Science and religion in the modern world

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original titleНаука и религия в современном мире
3. Language term Russian
4. lemma author Asliturk, Miriam
5. lemma category Key thinkers - Complementarity - Scientific theories and disciplines > Psychology-Psychoanalysis - Modes of interaction - Concepts of knowledge and modes of reasoning
6. Publication date 20-10-2017
7. lemma work Зобов, Роман Алексеевич [Author]. Наука и религия в современном мире
8. lemma manifestations ВЕСТНИК САНКТ-ПЕТЕРБУРГСКОГО УНИВЕРСИТЕТА.
9. Keywords Philosophy - psychology - modernity - Information technology - Russian Orthodox Church - social sciences - Eriksen, Thomas Hylland - Wilber, Ken
10. Url Click Here
11. Citations
    1. <p>Зобов Роман Алексеевич, Клинецкая Нина Васильевна Наука и религия в современном мире. <em>Вестник СПбГУ. Серия 12. Социология</em>. 2010. №2. Retrieved from: <a href="https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/nauka-i-religiya-v-sovremennom-mire">https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/nauka-i-religiya-v-sovremennom-mire</a> </p>
12. Lemma body

    1. The article argues that the relationship between religion and science has mostly been antagonistic. Religion has focused on profound human values (spirituality, ethical norms, etc.), passed down from generation to generation while science since the XVIIth century sought to discover the laws of the material world outside of human spirituality. Such opposition between religion and science has, however, been repeatedly criticized by philosophers and scientists alike. Kant, for example, believed that science’s possibilities should not be overestimated. The authors also point out that science, religion and philosophy (as well as art and other elements of European spiritual culture) have for centuries cooperated with each other.

       The authors stress that science itself has undergone important changes in the late XIXth-early XXth centuries. This era was characterized by a crisis of classical rationalism, when scientists realized that the person involved in a scientific study had an important impact on the latter. The same crisis is also characteristic of social sciences that for a long time had seen man as a rational agent. This important shift, according to the authors, encourages the dialogue between religion and science, in particular in the sphere of ethics. The article argues that the harmonious combination of material and spiritual elements, in particular science and religion, has always been an essential feature of the Russian mentality and can be traced in Russian literature and traditional philosophy. The Soviet period on the other hand has demonstrated, according to the authors, how destructive the rejection of religion can be.

       According to the authors, modern-day science tries to understand and rationalize the spiritual. It is getting interested in questions of spirituality, including the problems of the transformation of the human psyche, the transformation of many physiological processes occurring in the human body as he/she develops spiritually. New branches of psychology have developed to study transpersonal psychology and the psychology of the unconscious. In other words, science actively penetrates what has always been considered a matter of religion, trying to understand the phenomena that were usually associated only with faith. Analyzing the diversity of conceptual theories existing in various sciences, the well-known American psychologist K. Wilber managed to construct a matrix that allows to view human consciousness in its totality, with a whole spectrum of possible consciousnesses being implied. Wilber’s approach, the article points out, focuses not only on the external environment but also on the inner, spiritual life of man.

       The authors conclude by quoting anthropologist T.H. Eriksen, who characterized the current information society as one in which “the flow of information creates a fragmentary, associative and poetic mindset characteristic of pre-literate civilizations rather than the linear logical thinking typical of an industrial society.” The authors argue that such a society offers, in Eriksen’s words, “cascades of signs that are more or less accidentally related to each other" and not a structured scientific vision of the world, and is in a particular need of a fruitful dialogue between religion and science.