Ways of thinking.

The current fluctuations in thought in the question of understanding man and in the question of faith in God have their roots and source deep in the past – in the history of philosophical and later scientific understanding of the world and life. All Christianity lived for centuries from Revelation, whose originator was God. Revelation told the truth about God and man. Theology developed a magnificent image of God, of the creation of man. Everything was included in the picture that St. Thomas outlined in his Summa. Heaven, earth, life and death, time and eternity. In addition to the knowledge of faith from Revelation, there was a second source – it was the intellectual knowledge of people, beginning with the senses, formed from them by concepts of the essence of things and doctrine of all that exists. a particular order created by God. Philosophy dealt with the natural circle of creation.
Since the Middle Ages, the doubts of some philosophers about the value of philosophical concepts and the efforts of the nascent natural sciences have intervened in this thought effort. From the time of Descartes, 1596-1650, mathematical certainty became the desire of philosophers. With this new ideal of knowledge came a new period of history – a period of calculations, experiments. According to Descartes, the book of nature is written mathematically. In this spirit, Descartes developed a comprehensive mathematical-geometric view of the realities of our world. His idea was to accept as confident only what I have a clear and precise idea of. This change of perspective was not insignificant, and it was essential.

In the Middle Ages, people mainly asked about the purpose of things and wanted to research them. Goal and meaning decided everything. Starting with Descartes, people began to ask what the matter is made of, what law is it subject to? Both aspects combined into unity are fruitful and hope for real progress. However, if we separate them from each other, a gap will arise between them, exposing us to danger. According to Descartes, our world is material; it is a matter that must be understood as something separate. Its structure can be expressed mathematically based on experiments and measurements. In man, who also belongs to the visible world, we encounter another reality called consciousness, thinking, and spirit. Still, Descartes strictly separates man’s body and weight from man’s consciousness and spirit. However, the existence of man is one. The body does not exist without the spirit, and the human spirit is manifested in the body. The division of man into the material substance and the thinking substance, which are not connected into a single unity, which functions only based on some parallelism, must have had severe negative consequences. Descartes deprived the soul of its body, denied the soul of its influence on the body. Body and soul are two separate substances for Descartes. Thus, Descartes’s dualism gave rise to the most contradictory directions of idealism, positivism, and materialism. In this way, the duality of thought and faith, philosophy and theology gradually developed, and finally, the duality of faith far from the world and the world and far from God.