Getting to the Point

Even if metaphysical questions are not rejected in principle, there is a second objection to the God of revelation. This was already formulated in the philosophy of the ancients, but it has acquired far greater force in the modern scientific and technological world.

It can be put like this: a rationally constructed world is determined by rationally perceived causality. To such a scheme the notion of personal intervention is both mythical and repugnant. But if this approach is adopted, it must be followed consistently, for what applies to God also applies equally to man.

If there is only one kind of causality, man too as a person is excluded and reduced to an element in mechanical causality, in the realm of necessity; freedom too, in this case, is a mythical idea. In this sense it can be said that the personalities of God and of man cannot be separated.

If personality is not a possibility, i.e., not present, with the ‘ground’ of reality, it is not possible at all. Either freedom is a possibility inherent in the ground of reality, or it does not exist. Thus the issue of prayer is intimately linked with those of freedom and personality: the question of prayer decides whether the world is to be conceived as pure ‘chance and necessity’, or whether freedom and love are constitutive elements of it.

Joseph Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, p.20

Reflection – The attitude that the future pope Benedict describes here is not a relic of 19^th century positivist philosophy. It is alive and well in the new atheism of our day. It is, in fact, the essential premise on which the supposed opposition of religion and science, faith and reason rests. Scientists and those who use their reason (we are told) believe in an ordered universe of empirically observable and rationally provable causes and effects, predictable and unswerving sequences of events based on the interplay of natural forces.

Religious people (who don’t use their reason) believe that Jesus fed 5000 people with five loaves of bread, walked on water, and raised the dead. And so, in the rather crudely thought out dialectic between science and reason, religion and faith, it is the former that has all the credibility, the latter none.

Ratzinger identifies well what is wrong with this rather simplistic division. Leaving aside the obvious fact that many people of faith have been people of science and reason as well (a fact borne out by any study of European intellectual history), and so existentially there is clearly no real opposition between the two, there is also no rational opposition between them either.

God establishes a universe that runs, to a large degree, along basically mechanistic lines, that has an ordered course of operation that can be studied, learned, predicted, and then channelled to serve particular human ends—science and technology, in a nutshell.

But the God who ‘built’ the machine is also a Person not defined or limited by the machine, any more than a human being who makes a machine is not a slave to that machine. So this God can act, for reasons of His own, in the universe He made, to achieve this or that end.

Miracles, by the way, are not limited to biblical manuscripts or medieval legends. There is a chronicled, documented history of miracles that is fairly consistent from the time of Christ up to the present day. Atheists are sublimely uninterested in all that, by and large. Personally, I have seen physical healings following on prayer; people I know have experienced first-hand the miraculous multiplication of food, generally in places where the poor are served. Perhaps atheists are not aware of that because they don't tend to hang out in those places...

But all of that aside, Ratzinger makes here the very good point that to exclude this out of court as an absurdity really does not end with God and prayer and miracles. It extends, by strict logical necessity, to excluding real human freedom from the scene, and with the exclusion of freedom, love too is a casualty of atheistic materialism.

If there is nothing but matter and physical forces playing against each other, if all reality is to be interpreted only in this rubric of mechanism and strict necessity, then human beings too are machines, essentially, and consciousness and all that goes with it (the illusion of freedom, the illusion of love, the illusion of spirit) is merely a spandrel, a meaningless by-product, an emergent property that has no real significance or actual reality.

And if that is repulsive to us (and I think it is both that and utterly ridiculous to boot), then where on earth does freedom, love, and spiritual being come from in a materialistic universe? If we are not just machines following our programming, then how can the universe that produced us be only a machine, and how can there be nothing else besides us that transcends the machine?

If we lose God, we lose humanity. If we retain humanity, God sneaks in by the back door. And not one word of this, not one implication of this, in any way, shape, or form, weakens the commitment to scientific rigor, reason, or advance. It never has, never did, never will.

The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and forever spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this mortal has put on immortality.

Even what we call our material desires are spiritual, because they are human. Science can analyze a pork chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyze any man’s wish for a pork chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love for the beautiful.

The man’s desire for the pork chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folklore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy.

You can no more be certain in economic history that a man’s desire for money was merely a desire for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint’s desire for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science.

Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

Reflection – Another fine chapter from the man, worthy of the price of the book. He is specifically responding here to the kind of anthropology of folk lore fashionable in his day, which indeed tended to treat human beings (and especially, not to emphasize this aspect too much, human beings of darker skin tone and southern latitudes) as strange alien subjects to be studied under strict laboratory conditions. 

The idea that the scientist can possibly distance himself, dehumanize himself, in the study of man and his ways, and that this would actually be a movement towards deeper insight and understanding of man and his ways—this is what GKC is critiquing.

And I am firmly and utterly in agreement with him on this matter. The specific kind of anthropology he critiques has had its day, more or less, in part because of the precise criticisms Chesterton made of it, in part because there was in fact quite a bit of genuinely nasty racist sub-text at least implied if not always exactly intended in this kind of ‘scholarship’.

But the attempt to put man and woman under the microscope and treat humanity as a subject of scientific research continues. Perhaps it is needless to say that we are not talking here about medical science and all that: of course the workings of the human body are as much a matter of scientific research as the study of any other body, living or dead.

It is the workings of the human mind and its mysteries—this is not a matter for science, properly speaking. I realize that Chesterton’s position (which is mine, too) is unconventional, but I think it is true. And it think it can be borne out simply by studying the history of anthropology/sociology/ history/psychology. Theory has succeeded upon theory in each and all of these fields. Each theory has been advanced and argued upon rigorous scientific grounds. Arguments and research and the most scientific tests have been exercised in producing the latest theory about… oh, education, or sexuality, or economic behavior, or the causes of revolution, or... name it.

And ten years later, another bunch of scientists come up with a completely contradictory theory, bolstered by all the same type of research and scientific tests and studies and… well, something is very wrong with this picture, isn’t it? If I boil water one day under strict laboratory conditions and it boils at 100 degrees Celsius, and the next day using the same methodology it boils at 78 degrees, then either something is badly wrong with me, with the instruments, or with the water.

Yet this is exactly what has happened over and over again in all the attempts to ‘scientifically’ study humanity, and yet we remain inclined to uncritically accept whatever the latest batch of theories are that come from these (admittedly) brilliant men and women and their (granted) hard work.

The truth is, the best way to study what a human being is and why we do what we do is to attain the best possible knowledge of the one human being who is available to you for intense study at all hours of the day. In other words, look to your own heart and know what is going on inside yourself, and why. ‘Know thyself’, the inscription on the Delphic temple said, and you will know the mysteries of the universe. The Greeks knew a thing or two, as did the wise monks of the desert and the cloister of our Christian tradition, as did the common folk and the common sense of humanity.

In the process [of modern philosophy and rationalism], faith came to be associated with darkness. There were those who tried to save faith by making room for it alongside the light of reason. Such room would open up wherever the light of reason could not penetrate, wherever certainty was no longer possible. Faith was thus understood either as a leap in the dark, to be taken in the absence of light, driven by blind emotion, or as a subjective light, capable perhaps of warming the heart and bringing personal consolation, but not something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way.

Slowly but surely, however, it would become evident that the light of autonomous reason is not enough to illumine the future; ultimately the future remains shadowy and fraught with fear of the unknown. As a result, humanity renounced the search for a great light, Truth itself, in order to be content with smaller lights which illumine the fleeting moment yet prove incapable of showing the way. Yet in the absence of light everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil, or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.

Lumen Fidei 3

Reflection Time again for ‘Tuesdays With Francis’, our weekly reading and reflection on Lumen Fidei. Although, reading this paragraph, one is tempted to call this ‘Tuesdays With Francis (and, ahem, Benedict),’ as his distinctive style and thought patterns are all over this encyclical which he largely wrote. But it is an encyclical, and as such it is from Peter, and Peter’s chair is occupied by our good pope Francis now. So Tuesdays with Francis it is.

Here we see one way the modern world has tried to resolve the conflict between faith and reason. Reason gives us truth, and faith gives us comforting feelings, essentially. This is Schleiermacher’s effort to resolve the question. But the compromise breaks down on several points.

For one thing, I am not consoled by my faith unless it is, in fact, objectively true. If Jesus is not really raised from the dead, my nice thoughts and feelings about Him give me no real consolation. A faith that does not make truth claims does not provide us with any nice feelings, does it?

But also, reason unaided by faith only goes so far, and as the Pope points out, it doesn’t go very far at all in things that have proven to matter a great deal to human beings. Where are we from? Where are we going? What is it for? What good is it? How are we to live good lives, lives that correspond to the truth of who we are, where we’re from and where we are going?

Scientific reason and the experimental methods have not one singular, solitary thing to say about any of that, nor can they, and any real scientist will readily, happily acknowledge that. But… people care about these questions, right? I do, and I think the mass of humanity do, too.

The rationalist answer is to abandon these questions and live according to the small light we have been given by unaided reason. The results are precisely what the encyclical says: “in the absence of light everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil, or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.” And post-modern nihilism indeed leaves us right there, in a sort of metaphysical despair which yields to various forms of hedonistic oblivion, mystagogical obscurantism, or political radicalism: the worship of pleasure, power, or demons, essentially.

It is not unlike the temptations of Christ in the desert – bread, or power politics (the casting down from the temple as a brilliant PR coup), or the worship of Satan. This is where we are if all we have is reason and reason alone, a reason confined to the sciences and their built-in limits.

And so we are left in a quandary, aren’t we? …until next Tuesday, of course.