scholarly journals THE PHENOMENON OF NEO-DETERMINISM AND ITS COMPREHENSION IN MODERN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Ighor Ghudyma
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Causality Principle ◽  
Research Attention ◽  
Coin Toss ◽  
The World ◽  
Instability Factor ◽  
Divine Causality

The author's research attention is focused on modern science-historical interpretations of the phenomenon of neo-determinism. The author also turned his attention to attempts at a theological interpretation of such ideas through the provisions of a religious worldview. The main objective of this article is to study an updated understanding of the fundamental principle of science – the principle of causality. In addition, the author studied the features of the manifestation of the causality principle in scientific and humanitarian projections. The author's special attention is also focused on the study of the specifics of reflection in the modern religious consciousness of the ideas of divine causality. In addition, the author focused on certain manifestations of the immanence of divine being. The author was particularly interested in the specific components of religious teaching. These are the positions in which theologians try to imagine the point of concentration of God's efforts when God carries out his will and providence. It is on the question of divine immanence that the efforts of even the most inquiring mind are broken up into obstacles caused by faith itself. The limit of that area into which the mind cannot intervene is an attempt to touch the divine causality. The question of finding access points through which God changes the natural world in acts of wonderworking also remains incomprehensible. The topic of the article, the choice and application of its theoretical and methodological approaches are determined by the very subject of thought and the nature of the tasks posed. The following cognition methods were used in the article: general philosophical, general scientific theoretical methods. The author followed the principle of objectivity, applied causal analysis. The final results of the study of the topic lead the thought to the following proposition. Within the synergetic paradigm, the focus of scientists has shifted to the phenomenon of instability and randomness in the course of the processes of the world. This led to the foundation of a new non-linear way of thinking. It also led to the penetration of the provisions of nonlinear determinism in the main disciplinary practices – science, philosophy and religion. Ontological philosophical ideas about the nature of the original nomology (about the essence of the fundamental laws of the universe) have changed. The traditional views on the uniqueness of connections and relationships in nature are revised. This was favored by the development of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and the introduction into the scientific knowledge of statistical techniques and research operations. In understanding the causality of classical science, as well as in the picture of the world that this science offered, God, who casts lots, was a stranger and superfluous. However, modern science offers a new vision of the world. It is based on the nonlinearity of the development of the world and the pluralism of being. The instability factor arises at the bifurcation nodes of a particular process. As a result of fluctuations, the instability factor makes the forecast for the development of the system similar to the "coin toss". In this case, the vectors of several future options open in front of the object. Theologians carefully study the achievements of modern science. And here the theologians again got the opportunity to talk about God in a new way. God acts in alternating necessity and chance for a fraction of chance. The main goal of God is the instantaneous realization of new divine plans for the world and man.

scholarly journals Reason and ethos: Consequences of their separation and necessity of their unity

2003 ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Mihailo Markovic
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Active Principle ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
The World

Although the concept of "reason" acquired a precise meaning and clearly defined field of validity only in Kant's critical philosophy, the term has a long genesis in European intellectual history. The roots of the concept lie in the Greek concept of the logos and may be reduced to six basic meanings. The earliest Greek thinkers used the word logos to denote the logical structure of the human thought and the rational structure of the world. Anaxagoras considered the all-embracing spiritual principle of the nous the source of overall rationality. In the philosophy of the Stoa the term - logos spermaticos is the active principle acting on passive matter in order to create the world. For the Stoics, the concept of logos is the fundamental principle of entire morality. In Christian theology, the God is logos, Holy Spirit - pneuma the soul. In modern philosophy the basic meanings of the Greek logos were taken over by Latin terms "intellectus" and "ratio". These concepts chart quite clearly two basic lines of European thought, one characterized by immediate and the other by mediated discursive understanding of the truth. Kant was the first in the history of philosophy to introduce the essential distinction between understanding and reason (Verstand and Vernunft). According to this distinction, understanding is analytical and abstract, while reason is the source of apriori principles connecting and grounding the whole of our knowledge and volition. Therefore Kant distinguishes theoretical from practical reason. Though practical reason applies the concepts and principles of theoretical reason, it has priority over the latter because it bestows practical reality also on what is theoretically unknowable (freedom, God, immortality of the soul). The primacy of practical reason was especially emphasized by Fichte in his Doctrine of Science. Reason is for him a purely purposeful activity. The idea of reason attains full articulation in Hegel's philosophy of the absolute spirit. For Hegel, reason is first of all a world principle rather than a human capacity. Unlike Kant, whose reason is basically static, a substantial novelty of Hegel's conception of the objective reason is its dynamism, enabling it to reach an increasing awareness "of itself" in its dialectical development. By including the idea of progress in his conception of reason, Hegel introduced an evaluative element in the concept of rationality and thus enabled a connection between reason and ethos in the era of modernity. The deepest cleavage between reason and ethos was opened by the modern science. On one hand, it improved human life by its discoveries and new knowledge, liberating man from religious superstition and other forms of subordination, but on the other it displayed a restrictive attitude not only toward all sorts of value judgments but also toward many dimensions of reason. The positive knowledge of modern science with no ethos lacks any critical self-awareness of the purpose of knowledge, of how it can be used to the benefit of mankind or abused. Thus for establishing a humanistic scientific culture the connection between reason and ethos must be reaffirmed in modern science.

scholarly journals MATHEMATICS, THE "BOOK OF NATURE" AND THEOLOGY - GALILEO GALILEI AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-36
Author(s):  
Ion Cordoneanu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Great Book ◽  
Galileo Galilei ◽  
Book Of Nature ◽  
The World

Starting from the cycle of letters known as The Copernican Letters (1613-1615) and following through to the 1632 Dialogue, I will attempt to outline the context in which Galileo Galilei’s work is constituted as a veritable theory of nature research based on mathematics. Galilei rests on the principles of science to ground his choice for the Copernican model, as well as the separation of natural research from theology, but his concern for a unified philosophy of the natural world is intertwined in his work with the dignity of creation understood as “the great book of the world” by which divinity talks to man in the language of mathematics.

Enchantment

2000 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Roger Fellows
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
World View ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The World ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
Science Show

Oscar Wilde remarked in The Picture of Dorian Gray that, ‘It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Over three centuries of natural science show that, at least as far as the study of the natural world is concerned, Wilde's epigram is itself shallow. Weber used the term ‘disenchantment’ to mean the elimination of magic from the modern scientific world view: the intellectual rationalisation of the world embodied in modern science has made it impossible to believe in magic or an invisible God or gods, without a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’.

Matter and Nature

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-34
Author(s):  
Olga L. Lizzini
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Main Question ◽  
First Principle ◽  
Fundamental Structure ◽  
The World ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Divine Causality

Abstract The fundamental principle—ruling both Avicenna’s metaphysics and his ethics—that the action of superior causes cannot be explained in virtue of the existence of inferior effects—seems to deny any possibility of a consistent idea of providence in Avicenna’s system. Despite this fact, Avicenna recurs to the term (ʿināya; tadbīr) as well as to the idea of providence in various contexts in his oeuvre. More precisely, providence is equated to the flow of being that originates and explains the world; and this not only in respect to the fundamental, existential, positive and “good” properties that belong to it—the world itself is good, the flow is the principle of good and the First Principle is the cause of the world in so far as the order of good is concerned—but also as regards the marginal, negative, non-existential and “bad” properties that can affect its individuals and that are necessarily consequents of the good itself: evil is something the First Principle “wants”, although in an accidental way, and it is therefore implicit in and contained by divine causality. In this paper I shall outline the fundamental structure that explains the existence of individuals in the sublunary world. I do not claim to be exhaustive (some questions require further investigation); my aim is to provide an overview of the topic, with a main question in mind: on what principles does Avicenna base his idea of providence?

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

Varieties of Understanding

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Normative Considerations ◽  
Shed Light

According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.

Fundamentality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Healey
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
Physical Property ◽  
Natural World ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Quantum Field Theories ◽  
Fundamental Physics ◽  
The World ◽  
Energy Physics

The metaphor that fundamental physics is concerned to say what the natural world is like at the deepest level may be cashed out in terms of entities, properties, or laws. The role of quantum field theories in the Standard Model of high-energy physics suggests that fundamental entities, properties, and laws are to be sought in these theories. But the contextual ontology proposed in Chapter 12 would support no unified compositional structure for the world; a quantum state assignment specifies no physical property distribution sufficient even to determine all physical facts; and quantum theory posits no fundamental laws of time evolution, whether deterministic or stochastic. Quantum theory has made a revolutionary contribution to fundamental physics because its principles have permitted tremendous unification of science through the successful application of models constructed in conformity to them: but these models do not say what the world is like at the deepest level.

Beyond Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Language Function ◽  
Natural Signs ◽  
Transmission Of Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Information ◽  
Natural Ontology

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.

How is science to be carried forward, and its conclusions reported?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Briggs ◽  
Hans Halvorson ◽  
Andrew Steane
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Proof ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Component Part ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The World

The chapter appraises science as an intellectual activity that is appropriately carried out on its own terms. Consequently, it is not appropriate to introduce references to God as a component part of a mathematical proof, nor of a system of forces in the natural world, nor of a sequence of impersonal processes in the biosphere. This does not mean that it is inappropriate to be thankful to God and to celebrate all these aspects of the world as gifts. They can be employed as opportunities to express appreciation through studying and understanding them better in their own right. Nevertheless, there may be processes, such as those which shape a person’s self-identity, in which it is appropriate to recognize God’s more direct role. Good practice concerning acknowledgements sections in scientific publications such as doctoral theses and journal articles is then discussed.

Montaigne on Monsters and Monstrosity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

Monsters take on many roles in Montaigne’s Essays, almost always in novel ways. They do not take on their usual roles as markers of other races, genders, or bodies, as threats or objects of repulsion. Rather, the authorial self and his work are seen as monstrous; Europeans and their culture are seen as monstrous; the knowledge systems that create monsters are themselves monstrous; man’s vanity is monstrous. But most of all, the monster is the provocation to meditation on man’s presumption, and on the limitations of human knowledge and power in the face of the world and the divine. As the sign of the diversity and mutability of the natural world and thus of divine omnipotence, the monstrous and unusual is valued by Montaigne over the normal or usual. It is also the mark of human creativity, dependent as it is on the vagaries of the imagination, new and radically different from the rhetorical, literary, and artistic norms. This is why the Essays themselves can be considered a monstrous work.

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