Back to basics

Mind over matter

Thank you very much Yulia Igorevna and Ekaterina Alexeevna. First of all I want to say that I left behind some of the details of this work. Sherlock Holmes always said that details are the most important things in his job but I have no time for plunging deep in every part of my speech otherwise you will eat me alive. If you are curious enough you can ask me questions after I’ll finish my speech and if I will be able to answer I do it. In my incredible but true story I used some of the thoughts of scientists and a few of my own thoughts.

Back to basics

Just before Passion Week has started we were eating with Daniil here and he said during our lunch that mind has a lot of contradictions with faith. And for some reason I agreed with him then. Maybe I was too tired and just don’t want to argue at that moment. But now I can say that I definitely disagree with him. I can clearly see and express now that my scientific knowledge doesn’t have any contradictions with my faith. And even more than that - my scientific knowledge strengthens my faith so much. It is a really good level of improvement and now I will try to explain to you my point of view. I mean that you can argue endlessly with people from other religions and people with different world outlooks like atheists and of course you can argue a lot even with yourself. This last event happens with you because as you know everyone sometimes have such a bad day when everything falling from your hands and you beginning to think that there is no any God at all. It’s a rational natural feeling because it’s silly to believe in God Who does such a bad things with you and your faith becomes weaker because of it. You can clearly see at such moments the contradictions between your understanding of Orthodox faith and events which happen with you. And other people can tell you as well that your faith is silly like friends of righteous Job in the Old Testament have done and that’s for sure will not help you too. And all these bad things happen with you because you don’t have the right foundation. You can see these contradictions when you are at low level of understanding of religion and science. You can see only shards of the world and you can not see the whole world. My goal is to help you make the whole world outlook from these fragments. You just have to use the method of deduction in the words of Sherlock Holmes. He also said: “Once eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”.We will start from the most common mistakes. First of all there is a very high probability that you don’t know your own Orthodox religion. I mean Orthodox religion itself and what you are thinking about Orthodox religion it just can be two different things which are not related to each other. I’ve noticed that many people doing many mistakes in a very simple theological things. Or sometimes people just know nothing and they are still thinking that they know something about Orthodox theology. You are theologians and you should learn these simple theological things. It’s not as hard as physics or math and you just have to know it anyway. Your faith is based on a correct theological understanding of the Orthodox religion, and not on scientific evidence. But the scientific evidence may also help you very well because with this evidences you will be able to see many proofs of the truth of Orthodox faith from different sciences and philosophical systems. And I'm sure that the correct foundation consists out of the exact sciences and correct theological understanding of the Orthodox religion. Like you can’t really argue with someone who are saying that two plus two is four. Everybody knows this. Accept it or leave.