Catholic Republic, page 28
Today, as seen in every other chapter of this book, American Prot-Enlight misleadingly seems to be a dispute between two rivals. Crucial to remember, however, is that every view from which Protestantism and Enlightenment thought seem ostensibly rivalrous turns out to be born of similarity, not of difference.
The paganism of the American scientific and technocratic view will only accelerate, without some sort of popular intervention on behalf of the Catholic Natural Law.
Except for the occasional instance where American religion and science come together in the popular culture to yell past one another (recall “Creationism versus Evolution”), the parties are no longer even on speaking terms. This is very similar to the almost total lack of communication, today, between Church and state.
As per our murder trial analogy earlier in the chapter, the common American is being duped more and more by the alluring promises of scientism. After all, scientism appears flashy and sounds glib to the uncultivated mind, which is not trained to ask probative questions. Without “putting on our best defense” of the Christian view of the world,
Protestant Christianity (and even Christianity in general) will continue to appear unappetizing to the popular culture.
The conditions promise to worsen without the intellectual influence of the Catholic Natural Law tradition for which America is groaning.
All America can do is to hire a heavy-hitting “attorney” to make the case for a scientific theism of the Cross: the Catholic Natural Law position alone articulates a Christian viewpoint open to truth and agreeable to scientific advancement. The Catholic position alone can turn the tide on the advance of scientism and its insinuated atheism.
Nothing attests to this fact better than the mere existence of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, refounded in 1936 by Pope Pius XI, dating all the way back to scientism’s birth in the early 17th century. The Academy includes the membership of such Nobel Laureates as Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, Otto Hahn, Niels Bohr, and Charles Hard Townes. Most Americans do not know the substantial resources the Church has invested in an open investigation of the universe.
Most Americans, if made aware of this, would receive such evidence as vindicating the Catholic Natural Law: only the Catholic Church can supply a golden mean between scientism and Biblicism, just as only the Church can properly contextualize the other necessary elements of life in a republic.
Notes
a. Secular science quibbles with the first half of that proposition (concerning causation’s demand for a beginning and a Creator); the Protestants quibble with the second half (concerning Divine Creation’s implication of Catholic Natural Law).
b. Although the Protestants agree with the Church as to the final end of the world (i.e., God indeed created the universe by and through Christ) they disagree with the Church as to the knowability of Creation—and the knowability of Creation’s purpose.
c. Everyone assumes that each party to an argument will put on his best case in his own interest: it’s why an adversarial legal system like ours generally works so well. Parties tend to represent their own interest best. Conversely, no one assumes that a party to an argument has a devastating argument that he chooses to forego.
d. In fact, truth bulwarks other aspects of truth. But before one can gain access to this scientific route to religion, one must accept the Catholic Natural Law view of nature. Protestantism, on account of its rejection of Catholic Natural Law, has not and will not. If it had, there probably would never have been a Reformation in the first place. In our final chapter, we review and refine the Catholic view of nature described in this book’s Introduction. Recall that the central assumption of both Enlightenment secularism and Protestantism involves an anti-Natural Law view of nature: this is the primary reason why the Prot- Enlight, American version of nature cannot supply the necessary conditions for faith, republican citizenship, academic study, day-to-day life. To both parties, for differing reasons, the universe is deterministic (no free will in nature), meaningless (no understandability in nature), and purposeless (no goal in nature).
e. Details are important, as scientism insinuates, but the Church reminds science that details must be arranged and ordered according to their design. The end (omega) is important, as Protestantism recalls ceaselessly, but the Church urges to Protestants memorialization of the fact that the history into which Christ entered is a relevant composite of philosophical and scientific details.
f. A properly-Catholic study of nature requires real science and real theology, without sacrificing one to the other. With the deletion of the two more important Aristotelian causes, Prot and Enlight even share the specific source for the idea that science and religion are mutually exclusive. In asking why science and religion are presumed to be poised against one another, one gets to the heart of the matter. Both sides invoke ideas from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a.k.a. the early, early Enlightenment. As Chapter Four stated, the Reformation was simply intra-Christian Enlightenment, or Enlightenment retaining Christ. Although we correctly think of the Protestants and the secularists as epic rivals, the reader now sees their shared scientific pedigree: the eradication of the more important two (formal and final) Aristotelian causes.
Prior to the Baconian turn, the classical Aristotelian worldview posited that all things, including the universe, aim at the purpose God designated for them. Physical scientists and theologians alike imputed meaning and purpose to the object of their studies. And the Catholic Natural Law, which incorporated this view of nature, enabled man to use his natural reason to conceive of abstract ideas about physical things. This included things he could not physically experience like the surrounding cosmos.
Scientific history up to the 16th century had assumed that nature’s purpose was manifest within nature itself. And similarly, all of human history had assumed up to that point that the purpose of nature was knowledge of God.
g. So-called “grand unifying theories” (GUTs) are sought to tie the very small (quantum mechanics) to the very grand (Einsteinian cosmology); infinitely more valuable is the GUT of the Catholic Natural Law.
h. This much is true even at a very basic level. For instance, the fact of night and day conforms perfectly with humanity’s need for both rest and productivity. While such a truth is spoken of at great length in Scripture, in Genesis, it is more immediately knowable to a person who has never read Genesis: from daily life, I know I must rest some and work some. The goal-oriented view of the universe derived from a knowledge of night and day, however, is rejected by Protestants (when they’re being truly faithful to sola scriptura) because they deem such truths to be extra-Biblical, or pagan. If a Protestant of any stripe were to admit that nature is “readable” like a book, then something besides the words of the Bible would be affirmed in the discernment of truth. Catholic natural theology would then be vindicated, and a major portion of the Protestant qualm with Catholicism would be erased!
i. For example, in his new book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, militant atheist Jerry A. Coyne mistakes Thomas Aquinas as a Patristic, and even seems ignorant of Thomas’s fundamentally pro-science viewpoint.
j. Moving upward to the higher functions like the principles of pure reason, like mathematics or logic, sola scriptura becomes even more absurd. As soon as man begins to assemble and develop systems of science, logic, and math, he must forthwith abandon them if they were not directly derived from the words of the Bible, which they are not (e.g., Noah certainly employed the principles of geometry, although he did not instruct us about them!).
k. Think of the Aristotelian principle called “retortion,” in the following context: scientism’s claim that all immaterial things are unreal or imagined is itself demonstrably false. Retortion is considered an Aristotelian innovation with just a bit of modern enhancement: it is a logical proof of the existence of things that cannot be sensed, logical concepts called “first principles,” which are ideas necessary to all other ideas. One leading proponent of retortion notes the doctrine’s pedigree: “Aristotle invented this method, Augustine used it, Aquinas developed it, and Joseph Marechal emphasized it.” (Marc Leclerc, S.J., “Being and the Sciences: the Philosophy of Gaston Isaye,” International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 30, issue 3. September 1990.) Causation is one example of these first principles which can be demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, by retortion; the principle of non-contradiction is another. The catch is that retortion shows first principles to be necessary only when someone attempts to disprove them. Let’s imagine that the contrarian advocate of scientism (or any other materialist camp) asserts that “there are no real assertions.” While I cannot syllogistically prove to him that assertions exist— since we are dealing with one of the first principles which underlies all thought—our contrarian was forced to employ an assertion to assert that there are no assertions! Thereby, he shows the falsity of his own view, even if I cannot do so using standard logical arguments. This is called a performative contradiction, and it is the mechanism that makes Aristotelian retortion work. Retortion evidences the “principle of objectivity” (Leclerc) in immaterial understandings of the material universe, subsequent to the Baconian turn. The principle of objectivity lays at the very “foundation of knowledge” (Leclerc). For example, while I cannot strictly prove the principle of non-contradiction, it is operative in every sentence or thought I’ve expressed. Its truth is presupposed by even the false proposition: “the principle of non-contradiction is false”! Moreover, even though I cannot with my senses observe that a cue ball causes a billiard ball to move, upon striking it, I can rationally insist upon the necessity of that perfectly consistent correlation—the cue ball seeming to impart its motion to the billiard ball it strikes, every time. Science relies vitally on such inductions. Yet inductions are immaterial, and so if science played by its own rules (just as we said above of sola scriptura), then it would have to deny even the idea which it claims commitment to: causation. All inductions, including the principle of causation, are ideal and strictly belong to the realm of ideas rather than to the realm of observable things. Causation cannot be observed by science any more than it can be given by Scripture. The principle of non-contradiction is not addressed within the Bible, of course. But a perusal of the Bible requires it, in order that, say, the first three sentences of Genesis have a singular meaning! The first principles operate as part of our natural reason and as part of the Catholic Natural Law (denied by the Protestants and Enlightenment thinkers). De facto, sola scriptura is impossible because we need extrinsic, interpretive principles even before we can read! Sola scientia is impossible on precisely the same basis. The point is that Aristotelian retortion works equally well against scientism’s skepticism as against sola scriptura’s dogmatism. Each of the interpretive or logical canons used when a reader reads a text—even the Bible—exist outside of that text. The analogy of the two texts, the book of nature and the book of Scripture, help us to see that neither text, neither the Word nor the world, can interpret itself. Scientism and Biblicism each require extrinsic meaning-makers. This is the unique role of the single intelligent creature, man. Both “Prot” and “Enlight,” the religious Right and the secular Left, vitiate themselves by denying first principles. Only with a view to first principles can either Biblical or scientific meaning survive.
Citations
1. Wallace, W. “A Thomistic Philosophy of Nature,” in From a Realist Point of View: Essays in the Philosophy of Science, 2nd edition. Maryland: University Press of America, 1983. Page 39.
2. Aristotle. Metaphysics: 1073a14-15.
3. The Catholic Natural Law assumes a goal-oriented view of nature: it is purposeful and points to some ultimate truths of the universe, as clues left by a Creator. Catholicism also assumes an intelligible view of nature, indicating that if we are clever enough “scientific gumshoes,” we can make some natural theological meaning of the universe. This is, again, a simple review of the three prongs in the Introduction. Thus, a Catholic Natural Law view carries with it both the reasonableness and the goal-orientedness of nature, a proposition which describes the second and the third dimensions of the Catholic Natural Law described in the Introduction: nature as intelligible and nature as teleological. In other words, the Catholic faith admonishes that properly done science is true, but constantly urges us to a study of theology and of the final end of the universe.
4. Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum Scientiarum. (1620). Aphorism 1.
5. Bacon, Francis. The Works of Lord Bacon: The Second Book of The Proficience and Advancements of Learning, Divine and Moral. London: Henry G. Bohn Publisher, 1854.
6. This deliberate deletion can be called either “scientific positivism” or the “Baconian turn.” This book uses the latter.
7. Pope John Paul II picks up on this Scholastic aphorism. “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,” address of John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (October 22, 1996).
8. Tanzella-Nitti, Giuseppe. “The Two Books Prior to the Scientific Revolution.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. 57. September 2005.
9. Anthony the Abbot, 3rd century.
10. Genesis 1:31.
11. Tanzella-Nitti, Giuseppe. “The Two Books Prior to the Scientific Revolution.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. 57. September 2005.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Isaiah 34:4.
15. Revelation 6:14.
16. Revelation 20:12.
17. Tanzella-Nitti, Giuseppe. “The Two Books Prior to the Scientific Revolution.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. 57. September 2005.
18. Ibid.
19. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Harper Perennial Modern Thought; 2008.
20. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. Quoted in Joseph Pearce’s Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile. Ignatius Press; 2001.
21. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Harper Perennial Modern Thought; 2008.
22. This section heavily excerpted from “Alienated Technology: Smart Phone, Dumb Folks.” Online article (April 1, 2014), by Timothy Gordon. http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/04/technological-alienation-smart-phone-dumb-folks.html
Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic
