Science and Religion1
By St. Luke, Archbishop of Simferopol and All Crimea
By St. Luke, Archbishop of Simferopol and All Crimea
Preface
In our life journey, we encounter two types of people. Some deny religion in the name of science, while others are distrustful of science for the sake of religion. There are also those who have managed to find harmony between these two needs of the human spirit. Shouldn't such harmony be the norm that a person ought to strive for? After all, both needs are rooted in the depths of human nature. Is it not the crisis of the educated individual that their "mind is not in accord with the heart"? Is it not this one-sided "intellectualism" that has driven a wedge between the intelligentsia and the people in Russia? Furthermore, the very fact that atheism and anti-Christianity are being presented to the public under the banner of science, which supposedly long ago disproved religion, compels us to deeply reflect and thoroughly resolve the question: does science contradict religion?
Chapter One: What is Science?
Socrates taught that in order to draw correct conclusions we must be able to define concepts. Therefore, we will try to give precise definitions of both concepts under consideration – and then compare them. Science is a system of acquired knowledge about the phenomena of reality that we observe. Let us delve into each of these words. Science is a system, meaning it is not a random collection of knowledge, but a coherent, ordered combination. This is achieved through classification, which is the distribution of homogeneous data into groups and generalizations – that is, the establishment of those common formulas and laws to which nature conforms. Science encompasses the knowledge that has been attained, meaning not all knowledge, but only that which has thus far been achieved. Scientific activity is dynamic; it is a process of "creating truth through experience and reasoning." This process in science is something that is dynamic and becoming: it undergoes questions, searches, doubts, and hypotheses, which may later turn out to be false. Only knowledge, that is, genuine reflections of reality, constitutes the established, static content of science — knowledge that is proven, universally binding, widely recognized, and objective judgments that are substantiated both logically and empirically, through reasoning and experience. This is knowledge about phenomena, that is, manifestations of life and nature, but not about their essences (phenomena, not noumena), about the world as we see it, observe it, but not about the world as it exists in itself, in essence. Phenomena are those elements that are evident to our five senses (as it is commonly believed, although there are more), for our five-sensory logic, armed with the technical enhancements of our cognitive organs in the form of microscopes, telescopes, and other scientific instruments. Thus, the field of exact science is limited just as the organs of scientific cognition are limited in their capacity for understanding.
But man wants and must know what lies beyond science, what has not yet been achieved by it, and, by its very nature, lies outside its boundaries. For example, psychology is the science of mental phenomena. Yet we want to know more; we want to understand the soul, because all of life consists of encounters and interactions of human souls, and the soul is the person itself. It would be strange to assert that science knows or can know all of existence. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," says Hamlet in Shakespeare. Meanwhile, we also wish to comprehend this transcendental aspect; we seek to resolve the questions that so fill the soul of Heine's youth: "What is the mystery from ages past? And what is the essence of humanity? Where does one come from, where is one going? And who is there, above, beyond the stars?"2 Knowledge transcends science. It is attained through those higher abilities of the spirit that science does not possess. Primarily, this is intuition, that is, the immediate sense of truth, which anticipates, perceives, and prophetically foresees what lies beyond the reach of scientific methods of cognition. This intuition has increasingly captured the attention of philosophy in recent times. We live by it much more than we assume. It leads us into another, higher realm of the spirit – namely, into religion.
Notes:
1. Written in 1954. During the life of the Saint, the book was not published and was published for the first time only in 2000.
2. "The North Sea" by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856).
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