Science and faith in our time: together or not?

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original titleНаука и вера в наше время: вместе или нет?
3. Language term Russian
4. lemma author Saprykin, Dmitry
5. lemma category Various approaches to the problem of correlation between science and theology
6. Publication date 19-09-2017
7. lemma work Паршин Алексей [Author]. Science and faith in our time: together or not?
8. lemma manifestations Татьянин день
9. Citations
   1. http://www.taday.ru/text/2213575.html
10. Lemma body

    1. The Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences academician Alexei Parshin emphasizes in his report that the relationship between science and faith is "not just a matter of reflection, but also a matter of division in our society, which is growing more and more." According to Academician Parshin, such an antagonism of faith and knowledge was already outlined in the Enlightenment. For today, three main points of view on the problem, he believes, could be singled out: science and religion are related to different spheres of life, and everyone must do his own thing; science and religion say different things about the same thing and therefore contradict each other; regardless of the relationship to each other, science and religion should enter into a single holistic worldview.

       Academician Parshin also identified three main topics where there is a "dispute" between science and Christianity: the clash of the Christian creation, incarnation and the world end doctrine and of historical science in its present state; the contradiction between the world creation by God idea and the evolutionary theory; the conflict between Christian doctrine of the personality appearance at the conception moment and medical practice of abortion when detecting genetic diseases in the early stages of embryo development. These acute issues need to be considered and discussed in public, the researcher believes. At the same time, he critically assessed the attempts to directly "reconcile" science and theology, reminding that in history this led to the renewal movement.

       As a positive example of interaction of science and religious Church experience, Parshin brought the founder of modern physical cosmology Alexander Freedman, who wrote in his book "The World as Space and Time", that the first description of the time and space relativity in history was given by Blessed Augustine in his Confession. Augustine was also abundantly quoted by German mathematician, the set theory creator Georg Kantor. At the same time, another outstanding scholar of the first half of the 20th century, the Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, believed that the Scriptures do not need to be supported by the science arguments.

       Academician Parshin called the liturgy circles as levels of being (day, week and year) and various cycles in nature, where the connections can be traced "from biochemical scales to processes occurring in space", “another interesting example of intersection of scientific and religious experience”.