“The Key Philosophical Question” in the Context of the Polemic of Theism and Atheism as Systems of a Herson’s Worldview Navigation (Historical, Philosophical and General Theoretical Aspects)

Abstract

In the bygone epoch, when Marxism-Leninism was considered «the only true» philosophical doctrine, the key philosophical question was what is prime: matter or consciousness? Nowadays it is often declared that no «key question» has ever existed; it being far-fetched, an ideological Soviet cliché or hopelessly obsolete at best. Whether it is so? Whether the philosophical question about the nature of the substance and ontological status of the transcendent reality and the correlation of the material and the ideal both in the world and in human life is obsolete? Whether the fundamental anthropological issue of psycho-physical dualism is ob­solete? Finally whether the dispute between believers and atheists is obsolete? These are rhetoric questions. All the mentioned above never gets obsolete con­stantly forming sense-directing «poles» between which broadly speaking all the human spiritual culture is spreading around. The article attempts to demonstrate that the dispute between two main worldview answers to «the key philosophical question» i.e. materialism and idealism is tightly connected with ever-topical dis­cussion between the representatives of atheism and theism, evolutionism and cre­ationism, scientism and antiscientism, determinism and indeterminism, anthropo­logical reductionism and antireductionism or existentialism, the proponents of life coming down to «panem et circenses» and their opponents. Finally all this variety of worldview oppositions leads to the issue of existence or non-existence of tran­scendent reality beside directly available material or natural world.