The questions of young people are harsh and demanding. They are waiting for honest answers. They don't like general phrases. And they ask about what is interesting to them and not always interesting to elderly parishioners. In this book, such unusual questions met with unusual answers. Deacon Andrei Kuraev, a professor at St. Tikhon's Orthodox Theological Institute, is one of the most interesting and anticipated interlocutors among young people. There is often a certain unpredictability in his answers: sometimes he is unexpectedly harsh, sometimes unexpectedly soft. In general, a living person. A person with whom you can argue and ask questions.

This book contains answers to questions that I have heard at meetings with Orthodox youth.

About books, movies, rock music, falling in love

What was accidental in the relationship between faith and science: conflict or union?

For a century and a half, secular schools have been growing cockroaches to plant them in the heads of students. One of the most well-fed cockroaches is the one that digs somewhere in the area of the left ear and with its whiskers irritates the neural circuit with the help of which a well-trained person repeats: "Science and Christian dogmatics are incompatible!! Science was born, overcoming the fierce resistance of church obscurantists! And only with the liberation of people from the shackles of medieval scholasticism was scientific thought born!"

This flow of words is so habitual (for it began its murmur in pre-revolutionary schools, thereby preparing the "great revolution") that there is no desire to test its seeming "harmony" with the help of "algebra" (that is, logic and history).

But even in these habitual clichés there is a grain of truth, which, if taken seriously, can free the mind from the spell of atheistic propaganda. This grain of truth is that science is indeed born as mankind emerges from the Middle Ages.

Well, now for the questions.

Questions that lead away from stereotypes

The first is that if science is born in a certain era, does it mean that it has not always accompanied humanity? After all, man has always been interested in the world around him. I always tried to get to know it. But the scientific way of knowing the world appeared not with the birth of man, but with the birth of science. This means that science is not just the desire to learn something about the world, but cognition with the help of certain methods. This means that there are several methods of cognition of the world by man, and science is only one of them. This method is remarkably effective. But is it universal? Is it suitable for solving all the problems that arise when a person learns his place in the world?

The second question is: if science was born at a certain stage of the historical development of mankind, can it only be in conflict with the world that gave birth to it? Of course, at a certain moment the child makes an effort to get out of the mother's womb, and the mother makes an effort to push the child out of herself. But does this mean that the relationship between the child and his mother should be described only in terms of conflictology? If science was born at the exit from the world of the Middle Ages, it means that it was in this world that it was at least conceived and carried...

The third question is whether science is born at the moment when all mankind, or only a certain part of it, emerges from the Middle Ages? If only parts, then maybe the medieval history of this particular part was somehow specific? If science is born at the end of the Western world from its Middle Ages, doesn't this mean that there was something in the Western Middle Ages (unlike the Indian or Arab) that contributed to the birth of science?

The fourth question is: if science contradicts Christianity, then why did other cultures not lead to the birth of science? Why did Christianity, with its supposedly profound anti-science, create a culture in which the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took place?