Notre Dame Prof On Pope Benedict , Faith, and Reason

Prof Charles Rice of Notre Dame Law has a a very good piece today regarding Pope Benedict called Reason depends on faith. Tip of the Hat to the Ratzinger Forum that directed me here. Here a just a few parts:

What is most embarrassing to the world today," said Georgetown professor James Schall, S.J., "is that the most intelligent voice it confronts, or deliberately refuses to confront, is that coming from the papacy." Fr. Schall has a point. He was commenting on Pope Benedict XVI's second encyclical, "Spe Salvi," which drew its title from its opening words, "'SPE SALVI facti sumus'-in hope we were saved." The message is simple: "A world without God is a world without hope." No. 44. ......



point of interest to a university community is the relation between the lack of hope and what Benedict had described at Regensburg in 2006 as "the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable" so that "questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it." When reason is so limited, affirmations of God and objective morality are dismissed as non-rational. No one can know anything about God. And "justice" becomes, in the words of Hans Kelsen, the foremost legal positivist of the last century, "an irrational ideal."Benedict describes as "presumptuous and false," the idea that "[s]ince there is no God to create justice… man himself is now called to establish justice." "It is no accident," he said, "that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice…. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope." No. 42. Justice will be whatever man decrees. Thus Kelsen said that Auschwitz and other Nazi exterminations were "valid law." In accord with his "philosophical relativism," he could not reasonably criticize them as unjust. .....
Benedict affirms the achievements and potential of science, but he cautions that "[i]f technical progress is not matched by … progress in man's ethical formation… it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world." No. 22. The problem is that ethical formation is impossible unless reason can offer answers on moral right and wrong. But reason cannot do that if it is limited to the empirical, without "integration through… openness… to the differentiation between good and evil… [R]eason... becomes human only if it is capable of directing the will along the right path and it is capable of this only if it looks beyond itself…. Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope… God truly enters into human affairs only when, rather than being present merely in our thinking, he himself comes towards us and speaks to us…. Reason… and faith need one another in order to fulfill their true nature and their missions." No. 23.......



pertinent to the United States, where the Supreme Court has misinterpreted the First Amendment to impose an impossible neutrality between "religion and irreligion." In theory, that "neutrality" forbids any public official to affirm that the Declaration of Independence is in fact true when it identifies God as the author of rights. Similarly, public education is founded on a non-theistic religious proposition, that moral questions can - and must in the public sphere - be decided without reference to any controlling role of God and His law. Instead, each person creates his own moral truth. He is his own god. The result is not neutrality but an established agnosticism devoid of ultimate hope......


Good Stuff read the whole thing.