Science and religion: problem of a balance between belief and knowledge

Abstract

. The author stressed that in conditions of «technogenic» society a person feels his security only in conditions of a constant control over the world around. However cultural progress of mankind doesn’ provide the solution of important spiritual problems which remain secrets, inaccessible for rational thinking. The new appeal to a belief phenomenon is connected with understanding of the marked problem. There is a tradition in a world philosophy to consider the rationality as a criterion of division of belief and knowledge. Actually, there is no principal contradiction between belief and knowledge, but there is a cause-and-effect connection. The knowledge acts both the purpose and a consequence of belief so as belief itself arises in the course of emergence of subject-and-object relations. The content of belief is existence’s credibility as a process of perception. Therefore the belief doesn’t act as opposition to knowledge, but to scientific proof. The mechanism of belief is shown as the subject’s orientation on object, as self-renunciation of the subject. The rational thinking is capable to operate only with frequencies. Whereas the whole, being on its nature transcendental, appears to be available to belief exclusively. The belief in particular is directed on absolute reality. The miracle as the phenomenon unknown from the point of view of the final reasons is the way to an irrational way of receiving new knowledge of revelation. Revelation as result of belief is deprived of any advantages in comparison with science data. Thus, belief and knowledge differ among themselves; however they meet in a person, partly supplementing each other.