Publication Details

Abstract

The revolution in contemporary astronomy raised a crisis of mechanistic cosmological theories and pointed the antagonism of experience and theory. The temporary-lagging of empirical methods of cognition and verification of astronomic discoveries yield the space for idealism and religion. Among the authors who took advantage of this space, there belongs P. Teilhard de Chardin, who — from his position of cosmological fideism — tried to disprove the materialistic theory. But the antimaterialistic direction of Teilhard’s cosmology does not result only from his spiritualistic starting points, but also from the metaphysical and mechanistic conception of evolution and its wrong extrapolation to the cosmos as a whole. Teilhard’s cosmology follows the intention to make from the universe an illusionary sphere of religious escape from the real social and class problems of capitalism and to find in it the proofs of god, which would be out of the reach of scientific criticism. He subordinated the idealistic cosmological theories and speculations to this intention, the programme of de-mythologization and fideistic openness of his model of Christian world-outlook towards science. Even if Teilhard’s evolutional cosmological Christianity represents the most complete variant of the cosmological apology of religion, it is a component part of the whole theological and religious-philosophical tendency in Christianity, which — since the late 19th century — is manifested in the direction towards the employment of scientific discoveries for the needs of Christian apologetics.