I think we need to take a mental shower (or, to use another image, flush ourselves with brain bleach), after this week's sordid political news.

Let's think about God, and reason, and science.

In an earlier post I tried to explain Pope Benedict XVI's remarks that drew so much fire. Here. (includes link to Pope's speech in English) [As a footnote, I should have been more precise and spoken of mainstream Sunni Islam. Shia Islam has tended to view Allah as adhering to justice (by which Shiites usually mean the bloody vindication of their faith against others, especially Sunnis)].

Cardinal George Pell summarizes Benedict's point within this address. The relevant paragraphs are:

Pope John Paul wrote magnificently on faith and reason and on the essential relationship of truth and freedom and I want to say a few words on the equally essential link between love and reason or rationality.

Recently Pope Benedict has been in the news for his academic address at Regensburg his old university and once the seat of the Holy Roman Emperors. His passing references to Islam dominated the media, but most of the speech was about the importance of God for every society, and especially Western societies like ours and to emphasise that rationality, reason is an attribute of God. God is not cranky, or capricious. God is truthful.

The Pope quoted the beginning of John’s gospel. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” pointing out that the Greek word “Logos” means both word and reason.

The Holy Father acknowledges that this reverence for reason was taken into Revelation, into John’s gospel from Greek philosophy and this was a providential conjunction. Here lies one of the secrets of European and Western civilization. Here lives the reason for our Catholic schools, for our reverence for education, why Catholics should never be fundamentalists and can never be post moderns who reject the idea of truth.


Here is an address from two months ago by Cardinal George Pell on Christianity and science. Below is a thought-provoking excerpt.

(more below)

Recently I heard of a senior official from mainland China who was travelling in the Western world and trying to work out what was the principal factor which led to Western supremacy, not just in medicine, science, technology, but also in economics, self-government and even in literature, art and music. Certainly some of our music and art is corrupting and decadent, but there is no art or music in other cultures to match the range of emotion and the depths of spirituality which can be found in some Western music and art. Why did the scientific revolution begin and develop so spectacularly in the Western world? Why did Western economies, the free market, first produce such extraordinary wealth; certainly not for everyone, but for many or even most people in a country like Australia?

His answer would surprise and even shock many educated people in our country, because he concluded that the catalyst, not just for the basic decency, but for the spectacular intellectual development which lies behind Western achievement, was to be found in the core of Christian beliefs.

We are not accustomed to think like this. One devout Catholic university student asked me recently why it was that she had been taught to respect every religion but her own, which she had been encouraged to criticise. This is not a bad question.

We have been taught to recognize and praise the Enlightenment with its rejection of religion and authority. We have heard how Galileo was put under house arrest by the Catholic Church; of the debate over evolution between T. H. Huxley and “Slippery Sam” Wilberforce the Anglican bishop of Oxford and then Winchester.

And even if we do not know too much of these stories, many Australians are tempted to see scientific research and the Christian religion in a necessary relationship of tension and perhaps even of hostility. Within this mistaken framework Catholic participation in a Research and Biotechnology Precinct would be seen at best as an anachronism and marriage of convenience, if it was not something of a contradiction in terms.


. . . .

You will be relieved that I am not going to attempt to explain this claim now, although a politically incorrect American sociologist, an agnostic professor called Rodney Stark has written three interesting books on the theme. The most recent, published in 2005, is entitled “The Victory of Reason. How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success”. For anyone interested he provides ample food for thought.

Christians believe the one transcendent God is rational not capricious and that his creation does not revolve in an everlasting cycle of return. Such presuppositions prompted the search to discover the rational laws of physics and mathematics and led to the notion of progress.