Thursday 1 September 2011

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.

1 comment:

  1. Superb book, but see page 55 for why it could not find a publisher:

    "The condemnation of anti-Semitism in Nostra Aetate 4 was welcome enough, especially within a generation or so of the Holocaust. But there was nothing especially remarkable about it. It certainly did not represent any sort of break with some nonexistent history alleged in certain circles, but was totally in keeping with the Papal position on this question, not least as expressed in word and deed by Pius XII. It provides no basis whatever for the ridiculous suggestion that the Church should somehow cease to attempt to convert Jews, nor for any concession to Judaism, a conscious reaction against Christianity, in matters such as the naming, translation or other interpretation of the Old Testament. In its unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation, and in its denial of Original Sin, Judaism has given the world Marx and Freud, monetarism and neoconservatism, to name but a few with which Catholic Teaching can have no truck, as well as creating a vacuum to be filled by ever-expansionist Islam. A body blow was dealt in 1948 to a civilisation to which the Church was and is integral, and the Catholics of Lebanon live in constant fear of bombardment in pursuit of a claim to all territory south of the Litani, an existential threat to a state of which the President has to be a Catholic, while the Catholics of the West Bank are subject to martial law rather than to the government of the viable Palestinian State lawfully constituted on both sides of the Jordan. These, not some speciously invented history of anti-Semitism, are the Church’s priorities."

    As of course you know, everyone at the obvious publishers for this book will have agreed with you about this, but no-one trying to get by as a publisher in London or the USA would dare publish a book that said it out loud. So Lulu it is. But so what?

    How orthodoxy leads to radical conclusions is very much of the moment but you have no qualms about doing exactly the wrong way from the point of view of the Postliberal Establishment. You were never a liberal, so you are not a postliberal. They get noticed by writing that very traditional Trinitarian theology, Christology, ecclesiology and Eucharistic theology compel things like women "priests" and same-sex "marriages".

    But you present things like the anti-Marxist theological critique of capitalism, the patriarchal Old Testament writers as millennia ahead of feminism over heredity precisely because they were patriarchs, the racism and misogyny of the antinatal movements, the left-wing reasons why women must not become Anglican bishops (how the Fatherhood of God compels the re-opening of the coal mines and the eschewal of foreign wars), the affinities between the left and Opus Dei, all the wrong answers as far as the people who think that they are making orthodoxy radical are concerned.

    Keep the Faith. I know you will.

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