I was on Richard Dawkins’ blog, lavishing in his clear-thinking oasis, when I came across a critique Sam Harris wrote of Pope Benedict XVI’s now infamous speech. Partly to keep an open mind, partly to stroke my obsessive Amazon.ca package tracking fetish, I am eagerly awaiting Sam Harris’ ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’ to arrive at my flat. However, after reading his article my expectations were somewhat deflated. In what follows, the pope’s remarks are in bold, Harris’ in regular text, and italicized, moi.
“The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizon….”
The pope suggests that reason should be broadened to include the empirically unverifiable. And is there any question these new “vast horizons” will include the plump dogmas of the Catholic Church? Here, the pope gets the spirit of science exactly wrong. Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable). And it does mean to exclude the gratuitously stupid.
Pope Benedict XVI does call for reason to include the empirically unverifiable. Yes. Any careful examination of our reason should arrive at such a conclusion. If only empirically verifiable statements are open to reason, we will have amputated mathematics from our body of knowledge.
Analytic statements are not verifiable. Synthetic statements are.
Sam is right in acknowledging that the scientific method not only tests what is verifiable or falsifiable right now, but is open to what may become falsifiable if the right questions are asked. Pope Benedict XVI, however, has not gotten the spirit of science ‘exactly wrong’, he has put his finger on a dogma, on a ‘self-imposed limitation’ that does not deny questions ripe for testing, nor questions waiting to bloom. The pope has noted that some questions cannot be addressed by the scientific method.
“Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today….”
It is ironic that a man who has just disparaged Islam as “evil” and “inhuman” before 250,000 onlookers and the world press is now talking about a “genuine dialogue of cultures.” How much genuine dialogue can he hope for? The Koran says that anybody who believes that Jesus was divine—as all real Catholics must—will spend eternity in hell (Koran 5:71-75; 19:30-38). This appears to be a deal-breaker. The pope knows this. The Muslim world knows that he knows it. And he knows that the Muslim world knows that he knows it. This is not a good basis for interfaith dialogue.
Nor is the mischaracterization of the Abrahamic religions as nothing more than a conglomerate of fundamentalists a good basis for interfaith dialogue.
“In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures….”
Astrologers don’t like “their most profound convictions” attacked either. Neither do people who believe that space aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle.
…Astrologers and alien enthusiasts clearly being equivalent to those who are theists…
Happily, these groups do not take to the streets and start killing people when their irrational beliefs are challenged. I suspect that the pope would be the first to admit that there are millions of people on this Earth who harbor “most profound convictions” that are neither profound nor compatible with real dialogue.
…One might even say that was a major point of his speech…
Indeed, one doesn’t even need to read between the lines of his speech to glean that he would place the entire Muslim world beyond the “universality of reason.”
Actually, yeah Sam. You would. You’d have to take the view that a quote is equivalent to an endorsement, take the quote out of context, and chastise a man who has written voluminously on this subject matter.
He is surely right to be alarmed by Islam—particularly by its doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. He is right to find the treatment of Muslim women throughout the world abhorrent (if, indeed, he does find it abhorrent). He is right to be concerned that any Muslim who converts to Christianity (or to atheism) has put his life in jeopardy, as conversion away from the faith is punishable by death. These profundities are worthy objects of our derision. No apologies necessary, Your Holiness.
Weird. Thanks for the vote of confidence though.
We might, however, note in passing that one of the pope’s “most profound convictions” is that contraception is a sin. His agents continue to preach this diabolical dogma in the developing world, and even in sub-Saharan Africa, where over 3 million people die from AIDS each year. This is unconscionable and irredeemably stupid. It is also a point on which the Church has not shown much of an intelligent capacity for dialogue. Despite their inclination to breed themselves into a state of world domination, Muslims tend to be far more reasonable on the subject of family planning. They do not consider the use of temporary forms of birth control to be a sin.
Perhaps opening up dialogue with the modern age will be cause for revision of theological arguments for or against issues such as contraception. Why don’t we return to the point where the pope starts his conclusion, the point that Sam left out:
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvelous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application.
“Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought—to philosophy and theology….”
This may have been where Sullivan found the Holy Father to be particularly “deep and complicated” and “profound.” Granted, questions of epistemology can make one sweat, and there are many interesting and even controversial things to be said about the foundations of our knowledge. The pope has not said anything interesting or controversial here, however. He has merely insinuated that placing the God of Abraham at the back of every natural process will somehow reduce the quotient of mystery in the cosmos. It won’t. Nearly a billion Hindus place three gods—Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver) and Shiva (the Destroyer)—in the space provided. Just how intellectually illuminating should we find that?
Sam. Buddy. He has said something incredibly interesting and very controversial to your materialist argument. That’s why you paid very little attention to the backlash from the Muslim community and are focussing so much attention on the arguments in his speech. It’s OK to fess up. C’mon. I’ll buy you a coke.
“The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur—this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor….”
Please read that first sentence again. I hope it doesn’t seem peevish to point out that the West faces several dangers even greater than those posed by an incomplete epistemology. The West is endangered, primarily, by the religious fragmentation of the human community, by religious impediments to clear thinking, and by the religious willingness of millions to sacrifice the real possibility of happiness in this world for a fantasy of a world to come. In short, misguided reason that not only includes the aforementioned examples, but the dangers of extreme relativism as well, perhaps initiated by an incomplete epistemology?
We are living in a world where untold millions of grown men and women can rationalize the violent sacrifice of their own children by recourse to fairy tales.
See above.
We are living in world where millions of Muslims believe that there is nothing better than to be killed in defense of Islam. We are living in a world in which millions of American Christians hope to soon be raptured into the sky by Jesus so that they can safely enjoy the holy genocide that will inaugurate the end of human history. We are living in a world in which a silly old priest, by merely giving voice to his religious inanities, could conceivably start a war with 1.4 billion Muslims who take their own inanities in deadly earnest. These are real dangers. And they are not dangers for which more “Biblical faith” is a remedy.
So, from what I gather, Sam agrees with calling violence violence, and that rational discourse may be a means to suppress if not end violence, but disagrees that such rational discourse should be taken up by a Christian. What a sad state of affairs the world would be in for if a believer of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, could not question. Luckily that’s not fully the case.
