This article will explore the pattern of conflicts between secular thinking and religious beliefs from the perspective of critical thinking and analyse the potential that this conflict holds for increasing tolerance inside mixed society such as in Romania. It is often said that the ability of thinking critically deeply erodes the propensity towards religious faith and there are numerous study results that back up this assertion. This article tries to explain that  religious faith becomes fully understandable only in some larger pattern that shapes morality, cognitive strategies and social practices and this is true for secular thinking as well. We can name this patterns ascendant, respectively descendant. Ascendant thinking derives and explains higher level practices beginning from lower level entities through progress and emergence and for this kind of thinking, morality and cognition are an open fields that can be indefinitely improved. This kind of thinking embraces novelty and creativity and aims at human beings becoming capable of managing this novelty. The descending model derives from and explains the lower levels through complex and immutable entities and will tend to see novelty as change capable of breaking their models and therefore act towards neutralizing novelty through interpretation. Information and practices that cannot be neutralized will be counted as abnormous. The article comes forward with a comparative analysis between these two opposing patterns, showing that this interpretative frame is valid in retrodiction and that it can fundament concrete predictions. It will also show that critical thinking is permitted and can fundament a space for compromise and dialogue between religious and secular people.

Modern education has definitely entered an “age of measurement”, as educational specialist and philosopher Gert Biesta put it, and there is academic research that clearly shows that this operational and utilitarian shift comes with a cost as far as humanistic education and philosophical critical thinking is concerned. The implicit premise of this view is that every educational outcome can be properly measured and that every legit educational objective can be reframed as competence with components that can be properly measured. Moreover, these objectives are seen as attainable in principle through fully controllable processes that can be supervised and kept functional during every stage of their development. In this article, we argue that this view derives from a transfer of view and motives between the domains of entrepreneurship and education that this transfer, natural as can be in these times of scientific, technological and information based times, affects some of more conservative aims of education and can be potentially harmful for critical thinking and active citizenship competencies. In Romania, we are facing a clear shift in paradigms, replacing a model that is in its deepest forms poetic, formative and magisterial with models that favor more entrepreneurial and quantitative approaches. These later models are in principle based on attaining critical thinking skills, but we shall argue in this article that, inside this paradigm of efficiency and measurement, critical thinking has limited powers and functions and that a mixed model, that is still based on humanistic views and its dedicated to educational ideals that go further and deeper than entrepreneurial efficiency, is better suited for cultivating critical thinking.