Humanities & Social Sciences, Vol 8, No 1 (2015)

The Sense of the Universe: towards a New Phenomenological Turn in the Dialogue between Cosmology and Theology

Alexei Nesteruk

Abstract


The article discusses the problem of  interpretation of the universe as a whole in the context of the modern dialogue between science and religion. It is argued that the very possibility of cosmology and theology imply each other. Thus humanity becomes the central problem of the dialogue because of its ambivalent position in the universe as being an organic physical being on the one hand and the articulating consciousness of the whole universe, on the other hand. On the basis of asymmetry in relation between theology and cosmology a methodology of a theological treatment of cosmology is suggested as being based in the irreducible primacy of the event of living with respect to any possible representation of the universe. A phenomenological methodology of “deconstructing” the ideas about the universe is suggested with the aim to disclose the source of these ideas in human person.