Nowadays all people live in different communities, and various religions are spread among the population. During its history, humanity accumulated and explored a significant amount of knowledge about the world around. The world is changing, and all these changes affect the population in whole and certain human beings in particular. It is important to learn more about the world around, using both religious answers and scientific knowledge. In fact, these categories could be considered as two parts of the whole.
However, regardless of all the differences, people create one community and live in the shared world. Connections between people are stronger now than whenever else due to the modern technologies development. It was stated that all the people should be respected and treated equally because all of them are God’s creatures (the Pope Paul VI 4 “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions-Nostra Aetate” 4). Thus, it is highly important to explore the world around and people’s differences with the purpose to understand and appreciate it.
According to Newman (30), to explore the world, it is essential to get the education and to study different branches of knowledge. The author stated that all of them are equally important and connected to each other. Newman postulated that “All branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself as being the act and the work of the Creator” (30). Thus, it could be stated that for exploring and appreciating the world of Creator, a human being should become a philosopher and obtain a wide range of knowledge.
A similar point of view could be found in another essay of the Pope Paul VI “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes.” According to the author’s words, the church should focus its attention on “the world of men, the whole human family along with the sum of those realities in the midst of which it lives; … that world which the Christian sees as created and sustained by its Maker’s love…”(1). Therefore, the existing world was created by God, and it is worth to be learned and appreciated. According to the importance of knowledge, author postulated (3) that novel data influence people and cause the evolution of the society.
Despite all the changes appeared in the world, religions were and remain the important source of knowledge. In another work, “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions-Nostra Aetate,” The Pope Paul VI postulated that “People look to their different religions for an answer to the unsolved riddles of human existence” (1). In this essay, the Pope underlined the importance of different beliefs for people who are searching for answers. All major religions postulate that the whole world was created by God and that people should love and respect each other and everything around.
Therefore, the process of the reality understanding and appreciating is a highly significant philosophical issue for all human beings. Both religious knowledge and scientific information could be used to achieve this goal. Although all three cited works underline that people live in the world created by God and that this world should be studied and appreciated, in the treatise of Newman (43), the education and science are considered to be essential for the world exploring, while The Pope Paul VI in his essays “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions-Nostra Aetate” and “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes” highlighted the importance of religious answers for understanding and improving the reality.
Works Cited
Pope Paul VI. Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions-Nostra Aetate. Vatican, 1965.
Pope Paul VI. Pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world Gaudium et Spes. Vatican, 1965.
Newman, John Henry. “The Uses of Knowledge.” The Idea of a University, edited by John H. Newman and Leo L. Ward, Wiley-Blackwell, 1948