scholast

In my recent talk “Spiritual Dimensions of Scientific Cognition” at CERN discussion club “ConCERNed for Humanity” (downloadable audio mp3 and presentation pdf) I introduced a concept of the  Duoverse, as a dominating worldview, determined by the hostility of Macrocosm and Microcosm, leading to self-negation of reason. This split of initial Plato-Christian Universe first happen in philosophy of Spinoza, and became dominating due to scientific and technological progress, as a form of idolization of reason. Delusion of this idolization reveals itself in a self-negation of reason following from that. Consequences of this Duoverse state are man's fall into a world of objects among objects, loss of meaning of life, dehumanization of social life, unprecedented atrocities of the Scientific Communism and National Socialism. Here I am just briefly mentioning the main points of my talk; for the details and explanations please go to the links.

Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza saw the question about relation between Personal God and impersonal reason as the main spiritual problem. Descartes was convinced that God is above reason, that truths of reason were determined by God. Leibniz was sure in the opposite, that “when God was creating the world, truths of reason came into his mind without asking permission”.  Spinoza went even further, than Leibniz, completely removing God from the scene, so that even His name he gave to the impersonal “substance”, what was essentially the other name of the old reason. It was good and honest Spinoza, who killed the living God, proclaiming impersonal reason as a single explanatory principle. At the same time, happened one more thing - possibly, even harder for Spinoza. He not only killed the person of God, he killed the personality per se – thus, he killed man's personality as well. And he clearly told about that, negating the free will as an illusion. No free will can be true in his substance-determined world, where the order and connection of thoughts was exactly the same as the order and connection of things, being just two revelations of the substance order and connection.  Due to finiteness of man, all his thoughts have nothing to do with the infinite absolute reason, and Spinoza clearly states that: “The reason and will which constitute God's essence must differ by the breadth of all heaven from our reason and will and have nothing in common with them except the name; as little, in fact, as the dog-constellation has in common with the dog, the barking animal.” If Spinoza were self-consistent, he should have proceeded with this conclusion to his own philosophy and negate it as something equal to the dog's bark. He tried to escape from this logical catch, and formulate ethics consistent with this deterministic worldview – but no ethics can be consistent with that total determinism, so all his statements about duties are obviously negated by his own metaphysics, as any ethical statements would.

The Spinozian worldview soon was starting to dominate, and it is still dominating as a scientific worldview, with one important modification though. Namely, Quantum Mechanics with its probabilistic picture opened a door to interventions of chaos into Spinozian “order and connection of things”. At first glance, these interventions of chaos do not let any possibility to return personality – of man or God – on the list of fundamental realities. If I am realizing that my moves are not just determined by universal laws, but also influenced by chaotic forces, this does not make my freedom less illusive. However, there is one more important point here: a scientific observer cannot distinguish between an intervention of chaos and a personal creative act. By definition, the last one is unique, and thus, scientifically unobservable.  Thus, the Quantum revolution opened a door for interventions of personalities, making them possible, arbitrarily efficient, and scientifically invisible. This view on the Quantum revolution removes a contradiction between the continuous creation of the world - by God and man - and scientific worldview.

The Duoverse with its self-negation of man has to be overcome. To return its meaning, the human personality has to return to its closeness to the very center of Being. This requires the Person at this center – the living God, Who is our eternal Father and Savior.  This is not “wishful thinking”. This is the precondition for overcoming our self-negation, returning ourselves that high source of inspiration, which can let us be strong and creative in the full awareness of tragedy and pain of life and even coming death of all the humanity. Otherwise, we are doomed to live in a world, where all our best values, any meaning of our life, are humiliated, indeed, to nothing else as “wishful thinking”.