In an earlier entry, Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening Horizons of Reason, I quoted the entirety of a Vatican Information Service news article. I’ll quote a stretch of that article about Pope Benedict’s speech to a symposium of philosophers:
“Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man”.
Benedict XVI indicated that since the beginning of his pontificate he had received various suggestions “from men and women of our time”, and that “in the light of these I have decided to offer a research proposal which I feel may arouse interest in a relaunch of philosophy and of its unique role within the modern academic and cultural world”.
Quoting his own book, “Introduction to Christianity”, he said: “The Christian faith has made a clear choice: against the gods of religion for the God of the philosophers, in other words against the myth of custom and for the truth of being”. And he went on: “This affirmation … is still fully relevant in the historical-cultural context in which we now live. Indeed, only on the basis of this premise – which is historical and theological at one and the same time – is it possible to respond to the new expectations of philosophy. The risk that religion, even the Christian religion, be surreptitiously manipulated, is very real even today”.
“The proposal to ‘Broaden the Horizons of Reason’ should” he proceeded, “be understood as a request for a new openness towards the reality to which human beings in their uni-totality are called, overcoming old prejudices and reductive viewpoints in order to open the way to a new understanding of modernity”.
I’ve argued in various entries on this blog that physics and mathematics are the most important of the ‘specific sciences’, as Aquinas labeled them, when it comes to a revival, even rehabilitation, of Christian philosophy. But, given some coherent and fundamental understanding of being, we have to deal with the particular entities which God shaped from more abstract forms of being, that is, we have to deal with the story He’s telling, the story which is our world. Once we have a fresh metaphysical perspective which considers what’s actually known about the possibilities of human thought (given first by mathematics and logic) and the basic properties of physical being (given first by mathematics and physics), we can engage in a fresh encounter with other forms of empirical knowledge and research, including disciplined contemplative knowledge based on understandings of empirical reality. In fact, we can’t really proceed in quite that way. Good historians (e.g. Jacques Barzun or John Lukacs) and good biologists (e.g. Walter J. Freeman and Gerald Edelman) will do their work using a metaphysics with plausible foundations even if those foundations are still being rebuilt.
Some say God is in the details. I think it better to say that the thoughts God chose to have in His role as Creator are in the details and also at the level of the entire universe. (See A Universe is More than it Contains.) And so it is that on both of my blogs, Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I’ve put up some smaller entries on recent research results, such as Reality is Still Knocking: Human Uniqueness where I pointed out that it’s been a losing strategy to grasp hold of tool-making or language use or moral nature as the explanation for human uniqueness. Our uniqueness, if we are truly unique in the animal kingdom, comes from the incarnation of the Son of God, when He became one of us.
If Christians are to engage in a fruitful encounter with modernity as Pope Benedict wisely advises, we’ll have to breath in the atmosphere of modernity without letting the rich gases burn away our beliefs. We need to learn the facts and speculations and stories of modern physics and biology and astronomy and then we must learn how to embed modern empirical knowledge into the Christian story. I’ll address a specific example, research results discussed in this story: Sociological research shows combined impact of genetics, social factors on delinquency. The results are summarized in these words:
While genetics appear to influence delinquency, social influences such as family, friends and school seem to impact the expression of certain genetic variants,” said Guang Guo, the study’s lead author and a professor of sociology and faculty fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center and Carolina Center for Genomic Sciences. “Positive social influences appear to reduce the delinquency-increasing effect of a genetic variant, whereas the effect of these genetic variants is amplified in the absence of social controls.”
In other words, identifiable patterns in a child’s genes indicate their predilection for serious misbehavior if they’re not raised properly. Even if raised properly, they might fall into bad ways of behavior. These results are hardly surprising and are, in fact, consistent with Biblical views. The Old Testament, in particular, speaks often of traits passing from one generation to another and also of the bad results from inadequate discipline. It’s the New Testament that speaks of a freedom that comes through the Incarnate Son of God.
We do not sin, we are sin. We are bodily creatures and we are sin, that is, we’re unformed and the possibilities for disorder exist alongside those for order. We are sin but — remarkably — we can achieve a state of moral order. We can become at least virtuous pagans if we have some integrity and also the luck to receive a proper upbringing. To a Christian, a state of natural moral order is good in itself, but it’s far surpassed by a Christ-like state. With the grace offered to natural man by the Lord Jesus Christ, mortal man can achieve that still greater state, a share in the divine life, a resurrection into life without end as a companion of Jesus Christ.
Evolution can be seen as the prologue, but also an ongoing part, of the story of natural man, a creature who can rise to a state of natural moral goodness but in such a way that he’ll fall again. With even mild social breakdown, or a minority of irresponsible or ineffective parents, children with certain genes might grow into juvenile delinquents who endanger the welfare of all. A substantial social breakdown, such as we might now be suffering in the West, might well lead to the formation of a large body of barbarians born and bred in the heart of a decaying civilization.
By his own efforts, natural man can accomplish much but he needs good luck to achieve even a state of natural goodness and he needs the help of God to pass beyond that.
This sounds very like CS Lewis “Voyage to Venus” in its central affirmations.