Behind The Times

“The argument that creation requires a sentient creator – the teleological argument – had been ably sunk long before Professor Dawkins’ hero Charles Darwin began to fret whether a benevolent deity would have wilfully created a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs inside the body of a living caterpillar. David Hume perhaps scuttled it best, pointing out that if something as complex as the Universe required a creator, then that creator, being more complex, must have required one, too.”

So opines the poor, dated, Pope-baiting, Dawkins-worshipping Times. To which one can but reply:

“Such deployment [of the resources of Scripture and Tradition] upholds ontology and epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, economics and politics, society and culture, art and science, as against radical pluralism’s intolerance of any but its own claim to absolute truth, as against eclecticism’s refusal of the mediation of whole systems of thought by whole cultures, as against historicism’s denial of the enduring validity of truth, as against scientism’s restriction of objective truth to the findings of the natural-scientific method (or, perhaps, of that method’s actual or supposed analogues), and as against radical pragmatism’s failure to recognise the fundamental human need to be more than pragmatic alone. This upholding safeguards natural science against the eternalism, animism, pantheism, cyclicism and astrology that always characterise the thought of fallen humanity apart from the Biblical revelation. Those precluded or arrested the rise of natural science everywhere other than in Medieval Europe, and ‘post-Christian’ culture is now visibly regressing to them. To confine “scientific disclosure to revealing the technical transformability of the world, thereby allowing it to be potentially subservient to charity” looks like a frightened surrender to scientism, itself ignorant of the intellectual climate that alone made possible the rise of science.”

And

“The classical liberal is, of course, entirely correct to assert that belief in the objective existence of God is fully compatible with philosophical and scientific analysis, and that God operates in and through any scientifically investigable process. But such belief can never be restricted to such analysis, nor can that operation be limited to any one or more such processes. Scientific facts cannot be the objects of faith; one is simply obliged to accept them. Likewise, it is thoroughly orthodox to assert that some sort of experience of God underlies each of the great, or indeed small, theistic religious traditions in so far as any such tradition approximates to Christianity, as well as to recognise that His Natural Law is the root cause of similarities to Christian morality in other ethical systems. It is also the case that the full humanity of Jesus Christ must be emphasised most strongly while at the same time asserting that He was the man fully conscious of God in the way that we are all partially capable of being. However, the humanity of Christ must never be allowed to detract from His divinity, any more than vice versa, and a mere ‘degree Christology’ fails to satisfy humanity’s need for a Saviour who is at once God and Man.”

Buy the book here. No, one man with several Lulu accounts (I know who you are), neither Catholics nor theologians are apologising for ourselves to you and your ilk, and if you cannot understand what we are saying, then the fault is in you.