ABSTRACT
Religious experience is a threat to philosophical materialism but not to science as an objective method of knowledge. The attempt to restrict and define what God is capable of doing within the creation stems from disbelief in God or a concept of God more in line with paganism than Orthodoxy. Scientific knowledge can be interpreted as reflecting reality and truth in a universal, or it can be something that describes experience rather than the universals behind the experience. Reductionism in natural science is a tool to aid in the extraction of information from things, but reductive science alone cannot provide an understanding of life. In Orthodox Christianity there has been a culmination of claims made by disparate individuals and under diverse conditions and times, that have been repeated over and again and this fact forms a a basis for intersubjective and reproducible knowledge.
