Thanks to Edward for the article about the Pope’s speech. Interesting stuff but ultimately just flawed apologetics and Christian triumphalism. I follow the argument about cultures of reason and I accept the contribution of the Greeks, but man, I nearly threw up when I read how Ratzinger then tries to insert the idea of a designer god as being a necessary condition to the development of science. Yikes.
The first objection is that there is a glaring contradiction in acknowledging that the Greeks developed reason. How did they develop reason without a monotheistic creator? We know that the ‘pagan’ Greeks made significant advances in mathematics, medicine, science, engineering, music, poetics, theatre, etc, etc – all without the concept of a monotheistic creator god. What the Greeks allowed was a spirit of enquiry and from this they developed the rules of logic. It is the development of logic which is the sole source of the scientific method. Yes, the sole source.
Christianity and Abrahamic monotheism has always had a conflicted and contradictory relationship with logic and reason. Far from creating an harmonious synthesis of faith and reason the Church actually held reason and scientific progress back. It is also true that some Abrahamic scholars (including Muslims) studied the classics, thus preserving the Greco-Roman tradition, but other scholars (and fanatics) also distorted and corrupted the GR tradition. Many important GR works were lost or intentionally destroyed. And even then the more fanatical followers of each of the traditions struggled against reason and science.
But the Pope is being disengenuous to suggest that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was somehow fostered by the Church. Far from it. The sources of the Renaissance actually come from the influence of high Muslim culture. The Church may very well have had monks and scholars who could read Greek and Latin and therefore read the classics, but this knowledge was largely kept within the Church with the fist of blasphemy always hanging over proceedings. Contact with Muslim scholars undermined Church control and allowed the beginnings of the secular study of the classics.
It has always amused me that the very Church that suppressed the findings of Galileo and Da Vinci (particularly his studies of anatomy – stopped because some fuckwit thought he was practicing the witch’craft’ of necromancy) tries to make the claim that Christianity was a necessary component to the development of science.
But what of India? Was there no science in India? Anyone who has studied Indian philosophy knows that it developed reason and logic. In fact Indian culture has always had a genius for mathematics and science, a natural extension of Indian logic.
And what of China?
I just don’t buy it – Christianity contributed nothing, nix, nada. It was only ever (and still is) an impediment to reason.
The ‘theological’ development of a god of reason was the result of the power of logic and reason. Early Christian thinkers who understood reason and logic very quickly realized there were enormous problems with early Christian theology, enormous contradictions and inconsistencies. So what they did was change the nature of God and turn him from a capricious tyrant into a rational designer. The tail did not wag the dog – that is, Christianity did not modify reason, reason modified God.
I would add finally that by the time of Joshua the Nazorean the Greeks had understood that the gods were metaphors for the human condition. An early Greek criticism of Christianity attacks it for its ‘primitive’ literalism and its extraordinary irrationality (pointing out the glaring logical errors). Unfortunately the literalists eventually gained power and suppressed the more nuanced Greek view. So when ‘pscychology’ was first developed who did they turn to to explain the human condition? Why, the Greeks. ‘Psychology’ – psyche and logos, the ‘word of the psyche’. Christianity has offered fuck all insight into the psyche.
And why does science invariably turn to Greek and Latin to name theories, states, types and conditions? ie Homo Sapiens, homosexuality, the Oedipus complex, anima and animus? Even the name Jesus Christ is a bastardized Latin and Greek concoction (in English he should be called Joshua, the Messiah).
What Christianity has been very good at is inserting itself into the story and appropriating classical ideas. And this is exactly what Ratzinger is trying to do, make out that Christianity has something to do with the growth of reason. No, it happened despite the Church.
Incidentally, the whole story of Joshua wandering the land with a group of disciples is a Greek idea. Rabbis did not collect ‘disciples’. Joshua, in dressing simply and taking a vow of poverty, was copying Greek mystery and philosophical schools such as the Pythagoreans and Cynics.
I commented about Habermas’ inclusion of religious thought in another blog, but the following from Habbie is relevant here as well. This is from
“Religion in the public sphere†Lecture presented at the Holberg Prize Seminar, 29 November 2005:
http://www.holbergprisen.no/downloads/diverse/hp/hp_2005/2005_hp_jurgenhabermas_religioninthepublicsphere.pdf
Let me briefly outline a postmetaphysical mentality as a mindset that represents the secular counterpart to a religious consciousness that has become self-reflective. Post-metaphysical thought draws, with no
polemical intention, a strict line between faith and knowledge. But it rejects a narrow scientistic conception of reason and the exclusion of religious doctrines from the genealogy of reason.
Post-metaphysical thought certainly refrains from passing ontological statements on the constitution of the whole of beings. Yet at the same time it rejects a kind of scientism that reduces our knowledge to what is, at each time, represented by the “state of the art†in natural science. The borderline often becomes blurred between proper scientific
information and a naturalist world-view that is only synthetized from various scientific sources. This is the wrong way of naturalizing the human mind. It casts into question our practical self-understanding as persons who can take responsibility for our actions.
Post-metaphysical thought reflects on its own history. In so doing it refers, however, not only to the metaphysical heritage of Western philosophy. It discovers an internal relationship also to those world religions whose origins, like the origins of Classical Greek philosophy, date back to the middle of the first millennium before Christ – in other words to
what Jaspers termed the “Axial Ageâ€Â. Those religions which have their roots in the Axial Age accomplished the cognitive leap from mythical narratives to a logos that differentiates between essence and appearance in a very similar way to Greek philosophy. Ever since the Council of Nicaea, and throughout the course of a “Hellenization of Christianityâ€Â,
philosophy itself took on board and assimilated many religious motifs and concepts, specifically those from the history of salvation. Concepts of Greek origin such as “autonomy†and “individuality†or Roman concepts such as “emancipation†and “solidarity†have long since been shot through with meanings of a Judaeo-Christian origin.
Philosophy has recurrently found in its confrontation with religious traditions (and particularly with religious writers such as Kierkegaard, who think in a post-metaphysical, but not a post-Christian vein) that it receives innovative or world-disclosing stimuli. It would not be rational to reject out of hand the conjecture that religions – as the only surviving
element among the constitutive building-blocks of the Ancient cultures – manage to continue and maintain a recognized place within the differentiated edifice of Modernity because their cognitive substance has not yet been totally exhausted. There are at any rate no good reasons for denying the possibility that religions still bear a valuable semantic
potential for inspiring other people beyond the limits of particular communities of faith, once that potential is only delivered in terms of its profane truth content.
In short, post-metaphysical thought is prepared to learn from religion while remaining strictly agnostic. It insists on the difference between certainties of faith and validity claims that can be publicly redeemed or criticized; but it refrains from the rationalist temptation that it can itself decide which part of a religious doctrine is rational and which part is not.
This ambivalent attitude to religion expresses an epistemic attitude which secular citizens must adopt, if they are to be able and willing to learn something from religious contributions to public debates – provided it turns out to be something that can also be spelled out in a generally accessible language.
Hmm, yes, well – an interesting conundrum, learning from religion whilst remaining “strictly agnostic”.
I don’t doubt that individual Christians have not made valuable contributions to spiritual understanding, but I also wonder if they aren’t repeating what other traditions have already discovered.