Posted on 02/15/2013 2:27:05 PM PST by NYer
In his most eloquent account of the relationship between faith and reason – the 2006 Regensberg address – Pope Benedict XVI argues that the modern understanding of reason that restricts rationality to the deliverances of the hard sciences is incapable of offering a rational justification of itself, and much of anything else that makes life worth living. “Modern scientific reason,” the Holy Father writes, “quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit [i.e., mind] and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.”
In other words, the modern person who wants to limit rationality to the hard sciences must stop his inquiry and not ask why nature is intelligible and why our cognitive faculties are ordered towards the understanding of nature. These are just “givens” about which we should not rationally inquire, since to do so would mean that scientific rationalism is not the limit of reason. Benedict writes that “this aversion to the questions which underlie [the]…rationality” of modern scientific reason “endangers the West” and “[we] can only suffer great harm” because of it. The modern world denies reason’s “grandeur” and thus cannot summon “the courage to engage the whole breadth of reason.”
Within hours of Pope Benedict’s announcement that he would resign the papacy, confirmation of the truth of those theological insights came rushing through cyberspace in a variety of comments issued by the Holy Father’s most hostile critics. It would be a mistake to say that the irony was lost on these pundits, since the irony was never within their grasp to begin with.
With minds uncritically formed by the Zeitgeist that the pope powerfully explained in his Regensberg address – combined with an unwillingness to extend reason’s power to their most cherished secular pieties – these critics, despite their own native intelligence, would not likely understand what they do not realize they do not know.
Although I could provide several examples, one stands out as that than which no greater irony can be conceived. Soon after Benedict announced his abdication, the eminent science writer and Oxford professor, Richard Dawkins, sent out this tweet: “I feel sorry for the Pope and all old Catholic priests. Imagine having a wasted life to look back on and no sex.”
If you know anything about Dawkins, you know that he is the quintessential scientific rationalist, denying that anything that cannot be captured and quantified under the categories of the hard sciences, or traceable to them, is outside the purview of reason – and that anything outside that purview is de facto irrational. For this reason, Dawkins, as the pope would put it, has an aversion to asking questions that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationalism.
So let us explore the reason that dare not speak its name. Dawkins, as is well known, maintains that reason – understood as equivalent to scientific rationalism, which has established the truth of evolutionary theory – requires that we deny that nature is designed, and thus is not infused with intrinsic purposes or proper ends by which we can issue moral judgments.
Setting aside his ungrounded belief that evolution per se is inconsistent with intrinsic purposes and proper ends in nature, it should be clear that Dawkins’ scientific rationalism means that his anti-papal tweet cannot be a deliverance of reason.
After all, for one to claim that a life of priestly celibacy devoted to Christ and his Church is a wasted life requires that one know what a fulfilled life would look like. But such a life is an ideal, and thus is not like an empirical claim about the natural world. It is not an object of scientific inquiry. One cannot point to it, as one would point toward Pope Benedict or Richard Dawkins, though the intellect can be aware of this abstract truth when assessing Benedict and Dawkins by it.
Just as we know that a blind person ought to have sight because we know what a human being is by nature and how his parts and properties are ordered toward certain ends that work in concert for the good of the whole, we also know what excellence and virtue are before and after we see them actualized in our fellows.
But given his diminished understanding of reason, Dawkins must deny that even he can issue such judgments by means of his rational powers. Consequently, on Dawkins’ own account of reason, his verdict on the pope’s life is the cerebral equivalent of covert flatulence gone terribly wrong: not silent and not deadly.
Ping!
Who we are as humans is so much more than a collection of rationalizations.
I think Beckwith is saying that, based on Dawkins' own irrational, unreasonable reasoning, his stunted thinking and inadequate ideas expressed here are both loud and stinky, and his logic flaws are glaringly apparent and detectable, and are thoroughly noxious and nauseating.
ROTFL!
Yes, that too.
If all life is random and meaningless, there is no way anyone can have a wasted or unwasted life. Indeed, all our discoveries in science and technology are equally meaningless. ____________________________________________
Agreed, he is the one to be much pitied. It is he who has not only wasted and trashed his life, but has feverishly used it to caused great and irreparable damage to the eternal souls of those it is his duty to be leading into the truth of God.
Also, just as Dawkins does not know God, he cannot have any idea at all, as an atheist, about what really good and great sex is, which cannot be known, experienced nor understood apart from the inspiration of Almighty God, in the confines of holy matrimony. Poor guy doesn't even know what he is missing in the realm of a much vaunted life's pursuit, sex, for he has only experienced it on one dead and materialistic level.
Dawkins either doesn't know he got pwnd, or else lacks the honesty to admit it, first to himself.
Furiously flailing about within the philosophy that was just his own undoing can't bring any relief.
It reminds me of the liberals who always want to raise taxes or pass laws that only apply to 'those other people, over there'.
If it's all materialism, Dawkins' whole life is meaningless...or else the good Mr. Ratzinger's own scholarly approach (to the discussion those two had) has undeniable merit.
lol at Dawkins? or
There are many vocations — don’t be so quick with your words.....in other words, did you put your foot in your mouth?
Vocations:
Single throughout life
Married throughout life
Consecrated nun/sister throughout life
Consecrated brother/monk throughout life
Consecrated permanent deacon (married, but cannot remarry if his wife dies.)
Priesthood
Episcopate (Bishop)
Papacy
Can’t all these different vocations have an ongoing love of Christ alive in their vocations?
These vocations dedicate their lives to God, Christ and the Holy Spirit — in love.
Consecrated nun/sister throughout life
Consecrated brother/monk throughout life
Consecrated permanent deacon (married, but cannot remarry if his wife dies.)
Priesthood
Episcopate (Bishop)
Papacy
There is no need to feel sorry for them. Are you thinking as man thinks and not as God thinks?
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500 words to answer a tweet of 140 cifers. Dawkins is a dishonest publicity hound and should be ignored. He will not be changed, but there are many others who heard and comprehended what the pope was saying.
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