeni, there is a chance that theological gnoseology and scientific epistemology can be reconciled. On the one side, the epistemological perspective, founded and elaborated in quantum physics, will determine science’s opening towards interrogations and conceptual categories of a philosophical character. It will favour an articulation of the theological vision of the world with the scientific conception on a philosophical level. On the other side, Orthodox theology has to rethink and actualize in a creative way the relevant patristic tradition, which always had implied the dialogue of theology with culture, since theology has been called to respond to the needs of contemporary society in a contextual manner. In this way, the limit is assumed as a mutual opening, which can permit the reciprocal enrichment of science and religion with respect in their otherness.