Science and orthodoxy. The incompatibilities of a recent relationship.

1. Entity type Lemma
2. Original titleŞtiinţă şi ortodoxie. Incompatibilităţile unei relaţii recente.
3. Language term Romanian
4. lemma author Niculcea, Adrian
5. lemma category Key thinkers - Orthodox theological tradition and practice > Status of theology - Concepts of knowledge and modes of reasoning > Orthodox gnosiology - Modes of interaction - Various approaches to the problem of correlation between science and theology
6. Publication date 2008
7. lemma manifestations Ortodoxia
8. Keywords Plato - Platonism - Aristotle - Aristotelianism - Reality - natural contemplation - transcendence of God - dialogue between science and Orthodoxy - ontology - dogmatic theology - philosophy of science - History of Science
9. Lemma body

   1. In this article, the author deals with the relationship between science and Orthodoxy, or, more precisely, between modern scientific mentality and Orthodox theological thought. He argues that this relationship is quite recent. Science is seen as the creation of modernity, while modernity is a phenomenon that has emerged in the West. By contrast, orthodoxy is a genuine phenomenon of the East. Its beginnings can be traced back to the Byzantine context. The author goes on to pinpoint the true incompatibility between the two worldviews, which appears to be rooted far more deeply than one perceive at first glance. In short, they conceal two radically different conceptions of reality. Western thinking began only in the Middle Ages with the adoption of Aristotelianism as a logical and metaphysical scaffolding meant to stabilize the theological argumentation of the Church. It was based on the fundamental aristotelian thesis that what really has existence, what is truly real is only what is concrete, palpable, that which has a determined, finite form. In Eastern Orthodox Europe, the Greek Fathers preferred Plato over Aristotle, as their philosophical ground. This choice had extraordinary consequences. The author claims that this is the very starting point of the great separation which has been and still is still maintained between East and West. The Aristotelian passion for the physical world, for its experimental and logical research, will be replaced in the Greek East by the longing for the contemplation of God's being. The real will no longer be the individualized, finite physical object, having a distinct, clear, perceptible form through senses and reason. The search for what is real will be a fundamental obsession in the East as well. However, Platonic reality is no longer physical, but metaphysical. More than on the careful observations of the senses, the Eastern Fathers will rely on the intellectual contemplation purified entirely from anything that can be touched. They look to what is transcendent, to intelligible and immortal essences. The Orthodox thinking appears to be fundamentally religious, oriented to the absolute ontological peak that is not the physical world, but the divine being absolutely transcendent to this world.. Ontology is essential in this so-called agnosticism of the Orthodox mysticism. The divine being is more full of existence than any created being. Based on these tenets, Eastern thinking has finally focused on contemplation, abandoning any interest in the research of the material world. The author is fully aware of the complexity of the problem and warns against oversimplification. He has, however, developed these ideas to draw attention to several aspects of how the issue is being addressed. For the time being, it is not productive to directly compare domains such as scientific cosmology to biblical cosmology or biogenetics and scientific, evolutionary anthropogenetics to the equivalents of this great theme of the relationship between science and religion. The reason is extremely simple: those who engage in this way, irrespective of their degree of competence either in science or in theology, completely ignore the fact that at the basis of each of these great domains of human knowledge are in fact two entirely different attitudes in terms of ontology, gnoseology and epistemology. In his view, the only people who can live up to such a dialogue are only those who have a solid training in both the philosophy and history of science and in the philosophical foundations and in the history of the Eastern dogmatic theology.