The Christian Truth Doctrine as a Source of Scientific Rationality in the Modern Times.

Abstract

The thesis research is devoted to disclosing the ways of transformation of the Christian truth doctrine into an imperative of truth presence and attainment, which has become the cornerstone of scientific rationality in the Modern Times. Justification of the key provisions of the thesis is carried out in two stages, which are reflected in the relevant work’s sections. The first section reveals the fundamental method’s features of the Modern Time’s science and the structure of a scientific subject (consisting of ideologically-axiomatic, theoretical and empirical levels). The origin analysis of these axiomatic constructions is based on formation materials of authors of the first scientific programs in the Modern Time – Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes and Newton, – which leads to its primary source – the formation of scholastic theology of the XIII-XIV centuries. Christian theologians, as the first scientists, were confident in the truth availability and openness through philosophical beliefs of the Christian nature and were limited to the dogmatic truth doctrine. To some extent, this thesis is explained by the analysis of Plato’s teaching, paradigm to the Antiquity, which did not contain neither an idea of the Truth existence, nor a method of truth attainment through the knowledge of empirical reality. The analysis of the Christian sources and a historical reconstruction of the process of Christian dogmatic theology formation allow to outline that the core of the Christian truth doctrine creates a belief in God as the bearer of the Absolute Truth, and Church, obtaining the whole truth. On behalf of Church, a collective representative body – the cathedral of the legitimate representatives of separate churches, on the basis of conciliarism (collegiality), approves an “empirical” formula of heavenly Truth – the tenets “concretising” the Revealing truth. Allegedly, a philosophical level of scientific knowledge is based on the Christian, in the origin, axioms. Theoretical formations and facts are the concretisation of ontological axioms (one of which is the idea of the truth presence and attainment). Western science, in this case, is a cultural product of Christian origin. That is why its universality may be called into question in non-Christian cultures.