moscow

Prominent Russian scientists and religious leaders have met to proclaim their common interests for the first time since before the 1917 Revolution. Unlike 1917, when religion was branded the “opium of the people”, the scientists declared little conflict with religious thought, while their religious counterparts expressed concern about the lack of funding for science.

Both were attending a meeting called ‘Faith and Knowledge: Science and Technology at the Frontier of Two Centuries', in Moscow last week. The Worldwide Russian National Council meeting was organized under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Academy of Sciences — a combination that would have been unthinkable only ten years ago.

The Russian Orthodox Church's patriarch for Moscow and the whole of Russia, Alexsiy the Second, said: “Russia is the great scientific state, but the present economic crisis has damaged its scientific and technological potential, which means that in the coming century the country will face difficult obstacles.”

He added: “Russia's fate is now in the hands of scientific intelligentsia, and whether or not these people are ready to mobilize their abilities and strengths to serve Russia could not but be our church's concern.”

The meeting represented the first time for at least 80 years that scientists and clergymen have met in Russia. During the Soviet era, religion was officially discouraged, and one of the major tasks of the Academy of Sciences was to promote anti-religious propaganda.

The situation today is very different. “Science is not in conflict with religion, and religion is also based on rationality, it's a kind of rationality,” said Yuri Osipov, the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “A process of convergence is now taking place between science and religion; they interact in building the human-oriented values of our culture.”

Other speakers supported Osipov by pointing out that more than 40 per cent of scientists now openly call themselves believers — formerly all were considered to be atheists — whereas many clergymen hold scientific degrees from universities, another unprecedented step. Some scientists even compared the act of scientific discovery to a religious experience.

Vladimir Fortov, vice-president of the Academy of Sciences and until this week minister of science and technologies, said that science and religion have much in common; only their methods of understanding the natural world are different. The Big Bang theory, for example, is close to the theological view on the origin of the Universe, he said.

But the Russian Orthodox Church is not entirely enthusiastic about modern science. It strongly opposes any research on cloning not only humans but animals in general, and is suspicious about many other fields of science. “Nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, information systems and genetic engineering, all contain a ‘phantom’ of enormous danger,” said the Metropolitan Bishop Kirill.