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(including scientific) is only a means (but not a goal), to the development of
adequate expectations. Post-crisis science should remember this long-standing
and healthy value.
Religious character of science
A lot has been written about the religious and philosophical origins of European
science of the classical era, including a compelling and very interesting academic
collection in Russian. This topic, in particular, includes the question of how the
calculation of infinitesimal numbers has occurred from the question of how many
angels will fit on the tip of the little finger of Thomas Aquinas. Here I would like to
draw attention to another circumstance, namely, to a certain similarity of social
processes (including the dynamics of value attachments) associated with the
status of science as the cultural basis of life in the period of total crisis of the
beginning of the 21st century, analogous to the processes in the Christian religion
as a cultural basis life in the period of transformations and crises of the "long XVI
century". It can hardly be said that these processes began in full measure and are
clearly visible, but their signs are noticeable. In addition, as it was said, this is the
topic of a very detailed, separate study, lying at the junction of the stories of
religion and science, so I placed this item at the very end of the invective, and I
will dwell on it in the most general terms. The fact is that science, or the
"scientific view of the world," today not only determines the mass picture of the
world, just as the once-mass picture of the world was defined by religion, but also
by the skepticism of the most diverse layers towards this world picture (both in
terms of integrity, and in terms of its individual subject parts), and the search for
its alternatives, is today comparable with the skepticism, doubts and shifts that
took place in the era of the Reformation. That is, today it is the institute of
"science of scientific and technological progress", and not religion (including
"Christian science"), as it was before, is the predominant area of these
transformations. And it is also not a matter of the general process of archaization
of consciousness and cultural forms – such archaism, rather, is more "love of the
archaic" than the actual archaization, a stop at the crossroads, and reflects a
general crisis of consciousness associated, among other things, with those
discussed above five circumstances. In my opinion, in this connection, it would be
more productive to consider not only the
ritualization of science, the tightening of
the administrative and status hierarchy in it, and the transformation of some