Why do people believe in God (scientifically)? Why do people believe in God despite having no reason to believe in him? Why do people believe in God.

Tell me, is there a god?
-Not.
-When will it be?
From jokes

Once, at methodological seminars at our academic institute in the 1980s, a doctor of biological sciences, I will call him by the initials E.L., began his speeches with shocking: "As you know, there is a God!"

So I'll start with shocking. As you know, there is no God in nature. Not Orthodox, not Uniate, not Catholic, not Protestant, not Calvinist, not Anglican, not Shia, not Sunni, not Jewish, not, I'm sorry, Chinese.

Dear reader! If you are a believer, do not rush to close the page with indignation! A little patience. I'm just going to explain that God exists, but as genetic knowledge, and that the belief in the existence of God is rooted deep in the subconscious of people from their first breath at birth. But, unfortunately, it does not exist in nature, just as there are no ghouls, Baba Yaga, Santa Claus, not to mention the god Ra, the goddess Astarte, Zeus, Jupiter, Perun, etc. And certainly there is no God in churches, cathedrals, monasteries, mosques, synagogues and other "charitable" institutions that claim to be especially close to God.

A human baby is born completely helpless. He will not survive even a few hours without outside help. Unlike young animals, which literally immediately or very soon after birth are able to move independently, see and search for a source of food, a human newborn can, and for a relatively long time, up to a year or more, only breathe, suck milk, and get rid of the products of digestion. Even a newborn can cry. And it's all. The first thing a newborn baby does is start breathing on its own and immediately start crying. Why does he begin to breathe - clearly. He lost the supply of oxygen from the mother's body. Why is he crying? And then, that he - still in fact a completely unconscious living lump with a wandering look and involuntary movements of the limbs - "knows" initially at the genetic level that there is someone outside of him who will respond to this cry, warm, feed, wash, protect. No normal person can calmly and indifferently ignore the crying of a child. Numerous stories of "Mowgli" show that animals cannot do this either. And the child uses this means for the first few years of his life, until he becomes a conscious being. The instinct to cry is one of the most basic human instincts. We add that the instinctive desire to cry in stressful situations remains for a long time even in adults. It is in this property and primordial knowledge that the roots and nutrient medium of religious faith in God lie. It is possible, perhaps with some degree of exaggeration, to say that the crying of a child is an instinctive prayer. This means that people actually do not just believe in God, but initially, subconsciously know that God - someone outside of them, who will personally protect them, feed them and save them from all dangers - exists. It is quite possible, therefore, that, as some researchers have noted, there is an area in the human brain responsible for religious feeling.

This instinct in children continues in the instinctive "faith in the adult." Without this instinct, children will not survive and learn nothing. Children don't have to experiment with fire to learn that they can get burned. They will be told by mom or dad or grandparents or another adult in whose care they are. When children grow up, they learn from their parents, from other adults that there is an Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim Shiite, Muslim Sunni, Jewish, or some other god (where they came from, this is a separate conversation, we will not digress). But in the same way, they can suddenly lose faith in this if another authoritative adult tells them that there is no god. And they will not experience any trauma from this, just as they do not experience any trauma when they are told that Santa Claus is a fairy tale and that dad bought them a New Year's gift. My wife recalls that as a child she had a very pious nanny, and until the age of 7 she believed in God. One day her friend Valya said in the yard that there is no God. In horror, she ran to her mother to ask what Valya would do for it. But in the first grade, at one of the first lessons, the school teacher Lidia Fedorovna said that there is no God, and that's it. Since then my wife has been an atheist.

But the instinctive belief in the existence of God is not yet a religion. Religion is a form of social organization. There is no doubt that the modern world religions as social institutions originate in a slave society. They even retain many of its attributes. It is enough to recall the paraphernalia and phraseology of Orthodox Christianity: believers are servants of God, church hierarchs are masters, and so on. In those distant times, this natural primordial instinctive predisposition of people to believe in an otherworldly omnipotent being, along with an innate property to blindly trust an older and stronger one, naturally turned into an instrument of their subordination and social organization. And the basis of people's adherence to a particular religion is, apparently, another "basic" instinct, the herd instinct. The ancestors of modern Homo Sapience lived in packs. Homo Sapience lived, and many still live, in tribes, and the herd instinct was an important genetically inherited property for the survival of offspring. The fact that this herd instinct has not disappeared and is preserved in the human psyche, I think, does not need special proof. We are not at all as far removed in our basic instincts from our primate ancestors as we might think.
The phrase "herd instinct" has a negative connotation in Russian. Therefore, modern "culturologists" have come up with a luxurious euphemism for him: "national self-identification." Remember, gentlemen, how much massacre has caused and continues to cause, how many human destinies have been broken and continue to break in the expanses of the former Soviet Union by the mental virus of "national self-identification", which epidemically spread in the late 1980s simultaneously with the epidemic of the mental virus of religiosity!

In these years, cases have also become widespread when adults who were previously non-believers suddenly become devout believers (I, of course, do not mean the cases characteristic of the Russian-speaking emigrant environment in the USA, Germany, Israel, and not uncommon in Russia itself). when it is caused by purely mercantile considerations). What should be the position of atheists, who realize that the most convincing reasonable arguments that the God preached by religions is an illusion may not be heard, simply because people can lock their minds to subconsciously unwanted information?

Of course, one cannot dispute the right of people to believe what they want, as long as it does not affect the interests of other people. You can not forbid them and unite in groups and public associations in accordance with this faith. The root of the atheistic worldview is not in the prohibition of religious beliefs, but in the categorical rejection of religions as social institutions, rejection based on the realization that the idea of ​​God they represent is a lie used to master the souls of people, and that the fundamental goal of churchmen is not to serve people , not the storage and dissemination of moral and ethical standards and the spiritual heritage of civilization, which they cynically claim without any reason, but the self-preservation and reproduction of religious institutions and infrastructure through privatization, moral enslavement and exploitation of the flock.

The humanistic duty of atheists is to try to use the still available opportunities to open people's eyes and free them from the mental virus infection spread by churchmen and from mental slavery, and often quite real slavish submission to religious preachers and church hierarchs. One cannot leave unanswered the constant massive brainwashing that they have been subjecting us all to from television screens, radio and from the pages of newspapers and books in recent years with the servilely enthusiastic shameful participation of the literary and artistic beau monde, then the persistent and obsessive zombification, the most recent example of which serves as a recent campaign for the funeral of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Perhaps people are predisposed - genetically and from infancy - to believe in powerful otherworldly beings - gods and angels. But to no lesser extent, people genetically prefer the truth to lies, they prefer to know what really exists and what does not. Otherwise, the human race would not have continued, that's for sure.

WHY MAN BELIEVE IN GOD

The universality of faith poses the following question for us. Why do all people, or at least all tribes and peoples, if not each of their representatives, feel the need for a religious experience of being. The answer to this question is far from simple and unambiguous. At different times, different thinkers have answered it differently.

In the Texts of the Arks and in the Bhagavad Gita, as you remember, the idea was expressed that faith is an internal quality, and even more than that, the essence of a human being. "Man is formed by faith." It is clear that in this case faith is an integral feature of the human personality, like vision or breathing.

People of Greco-Roman antiquity considered knowledge of the gods to be a natural, innate (Greek - "???????") quality of a person. “It is necessary to recognize that the gods exist precisely because the knowledge of this is embedded in us (insitae), or, better, is innate (innatae),” wrote Cicero [On the nature of the gods I. XVII.44]. “God is not a name, but a thought about something inexplicable, planted in human nature*,” pointed out the Greek Christian Justin the Philosopher and Martyr (? 110-166). And the great Hellenic Neoplatonist Iamblichus of Chalkis (4th century) explained: “Innate knowledge of the gods accompanies our very essence, it is beyond all reasoning and proof. It is initially connected with its own cause and is present together with the striving for the good inherent in the soul. <...> Rather, we ourselves are embraced by this connection, and are filled with it, and possess in the knowledge of the gods the very thing that we are. [On the Egyptian Mysteries 1.3].

Many thinkers of the first centuries of Christianity were inspired by the idea of ​​the constant presence of the divine spark in the world. Starting with the philosopher Justin, this spark was called the “seed word” (Hbuost otgёrtsa-pkost), because, as it were, the seeds of truth were planted by God himself in the hearts of people, and they sprouted when a person irrigated his heart with love for God and people. “Everything that was ever said and openly good between philosophers and legislators - all this was done according to the extent of finding and contemplating the Word (of God)” [Justin the Philosopher, 2 Apology, 10] . “Your foot will not stumble if you attribute everything good to Divine Providence, whether it be Hellenic or our (Christian) good,” writes another prominent Christian thinker Clement of Alexandria (150-215), and continues: God is the culprit of all good” [Stromates I, 5].

Christian writers, who lived at a time when most of their compatriots remained outside the church, either in paganism or following one or another philosophical tradition, did not get tired of emphasizing that everything good both in the thoughts and in the deeds of each person comes from God. When a person finds in himself the strength to take his eyes off the earth, when he feels his calling to eternity, then this is not his merit. After all, animals, to which humans are biologically similar, do not think about eternity or about God. The experience of the Absolute is one of the most distinctive features of the human race, if not in general the most important generic feature of a person, Christian thinkers believed.

“Everything divine, revealed to us, is known only through participation. And what it is in its beginning and foundation - it is above the mind, above all essence and knowledge, ”pointed out the thoughtful author, who wrote under the name of the Christian bishop of Athens of the 1st century - Dionysius. [About divine names. 2.7], emphasizing the idea that the "seeds of the Word of God" are the nature of the Absolute present in us. Only because in man there is something divine by nature, he experiences God, he can and, as a rule, longs to believe in Him, to be with Him.

That is why it would be surprising for a Christian to find a people without faith in God. But the conviction that a spark of the divine, the image of God is naturally inherent in any person, forced serious Christians to carefully look at everything good in other religions, in other teachings about the Absolute. “When the Gentiles, who do not have the law,” the Apostle Paul explained to the Christians of the city of Rome, “by nature do what is lawful, then ... they show that the work of the law is written in their hearts” [Rom. 2, 14-15]. “Traces of the presence of God are also found in pagan religions,” noted the most learned Christian from Alexandria, priest Origen (185-253). He warned his co-religionists against destroying the statues of pagan gods “for they are undoubtedly an attempt to reflect the sacred” [Against Celsus 5.10; 4.92]. “The ancient pagans searched for God with thirst and greed,” wrote another teacher of the ancient Church, Bishop Gregory (329-390), to whom the Christian tradition gave the honorary nickname “The Theologian.” – Throughout the history of mankind, the hand of God is visible, leading man to the Truth” (P. G. 36. 160-161).

Of course, among Christians there have always been adherents of the point of view that denies the positive meaning behind other religions and, accordingly, the natural involvement of man in God. At times, even the majority of such Christians turned out to be, especially in those centuries when the experience of live communication with the bearers of other religions almost ceased. In a Muslim, a Jew, a pagan, such Christians refused to see a person in communion with God, similar to their own. This led to cruelty, intolerance, genocide. But the ancient teaching about the “seed Word” has never been completely forgotten, and until now it determines the attitude to the religiosity of a person, explains the mystery of faith.

“All people are one family and have one nature and origin, for God made the whole human race to dwell on all the face of the earth. Their ultimate goal is one: God. His providence, His good deeds and His desire to save extend to all people.

The modern Orthodox French thinker Professor Olivier Clement conveys to the stratum of the Patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras what he said on the issue of the plurality of religions: “I told you that Christ and Christianity are everywhere. We need Christ, without Him we are nothing. But He does not need us to act in history. The entire history of mankind, starting from the day of the Resurrection, and even from the day of creation, the whole history is permeated with Christianity. ‹…› So, Adam's covenant, or rather Noah's covenant, continues to exist in archaic religions, primarily in the religions of India with their cosmic symbolism. ‹…› But paganism has forgotten the Living God; we now know that light comes to us from the Face. A covenant with Abraham was needed, and it is undoubtedly renewed in Islam. The covenant with Moses is preserved in Judaism… Christ has reproduced everything anew. The incarnated Logos, who creates the world and reveals Himself in it, is the Word that speaks through the mouths of the prophets to guide history ... That is why I believe that Christianity is the religion of religions, sometimes I even say that I belong to all religions.

When, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Western science became more and more alien to religiosity, it tried to examine faith in God not from within, as ancient Christian thinkers did, but from without. Religion has become for scientists an object of study, a "form of social consciousness". The nineteenth century for the most part shared the teachings of the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) on the nature of the religious. Hegel suggested that belief in the "supernatural" is a way of knowing oneself and the outside world, characteristic of the early stages of human development. Not understanding the essence of the surrounding reality, a person first endows natural forces with personal features and tries to enter into relations of power and subordination with them, just as he enters into relations with other people. With the help of gifts-sacrifices, he tries to appease the spirits of nature, with the help of special techniques, "secret knowledge", to subjugate these spirits to himself. This, the first stage of religiosity, Hegel called "witchcraft." At the second stage of human development, the feeling of the greatness of these spiritual forces increases. A person is convinced that he cannot rule over them, that the spirits themselves rule over him. At the same time, a person begins to become more deeply aware of his own nature, its vulnerability and finiteness, is horrified by his susceptibility to disease, aging, and death. Having won the mercy and love of powerful spiritual forces, he hopes to overcome his own inferiority. Hegel calls this stage religious.

“The essential feature of religion is the moment of objectivity,” he writes, “that is, the need for spiritual power to manifest itself to the individual, to the individual empirical consciousness in the form of a universal, opposing self-consciousness ... In prayer, a person turns to the absolute will, for which the individual person is the subject of concern , which can heed prayer or not heed it ... Witchcraft in general consists in the fact that a person exercises his power in his naturalness, ”Hegel pointed out in a course of lectures on the philosophy of religion, which he read at the University of Berlin in 1821-1831.

Pointing out the difference between “witchcraft” and religion and establishing their temporal sequence, Hegel assumed that religion would develop until man fully comprehended the Spirit, to such a state when the philosophical and religious comprehension of the world would completely unite.

However, most of the students and followers of Hegel concluded that religion cannot be the final state of human consciousness. Ludwig Feuerbach expressed the conviction that just as witchcraft was replaced by faith in God, so faith in God itself will give way to faith in a person, love for God - love for a person as an absolute value. The French thinker Auguste Comte (1798-1857) believed that religion is an intermediate state of mind of mankind in its movement towards the fullness of knowledge. The highest form of cognition is not religious, but scientific knowledge, when higher forces are recognized as natural and their subordination to man.

The founders of Marxism defined the place of religion in a similar way. “The religious reflection of the real world can disappear altogether only when the relations of the practical everyday life of people are expressed in transparent and reasonable connections between them and with nature. The structure of the social life process ... will throw off the mystical foggy veil only when it becomes the product of a free social union of people and will be under their conscious and planned control.

A man of the 19th and early 20th centuries was flattered by the thought that it was in his time that the world was moving from the sphere of religion to the higher sphere of science. The ideas of Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx about the fate of religion gained great popularity. Sir James George Fraser (1854-1941), the greatest British religious scholar, adopted the scheme of the origin of religion from magic in his famous work The Golden Bough. He began to call magic the phenomenon that Hegel defined as witchcraft.

Multi-volume, exceptionally rich in factual material, Fraser's research is based on the belief that man himself invents gods for himself. Religion arises from a misunderstanding of reality, from the desire to control nature without the ability to master it, from the inability to separate one’s own consciousness from the insensible world and, as a result, from endowing everything around with human qualities of rationality and will. A stone, a tree, a wind blowing in a certain direction, an animal - all of them are personalities hiding a powerful spiritual nature behind a material shell. So think, according to Fraser, savages, so did our distant ancestors. Gradually, magic is replaced by religion, but in any religious system it is easy to detect "remnants" of the magical level of the ancient faith. In essence, Frazer tried to explain the great modern religions by revealing ancient magical foundations in them.

Another British scientist, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), explained the emergence of religion differently. Agreeing with the same Hegelian scheme of the historical development of religiosity from magic to science through religion, he explained the very origin of magic by the veneration of great dead ancestors. The tribesmen continued to turn to especially strong and wise people with requests for help even after their death. Then they began to make requests to the forces of nature and natural phenomena, which were also animated. Having the experience of achieving the set goals in this world with the help of actions directed in a certain way, people began to transfer the same practice to the fictional world of spirits. They began to try to subjugate to their will not only material things, but also their spiritual essence. So, according to Spencer, magic arose, and from it - a religion that preserved the traditions of honoring strong ancestors from the deepest antiquity.

The greatest English anthropologist and ethnographer Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) adhered to close views. He also believed that man invented his own religion. Religiosity apparently arose a very long time ago, since at present there is not a single tribe that stands at a pre-religious level of development, the scientist pointed out in his fundamental study “Primitive Culture”. Religion, in his opinion, arose as a result of an analysis by an ancient person of similar "boundary" phenomena of sleep, fainting, death. In a dream, the soul, as it were, separates from the body, in a swoon a person lies for some time as if dead, and then comes to life again *. Therefore, death, from which one no longer comes to life, began to appear as a long swoon, a long separation of the soul, capable of seeing dreams, from the body. From this arises the idea of ​​a disembodied soul, and the world is filled with many spirits by the ancient man. This, the first period of religiosity, Tylor called animism (from Latin anima - soul). Later, a person reduces numerous spirits of natural objects and forces into generalizing images of the gods of the forces of nature. So the spirits of all specific forests and groves take on a new face in the god of the forest, the spirits of all winds - in the god of the wind. From animism arises polytheism, polytheism. Finally, the ultimate generalization of polytheism leads a person to the conviction that there is only one Spirit - God. This last stage of the development of religion Tylor calls monotheism - monotheism. Since religion arose from an erroneous explanation of boundary phenomena, it, according to Tylor, is not eternal and dies off as a person's view of the world around him and himself becomes clearer.

The largest researcher of the influence of religion on society, the German scientist Max Weber (1864-1920), was also convinced that religion arose from an attempt to master the forces of nature, for which primitive man did not yet have real opportunities. “Religious and magically motivated actions at an early stage of their development are oriented to this world... Just as friction extracts a spark from a tree, the “magic” techniques of a skilled person cause rain from clouds... In the beginning, the spirit is neither a soul, nor a demon, much less God, but something indefinite, material, although invisible, impersonal, but possessing a kind of will ... ".

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) saw even more applied significance in religion. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), he argued that religion is a primitive ideology created by society itself for its own preservation and development. After examining the life of the aborigines of Australia, Durkheim wrote: "Society has everything necessary to arouse a sense of the divine in the minds of its members, mainly with the help of the power that society itself has over them."

However, by the time Emile Durkheim published his book, anthropologists and paleoanthropologists had collected a large number of facts proving that there are no communities where there would be no ideas about God, the Creator of the world. English explorers Andrew Lang and Sir Evans-Pritchard pointed out that even the most primitive peoples have knowledge of a higher God, the creator and judge of people. Another thing is that he is not addressed by "savages" in everyday life. It turned out that on Earth not only there is no pre-religious people, but also a people who do not know about the “Father of all”, about the only God-Creator. Consequently, the idea of ​​the entire Hegelian religious studies of the 19th century that belief in spirits precedes belief in gods, and belief in many gods precedes monotheism, this idea was not supported by objective scientific facts. The proponents of the conventional scheme have tried to object by pointing out that the Creator-God among primitive peoples is a "borrowed God" (loan-God), the knowledge of which they have learned from Christians, Muslims or Hindus. So thought, for example, a prominent British explorer Sir Arthur Ellis.

Objecting to him, Andrew Lang wrote: “If faith in the Father of all among savages is a late product of human reasoning, we must expect it to be the most popular and significant. But in Australia it is far from being popular, but on the contrary, it is a secret teaching hidden from women, children and uninitiated white people. Under the influence of new data, Arthur Ellis himself abandoned his hypothesis of a “borrowed God”, but it was finally refuted by R. S. Rattray, who carefully studied the religious world of one of the African equatorial peoples - Ashanti and proved that faith in God the Creator did not can be considered borrowed from this people, it is an inseparable part of all its beliefs.

At the beginning of the 20th century, indisputable signs of the religious life of prehistoric people who lived about 100 thousand years ago were also discovered, which by no means unequivocally testified that the ancients lived only in the world of spirits.

All these new data have forced serious researchers to abandon schemes for the development of religion like "animism-polytheism-monotheism", or "magic-religion-science". A "pre-religious" human society was no longer spoken of anywhere, except in countries with a communist ideology.

Since the mid-1950s, there have been two strands in the study of religions. Some scientists have refused to look for any meaning in the religious life of mankind. They consider religion as one of the manifestations of the life of the people. Not interested in the degree of objectivity, the authenticity of religious aspirations, such scholars examine with great care the forms of religious life, being sure that the essence of religious existence is either unknowable in principle, or completely absent. One of the largest religious studies schools in the West, the so-called Leiden School (magazine - Numen), organized in the ancient Dutch city of Leiden, proceeds precisely from this principle.

Close to Leiden, the largest Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim in the book “Ancient Mesopotamia, a portrait of a dead civilization” called the chapter on the Mesopotamian religion “Why the chapter “Mesopotamian religion” should not be written” . Oppenheim is convinced that a modern man cannot understand the ancient faith, because all his concepts, goals and values ​​are different. Therefore, one should be content with describing individual religious facts, but in every possible way avoid generalizations.

Another scientist, S. Mowinkel, categorically objected to clarifying the meaning of a particular religious concept by attracting comparative material from other beliefs, from the religions of other peoples. “It is absolutely necessary to consider each individual religion as a special structural whole,” the scholar wrote. “All the individual elements contained in such a whole acquire meaning and significance only from a given religious whole, and not from what they mean in a different religious whole.”

The essence of these opinions lies in the fact that in religion there is in fact no object to which, in different ways, but various peoples and civilizations strive. Because religion is a means without an end, such scholars suggest, it cannot be understood through an end. It can only be understood from itself. Imagine for a moment that we would not know anything about the purpose of the car. We would study a huge variety of cars and trucks, cement trucks, fuel trucks, armored cars from the point of view of the correspondence of parts, parts inside a particular car, we would compare the types of cars in terms of size and complexity, according to the materials used in them, but at the same time, the car remained would be essentially indistinguishable for us from a transformer box or a loom, since we do not know the main purpose of the car - to drive and move people and goods in space. Having acquired this basic knowledge, we will immediately acquire the right to compare cars with each other, we will immediately understand the logic of the development of the automotive industry.

The fear of comparison, juxtaposition, causality in the history of religions is an indication that scholars who do this think that the purpose of religious life is subjective and illusory. “Everyone believes in his own,” they say.

If the 19th century tried to do away with religion, looking for a pre-religious society, or at least a society in which they still believe only in spirits, but not in a Creator God, then the 20th century chose a different path for this. “Faith is the sum of subjective sensations” is still an individual, an entire people or even a civilization, believe the supporters of the Leiden school.

Another tradition of modern religious studies has a long history. Its founder in scientific religious studies, the Lutheran theologian and philosopher priest Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), in his "Speech on Religion" explained faith by the "feeling of complete dependence" of a person on the circumstances of life, and ultimately on the Creator. Schleiermacher, having subtly analyzed the world of human feelings, showed that the basis of religiosity is a person's personal inner experience. Our mortality, vulnerability, as well as a sense of justice, the voice of conscience and, finally, awe of omnipotence. God makes a man a "religious man". The sum of these feelings is experienced differently by different people. As in music and poetry, there are especially deeply gifted natures, but in almost every person and, of course, in every nation there is a poetic and musical structure, since the harmony of sound and the harmony of the word is an objective reality, and the presence of God in a person is an objective reality. , Schleiermacher is convinced, because God is real. Feelings experienced by a person in direct communion with God gave rise to religion.

Schleiermacher and his followers are referred to the Theistic School of Religious Studies (from the Greek ???? - God), as they recognize the reality of God, the object of religious aspirations. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ideas of Schleiermacher were developed by the prominent American religious scholar James William, the German scholars Max Muller and Rudolf Otto, and the Lutheran Bishop of Uppsala, the Swede Nathan Soderblom. Their approach to religious studies is often called historical-phenomenological, because the task of the theistic school is to study the manifestations of the divine in the history of mankind. The era in religious studies was opened by Professor Otto's book The Holy, which he provided with the subtitle: "Introduction to the extraconscious aspects of the experience of the divine and their relation to reason." Religion arises from reverence for the sacred, before God, perhaps even unconsciously, to whom a person is facing.

As an example of the experience of the “saint”, Otto cites a passage from the first book of the Bible, which tells about the journey of Jacob from Beersheba to Harran:

“Jacob left Beer-sheba and went to Haran, and came to a certain place, and stayed there overnight, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place, and put it under his head, and lay down on that place. And I saw in a dream: behold, a ladder stands on the ground, and its top touches the sky; and behold, the angels of God ascend and descend upon it. And so, the Lord stands on it and says: I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac ... Jacob woke up from his sleep and said: truly the Lord is present in this place; but I didn't know! And he was afraid and said, How terrible is this place! it is none other than the house of God, it is the gate of heaven. And Jacob arose early in the morning, and took the stone which he had laid for his head, and set it as a memorial, and poured oil on top of it.”

[Gen. 28:10-22].

Thus, according to Rudolf Otto, worship of God arises. Archbishop Soderblom has repeatedly said that "the history of religions is the best proof that there is a Living God." Throughout the existence of mankind, the experience of the "holy" could only be preserved by feeding on a true source. Any self-deception, sooner or later, would be revealed by mankind. Already in his dying illness, Nathan Soderblom said to his loved ones: "There is a Living God, I can prove it with the whole history of religion."

These views became the theoretical basis for a group of British scientists who worked at the University of Manchester and London before World War II and in the 1950s and 1960s. The most significant of these is Edwin Oliver James. James's friend and colleague, S. G. F. Brandon, in Man and His Destiny, suggested that religion arises from the experience of one's own mortality. “In every human being,” he wrote, “there is a deep awareness of vulnerability. Whatever his current state, everyone understands that he is a tributary of time, bearing old age, decrepitude and death. Understanding that such is the nature of human destiny has caused a number of responses in mankind, which took shape in a variety of religions. With a small exception, these answers had a common basis in the desire to ensure a reliable and safe existence after death through the rapprochement or merging of the human personality with some eternal, life-giving essence, ”in other words, with God the Creator.

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a prominent historian of religion of our time, a Romanian by nationality, who taught for most of his life at various universities in Western Europe and the USA, is a successor to earlier trends in theistic religious studies. At the universities of Chicago, he founded the historical-phenomenological school of the study of religions, which has now become the dominant theoretical direction of this science. Its main periodical is The History of Religions (Chicago). M. Eliade was convinced that "any religious celebration, any establishment of a liturgical order is a reproduction of the sacred events that took place at the" time it ", at the beginning of being" .

Under the editorship of Mircea Eliade, the most fundamental modern "Encyclopedia of Religion" was published in 1987, where the phenomenon of religion is given the following definition:

"Religion is the organization of life around the deepest penetrations of experience, differing in form, completeness and clarity and consonant with the surrounding culture" .

The main thing in the historical-phenomenological, or, as it is also called, the Chicago school, is the conviction that the object of religious experience exists not only in human experience, but also outside of it. Religion, the "holy", the awe of mortality and the hope of overcoming it - all these are the "deepest penetrations of our experience" into the sphere of Divine being, which is, however, a lesser reality than America for the navigators striving for it.

As you can see, the circle is closed. Four thousand years ago, the Egyptian knew that the memory of death was given to man in order to he did not leave faith. Brandon repeated this idea in the 1960s. The essence of a person is his faith, the ancient Indians believed. And again, the Encyclopedia of Religion repeats the same idea in modern philosophical language. The experience of the divine, the sacred - a distinctive feature of the human race - said the thoughtful Hellenes. For Schleiermacher, Max Muller, Rudolf Otto, fear and reverence for the shrine is the reason for religiosity.

The data of field ethnography and archeology destroyed the beautiful theoretical constructions of religious scholars - the Hegelians. There are almost no adherents left in the theory of Emile Durkheim, popular in the 1920s. Those religious scholars who do not accept for themselves the objectivity of the existence of God, now prefer not to be militant atheists, but empiricist agnostics, giving the supporters of the historical-phenomenological school a general theory of the origin and existence of religion.

Modern religious studies have long been engaged neither in proving the existence of God, nor in exposing the deceptions of "churchmen" except in countries with communist ideology. It got out of the impasse of the insoluble "basic question of philosophy" by developing a set of methods of analysis that all self-respecting scientists now adhere to. The religious phenomenon is investigated by itself in the system of its own logic, it is accepted as a reality insofar as it is not the researchers who believe in it, but the researched. This method was developed most fully and consciously by the Chicago Historical and Phenomenological School, but to one degree or another, all modern religious studies schools adhere to it. Mockery over the subject of the faith being studied, doubts about the adequacy of subjective religious experience are not accepted today.

It is not easy for the scientific atheist to come to terms with this. He used to fight and learn to expose. “The study of the history of religion is inseparable from the tasks of atheistic propaganda, from the tasks of fighting religion,” wrote, for example, the respected Soviet religious scholar S. A. Tokarev. A modern religious scholar does not put the question this way at all - it is enough for him to know that Athena, Poseidon, Zeus were realities for Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, he is interested in what the nymphs and dryads were for the Greek. Doubts about their objective existence are fruitless in religious studies and therefore are now excluded as a method of research. Domestic authors describing a living religious phenomenon, say, shamanism (Anna Smolyak, Elena Revunenkova, and others), follow this rule as consistently as foreign ones.