"Evolutionary Religious Studies" and Orthodox theology about the essence of spiritual culture: confrontation or dialogue?

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original title«Эволюционное религиоведение» и православное богословие о сущности духовной культуры: противостояние или диалог?
3. Language term Russian
4. lemma author Saprykin, Dmitry
5. lemma category Co-existence - Scientific theories and disciplines > Religious studies
6. Publication date 20-11-2009
7. lemma work Мумриков, Олег A. [Author]. "Evolutionary Religious Studies" and Orthodox theology about the essence of spiritual culture: confrontation or dialogue?
8. lemma manifestations Богослов.ру
9. Keywords atheism - Philosophy of religion
10. Citations
    1. http://www.bogoslov.ru/text/507057.html
11. Lemma body

    1. The author of the article raises questions concerning "evolutionary religious studies" (in other words, the revival of naturalistic hypothesis of religious origin):

       What is religion - "the fundamental, non-derivative and unremovable function of the spirit," "useful psycho-biological adaptation," "illusion," "brain virus" or "the malfunction of the navigation system of the moth flying into the flame of a candle"? May "evolutionary religious studies" represent a serious environment for the development of an atheistic view of the origin of human religiosity? Are there any alternative worldview interpretations of the facts on which critics of Christianity are based, within the framework of Orthodox theology?

       Thus, the author concludes that the interpretation of religiosity in the framework of "evolutionary religious studies" lies, as it were, in the particular plane: the fundamental, eternal and most complex phenomenon of human culture turns out to be reduced to elementary biological functions of reproduction, struggle for existence, natural selection, adaptation, genetic drift, expression genes, and the like. Meanwhile, the comprehension of the same factology within the framework of Christian theology breaks fresh ground to the third, worldview "dimension" that opens perspective to obvious sense of human being in the world comprehended through experience, in contrast to the atheistic explanation of the phenomenon of religiosity.

       In addition, the biblical understanding of the phenomenon of man as indissoluble, close, interconnected psychosomatic unity of the spirit, soul and body becomes more and more obvious. Orthodox theology, affirming the view of religion as a radical non-derivative and unremovable function of our spirit, is ready to conduct a further dialogue with natural science at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, not denying it, but filling it with a special meaning, assisting "to hear heavenly sounds in the music of nature ", as the author alleges.