Back in the early 1840s, John Henry Newman observed that physical philosophers—that is, scientists—"are ever inquiring whence things are, not why; referring them to nature, not to mind; and thus they tend to make a system a substitute for a God..." The "tending" has been, as they say, trending ever since. About a hundred years later, in 1948, Fulton Sheen remarked in his outstanding study Philosophy of Religion, that:

Science cannot give us a philosophy, nor can it give us an ethics; it cannot give us a philosophy, because it immerses man in nature and avoids the important subject of his destiny. It cannot give us an ethics because science by itself is amoral. Morality comes from its ends, and science is indifferent to ends.

Lest it be thought that Sheen was anti-science or the enemy of scientists, consider his remark, from his 1928 book Religion Without God, that the "rock-surenes of 'Science' does not exist in the mind of the scientists themselves, although it does love and throb in the minds of publicists and propagandists. Scientists themselves disclaim they possess ultimate truth; rather they look upon it as a horizon toward which they are proceeding." Sheen was indicating that when a scientist begins to make metaphysical or philosophical assertions, he is no longer speaking as a scientist. Of course, a great number of famous scientists—Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking come to mind immediately—have used their scientific reputations in order to wade into waters that are better described as ideological and polemical. And even political.

All of those elements were obvious in the "March for Science" event that took place last week. I was blissfully unaware of the event until a friend sent a link to the local newspaper's coverage of the March for Science in Eugene, which featured some 1,500 or so true believers. And I don't say "true believers" with any sarcasm or snarkiness; on the contrary:

“We teach science and we believe in science,” said Carrie Ann Naumoff, a fifth-grade teacher at Edison Elementary in Eugene. “We’re concerned that science is being blocked and interrupted. We’re concerned about the EPA and concerned that ­scientists are being harassed for what they’re publishing. We want our students to have access to real information.”

"We believe in science." Whatever does that mean? What if the seventh-grade home-ec teacher (if such a thing still exists) exclaimed, "We believe in the culinary arts", or the 10th-grade French teacher solemnly explained, "We believe in language." Huh? But we can guess what Ms. Naumoff means: she and the enlightened educating class are the guardians of science, which is the one, true source of truth and goodness, leading us into a future of bliss. However, such a belief is not really about scientific research and fact, but about a particular ideological perspective, generally called scientism, which is not about following physical evidence where it might lead, but flattening all of reality into the narrow confines of materialist proofs and premises.

Dr. Austin L. Hughes, a professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina, described it well in an 2012 essay titled "The Folly of Scientism":

Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit.

Writing about the recent March for Science event—which was directly inspired by the hyper-political Women's March in January—Eric Metaxas & G. Shane Morris observe:

There was a time when “science” meant the systematic pursuit of knowledge through experimentation and observation. But it’s rapidly becoming a synonym for progressive politics and materialist philosophy.
 
To be labeled a “science-denier” in 2017 often just means you’ve upset someone who insists on teaching strict, Darwinian orthodoxy in schools, or who advocates particular climate legislation, or who supports ethically fraught research on embryos.
 
In contrast, being “pro-science” has become a shibboleth for supporting progressive ideology. Think of a recent ad by National Geographic with the caption, “Stand behind the facts. Stand with science. Stand for the planet.” But just weeks prior, National Geographic had run a cover depicting a nine-year-old boy dressed as a girl. Because, as we know, they stand with science.
 
But if there were ever going to be a ceremony inaugurating this new and useless definition of science, it’s got to be last weekend’s “March for Science” in the nation’s capital, co-chaired by Bill Nye, “the science guy.” Nye, a children’s TV host from the nineties with no formal training as a scientist, has recaptured the spotlight with his videos on climate change, abortion, women’s rights, and other topics.
 
To say his arguments in some of these videos are embarrassing is being kind. For instance, in one odd and rambling speech promoting abortion, Nye claimed that because many lives end through natural causes before they leave the womb that it’s okay for us to kill the unborn ourselves. That’s like saying it’s okay to kill adults, because millions die of natural causes. That does not stop Nye’s supporters from honoring him as a champion of science.

But, again, Nye and his supporters are not really about science, but about scientism; they are not interested so much in limited, focused empirical data, but broad, sweeping claims that many would associate only with the stereotypical wild-eyed fundamentalist. Yet it's fitting, since scientism is the result of a hijacked and confused religious impulse. One serious problem, as Sheen pointed out in 1948, was that if "philosophy"—which is not much taught, learned, or loved by most Americans—"can no longer judge science, then science is its own justification; it can be used as well for purposes of destruction as for human betterment, and no one can pass judgment on its morality." Nye is a perfect example of this fundamentalist scientism, as evidenced in an op-ed he wrote for CNN.com in which he states:

With more than 600 marches taking place around the world, we conveyed that science is political, not partisan, and science should shape our policies. Although it is the means by which humankind discovers objective truths in nature, science is and has always been political. 

Which, of course, is nonsensical and irrational, just like Nye's support for abortion. The editors of The Register-Guard, perhaps mildly taken aback or even embarrassed by the creed of Ms. Naumoff and company, sought to strike a more agnostic note, stating:

The march will have served a useful purpose if it succeeds in getting Americans, including the Trump administration, to think about what science is, and what it isn’t. Science isn’t truth, and it isn’t something people should believe in. It is a method for zeroing in on the truth by testing possibilities and gathering evidence.

Hughes, in concluding his essays, offers this very sober note of warning:

Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself. Yet it seems the very antithesis of reason to insist that science can do what it cannot, or even that it has done what it demonstrably has not. As a scientist, I would never deny that scientific discoveries can have important implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and that everyone interested in these topics needs to be scientifically literate. But the claim that science and science alone can answer longstanding questions in these fields gives rise to countless problems.
 
In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer.
 
Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence.

Around the same time that Sheen was writing Philosophy of Religion, a young, agnostic medical student named Walker Percy discovered—through debilitating illness and then deep reading of Christian philosophy—that science, which he once viewed as the final word on everything, could not answer the ultimate questions. Modern science, he later wrote (after becoming Catholic), "is itself radically incoherent, not when it seeks to understand things and subhuman organisms and the cosmos itself, but when it seeks to understand man, not man’s physiology or neurology or his bloodstream, but man qua man, man when he is peculiarly human. In short, the sciences of man are incoherent."

And in a self-interview, "Questions They Never Asked Me," Percy put it this way:

This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, ‘Scientific humanism.’ That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and infinite delight; i.e., God.

We can either have an earth-bound and cramped system, or Truth Himself. The former offers trendy marches and Bill Nye rants; the latter offers infinite mystery and infinite delight.
 
 
Originally published at Catholic World Report. Used with permission.

The common wisdom in many circles (most located in certain cities on the East and Left Coasts) is that religion, in general, is a bad thing, and that in the hands of "fundamentalists," the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and ultra-super-radical-Islamic terrorists, it is inevitably evil. Eliminating religion, it is then suggested or even openly argued, is a sure way to rid the world of evil. The term "religion," it should be noted, almost always refers to Christianity (or a form of pseudo-Christianity) and then, in some cases, to Islam.

An example of such thinking is the story of a film that documents the abuse of religion and the deadly bigotry that can flow from racists who twist the Bible for evil purposes. The Detroit Free Press reports on a showing of the documentary at Rochester College in Michigan and the reaction to it:

In the often-emotional discussion after the film, Rubel Shelly, a Rochester College professor who teaches courses on religion, told the crowd, "This startles me, aggravates me and humbles me. It scares the life out of me."

He said the film made him wonder about everything from the abuse of Christianity by white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to the twisting of Islam by suicide bombers. "For me, the insight from this film is that religion can become downright evil," he said.

Based on these comments, one might conclude that the film is about "white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan" or "suicide bombers" or perhaps a crazed "fundamentalist" Christian who tried to bomb an abortion clinic. But the film (which aired on PBS in Michigan) is titled "Theologians Under Hitler: Could It Happen Again?":

The film focuses on several 1930s-era Protestant theologians in Germany who encouraged the rise of Nazism, publicly praising it as a gift from God to resurrect the impoverished German people. These men also added their moral weight to the attempted destruction of Judaism.
 
Among the most infamous was Gerhard Kittel, at the time a world-famous Protestant expert on the ancient history of the Bible. Far from a marginal figure or thug, like many of Hitler's early followers, Kittel taught at the centuries-old Tubingen University, the same school that later would have Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, on its faculty.

Reading this, a couple of questions come to mind. First, was Gerhard Kittel some sort of knuckle-dragging, half-witted "fundamentalist"? No, he wasn’t. On the contrary, he was a highly regarded and well-educated New Testament scholar who produced work – the ten-volume Theological Dictionary of the New Testament – that is still used today.

Secondly, if religion is proven bad because Kittel and some other Christians supported the Nazis, what was proven by the many Protestants and Catholics—including the much-maligned Pope Pius XII—who helped save hundreds of thousands of Jews? What about Hitler’s obsessive hatred of orthodox Christianity? Is religion itself really the problem? Specifically, when someone states that "religion can become downright evil," is he saying that religion inevitably leads to evil, or religious people commit the majority of evil acts, or that the religious impulse must be severely contained (or even destroyed)?

Sam Harris thinks so. The popular atheist author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the End of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2004) makes a passionate, if not convincing, case for the elimination of religion, namely (of course) Christianity and Islam. Lamenting that many people, including some public leaders, still take seriously Christian doctrine, Harris writes: "As we stride boldly into the Middle Ages, it does not seem out of place to wonder whether the myths that now saturate our discourse will wind up killing many of us, as the myths of others [terrorists] already have."

He then boldly insists that "faith" must go the way of the dodo bird: "We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. … It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs" (47, 48). It comes as no surprise that Harris’s polemic is praised by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, who advocates infanticide and euthanasia and all else in-between (yet, irrationally, Singer spent much moneykeeping alive his mother, who is stricken with Alzheimer's disease).

Professor Shelly apparently missed Harris’s book (which was well-received among those who read The New York Times Book Review—"This in an important book"—and sleep in on Sunday mornings). Still, when a professor of religion states, "For me, the insight from this film is that religion can become downright evil," one can be forgiven for wondering what they have studied and if they have ever contemplated human nature, both by considering the actions/thoughts of others and examining their own actions/thoughts. Sure, there is a sense in which "religion can become downright evil," which is because people can become downright evil. As G.K. Chesterton rightly noted somewhere (the exact location escapes me), if you think the world is in bad shape you might be shocked how much worse it would be if Christianity weren’t around. And before anyone argues that it’s a completely subjective point, do check out The Black Book of Communism.

The problem many people have today is not that they deny outright the existence of evil, but that they deny they could have anything to do with evil. Sure, evil is personal and is committed by persons—but not by me. Yes, Hitler was human—but I’m different from Hitler. Some folks aren’t even comfortable at that distance, so they create more space by conceiving of evil as something done to them or forced upon them (usually by an institution) rather than a specific attack on the good and on others that humans can freely choose to commit. Another comment by Professor Shelly from the Free Press article points toward this second option:

Without a stricter separation of church and state, Shelly argued, "we can still allow ourselves as Christians to be played by political power," just as in Germany in the 1930s. At that point, he turned to Martin and asked, "So where are the religious leaders who are strong enough to resist the stroking of political power today?"

The implication, it seems clear, is that evil comes in the form of large, faceless, and frightening institutions—usually political—that force themselves on us. Strangely enough, a common (and sometimes warranted) criticism of some "fundamentalists" is that they have a conspiratorial mindset and operate out of fear of the Big, Bad Bogeyman (the U.N., the European Union, Hollywood, etc.). But if one feature of "fundamentalism" is an irrational, conspiratorial, and highly emotional fear of beliefs and institutions that we do not understand (nor try to understand), then "fundamentalism" is hardly limited to the realms of traditional Christianity, conservative politics, or Middle America. Nor is evil the sole property of a certain religion, political party, or ideology, even if a particular religion or ideology carries fuel that feeds the thought and actions of a person bent on committing acts of evil.

Admittedly, it is often difficult to see where religious teaching ends and adherence to that teaching begins. It becomes even more difficult when the teaching appears to be ambivalent or open to different interpretations. But to say, for instance, that a priest who molests a boy does so because of his religion (or, as it is sometimes argued, the unrealistic or "unnatural" disciplines of his religion) is to ignore that Catholicism condemns such an act. In the case of Kittel, I don’t know all of the influences—either theological or political—that shaped his thinking. But I know that nearly a million Jews were saved by the actions of Pope Pius XII, who acted in accord with the religious belief that all men are created in the image of God and that murder is evil. (And yet, when many people think of Christianity and Nazism, they also think of "Hitler’s Pope," a sad testament to the reality of evil attacks on truth.)

We can see the effects of this skewed thinking when confronted with the "solution" so often promoted by educators such as Professor Shelly, which is a "stricter separation of church and state." If that is the answer, look no further than the former Soviet Union to see what happens when the ultimate separation of church and state takes place—that is, when the state essentially destroys the church (and I use "church" here to mean an authentic body of Christians who don't give lip service the state to save their skins). The result is not just the eradication of traditional religion but also the establishment of a grotesque and bloody new religion—or anti-religious religion.

In the words of Simone Weil: "Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people." Weil's remark is quoted in Raymond Aron's The Opium of the Intellectuals, a classic work of political reflection on radical politics, especially Marxism and Communism. In another work, The Dawn of Universal History,Aron (1905-1983)—a French intellectual who was once classmates with Sartre but chose a far different path from the famed existentialist—has a lengthy analysis of "The Secular Religions," which include Fascism, Nazism, Marxism, and Stalinism.

Aron writes that these secular religions "related everything—men and things, thoughts and deeds—to that ultimate end [the totalitarian goals of each respective political movement], and utility in terms of that end is the measure of all values, even spiritual ones. Partisans of such religions will without any qualms of conscience make use of any means, however horrible, because nothing can prevents the means from being sanctified by the end. In other words, if the job of religion is to set out the lofty values that give human existence its direction, how can we deny that the political doctrines of our own day are essentially religious in character?" He then points out how these secular religions provide an interpretation of the world, the meaning or source of suffering, salvation and the hope of a future utopia, and the demand of sacrifice by commitment to the "movement."

Oddly enough, Harris also recognizes the religious character of certain totalitarian ideologies, although his comments suggest that his reasoning is self-serving: "Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. … Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational" (79; emphasis added). Readers are apparently expected to take on good faith that Harris is not just paying lip service to rationality, but hates religion for perfectly rational, scientific reasons.

The point is that every "ism"—even atheism, materialism, and the "pragmatism" endorsed by Harris—plays riffs based on the same tunes since man moves to a religious beat; to further the metaphor, man has music within him and longs to know the composer. He is, in other words, a religious animal who thinks religious thoughts and has religious impulses. In the words of Chesterton:

Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence. This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern world. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. (Heretics, [Ignatius, 1986], p. 205).

So, one of dogmas (either conscious or otherwise) of avowed secularists is that religion is unreasonable and almost inevitably produces evil. Another is that some form of pure secularism (often described using terms such as "education," "progressive thinking," "enlightenment," "sophisticated," "scientific," and so forth) is the much-needed answer to the problems that plague humanity.

But Chesterton is correct in observing that there "are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice" (What’s Wrong With the World [Ignatius, 1987], p. 48), and that doctrine "is a definite point," while prejudice is "a direction." Religion, especially orthodox Christianity, is despised because it is a definite and specific faith. Instead of vague platitudes about love, the Christian Faith speaks of specific suffering and a definite Cross. Instead of hazy affirmations of the goodness of man, Catholicism teaches a specific doctrine of sin and makes definite moral demands.

And instead of a general appeal to "just get along," the Church insists on specific sacrifices and definite choices between good and evil—and bluntly says that all of us are capable of evil, regardless of how non-religious our religion might pretend to be.
 
 
(Image credit: The Day)

I was recently re-reading sections of what I think is one of the best and yet most under-appreciated Catholic books written in recent decades, Faith and Certitude by Father Thomas Dubay. Fr. Dubay's book is, as the title suggests, especially concerned with skepticism and unbelief, and is an excellent examination of the intellectual premises and varied attitudes held by atheists. In a chapter titled, "Clarifying Our Concepts," Fr. Dubay writes:

"Everyone is dogmatic. The statement may startle, but it is easy to demonstrate. We human beings differ not as to whether we consider ourselves infallibly right about this or that but as to what this or that may be. ... All of us have dogmas, some with good reason, some without."

This is similar to a line in G.K. Chesterton's Heretics, which indicates: "Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. . . . Trees have no dogmas." A bit later Dubay states:

"Yet despite this confusion [brought about by relativism] there lurks in the human heart a deep need for what we shall call objective truth and the secure possession of it."

Simple enough, but also profound. Those statements came to mind when I stumbled upon a piece on ScientificAmerican.com titled, "Rational Atheism," which is "An open letter to Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens," written by Michael Shermer. Shermer is publisher of Skeptic and author of Why Darwin Matters (Henry Holt, 2006). He is not too taken with the often harsh and sensational methods of attack sometimes employed by the best-selling authors he addresses his letter to; he pleads for a more calm and reasoned approach that stresses positive thoughts and action: "I suggest that we raise our consciousness one tier higher..." And:

"Promote freedom of belief and disbelief. A higher moral principle that encompasses both science and religion is the freedom to think, believe and act as we choose, so long as our thoughts, beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others."

A higher moral principle....but based on what? He refers to the "golden rule," which is, if I'm not mistaken, a religious principle made famous by Jesus Christ.

Shermer ends his letter with what can only be read as an overt dogmatic statement: "Rational atheism values the truths of science and the power of reason, but the principle of freedom stands above both science and religion." I find it interesting how some atheists tend to find something out there and above us that is providing objective guidance—a "principle" in this case—but don't imagine it could be a personal Creator.

For example, Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith, writes that there “is no reason that our ability to sustain ourselves emotionally and spiritually cannot evolve with technology, politics, and the rest of culture. Indeed, it must evolve, if we are to have any future at all.” If that isn’t an overt statement of dogmatic faith—in the necessity and inevitability of some sort of evolution—what is?

Harris's book is a rather fascinating read. Unfortunately, good reason and reasoning are rarely found, as Harris's favorite argument against "faith" and "religion" (mostly Christianity and Islam) is that religious people and beliefs are ignorant, foolish, backwards, insulting, intolerant, violent, insane, etc., etc. Every religion, he writes, “preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. This puts the ‘leap’ in Kierkegaards’ leap of faith.” And: “Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.”

In glancing through The End of Faith once more, I noted how much it resembles a bad magic act, with the magician (the atheist author) trying to confuse the audience with a flurry of clumsy distractions (name calling; straw men; rapid fire accusations; emoting; whining) so they won't notice how poorly he performs the "trick" (makes God disappear). It is curious, for example, that a 336-page book with extensive endnotes, written by someone with a degree in philosophy who supposedly relies occasionally on philosophical arguments—and which describes Catholic doctrine and beliefs as "suggestive of mental illness"—does not contain a single reference to Thomas Aquinas. Or John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Paul Claudel, Josef Pieper, Han Urs von Balthasar, Mortimer Adler, Hans Küng (a man I often criticize, but who wrote an 800-page book titled Does God Exist?), Romano Guardini, Richard Swinburne, Karl Rahner, William Lane Craig, Michael Novak, etc., etc. Augustine is mentioned a few times, but mostly to call him an anti-Semitic "sadist." Of Blaise Pascal: "That so nimble a mind could be led to labor under such dogma [regarding the divinity of Jesus] was surely one of the great wonders of the age."

Imagine if a theist wrote a book titled The End of Disbelief and failed to mention, say, Hume, Voltaire, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, Comte, and Sartre, with only passing reference to Darwin, Freud, and Singer. It would be roundly and rightly criticized...by Christians!

Equally revealing is this passage by Harris:

"Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God."

Here, again, it is the omission that stands out, especially from a student of philosophy. What are the famous words of Socrates? "Know thyself." Harris is so fixated on scientific and technological achievement and knowledge that he ignores the perennial greatness of self-examination and knowledge of man—who he is, how he thinks and feels, how he lives and should live, how he should treat others, etc. That is what the well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century knew far better than the average, self-absorbed, unthinking denizen of the Information Age. Of course, Aquinas spends much time in the Summa Theologica considering the nature and existence of God; but he also focuses on the nature and meaning of being human, the meaning of life, the goal of life, the what and why of ethics, and so forth. It is one reason that even non-Christians generally recognize him as a philosophical/theological genius (even if Harris is unaware of that fact).

As Fr. Dubay points out, there are three untenable conclusions "that necessarily flow from the atheistic choice." They are the belief in blind chance "as the origin of an unimaginably complex universe"; atheism's "lack of rationality and the ultimate nihilism to which it necessarily leads the consistent mind"; and, to the point I've just made, atheism's "inability to explain men and women to themselves."

Atheism, especially the popular sort offered by Harris, tends to spend much time explaining what it doesn't believe and why it hates Christianity. That might be enough for some people to live on intellectually and otherwise, but it's not enough for folks who are really grappling with the mysteries of life and reality.
 
 
(Image credit: TED)

Ever since the seventeenth century, the celebrated “Galileo affair” has been one of the featured items on the list of dark moments in the history of Catholicism. That the Church mistreated the Italian astronomer—or at least misjudged his claims concerning the structure of the solar system—seems clear. Pope John Paul II, for example, apologized for the Church’s condemnation of Galileo in 1992. No one now disputes the fact that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around.

For anti-Catholic historians and polemicists the episode is but the most obvious instance of the supposedly perennial conflict between religion—often enough Catholicism specifically—and science. The seventeenth-century battle, in the conventional view, pitted clergymen, who relied on revelation, against scientists, who relied on empirical observation.

But what if this typical portrayal of the heliocentric debate is almost entirely wrong?

That’s the claim of Dr. Christopher M. Graney in Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). Graney, professor of physics at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky, credits a question from one of his students with propelling him into an exploration of the history of heliocentrism and its skeptics. He corresponded recently about his surprising findings.

 
CARL OLSON: One of the blurbs on the back cover calls it “the most exciting history of science book so far this century.” I took that as hyperbole—until I read the book. It has the potential to overturn some important and entrenched narratives in the history of the relation between science and religion. To understand how, we need to know a little bit about the central character, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, whom you seem determined to rescue from obscurity. Who was he and why is he important?

DR. CHRISTOPHER M. GRANEY: Your comment about obscurity reminds me of my wife dubbing me “Riccioli’s agent.” He was an Italian Jesuit priest who worked in Bologna. He was born at the turn of the seventeenth century, so he was a very young man when Galileo was making big discoveries with the telescope in the 1610’s. Riccioli was bitten by the science bug, and eventually obtained permission from his superiors to devote time to science. He did a lot of physics experiments, including some of the first experiments to precisely study gravity. His results were quite good (he was very “detail oriented,” maybe to the point of being a little obsessive about it). He made a lot of astronomical observations with the telescope; he and his fellow Jesuit Francesco Maria Grimaldi gave the features on the moon the names we use today. Readers may recall that Apollo 11 landed in an area on the moon called “Tranquility.” Riccioli gave it that name. He wrote a huge book on physics and astronomy, called the New Almagest, published in 1651, that became a standard reference book. He was a prominent opponent of the heliocentric theory and was well-known in his time.

CARL OLSON: One of your main contentions is that even though in the long run Copernicus would be proven right by science, considering what was known at the time Riccioli actually had the stronger scientific case. Can you describe some of the problems that heliocentric theorists in the early seventeenth century had no good answer for?

GRANEY: There were two main problems. They take some space to explain fully, as I do in the book, but in short, one problem was Earth’s rotation in the heliocentric system. Fathers Riccioli and Grimaldi figured out that projectiles such as cannon balls should be affected by Earth’s rotation. Today we know that they were right. The effect is called the Coriolis Effect, and it is part of the reason why weather patterns rotate around a “high” or “low.” But it is a subtle thing, and at the time it had not yet been discovered. So Riccioli said that since the effect was not there, the Earth could not be rotating and heliocentrism must be wrong.

The other problem was star sizes. Heliocentrism required the stars to be huge—to utterly dwarf the sun. Today we know that stars come in many sizes: some do dwarf the sun, but many others are similar to the sun in size, and actually most are “red dwarfs” and smaller than the sun. But as I explain in the book, heliocentrism seemed to require every last star to dwarf the sun. Riccioli (and others) thought this was nuts. By contrast, in a geocentric universe everything fit neatly into a consistent size range, with the moon being the smallest and the sun the largest. That seemed much more reasonable.

Interestingly, many heliocentrists didn’t try to argue about the star sizes. They just said, “Hey, God can make huge stars.” One fairly prominent heliocentrist even explained that the stars were so huge because they were God’s warriors—the guards at the gates of heaven. He backed this up with scripture. Riccioli basically said, “Well, no one can deny the power of God, but this idea won’t satisfy prudent people.” It took a long time for scientists to discover that the apparent size of the stars is false, and stars are not all so huge. Explaining why that is takes up quite a few pages in the book.

CARL OLSON: The most stunning passage in the book (p. 104) is where you cite a series of quotations from scientists and historians, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. All accuse Riccioli of excessive reliance on theology and imply that Galileo and the other champions of the Copernican revolution had science on their side. In light of the evidence you’ve produced in this book, it hardly seems possible that so many authorities could be so wrong. How could such an erroneous view be so widespread and so durable?

Graney: That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer. This stuff was not hidden away—Riccioli’s New Almagest is old, and rare, but not that rare, and it was well known in its day. Many copies exist today in libraries and private collections. Other people of that time also wrote about the star size problem (like Tycho Brahe, a very prominent astronomer) and their books are available, too. Moreover, in at least the early nineteenth century you could find the scientific case against heliocentrism, namely the star-size problem, being mentioned even in an encyclopedia article. So the information is in libraries, and it used to be at least somewhat broadly known. I find it particularly weird that the Catholic world forgot this history: prominent work, done by one of its own, that has a bearing on one of (to use your words) the dark moments in the history of Catholicism.

CARL OLSON: The story of the heliocentric debate, you conclude later in the book (p. 145), “does not look so much like a morality play about brave reason and villainous superstition, about ‘science vs. religion,’ as it looks like a battle between two scientific theories, about ‘science vs. science,’ with a little ‘religion vs. religion’ thrown in as well.” Are you optimistic that your book will significantly change the common historical view of the Copernican Revolution? Or popular perceptions concerning the incompatibility of Christianity and science? How do you expect the book to be received?

Graney: Historians of science have been saying for a while now that the heliocentric debate was not like the common or popular perception of it, but that perception still sticks around. Everyone likes a “good guy/bad guy” story more than a story about the scientific process at work! So I’m not expecting much there, unless it comes from the science world, which has been very receptive to Riccioli and the star size problem.

It’s hard to predict how the book will be received, but the science world has been very receptive toward this general topic. Physics Today and Scientific American both published articles I wrote on Riccioli. Nature twice featured the star size problem prominently on their web page. It may be that scientists sense a particular relevancy in this story. Today rejection of science is a growing problem, as recently was brought to attention through a measles outbreak.

People have this image of science as an endeavor in which powerful forces cover up the truth for their own agenda. The stereotypical “Galileo Affair” story feeds that image, to science’s detriment. But the nature of science is actually such that it is hard to cover up truth, because different people get interested in a problem and start attacking it from different angles. Riccioli’s work and the star size problem tell us that what was going on in the seventeenth century was not the brave and reasonable Copernicans against powerful forces arrayed to cover up the truth, so much as it was the scientific process at work: a vigorous debate, with good arguments and careful observations on both sides, as each worked to figure out what the truth was.

So if this book does change broader perceptions, I think it will be because what it has to say about science at work could have some broader appeal in the science world.

Originally published in Catholic World Report. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Catholic World Report)

A few years ago, Professor A.C. Grayling, professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, wrote a column titled "The persistence of the faithful" in The Guardian.

Grayling's column was ostensibly concerned with the apparent decision of the British government passing the "Equality Act," which would make it law that adoption agencies, including those run by the Catholic Church, would have to allow homosexual couples to use their adoption services. But Grayling's column touched on a number of larger issues, both historical and philosophical in nature, which deserve some further response.

My goals in this article are modest: to offer some context to situate this discussion in a larger and older debate, to suggest some resources that might be of interest to readers, and to critique some of the premises set forth by Professor Grayling. I am certainly not an historian, nor do I play one on television or on the Internet, nor am I a specialist in matters medieval. And so I readily draw upon the knowledge and work of those who know much more about some of these issues than I do, perhaps pointing curious readers to longer and more detailed works of history, philosophy, and theology.

Grayling's column states:

"Seven centuries after the beginnings of classical civilisation in the Greece of Pericles and Socrates, an oriental superstition, consisting of an amalgam of dying and resurrecting god myths and myths about the impregnation of mortal maids by deities, captured the Roman Empire. Such was the beginning of Christianity. By the accident of its being the myth chosen by Constantine for his purposes, it plunged Europe into the dark ages for the next thousand years - scarcely any literature or philosophy, and the forgetting of the arts and crafts of classical civilisation (quite literally a return to daub and wattle because the engineering required for towers and domes was lost), before a struggle to escape the church's narrow ignorance and oppression saw the rebirth of classical learning, and its ethos of inquiry and autonomy, in the Renaissance."

Grayling admitted in later comments that his column "was of course brief, conversational, rhetorical and polemical only." Fair enough, but it is readily apparent where he is coming from and what he thinks of Christianity: it is an intolerant and despondent mythology that thrives on ignorance, oppression, and the suppression of knowledge.

Grayling describes himself as a "humanist" and an adherent of what he calls "secular, free-thinking, classically rooted inheritance." He is an heir to the Enlightenment and thrives on the sort of anti-Christian polemics and dubious historical assertions that became the rage among many intellectuals during the Enlightenment era, so much so that he seems to be nearly entombed in a dusty (dare I say "old-fashioned") form of simplistic skepticism that was in style many decades ago.

So, for example, his description of early Christianity as "an amalgam of dying and resurrecting god myths and myths", has far more in common (nearly everything) with the pseudo-scholarship of The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, written in 1875 by freethinker and anti-Christian Kersey Graves, than it does with the sober historical, textual, and biblical research done by over the last several decades by men such as Jean Danielou, N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, Raymond Brown, Luke Timothy Johnson, John Fitzmyer, Bruce Metzger, John P. Meier, Larry W. Hurtado, and many others. Writing over fifty years ago, Henri Fehner (then a professor at Russian College, Meudon, France), observed that prior to the end of the eighteenth century "nowhere at any time had there ever been any doubt about the historical existence of Christ."¹ The point here is not to launch an extended apologetic discussion on this topic, but to point out that Grayling's position is, ironically enough, antiquated and out of step with the best scholarship.

The same criticism can be leveled at this sweeping remark: "By the accident of its being the myth chosen by Constantine for his purposes, [Christianity] plunged Europe into the dark ages for the next thousand years." There has been much debate over the term "dark ages" and what era it might specifically describe, but modern scholars do not attach the term to a millennium, if they use it at all. Grayling himself admitted, when I questioned his sloppy use of the term, that "you are quite right to pick me up on the rhetorical flourish of 'a thousand years'; more accurately I should have nominated the period between (say) 320 and--shall we choose your date of 1145 as the beginning of the construction of Chartres Cathedral?"

No matter how short and popular the column, such a "rhetorical flourish" was not only inaccurate, it was used purposely to invoke the prejudices of a largely ignorant readership. This misuse of the term "dark ages," as well as the use of "medieval" in a pejorative sense, has been commented on many times by historians. For example:

"Both continuity and change are characteristic of the Middle Ages. This conception runs counter to ideas widely prevalent not only among the unlearned but among many who ought to know better. To these the Middle Ages are synonymous with all that is uniform, static, and unprogressive; 'mediaeval' is applied to anything outgrown, until, as Bernard Shaw reminds us, even the fashion plates of the preceding generations are pronounced 'mediaeval. The barbarism of the Goths and Vandals is thus spread out over the following centuries, even to that 'Gothic' architecture, which is one of the crowning achievements of the constructive genius of the race; the ignorance and superstition of this age are contrasted with the enlightenment of the Renaissance, in strange disregard of the alchemy and demonology which flourished throughout this succeeding period; and the phrase 'Dark Ages' is extended to cover all that came between, let us say, 476 and 1453."²

So wrote Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), America's first great medieval historian, over eighty years ago in his influential 1927 work, The Renaissance of the 12^th Century. He also stated, in the preface, "The continuity of history rejects violent contrasts between successive periods, and modern research shows the Middle Ages less dark and less static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed."

Unless, of course, you are committed, for whatever reason, to rejecting the possibility that much, if not most, of what came into fruition in the Renaissance and Enlightenment was reliant upon Christianity and medieval culture and thought. Thus Grayling angrily writes of "the plan of Angela Merkel and the Pope to recycle the old lie that the enslavement of the European mind by the absurdities of Christianity are foundational to what is in truth our secular, free-thinking, classically rooted inheritance." Yet Haskins wrote that the twelfth century in Europe

"was in many respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry... We shall confine ourselves to the Latin side of this renaissance, the revival of learning in the broadest sense--the Latin classics and their influence, the new jurisprudence and the more varied historiography, the new knowledge of the Greeks and Arabs and its effects upon western science and philosophy..."³

This echoes what was stated two years earlier by philosopher and metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead in Science and the Modern World, based on the Lowell Lectures of 1925:

"The Reformation and the scientific movement were two aspects of the [historical] revolt which was the dominant intellectual movement of the later Renaissance. The appeal to the origins of Christianity, and Francis Bacon's appeal to efficient causes as against final causes, were two sides of one movement of thought."

And:

"I do not think...that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope.... My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivation from medieval theology."⁴

Again, the point simply being that Grayling's views are not only distortions of the historical record, they've been out of date among scholars for close to a century. Which brings us to the person and work of Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), one of the finest historians of the past century. Dawson, a Catholic, has sometimes been called a "metahistorian" because of how he approached the big picture of cultures and historical epochs. In books such as Understanding Europe, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Religion and Culture, Medieval Essays, and Progress and Religion (and the excellent compilation of essays, Dynamics of World History), Dawson explored the relationship between culture and religion, especially between European culture and Christianity. In the essay, "The Scientific Development of Medieval Culture," found in Medieval Essays, Dawson discusses the criteria used by historians in evaluating the role of religion:

"The ultimate criterion by which we must judge the value of a religion is not its cultural fruits but its spiritual truth. This, however, is not the criterion which the historian or the sociologist applies in his judgment of an age or a civilization. A false religion which produces a great art or a great literature, a religion which expresses itself in a brilliant civilization, will naturally be of greater interest to him than a true religion which produces only martyrs or mystics. But while the historian is justified in judging the cultural value of a religion by its cultural fruits, he has no right to treat his conclusions as final from the religious point of view. Actually, however, it is very difficult for an historian to preserve this distinction between religious and cultural values. If he believes a religion to be true, he will naturally tend to take a favourable view of the culture with which it is associated, and if he regards a culture as barbarous or unprogressive he will be apt to condemn or depreciate its religious standards and beliefs."

And then, a description that could just as well be put to the recent column and comments of Professor Grayling:

"Now it was on this ground that the traditional humanistic criticism of medieval religion was based. Medieval literature, medieval philosophy and medieval science alike appeared beneath contempt in the eyes of the Renaissance scholar, and still more of the philosopher of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and consequently medieval religion either shared in their condemnation or, still more frequently, was regarded as primarily responsible for the cultural backwardness of medieval Europe--in Gibbon's famous phrase, the Middle Ages were "the triumph of barbarism and religion."⁵

But, Dawson notes, way back in 1934, that such views were no longer tenable, nor in vogue:

"This wholesale condemnation of medieval culture has long since been abandoned by the educated world, and it was the rediscovery of the purely cultural values of the Middle Ages--of medieval literature and medieval art--which was the main factor in bringing about the change, and which contributed very materially to the wider appreciation of the value of medieval religion."⁶

And yet Grayling and others are able to be so unremittingly negative about the history of Christianity in general and the medieval era in particular because there remains, for various reasons, a huge chasm between scholarly research and popular knowledge. As Grayling's column indicates (and as he even tacitly admits), appealing to popular prejudices and longstanding stereotypes about the "dark ages" is often a successful polemical tactic. This is discussed at length by Régine Pernoud, a French medievalist, in her book Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths (first published in French in 1977), who summarizes part of the problem in this way:

"The Middle Ages still signifies: a period of ignorance, mindlessness, or generalized underdevelopment, even if this the only period of underdevelopment during which cathedrals were built! That is because the scholarly research done for the past fifty years and more has not yet, as a whole, reached the public at large. ... It is so easy, in fact, to manipulate history consciously or unconsciously, for a public that is not knowledgeable about it ... The Middle Ages is privileged material: one can say what one wants about it with the quasi-certainty of never being contradicted."⁷

Sociologist Rodney Stark, professor at Baylor University, goes even further in his recently published book, The Victory of Reason:

"For the past two or three centuries, every educated person has known that from the fall of Rome until about the fifteenth century Europe was submerged in the "Dark Ages"--centuries of ignorance, superstition, and misery--from which it was suddenly, almost miraculously rescued, first by the Renaissance and then by the Enlightenment. But it didn't happen that way. Instead, during the so-called Dark Ages, European technology and science overtook and surpassed the rest of the world!"⁸

Stark describes the "Dark Ages" narrative as "a hoax originated by antireligious, and bitterly anti-Catholic, eighteenth-century intellectuals who were determined to assert the culturally superiority of their own times and who boosted their claim by denigrating previous centuries ..." He goes on to provide a provocative and well-documented summary of the many scientific, technical, economic, and artistic innovations and advances of the medieval era, ranging from water-powered mills to chimneys to the harnessing of horses.⁹

Which is not to suggest that the history of Christianity from the fourth century until the twelfth century was one of steady and unhampered progress and success. Not at all. As Dawson and other historians readily point out, there were difficult, even dark, moments throughout, including the fall of Rome, disease and famine, various assaults by barbarians and, later, by Muslims. Nor is it to deny that there have been Christian despots, corrupt clergy, and lax laity. Yet Grayling apparently thinks that any mention of positive achievements on the part of Christianity is a naïve denial of any failures--as though any admission of Christian achievement is tantamount to kissing the hand of the Pope and begging entrance into the Catholic Church. Thus:

"From that point to this day every millimetre of progress in liberty and learning has been bitterly opposed by the organised institutions of Christianity, which at the outset burned to death anyone who disagreed with its antique absurdities--none of its officers ever being arraigned for these vast numbers of murders, or the literally millions of deaths caused by the wars of religion that plagued Europe, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. But bit by bit religion was forced back into its own shadows by the new learning and the larger freedoms of mind and action that increasing secularisation brought, liberating individuals and societies to the extent enjoyed today.

But now that toleration and secularity has allowed the cancers of organised superstition to regrow, we see the old story repeating itself: the church battling to stop progress, to return us to the dark of prejudice and irrationality."

If I understand Grayling's argument correctly, he is saying that the last 300 years or so have witnessed a steady growth of liberty and tolerance that has been inversely proportional to the decline of religious (Christian) belief, which is full of prejudice and empty of reason. Secularism--that is, the absence of religion (again, Christianity)--is a force, or the engine, for freedom, tolerance, liberty, reason, and progress.

There are a couple of notable problems with this vignette of recent Western history. First, it begs the question: In a world of increasing liberty, reason, and tolerance, why would anyone see fit to return to darkness, repression, and intolerance? Sure, there will always be a few crazies and misfits on the fringes, but religion, which was supposed to die in the 20^th century, has made a dramatic comeback in recent decades. Why? And how? Again, how can the supposed secular virtue of tolerance be the reason when the greatest secular virtue of reason should keep the enlightened masses away from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and various forms of Eastern mysticism.

Secondly, what to do with Naziism and (especially) Marxism/Communism, the two most murderous ideologies of the past century? After all, both hated religion, especially Judaism and Catholicism, with a passion. Communism, in its various forms, promised liberty, progress, a life guided by reason, and freedom from religion. Grayling's answer to this is not convincing, but is rather revealing:

"Thirdly, the major religions and the major ideologies of fascism and communism are the same thing, namely, totalitarian ideologies--systems that seek to impose a monolithic outlook to which all must conform on pain of punishment including torture and death.

They are orthodoxies insisting that all must believe and act the same, under threat. In religion the threat is damnation; it used to be posthumous damnation PLUS the rack, the water torture, the auto de fe. Fascism, communism, religionism: the one difference is that the enlightened world rose up and defeated fascism and communism (at least the Soviet kind), the first in 12 years and the second in 70 years; but the resourceful reinventions of religion keep it alive, even through the liberating and enlightened centuries which have followed the breaking of the Catholic Church's hegemony over Europe and its extension round the world ..."

There is more than a little strained logic and notable ironies in Grayling's position:

1). He conflates fascism and Communism with Christianity, even though fascism and Communism hated Christianity for the same reasons he dislikes it, especially its insistence on an afterlife and a moral judgment based on actions and decisions from this life.¹⁰ This is akin to saying that observant Muslims and Jews are just alike because they are both monotheists. As simple as it sounds, it must be said that what ultimately distinguishes religions and ideologies from one another is not what they share, but what they do not share. Besides, it's not as though the real or potential punishments of imprisonment or persecution are absent from Grayling's secular society, since it (as does every society) requires enforcement of laws.

2). He scorns a "monolithic outlook" that demands conformity, even while insisting that all people must embrace homosexual acts as "natural"--this based on the very dubious assertion that such acts are as natural of "fact" as "being female, or black, or white, or heterosexual"--as though external physical characteristics (gender, skin color, etc.) should be confused with actions based on free will and moral judgments. (On what basis, I wonder, might Grayling condemn pedophiles or peddlers of pornography featuring children?) So now instead of the (mythical) Catholic hegemony we take another step closer to the (increasingly) secular hegemony, which operates via the application of a soft totalitarianism that is most certainly ideological and totalitarian beneath its veneer of patronizing political correctness.

3). He apparently believes that "tolerance" means agreeing with him, as in the Catholic Church must do as he wishes because, well, that is what he wants. And what he wants is for homosexuals to be able to force the Catholic Church to provide them with children, even though there is plenty of evidence that homosexuals are far more prone to violence, abuse, instability, depression, and suicide.¹¹ How rational and caring is it to place children in homes where they are far more likely to be exposed to such problems?

4). He doesn't appear to understand that the Catholic Church (along with other Christian bodies) makes a clear distinction between the dignity and value of every person, and the moral value of that person's actions.¹² Instead, he assumes that a moral judgment about an action is a wholesale condemnation of the person, and he concludes that this is "horrible and unjustified, unkind and ignorant." As opposed to saying that anyone and everyone who is a Christian is intolerant and irrational, regardless of whether or not they actually are those things.

We return, then, to Grayling's understanding of tolerance. He writes, in a comment on the Insight Scoop blog:

"I sorrow for my fellow human beings who languished under so long an oppression, and as you see, join with fellow humanists and secularists to save us from being dragged back into its shadows. We say to you: be free to believe what you like, but do not impose it on those of us who do not agree with you. That is our message; for then we can live in peace, you with your private beliefs in the private sphere, the public domain a neutral space where we can all meet as human beings, and respect one another on merit, not because of labels."

Which is simply the schoolyard bully saying, with a thin smile, "I'll leave you alone. Don't worry. Just give me your lunch money everyday and don't tell anyone about it and we'll get along just fine." Notice that the belief that the Catholic Church should be able to control its own affairs, especially when it comes to the well being of those in her care, is to be private.

Why? Because the secularist believes that is best. Why? Because the tolerant and open-minded secularist knows that sharing the public square would give religion implicit credibility; it would be a tacit admission that Christianity might have public value. And so he demands that religion must remain a private matter only, simply because that is his public belief, hoisted, however precariously, upon a platform of new "rights" that cancel out longstanding, traditional rights. So, instead of a place where ideas can be debated, the public square becomes, by default, the property of the secularist, who calls upon the state to enforce his "reasonable" and "tolerant" views upon everyone else.

This way of thinking has been described well by a man quite familiar with the ideologies and pathologies of the past century:

"Indeed, in a certain sense, scientific rationality is imposing uniformity on the world. In the wake of this form of rationality, Europe has developed a culture that, in a manner hitherto unknown to mankind, excludes God from public awareness. His existence may be denied altogether or considered unprovable and uncertain and, hence, as something belonging to the sphere of subjective choices. In either case, God is irrelevant to public life. This is a purely functional rationality that has shaken the moral consciousness in a way completely unknown to the cultures that existed previously, since it maintains that only that which can be demonstrated experimentally is 'rational.'"

And:

"The concept of discrimination is constantly enlarged, and this means that the prohibition of discrimination can be transformed more and more into a limitation on the freedom of opinion and on religious liberty. Very soon, it will no longer be possible to affirm that homosexuality (as the Catholic Church teaches) constitutes an objective disordering in the structure of human existence ... At the same time, it is equally obvious that the concept of liberty on which this culture is based inevitably leads to contradictions, since it is either badly defined or not defined at all. And it is clear that the very fact of employing this concept entails limitations on freedom that we could not even have imagined a generation ago. A confused ideology of liberty leads to a dogmatism that is proving ever more hostile to real liberty."¹³

That is how Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger accurately and with his usual clarity summarized the situation in his book, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, written shortly before he was elected to be Pope Benedict XVI.

Later, in the same work, Ratzinger asks the rhetorical question about his critique of the Enlightenment: "Does this amount to simple rejection of the Enlightenment and modernity? Certainly not!" He then notes that Christianity is rational, philosophical, universal, trans-political, trans-cultural, pro-man, and pro-life. "In this sense," he writes, "the Enlightenment has a Christian origin, and it is not by chance that it was born specifically and exclusively within the sphere of the Christian faith, in places where Christianity, contrary to its own nature, had unfortunately become mere tradition and the religion of the state". ¹⁴ Obviously, Grayling disagrees. But note that Ratzinger has no problem acknowledging whatever is good and true in the Enlightenment and in modernity. Compare that to Grayling's refusal to admit--despite much historical evidence to the contrary--that anything good has come from Christianity.

Whether in the realms of theology and philosophy (as Ratzinger demonstrates) or the realms of science and technology (as Stark argues), Catholicism has shown a remarkable ability to assess, incorporate, assimilate, and appreciate what is good and truthful in other religions and belief systems. An obvious example from the medieval era is Thomas Aquinas, who vigorously engaged with the thought of Aristotle and other pre-Christian pagan philosophers, as well as with some aspects of Islamic theology. It is easy enough, of course, to find examples in Church history of what would now be described as repression, intolerance or cruelty. More often than not, such examples are taken out of context, misrepresented, or judged according to criteria that didn't exist in the past. When Grayling speaks of the "cruelty of [the Church's] discrimination against women," he overlooks or is ignorant of how much better off women were in early and medieval Christian cultures than they were in ancient Greece and Rome¹⁵, not to mention many countries caught up in the fervor of the Enlightenment.¹⁶

In the end, the secularist view rejects all that is good about religion, especially Christianity, even while living off of the intellectual and cultural goods created by those who were supposedly superstitious and intellectually inferior. The Catholic view is far more open minded and clear minded, being open to what is good and true while being equally certain that there actually do exist things that are good and true. This is part of what G.K. Chesterton called the "thrilling romance of Orthodoxy":

"People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. ... The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. ... It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands."¹⁷

 
 
(Image credit: Telegraph)

"The greatest of these," wrote the Apostle Paul, "is love" (1 Cor. 13:13). Many centuries later, in a culture quite foreign to the Apostle to the Gentiles, the singer John Lennon earnestly insisted, "All we need is love."

Different men, different intents, different contexts. Even different types of "love." You hardly need to subscribe to People magazine or to frequent the cinema to know that love is the singularly insistent subject of movies, songs, novels, television dramas, sitcoms, and talk shows—the nearly monolithic entity known as "pop culture." We are obsessed with love. Or "love." With or without quotation marks, it’s obvious that this thing called love occupies the minds, hearts, emotions, lives, and wallets of homo sapiens.

Yet two questions are rarely asked, considered, contemplated: Why love? And, what is love? These aren’t just good questions for philosophical discussions—these are important, powerful questions that all Catholics and atheists should consider.

What Is This Thing Called Love?

One man who spent much time and thought considering the why and how of love was St. John Paul II. "Man cannot live without love," he wrote in Redemptor Hominis, his first encyclical. "He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it" (10).

That is a statement both St. Paul and John Lennon could agree with, for it states something that is evident to the thoughtful person, whether Christian or otherwise: I need love. I want to love. I am made for love.

But what is love? Many profound works have considered this question at great length and with intense detail. They have plumbed the depths of the various types of love—familial, sexual, and agape. I’ll start with the basic brushstrokes of a definition of love between humans.

The Thomist Josef Pieper, in his essential book On Love, wrote that this love is personal, active, and evaluating. It gauges what is beautiful, right, and—especially—good, and affirms that it is such. "Love," Pieper states, in articulating a philosophical understanding, "is therefore a mode of willing. … To confirm and affirm something already accomplished—that is precisely what is meant by ‘to love’" (On Love II).

How Wonderful That You Exist!

But what is willed by loving? When we say to another: "It is good that you exist, that you are!"—what do we mean? The question is not nearly as abstract or obtuse as it might sound, for it does serious damage to the flippant claim that man is able to "make a meaning," for love is not about making something ex nihilo, but the recognition and affirmation of what already is. Or, put another way, in seeing the good of another, we choose to embrace and treasure that good.

So Pieper makes an essential distinction: "For what the lover gazing upon his beloved says and means is not: How good that you are so (so clever, useful, capable, skillful), but: It’s good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!" (On Love II). This seemingly simple point has profound ramifications, for it is an affirmation of what is. It involves the recognition that something outside of myself is objectively good and worthy of my love. Because reality is knowable and has objective meaning—not shifting, subjective "meaning"—love is possible and can be known. This, of course, raises the question: Where does the objective meaning of love ultimately originate from if not from myself? It is a question sometimes ignored by skeptics, but worth asking of both those who deny God’s existence and those who reject the existence of objective truth: "If your love for your spouse or family is subjective and of a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ sort, what meaningful, lasting value does it really have?"

The true lover, Pieper argues, intuitively understands, even if not with precise logic, that an affirmation of the beloved’s goodness "would be pointless, were not some other force akin to creation involved—and, moreover, a force not merely preceding his own love but one that is still at work and that he himself, the loving person, participates in and helps along by loving" (On Love II).

Human love, therefore, is an imitation, a reflection, of the divine love that created all that is, including each of us. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est, "there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence" (5). Even Sartre, who is not known for being happy about much of anything, remarked in Being and Nothingness, "This is the basis for the joy of love . . .; we feel that our existence is justified" (3.I).

Grateful to No One in Particular

It is here that Pieper makes a significant connection, proffering (as even Sartre’s remark suggests) that all love must contain some element of gratitude. "But gratitude is a reply," he argues, "it is knowing that one has been referred to something prior, in this case to a larger frame of universal reference that supersedes the realm of immediate empirical knowledge" (On Love II).

This is noteworthy because there are atheists and skeptics who insist that it is perfectly logical, even laudable, to be grateful. Recently, The Philosopher’s Magazine ran a piece titled, "Thank Who Very Much?", written by Ronald Aronson, Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wayne State University. It opened with a rather honest and blunt assessment of the situation faced by atheists and agnostics:

"Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists. . . . By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern faith that human life is heading in a positive direction has been undone, giving way to the earlier religious faith it replaced, or to no faith at all."

So, what to do? Aronson maintains a stiff upper lip, exhorting his fellow unbelievers to "shape a satisfying way of living in relation to what we can know and what we cannot know" and so forth. Noting that Christianity and Judaism tend to be filled with gratitude since they believe in a personal God, he offers a rather startling suggestion, worth considering at length:

"But there is an alternative to thanking God on the one hand and seeing the universe as a 'cosmic lottery' or as absurd on the other. An alternative to being grateful to a deity or to ignoring such feelings altogether.
 
Think of the sun’s warmth. After all, the sun is one of those forces that make possible the natural world, plant life, indeed our very existence. It may not mean anything to us personally, but the warmth on our face means, tells us, and gives us a great deal. All of life on Earth has evolved in relation to this source of heat and light, we human beings included. We are because of, and in our own millennial adaptation to, the sun and other fundamental forces.
 
My moment of gratitude was far more than a moment’s pleasure. It is a way of acknowledging one of our most intimate if impersonal relationships, with the cosmic and natural forces that make us possible."

Why Does It All Exist?

We can be grateful, I suppose, for Aronson’s suggestion but still find it unconvincing. His notion of an "intimate if impersonal relationship" is, at best, paradoxical, and at worst, illogical. It is an attempt to assign meaning to something (creation) whose value has already been denied (since the world and our lives are the accidental offspring of molecular chaos). If I understand his proposition correctly, man should extend personal, relational reaction in response to a reality that is not only impersonal, but possessing no personal basis or value. And then we are stop there, without contemplating, "Where did all of this come from? Why does it even exist?"

Aronson recognizes this problem and appeals not only to "our gratitude to larger and impersonal forces," but to man’s dependence "on the cosmos, the sun, nature, past generations of people, and human society." Which still does not explain why the cosmos, the sun, and nature exist, or why they exist so as to sustain human life. Strip away the sincere intentions and we are still left with a simple fact: It’s not enough. The vast majority of people down through time have never found it enough to extend an intimate and personal note of gratitude to impersonal, biological forces that do not care about us or love us. Responding in gratitude to the sun, the fallow earth, the dewy meadow, the complexity of DNA is either sentimental neo-paganism or points to man’s natural knowledge that Someone must be responsible for those lovely—and love-revealing—realities. Skeptics should be led to ask themselves: "Are you grateful to be alive? If so, does it make sense to be grateful to immaterial forces and objects that don’t care at all about your existence?"

The novelist and essayist Walker Percy, a former atheist who believed in his youth that science would provide the answers to all questions and problems, impatiently dismissed the "grateful, but to no one" position in his rollicking self-interview, "Questions They Never Asked Me":

"This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, 'Scientific humanism.' That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight; i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything else."

Aronson, like many skeptics, puts on a brave face, but ultimately settles for too little. His philosophical approach is merely a more sophisticated version of the crude belief: Create your own meaning. Yes, he essentially says, I readily admit that the universe is diverse and full of unbelievable phenomena, but at the end of the day I conclude it still has no meaning other than that which I give it. Ironically, it is the skeptic who takes an illogical leap of faith. Fortunately—or rather, providentially—faith does not have to be the enemy of reason, as long as it is faith in the right Person.

Love Is of God

The most convincing explanation for human love is divine love. As Benedict explains so well in Deus Caritas Est, Christianity carefully distinguishes between divine love and human love, but also recognizes that the latter results from the former. On one hand, man cannot know and grasp the theological virtue of love by his natural powers. Yet by his nature man is drawn toward God even through human love—especially through human love. And it is the Christian story—the Christ story—that makes sense of man’s hunger to love and to be loved. The great surprise is that God’s love is most fully revealed in the death of the God-man, Jesus Christ, on a cross, which was the culmination of the great scandal of the Incarnation and was validated by the great mystery of the Resurrection.

"In the mystery of the Cross love is at work," wrote Pope John Paul II in Dominum et Vivificantem, "that love which brings man back again to share in the life that is in God himself" (41). This love allows man to participate in the life of the Triune God, who is love (1 John 4:16). The perfect love in and of the Trinity is the source of love and the home of love. The Son’s redemptive work of love unites us to himself, the Holy Spirit perfects our will in love and makes us more like the Son, and both guide man toward the loving heavenly Father. Such is the path of divine life and love, the joy of divinization. "God himself," the Catechism summarizes, "is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange" (CCC 221).

"Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new," wrote Augustine in his Confessions. As a young man he had sought love in many places, things, and people. Why? Because he knew that he was made to love and be loved. Everyone, in the deepest recesses of their hearts, has the same knowledge, no matter how scarred and distorted it might be. Some have even made love their god, failing to see that we cannot love love, nor can we worship love. Lennon sang, "All we need is love." More accurately, all we need is the One Who is Love. Now that is a lyric worth singing for a lifetime and beyond.
 
 
Originally published in This Rock Magazine. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

Albert Schweitzer, in the opening pages of his famous and influential 1906 book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, wrote, "And so each subsequent epoch in theology found its own ideas in Jesus, and could find no other way of bringing him to life. Not only epochs found themselves in him. Each individual recreated him in the image of his own personality."

Examples abound:

• Many atheists insist that Jesus didn't even exist or that, if he did, he is either lost in the mists of time or misused by Christian zealots.
• Rationalists tend to depict Jesus as a philosopher of good or questionable abilities and intentions.
• Socialists often present Jesus as a protoMarxist and liberation leader whose struggle was ultimately political, not religious or spiritual. Other leftists paint a portrait of Jesus the community organizer or community agitator.
• Denizens of the New Age realm regularly equate Jesus with Buddha and speak of "Christ-consciousness."
• Some Christians speak of a friendly, all-inclusive Jesus who hardly warrants interest, let alone worship, while others preach a Jesus who is judging and angry and hardly warrants charity, let alone discipleship.

Some of these "Christs" are simply false; some are, more specifically, also heretical. "Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church," wrote G. K. Chesterton in St. Francis of Assisi. Likewise, these heresies seek to narrow the person of Jesus Christ. Here, then, are three popular depictions of Jesus Christ that are not only flawed but dangerous to one's intellectual and spiritual health.

Jesus the Myth

The belief that Jesus Christ never even existed but was the creation of early Christians is increasingly common but also increasingly crude and crack-brained. It is summed up well enough by the skeptics at JesusNeverExisted. corn: "Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct."

The claim of syncretism is standard and has found its way into all sorts of popular fiction and entertainment, most notably The Da Vinci Code. The nonfiction The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light, written by former Anglican priest Tom Harpur, is a good example of an attempt at putting a scholarly veneer on the enterprise. Harpur argues that Christianity is almost entirely derived from ancient mystery religions–especially Egyptian–and based around Horus, the son of the goddess Isis. In turn, Harpur often draws upon the work of Gerald Massey, a 19th-century freethinker, who posited that true Christianity was thoroughly Egyptian in origin and Gnostic in theology. Harpur concludes that a human Jesus never existed but was created by a corrupt, power-hungry hierarchy, a recurring theme in such literature.

The roots of this approach go back to the 18th century, when Charles Francois Dupuis (1742-1809) wrote The Origin of All Religious Worship, one of the first attempts to show that all religions, including Christianity, are essentially the same and that Jesus was the mythical creation of early Christians drawing upon pagan myths. This position gained currency in the United States in the late 1800s with the publication of of The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (or Christianity before Christ), written in 1875 by Kersey Graves (1813-1883). Jesus, the book asserted, was not an actual person but a creation based on earlier stories of deities or god-men saviors who had been crucified and who descended to and ascended from the underworld. Graves, born into a Quaker family, was an atheist who employed spiritualism to gain insights into historical events and personages. His methods and findings have been thoroughly discredited–even by many atheist scholars–but his book continues to attract readers online.

The first part of the loth century was dominated by this tantalizing notion that pagan mystery religions, especially the mythology of "dying-rising" gods, had strongly influenced, or even produced, essential Christian doctrines. The most famous example of this obsession is Sir James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, a 12-volume study of folklore and religion. But scholars in the mid- and late-20th century, such as the anthropologist (and Anglican cleric) E. O. James (1888-1972) questioned and eventually rejected these assumptions. Rigorous studies demonstrated that the pagan mystery religions of the Greco-Roman world were different in essential ways from those religions of the ancient Far East.

Yet this didn't stop Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) from writing a best-selling book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and co-hosting a PBS program with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (aired 1988), that drew upon the same dubious streams of thought. Campbell popularized the notion of "monomyth," which refers to a basic pattern of a hero's journey found in many narratives from around the world; this idea, for example, influenced George Lucas in his creation of Star Wars.

More recently, the same mythological shtick was taken up by atheist Christopher Hitchens in his 2007 bestselling book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens denied that the four Gospels have any historical value at all, falsely stated the Gospel authors "cannot agree on anything of importance," wrongly propounded that the "Gnostic gospels" give a "fractionally more credible" account than do the four Gospels, referred disdainfully to the "highly questionable existence of Jesus," said accounts of Jesus' life are "legend," and stated that the "Gospels are most certainly not literal truth." It's not surprising that his book cites the arguments of just one Christian scholar from the past hundred years, the Anglican apologist and author C. S. Lewis.

Hitchens was either unaware or dismissive of the abundance of studies from both Christians and non-Christians that Jesus of Nazareth did exist and that the Gospels do indeed provide information that historians take seriously as providing real accounts of real people doing real things. No reputable modern-day historian of the ancient world denies that Jesus of Nazareth existed, which is why Graham Stanton, in The Gospels and Jesus (Oxford University Press, 2002), wrote, "Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the Gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically." The amount of textual evidence for the existence of Jesus is overwhelming, especially for an ancient historical figure. The more scholars learn about first-century Judaism, the more historically accurate the Gospels show themselves to be. In addition, the thoroughly Jewish character of Jesus' words and actions are further revealed, destroying the tenuous theories linking Jesus to Greek myths or Egyptian gods.

Jesus the Mere Man

That Jesus was merely mortal is now standard fare among those who cannot deny the basic historical evidence but reject the uniqueness of the man from Nazareth. The variations are many: Jesus was just a misguided prophet, a Cynic philosopher, a Jewish rabbi, a political zealot, an itinerant guru, an agitator for social change. This is hardly new. From the beginning, some doubted or mocked Jesus' claim to divinity: "They said, 'Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, "I have come down from heaven"?'" (Jn 6:42). Jews, Romans, and other pagans of the early centuries mocked the first Christians for their belief that Jesus is the Son of God.

The role of the Reformation in this approach was significant. How? Anglican Scripture scholar N. T. Wright has noted that Martin Luther and other early Protestants were so intent on "the results" of Jesus' saving work they failed, in his words, to "ask about the theological significance of the ministry of Jesus" and also failed "to treat the Gospels with full seriousness, as they stand, that is, as stories" (Jesus and the Victory of God, 1996). Thus, Jesus was severed from his historical and cultural background as the emphasis was placed upon personal experience. "This is to know Christ, to know his benefits... . Unless one knows why Christ took upon himself human flesh and was crucified," asked Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), Luther's close friend and the first Protestant systematic theologian, "what advantage would accrue from having learned his life's history?"

The lineage from Protestant revolt to Enlightenment-era skepticism is not simple, but it is logical, and it is hardly a coincidence that 18th- and 19th-century German theology and philosophy were at the cutting edge of saying, in short, that Jesus "was just a man."

The philosopher Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) believed in a deist God who did not intervene in any way in history. Reimarus therefore denied miracles and the Incarnation, arguing that Jesus was "a Jewish reformer who became increasingly fanatical and politicized, and he failed." His work is often cited as the beginning of the division between the "historical Jesus" and the Jesus of faith supposedly created by the early Church. The theologian Christian Baur (1792-1860 rejected all supernatural elements in the Gospels, presenting Jesus as a mere mortal combining Jewish religious beliefs with Greek philosophy. He concocted the influential theory that Peter and Paul led radically opposed wings of early Christianity, neither of which was true to Jesus' higher (but only mortal) consciousness.

In 1835 the precocious and polemical David Strauss. (1808-1874) wrote Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined), the most influential "life of Jesus" of the 19th century. He presented Jesus as a fanatical Jewish preacher with delusions of messianic grandeur and insisted the Gospels were mostly legend and folklore. The influence of his bare-bones story of an itinerate preacher who proclaimed the Kingdom can be seen in the work of the modern-day Jesus Seminar, which has rejected as unhistorical or exaggerated nearly every narrative in the Gospels. Strauss is notable for interpreting Jesus' miracles as "mythical" in character, against rationalists (who found natural explanations for the miracles) and supernaturalists (who believed the miracles really were miracles).

Modern-day variations on this theme are numerous and appear in historical novels presented as well-researched and theologically sophisticated. The rogue historian Leigh Teabing, a main character in The Da Vinci Code, says, "[Jesus was] a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal." He and the novel's hero, Robert Langdon, declare that Jesus was "made" divine at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 and that prior to that time no one–not even Jesus' followers–believed that he was the Son of God. Never mind the obvious evidence to the contrary (see Mt 1:23, 3:16-17; Jn 1:1ff, 5:18, 8:56ff, Jn 20, etc.). A more recent example is found in a novel, The Book of Rachael, written by "academic, ethicist, activist" Leslie Cannold, which depicts a Jesus who died not for man's sins but for his staunch feminist beliefs. Thus, Jesus is again presented as a mere mortal whose wrong-headed disciples attempt to deify him after his tragic death. The cases of Brown and Cannold are ample proof of Schweitzer's statement, "Each individual recreated [Jesus] in the image of his own personality."

The Gospels and New Testament do not depict Jesus as a radical feminist but do clearly present him as being somehow divine. Jesus, to take just one instance, states, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am" (Jn 8:58)

The Jews arguing with him understood what he meant, for they "took up stones to throw at him." What options exist, then, for the skeptic? C. S. Lewis famously offered the "trilemma" of "liar, Lord, or lunatic," to which Peter Kreeft has added "guru/teacher." And that is the third and final false Christ we will examine.

Jesus the Avatar

Jesus, according to this fallacy, is primary or completely "spiritual" in nature, one of many spiritual guides who have achieved an exalted state of spiritual enlightenment, free of doctrine, dogma, and authority. The ancient roots for this are found in Gnosticism, a broad movement that emerged in the second century against orthodox Christianity and that sought to reshape Christian doctrine by redefining key words and ideas.

"The first heresies," notes the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "denied not so much Christ's divinity as his true humanity (Gnostic Docetism)" (CCC 465). Docetism (from the Greek word for "appear") was the early Gnostic heresy holding that Jesus only appearedto have a body, whereas he was only spiritual, having attained freedom from the material realm. This essential premise is a constant among those who present Jesus as a spiritual guru, for they have little or no interest in the actions of Jesus in time and space. The "Gnostic scriptures," logically enough, have little or no historical narrative and are fixated instead on secret knowledge and hidden techniques of spiritual enlightenment.

The Jesus of the Gnostic writings is hardly recognizable as a Jewish carpenter, teacher, and prophet dwelling in first-century Palestine; instead, he is described as a phantom-like creature who lectures at length about the deficiency of aeons, the mother, the Arrogant One, and the archons–terms that only the Gnostic elite would comprehend. In some Gnostic texts Jesus and Christ are depicted as two separate beings: Christ coming from above and Jesus, coming from below, merely the bodily vessel that Christ dwelled in for a time on earth.

Something similar can be found in the Christ of the New Age movement, a movement that generally embraces pantheism or monism, the belief that "all is One" and this One is impersonal. An excellent and recent example can be found in the writings of the prolific Deepak Chopra, especially in his best-selling book The Third Jesus (2008; see "Chopra's Christ: The Mythical Creation of a New Age Panthevangelist" for a detailed review and critique). Chopra purposely seeks first to remove Jesus from any historical context and reality then detaches Jesus from theological reflection and doctrinal formulation. The "first Jesus," then, "is historical and we know next to nothing about him." Of course, Chopra goes on to say specific things about the historical Jesus but still insists that he is completely unknowable. Why? "This historical Jesus has been lost, however, swept away by history." Actual historical studies and evidence are not considered or even acknowledged; rather, this anti-historical approach is taken for granted, as something of an act of blind faith. The "second Jesus," says Chopra, is "the Jesus built up over thousands of years by theologians and other scholars." This Jesus, Chopra insists, "never existed" and "doesn't even lay claim to the fleeting substance of the first Jesus." Again, no evidence is offered and there is no engagement at all with the rich theological tradition of the Catholic Church. But this isn't surprising, as Chopra, like most New Age adherents, is anti-theological and anti-metaphysical. He considers theology to be either pointless or propaganda.

The "third Jesus" is Chopra's Christ, the epitome of a subjective savior, although Chopra has no need to be saved from sin and evil. Rather, "Jesus intended to save the world by showing others the path to God-consciousness." This journey to "God-consciousness" happens through "Christ-consciousness," the ambiguity of which can be tweaked and molded as one wishes to one's personal tastes. Christ the "guide" is a spiritually advanced being who helps seekers achieve "spiritual evolution." He is compared to or even joined in some way to Buddha. Chopra–having done away with history and theology–conveniently sees no difference between the two, stating that "the Christian seeker who wants to reach God is no different from the Buddhist. Both are directed into their own consciousness."

Since the emphasis in Gnosticism and in the New Age movement is on elite teaching, the death of Jesus and his Resurrection from the dead are of little or no importance. The result is that a significant part of the Gospels–about a quarter of those texts–is simply ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. Since historical context is of no interest, specific details from the Gospels are either ignored or wildly misinterpreted. Chopra, for example, enjoys interpreting texts about "light" in a most hazy and vague manner, ignoring the fact that references to light in the Gospel of John are in the context of Genesis 1, the Feast of Lights, and the Shekinah glory of God.

Ultimately, this false Christ is part of the tired but popular theme, "Religion is bad, spirituality is good." It is highly individualistic and unrelentingly subjective; it is openly opposed to logic, history, and traditional authority. One might say that it is the result of faith divorced from reason, but only if that "faith" is understood to be, finally, in oneself as a part of an impersonal, cosmic whole.

God, Made in Man's Image

These three false Christs are rooted in three faulty views of God and the world: atheism, deism, and pantheism. Each fails, in essential ways, to take seriously as historical events what is described in the Gospels and proclaimed by the Church. The importance of this is stressed by Pope Benedict XVI in the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth: "For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolizing suprahistorical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here on earth."

Each false Christ also results from a failure to see the entire picture and take into account all of the historical information. "If you want to understand the Scripture in the spirit in which it is written," wrote Benedict XVI, "you have to attend to the content and to the unity of Scripture as a whole." In addition, each misunderstands or misrepresents the social, religious, political, and cultural context of first-century Palestine. Ignored or overlooked is the Jewish character of Jesus' teaching and how it is nearly impossible to get an accurate sense of who Jesus is without some understanding of the Old Testament and first-century Judaism.

Finally, each of these false Christs relies, to one degree or another, on a subjective or esoteric way of reading and interpreting Scripture. Put another way, each rejects the authority and teaching office of the Catholic Church. Jesus Christ cannot be rightly understood and defended apart from Scripture, and Scripture cannot be rightly read and interpreted outside the Church. Otherwise we simply recreate Christ in the image of our own personality, which is not and cannot be a basis for objective and ultimate truth.
 
 
Originally posted at Ignatius Insight. Used with permission.

"Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all of its conquerors," wrote G. K. Chesterton.

Faith is the Christian word. Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., in his masterful theology of faith, The Assurance of Things Hoped For, writes, "More than any other religion, Christianity deserves to be called a faith". He points out that in the New Testament the Greek words for "faith" and "belief" occur nearly 500 times, compared to less than 100 for "hope" and about 250 for "charity" or "love." Which is not to say, of course, that faith is more important than love, since Paul makes it clear that love is the greatest of the three theological virtues: "So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:13).

But there is no doubt—pun intended—that faith is essential to being a Christian and to having a right relationship with God, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews states, emphatically and succinctly: "And without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Heb. 11:6).

The daunting work of defining and analyzing faith has been described, with perhaps a dose of knowing humor, as the "cross of theologians." As with hope and love, the virtue of faith can appear initially rather simple to define, often as "belief in God." But some digging beneath the surface suggests a far more complicated task, as some basic questions suggest: What is belief? How is faith obtained? Is it human or divine in origin? How should man demonstrate his faith? What is the relationship of faith to the will, to the intellect, and to the emotions?

The Catholic, meanwhile, must respond to charges against faith: that it is "irrational" or that it is the cause of conflict and violence. In recent years a number of popular, best-selling books written by atheists have called into question not only tenets of Christianity—the historical reliability of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, the Resurrection, and so forth—but the viability and rational soundness of faith itself.

One such book is The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, which repeatedly—mantra-like—uses words such as "ignorant" and "irrational" in making the case that religious faith is not only outdated, but overtly evil. Every religion, Harris muses, "preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidenc e is even conceivable. This puts the ‘leap’ in Kierkegaard’s leap of faith" (Harris, The End of Faith, 23). He adds: "Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible" (Harris, The End of Faith, 25).

Calling Christians and other religious believers stupid and unreasonable is often the default argument for Harris; it is also an approach, crude yet often effective, embraced by many who believe that religious faith is an offense to enlightened, modern man. With that basic opposition in mind, let us take up two basic tasks: defining what faith is and answering some of the charges against belief.

Do I Trust the Chair?

A witticism goes: "Everybody should believe in something; I believe I’ll have another drink." It is more accurate to say that everybody does believe in something, even if it is belief in the ability to live without belief. Of course, even the skeptic understands that life in the material world requires certain types of belief or faith, using those terms broadly and non-theologically: the belief that stop lights will work correctly, faith that I will be given a paycheck at the end of the month, the trust that my grasp of basic math will keep me on the good side of the IRS.

One argument posits that sitting upon a chair is an act of faith, so even atheists have faith when they sit on a chair in, say, a home they are visiting for the first time. If for some reason I doubted the chair in question would hold my weight, I could ascertain its load-bearing capabilities by asking my host to sit in it first, thereby ridding myself of concern (and likely puzzling or offending my host). The argument only goes so far when it comes to faith in what cannot be seen, touched, or proven by scientific means. It does, however, suggest what many people are reluctant to admit: that all of us have beliefs and we live our lives based on those beliefs, even if we never articulate or define them. As Joseph Ratzinger observes in Introduction to Christianity, "Every man must adopt some kind of attitude to the basic questions, and no man can do this in any other way but that of entertaining belief." (Introduction to Christianity [2nd ed.], 71)

We, as creatures, have limited, finite knowledge, and so must make decisions—practical, relational, philosophical—without the luxury of proof. We use common sense and rely on our experience and, significantly, on the experience and testimony of others. I may not know for certain that the chair will hold me, but I conclude it is rational to think it will, based on certain observations: The chair looks well-constructed; it appears to be used on a regular basis; and it is in the home of someone who isn’t the sort of person to ask guests to sit on a chair that might fall apart upon human contact. Sitting on the chair is a reasonable thing to do. Implicit here is the matter of trust. Do I trust the chair? Do I trust my host? And, more importantly, do I trust my perception and assessment of the chair?

Consider another example. You receive a phone call at work from your best friend, who is also your neighbor. He exclaims, with obvious distress, "Your house is on fire! Come home quickly!" What is your reaction? You believe your friend’s statement—not because you’ve seen a live shot of your house in flames on a Channel 12 "news flash" but because of your faith in the truthfulness of the witness. You accept his word because he has proven himself worthy of faith in various ways. Trust in testimony and witness is an essential part of a theological understanding of faith.

God’s Gift and Our Response

The Old Testament emphasizes trusting in God and obeying his utterances, which were often (although not exclusively) entrusted (there’s that word again!) to patriarchs and prophets: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Samuel, Jeremiah, and others. But while there are many men and women of faith in the Old Testament, trustworthiness and faithfulness are most clearly ascribed to God: "Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments …" (Deut. 7:9). The well-known narratives of the Old Testament are accounts of faith and faithfulness (and much faithlessness), all deeply rooted in a covenantal understanding of God’s revelation of himself to man. It is God who initiates and it is God who gives wisdom, understanding, and faith.

The New Testament places more emphasis on the doctrinal content of faith, focusing upon man’s response to the message and person of Jesus Christ. Again, faith is a gift that comes from God, accompanied by God’s promises of life. "No one can come to me," Jesus declares, "unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day" (John 6:44). Paul repeatedly states that faith is intimately linked with trust and obedience, referring to the "obedience of faith" (Rom. 1:5), exhorting the Christians at Philippi to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12), and telling the Galatians that circumcision is not the issue of concern, "but faith working through love" (Gal. 5:6). Faith is portrayed as a living, vital movement that brings man into a grace-filled union with the Father, through Jesus, in the Holy Spirit. According to James and John, while faith is distinct from good works, it is never separate from them, for they display the reality of faith: "Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith" (Jas. 2:18), and "this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us" (1 John 3:23).

Needless to say, the Old and New Testaments together present a complex and rich tapestry of understandings of faith, including elements, Cardinal Dulles writes in his study, "such as personal trust, assent to divinely revealed truth, fidelity, and obedience" (Assurance, 17).

At the Threshold of Belief

Augustine and Aquinas stressed that the object of belief cannot be seen or directly perceived, nor proven by mere logic. If you can prove it, you don’t need to believe in it. And yet, as Josef Pieper explained in his essay, "On Faith," the believer must

know enough about the matter to understand "what it is all about." An altogether incomprehensible communication is no communication at all. There is no way either to believe or not to believe it or its author. For belief to be possible at all, it is assumed that the communication has in some way been understood. (Faith Hope Love, 24)

God has revealed himself in a way that is comprehensible to man (in an act theologians call "divine condescension"), even if man cannot fully comprehend, for example, the Incarnation or the Trinity. Reason and logic can take man to the door of faith, but cannot carry man across the threshold. "What moves us to believe," explains the Catechism, "is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: We believe because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived" (CCC 156).

Belief can also rest upon the testimony of someone else, as Paul states: "But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14). Aquinas succinctly remarks: "Now, whoever believes, assents to someone’s words…" (Summa Theologiae II:2:11). Pieper points out, however, that this leads to a significant problem: that no man is superior enough spiritually to serve as "an absolutely valid authority" for another man. This problem is only solved when the One who is above all men communicates with man. This communication, of course, reaches perfection in the Incarnation, when God becomes man—that is, when the Word, God’s perfect communication, becomes flesh. And this is why, to put it simply, the historicity of Jesus Christ and the witness of those who knew him is at the heart of the Catholic faith.

Faith is ultimately an act of will, not of emotion or deduction. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting Aquinas, teaches, "In faith, the human intellect and will cooperate with divine grace: Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace" (CCC 155). This submission is called "the obedience of faith" (CCC 143). Logic, reason, and recognition of authority go only so far; an act of will, dependent upon God’s grace, is required for faith to be realized. Yet this response of the will is not an impersonal act, like selecting numbers for the lottery, but an intensely personal response. "We believe, because we love," wrote John Henry Newman in a sermon titled, "Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition." "The divinely enlightened mind," he continued, "sees in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship,—the Object correlative of its own affections; and it trusts him, or believes, from loving him."

So much for understanding what faith is. What are some of the popular, common criticisms of faith that need answering?

Faith is contrary to reason. Harris puts it in this provocative form: "And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs are. This is not surprising, since most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths" (The End of Faith, 72). Yet the claim, "I don’t need faith!" is ultimately a statement of faith. If reason is the ultimate criteria of all things, can the skeptic prove, using reason, that reason explains everything about reality? To say "I will only trust that which I can logically prove" begs the question: "How do you know you can trust your mind and your logic? Aren’t you placing your faith in your reason?"

Thus atheism requires belief, including faith in (choose one) the perfectibility of human nature, the omniscience of science, the equality of socialism, or the steady conquest of political, technological, and social progress. But reasoned observation shows that the "truths" produced by these philosophies and systems of thought are lacking and incomplete; they cannot provide a satisfactory answer to the big questions about life, reality, and existence. The belief in science is a good example. The Catholic Church recognizes that science, the study of physical realities through experimentation and observation, is a valid source of truth. But this is quite different from believing that science can and will provide the answers to every question put forth by man. That is a belief—commonly called scientism—that cannot be proven but rests upon the unstable premise of materialism, which is a philosophical belief, not a matter of proven scientific study. For example, Harris writes that there "is no reason that our ability to sustain ourselves emotionally and spiritually cannot evolve with technology, politics, and the rest of culture. Indeed, it must evolve, if we are to have any future at all" (The End of Faith, 40). If that isn’t an overt statement of dogmatic faith, what is?

Put simply, the Church believes that reason is limited and not contrary to faith. True faith is not irrational, but supra-rational. In the words of Blaise Pascal, author of Pensées, whose rational genius is difficult to deny (unless one wishes to be unreasonable about it): "Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them" (Pensées, 68). So faith does not contradict the facts of the material world, but goes beyond them.

Faith is a crutch for those who can’t handle the difficulties of life.I once worked for a delightful Jewish lady who was married to a self-described atheist. She once told me, with obvious frustration, that he would often tell her that faith in God was simply "a crutch." This is not an argument at all; it is simply of way of saying, "I’d rather trust in myself than in God." But belief in self only goes so far; it obviously does not save us from death, or even suffering, disease, tragedy, heartache, depression, and difficulties. Everyone has a "crutch," that is, a means of support we turn to in the darkest moments. These can include power, money, drugs, sex, fame, and adulation, all of which are, by any reasonable account, limited and unsatisfying when it comes to the ultimate questions: What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? Who am I? Harris, for his part, spends a considerable portion of the final chapter of his book arguing that Eastern mysticism is a thoroughly rational and legitimate means for living a full life. In the end, his book says, "Religion is evil. Spirituality is good." But spirituality does not provide answers; religion does.

Faith is the source of superstition, bigotry, and violence. We’ve all heard variations on this theme, mouthed by the increasing number of people indoctrinated to believe that nothing good ever came from Christianity and that every advance in human history has been due to the diminishing influence of Christian thought, practice, and presence. Never mind that the bloodiest and most savage century in human history was dominated by forms of atheistic Marxism (e.g., the Soviet Union) and neo-pagan Fascism (e.g., Nazi Germany), accounting for the deaths of tens of millions. Harris insists that Communism and Nazism were so bad because they were religious in nature:

Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: Although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. … Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational. (Harris, The End of Faith, 79)

This is actually quite true, and provides further evidence that every "ism"—even atheism, materialism, and the "pragmatism" endorsed by Harris—is religious in nature. History readily shows that man is a religious animal who thinks religious thoughts and has religious impulses. As Chesterton wrote in Heretics:

Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence. This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern world. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. ("Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy")

Chesterton suggests elsewhere that if you wish to be free from contact with superstition, bigotry, and violence, you’ll need to separate yourself from all human contact. The choice is not between religion and non-religion, but between true religion and false religion.

Christian faith, then, is not contrary to reason. Nor is it merely a phantasmal crutch built on pious fantasies. Neither is faith the source of evil. Faith is a supernatural virtue, a gift, and a grace. Faith is focused on God and truth; it is the friend of wisdom. "Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion," wrote Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, "The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and faith" ("Man and Mythologies"). The challenge for every Catholic is to give assent and to have faith, while the Catholic apologist must strive to show that such assent is not only reasonable, but brings us into saving contact with the only reason for living.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers.
(Image credit: The Daily Show)

January 11, 49 B.C. is one of the most famous dates in the history of ancient Rome, even of the ancient world. On that date Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, committing himself and his followers to civil war. Few, if any, historians doubt that the event happened. On the other hand, numerous skeptics claim that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are myth and have no basis in historical fact. Yet, as historian Paul Merkley pointed out two decades ago in his article, "The Gospels as Historical Testimony," far less historical evidence exists for the crossing of the Rubicon than does for the events depicted in the Gospels:
 

"There are no firsthand testimonies to Caesar’s having crossed the Rubicon (wherever it was). Caesar himself makes no mention in his memoirs of crossing any river. Four historians belonging to the next two or three generations do mention a Rubicon River, and claim that Caesar crossed it. They are: Velleius Paterculus (c.19 B.C.–c.A.D. 30); Plutarch (c.A.D. 46–120); Suetonius (75–160); and Appian (second century). All of these evidently depended on the one published eyewitness account, that of Asinius Pollio (76 B.C.–c. A.D. 4)—which account has disappeared without a trace. No manuscript copies for any of these secondary sources is to be found earlier than several hundred years after their composition." (The Evangelical Quarterly 58, 319-336)

 
Merkley observed that those skeptics who either scoff at the historical reliability of the Gospels or reject them outright as "myth" do so without much, if any, regard for the nature of history in general and the contents of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in particular.

The Distinctive Sign

 
So, are the four Gospels "myth"? Can they be trusted as historical records? If Christianity is about "having faith," do such questions really matter? The latter question is, I hope, easy to answer: Yes, it obviously matters very much if the narratives and discourses recorded by the four evangelists are about real people and historical events. Pope Benedict XVI, in his book Jesus of Nazareth, offers this succinct explanation:
 

"For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolizing suprahistorical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here on this earth. The factum historum (historical fact) is not an interchangeable symbolic cipher for biblical faith, but the foundation on which it stands: Et incarnates est —when we say these words, we acknowledge God’s actual entry into real history." (Jesus of Nazareth, xv)

 
Christianity, more than any other religion, is rooted in history and makes strong—even shocking—claims about historical events, most notably that God became man and dwelt among us. Of course, some Christians of a less-than-orthodox persuasion are content to discard large chunks of the Gospels as unnecessary (or even "offensive") or to interpret as "mythological" or "metaphorical" nearly each and every event and belief described therein. But such is not the belief of the Catholic Church (or of the Eastern Orthodox churches and most conservative Protestants). As the Catechism of the Catholic Church flatly states: "Belief in the true Incarnation of the Son of God is the distinctive sign of Christian faith" (CCC 463).

It is, ultimately, this distinctive sign—the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was and is truly God and man—that is the focal point of attacks on the historical credibility of the Gospels and the New Testament. Over the past few centuries many historians and theologians have sought to uncover the "historical Jesus" and to peel away the many layers of what they believed were legend and theological accretion. Many abandoned hope that any historical (never mind theological) fact could be extracted from the Gospels.

A Work of Fiction

 
There were many complex reasons for this state of affairs, one of them being the Enlightenment-era doctrine that purely scientific, objective history could not only be found, but was necessary. Empirical data became for many scholars—men such as Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes—the key to all scholarship, including the study of history. It became the accepted wisdom that supernatural or miraculous elements could not be considered scientific and truly historical and that they had to be rejected. Anything outside the realm of empirical data was liable to be labeled "myth" and "legend."

Fast-forward to our day. The results of this approach are all around us, both in the scholarly and popular realm. Not long ago, a young filmmaker named Brian Flemming produced a documentary titled "The God Who Wasn’t There". Its purpose, he explained in an interview, is to demonstrate that the "biblical Jesus" is a myth. Asked to summarize the evidence for this stance, Flemming explained:
 

"It’s more a matter of demonstrating a positive than a negative, and the positive is that early Christians appeared not to have believed in a historical Jesus. If the very first Christians appear to believe in a mythical Christ, and only later did "historical" details get added bit by bit, that is not consistent with the real man actually existing...I would say that he is a myth in the same way that many other characters people believed actually existed. Like William Tell is most likely a myth, according to many folklorists and many historians. Of course, [Jesus] is a very important myth. I think that he was invented a long time ago, and those stories have been passed on as if they are true." (David Ian Miller, "Finding My Religion," www.sfgate.com)

 
Here "myth" is synonymous with "fiction" or even "falsehood," reflecting the Enlightenment-era bias against anything bearing even trace amounts of the supernatural. "All I’m saying," remarked Flemming, "is that [Jesus] doesn’t exist, and it would be a healthy thing for Christians to look at the Bible as a work of fiction from which they can take inspiration rather than, you know, the authoritative word of God."

"Serious Unicorns"

 
Thus the Gospels, according to skeptics such as Flemming, are compilations of "nice stories" or "silly tales," just like stories about unicorns and the Easter Bunny. Some skeptics mock Christians for holding fearfully onto childish tales while the truly mature people go about the business of making the world a better place. "Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology," stated well-known atheist Richard Dawkins in column in The Independent (Dec. 23, 1998), "as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns." Fellow atheist Daniel Dennett, in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, wrote:
 

"The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight—that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether." (18)

Smarter than Thou

 
Such rhetoric rests both on the assumption that the Gospels are fanciful myth and that the authors of the New Testament (and their readers) were clueless about the difference between historical events and fictional stories. There seems to be an overbearing sense of chronological snobbery at work: We are smarter than people who lived 2,000 years ago. Yet the Second Epistle of Peter demonstrates a clear understanding of the difference between myth and verified historical events: "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Pet. 1:16). The opening verses of Luke’s Gospel indicate that the author undertook the task of writing about real people and events:
 

"Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed." (Luke 1:1-4)

 
And the fourth Gospel concludes with similar remarks:
 

"This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." (John 21:24-25)

 
These quotations do not, of course, prove the historicity of the New Testament. Rather, they suggest that the authors, far from being knuckle-dragging simpletons, set about to write works depicting real people and events—especially since they believed the narratives they recounted had meaning only if they really did occur. As such, their historical content should be judged not against tales of unicorns and Easter bunnies, but against other first-century works of history and historical narrative.

What Is a Gospel?

 
The word gospel comes from the Greek word euangelion, meaning "good news" and refers to the message of Christian belief in the person of Jesus Christ. There has been much scholarly debate about the genre of "gospel" and how it might relate to other forms of writings found in first-century Palestine and the larger ancient world. Obviously, they do contain biographical details, and some scholars have argued in recent years that the gospels are as biographical in nature as anything in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

"The majority of recent specialized studies," writes Evangelical biblical scholar Craig L. Blomberg in Making Sense of the New Testament, "has recognized that the closest parallels are found among the comparatively trustworthy histories and biographies of writers like the Jewish historian Josephus, and the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides" (28). In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Catholic theologian and biblical scholar Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes:
 

"We must conclude, then, that the genre of the Gospel is not that of pure "history"; but neither is it that of myth, fairy tale, or legend. In fact, euangelion constitutes a genre all its own, a surprising novelty in the literature of the ancient world. Matthew does not seek to be "objective" in a scientific or legal sense. He is writing as one whose life has been drastically changed by the encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. Hence, he is proposing to his listeners an objective reality of history, but offered as kerygma, that is, as a proclamation that bears personal witness to the radical difference that reality has already made in his life." (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. II: Meditations on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, 44)

 
Many early Christian authors, such as Justin Martyr, referred to the Gospels as memoirs of the apostles. Blomberg has used the descriptive "theological biographies," which captures well the supernatural and human elements found within them.

The Historical Evidence

 
Those supernatural elements—especially the miracles of Jesus and his claims to divinity—are, as we’ve noted, why skeptics call the Gospels "myth" while remaining unruffled about anything written about Julius Caesar and the Rubicon by Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Appian. Yes, Suetonius did write in his account (Lives of the Twelve Caesars) about "an apparition of superhuman size and beauty...sitting on the river bank, playing a reed pipe" who persuaded Caesar to cross the river, but it has not seemed to undermine the belief that Caesar did indeed cross the Rubicon on January 11, 49 B.C. But, for the sake of argument, let’s set aside the theological claims found in the New Testament and take a brief look at the sort of data a historian might examine in gauging the reliability and accuracy of an ancient manuscript.

First, there is the sheer number of ancient copies of the New Testament. There are close to 5,700 full or partial Greek New Testament manuscripts in existence. Most of these date from between the second to 16th century, with the oldest, known as Papyrus 52 (which contains John 18), dating from around A.D. 100–150. By comparison, the average work by a classical author—such as Tacitus (c. A.D. 56–c. 120), Pliny the Younger (A.D. 61–113), Livy (59 B.C.–A.D. 17), and Thucydides (460–395 B.C.)—has about 20 extant manuscripts, the earliest copy usually several centuries later than the original. For example, the earliest copy of works by the prominent Roman historian Suetonius (A.D. 75–130) date to A.D. 950—over 800 years after the original manuscripts had been written.

In addition to the thousands of Greek manuscripts, there are an additional 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and thousands of additional manuscripts in Syriac, Aramaic, and Coptic, for a total of about 24,000 full or partial manuscripts of the New Testament. And then there are the estimated one million quotes from the New Testament in the writings of the Church Fathers (A.D. 150–1300). Obviously, the more manuscripts that are available, the better scholars are able to assess accurately what the original manuscripts contained and to correct errors that may exist in various copies.

When Were They Written?

 
Closely related is the matter of dating. While debate continues as to the exact dating of the Gospels, few biblical scholars believe that any of the four works were written after the end of the first century. "Liberal New Testament scholars today," writes Blomberg, "tend to put Mark a few years one side or the other of A.D. 70, Matthew and Luke–Acts sometime in the 80s, and John in the 90s" (Making Sense of the New Testament, 25). Meanwhile, many conservative scholars date the synoptic Gospels (and Acts) in the 60s and John in the 90s. That means, simply, that there exist four accounts of key events in Jesus’ life written within 30 to 60 years after his Crucifixion—and this within a culture that placed a strong emphasis on the role and place of an accurate oral tradition. Anyone who denies that Jesus existed or who claims that the Gospels are filled with historical errors or fabrications will, in good conscience, have to explain why they don’t make the same assessment about the historical works of Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Julius Caesar, Livy, Josephus, Tacitus, and other classical authors.

Secondly, historical details are found in the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament. These include numerous mentions of secular rulers and leaders (Caesar Augustus, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Felix, Archelaus, Agrippa, Gallio), as well as Jewish leaders (Caiaphas, Ananias)—the sort of names unlikely to be used inaccurately or even to show up in a "myth." Anglican scholar Paul Barnett, in Is the New Testament Reliable?, provides several pages’ worth of intersections between biblical and non-biblical sources regarding historical events and persons. "Christian sources contribute, on an equal footing with non-Christian sources," he observes, "pieces of information that form part of the fabric of known history. In matters of historical detail, the Christian writers are as valuable to the historian as the non-Christian" (167).

Then there are the specifically Jewish details, including references to and descriptions of festivals, religious traditions, farming and fishing equipment, buildings, trades, social structures, and religious hierarchies. As numerous books and articles have shown in recent decades, the beliefs and ideas found in the Gospels accurately reflect a first-century Jewish context. All of this is important in responding to the claim that the Gospels were written by authors who used Greek and Egyptian myths to create a supernatural man-god out of the faint outline of a lowly Jewish carpenter.

Pay Dirt

 
Various modern archaeological discoveries have validated specific details found in the Gospels:

• In 1961 a mosaic from the third century was found in Caesarea Maritima that had the name "Nazareth" in it. This is the first known ancient non-biblical reference to Nazareth.
• Coins with the names of the Herod family have been discovered, including the names of Herod the king, Herod the tetrarch of Galilee (who killed John the Baptist), Herod Agrippa I (who killed James Zebedee), and Herod Agrippa II (before whom Paul testified).
• In 1990 an ossuary was found inscribed with the Aramaic words, "Joseph son of Caiaphas," believed to be a reference to the high priest Caiaphas.
• In June 1961 Italian archaeologists excavating an ancient Roman amphitheatre near Caesarea-on-the-Sea (Maritima) uncovered a limestone block. On its face is an inscription (part of a larger dedication to Tiberius Caesar) that reads: "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judaea."

Numerous other finds continue to demolish the notion that the Gospels are mythologies filled with fictional names and events.

The External Evidence

 
Third, there are extra-biblical, ancient references to Jesus and early Christianity. Although the number of non-Christian Roman writings from the first half of the first century is quite small (just a few volumes), there are a couple of significant references.

Writing to the Emperor Trajan around A.D. 112, Pliny the Younger reported on the trials of certain Christians arrested by the Romans. He noted that those who are "really Christians" would never curse Christ:
 

"They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so." (Letters, Book 10, Letter 96)

 
The historian Tacitus, in his Annals —considered by historians to be one the finest works of ancient Roman history—mentioned how the Emperor Nero, following the fire in Rome in A.D. 64, persecuted Christians in order to draw attention away from himself. The passage is noteworthy as an unfriendly source because although Tacitus thought Nero was appalling, he also despised the foreign and, to him, superstitious religion of Christianity:
 

"Hence to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius: but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular." (Annals, 15:44)

 
Robert E. Van Voorst, author of Jesus Outside the New Testament, offers a detailed analysis of scholarly controversies about this passage, and then states, "Of all the Roman authors, Tacitus gives us the most precise information about Christ" (45). This includes Tacitus’s understanding that "Christus"—not Paul or someone else—was the founder of the Christian movement. He notes that Christ was executed under Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, and that Judea was the source of the Christian movement. All of which further confirms the historical reliability of the Gospels.

Conclusion

 
As Pope Benedict XVI noted in his book on Jesus, there is much that is good about historical-critical and other scientific methods of studying Scripture. But these approaches have limits. "Neither the individual books of Holy Scripture nor the Scripture as a whole are simply a piece of literature" (Jesus of Nazareth, xx).

The Gospels are not myths or lies, but truthful accounts of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Cross Examined)

Pope Benedict XVI dramatically underscored the importance of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) recently. In a series of general audiences dedicated to the Church fathers, Benedict devoted one or two audiences to luminaries such as St. Justin Martyr, St. Basil, and St. Jerome, while dedicating five to Augustine. One of the greatest theologians and Doctors of the Church, Augustine’s influence on Pope Benedict is manifest. "When I read Saint Augustine’s writings," the Holy Father stated in the second of those five audiences (January 16, 2008), "I do not get the impression that he is a man who died more or less 1,600 years ago; I feel he is like a man of today: a friend, a contemporary who speaks to me, who speaks to us with his fresh and timely faith."

The relationship between faith and reason has a significant place in Augustine’s vast corpus. It has been discussed often by Benedict, who identifies it as a central concern for our time and presents Augustine as a guide to apprehending and appreciating more deeply the nature of the relationship. Augustine’s "entire intellectual and spiritual development," Benedict stated in his third audience on the African Doctor (January 30, 2008), "is also a valid model today in the relationship between faith and reason, a subject not only for believers but for every person who seeks the truth, a central theme for the balance and destiny of all men."

This is a key issue and theme in Augustine’s Confessions, his profound and influential account of his search for meaning and conversion to Christianity. Augustine testifies to how reason puts man on the road toward God and how it is faith that informs and elevates reason, taking it beyond its natural limitations while never being tyrannical or confining in any way. He summarized this seemingly paradoxical fact in the famous dictum, "I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe" (Sermo 43:9).

Falsehoods about Faith

 
There are, as we all know, many distorted and shallow concepts of faith, reason, and the differences between the two. For self-described "brights" and other skeptics, reason is objective, scientific, and verifiable, while faith is subjective, personal, and irrational, even bordering on mania or madness. But if we believe that reason is indeed reasonable, it should be admitted this is a belief in itself, and thus requires some sort of faith. There is a certain step of faith required in putting all of one’s intellectual weight on the pedestal of reason. "Secularism," posits philosopher Edward Feser in The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism,

can never truly rest on reason, but only "faith," as secularists themselves understand that term (or rather misunderstand it, as we shall see): an unshakeable commitment grounded not in reason but rather in sheer willfulness, a deeply ingrained desire to want things to be a certain way regardless of whether the evidence shows they are that way. (6)

For many people today the source of reason and object of faith is their own intellectual power. To look outside, or beyond, themselves for a greater source and object of faith is often dismissed as "irrational" or "superstitious." As the Confessions readily document, Augustine had walked with sheer willfulness (to borrow Feser’s excellent descriptive) down this dark intellectual alleyway in his own life and found it to be a dead end. He discovered that belief is only as worthwhile as its object and as strong as its source. For Augustine—a man who had pursued philosophical arguments with intense fervor—both the object andsource of faith is God.

"Belief, in fact" the Thomistic philosopher Etienne Gilson remarked inThe Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, "is simply thought accompanied by assent" (27). There is not and cannot be tension or conflict between reason and faith; they both flow from the same divine source. Reason should and must, therefore, play a central role in a man’s beliefs about ultimate things. In fact, it is by reason that we come to know and understand what faith and belief are. Reason is the vehicle, which, if driven correctly, takes us to the door of faith. As Augustine observed:

My greatest certainty was that "the invisible things of thine from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even thy eternal power and Godhead." For when I inquired how it was that I could appreciate the beauty of bodies, both celestial and terrestrial; and what it was that supported me in making correct judgments about things mutable; and when I concluded, "This ought to be thus; this ought not"—then when I inquired how it was that I could make such judgments (since I did, in fact, make them), I realized that I had found the unchangeable and true eternity of truth above my changeable mind. (Confessions 7:17)

Get through the Door

 
However, while reason brings us to the threshold of faith—and even informs us that faith is a coherent and logical option—it cannot take us through the door. Part of the problem is that reason has been wounded by the Fall and dimmed by the effects of sin. Reason is, to some degree or another, distorted, limited, and hindered; it is often pulled off the road by our whims, emotions, and passions.

But this is not why natural reason, ultimately, cannot open the door to faith. It is because faith is a gift from the Creator, who is himself inscrutable. In Augustine’s intense quest for God he asked: Can God be understood and known by reason alone? The answer is a clear, "No." "If you understood him," Augustine declares, "it would not be God" (Sermo52:6, Sermo 117:3). The insufficiency of reason in the face of God and true doctrine is also addressed in the Confessions. Writing of an immature Christian who was ill-informed about doctrine, the bishop of Hippo noted:

When I hear of a Christian brother, ignorant of these things, or in error concerning them, I can tolerate his uninformed opinion; and I do not see that any lack of knowledge as to the form or nature of this material creation can do him much harm, as long as he does not hold a belief in anything which is unworthy of thee, O Lord, the Creator of all. But if he thinks that his secular knowledge pertains to the essence of the doctrine of piety, or ventures to assert dogmatic opinions in matters in which he is ignorant—there lies the injury. (Confessions 5:5)

Augustine’s high view of reason rested on his belief that God is the author of all truth and reason. The Incarnate God-man, the second Person of the Trinity, appeals to man’s reason and invites him to seek more deeply, to reflect more thoroughly, and to thirst more intensely for the "eternal Truth":

Why is this, I ask of thee, O Lord my God? I see it after a fashion, but I do not know how to express it, unless I say that everything that begins to be and then ceases to be begins and ceases when it is known in thy eternal reason that it ought to begin or cease—in thy eternal reason where nothing begins or ceases. And this is thy Word, which is also "the Beginning," because it also speaks to us. Thus, in the gospel, he spoke through the flesh; and this sounded in the outward ears of men so that it might be believed and sought for within, and so that it might be found in the eternal Truth, in which the good and only Master teacheth all his disciples. There, O Lord, I hear thy voice, the voice of one speaking to me, since he who teacheth us speaketh to us. (Confessions 11:8)

Another example of Augustine’s high regard for reason and for its central place in his theological convictions is found in his experience with the teachings of Mani. As Augustine learned about the Manichaean view of the physical world, he became increasingly exasperated with its lack of logic and irrational nature. The breaking point came when he was ordered to believe teachings about the heavenly bodies that were in clear contradiction to logic and mathematics: "But still I was ordered to believe, even where the ideas did not correspond with—even when they contradicted—the rational theories established by mathematics and my own eyes, but were very different" (Confessions 5:3). And so Augustine left Manichaeanism in search of a reasonable, intellectually cogent faith.

Know the Limits

 
Reason, based in man’s finitude, cannot comprehend the infinite mysteries of faith, even while pointing towards them, however indistinctly. For Augustine this was especially true when it came to understanding Scripture. Early in his life, reading the Bible had frustrated and irritated him; later, graced with the eyes of faith, he was able to comprehend and embrace its riches:

Thus, since we are too weak by unaided reason to find out truth, and since, because of this, we need the authority of the holy writings, I had now begun to believe that thou wouldst not, under any circumstances, have given such eminent authority to those Scriptures throughout all lands if it had not been that through them thy will may be believed in and that thou might be sought. For, as to those passages in the Scripture which had heretofore appeared incongruous and offensive to me, now that I had heard several of them expounded reasonably, I could see that they were to be resolved by the mysteries of spiritual interpretation. The authority of Scripture seemed to me all the more revered and worthy of devout belief because, although it was visible for all to read, it reserved the full majesty of its secret wisdom within its spiritual profundity. (Confessions 6:5)

The contrast between reading Scripture before and after faith is one Augustine returned to often, for it demonstrated how reason, for all of its goodness and worth, can only comprehend a certain circumscribed amount. While reason is a wonderful and even powerful tool, it is a natural tool providing limited results.

Man, the rational animal, is meant for divine communion, and therefore requires an infusion of divine life and aptitude. Grace, the divine life of God, fills man and gifts him with faith, hope, and love. Faith, then, is first and foremost a gift from God. It is not a natural virtue, but a theological virtue. Its goal is theosis —that is, participation in the divine nature (see CCC 460; 2 Pt 1:4). The Christian, reborn as a divinized being, lives by faith and not by sight, a phrase from St. Paul that Augustine repeated: "But even so, we still live by faith and not by sight, for we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope" (Confessions 13:13).

Recognize Rightful Authority

 
Humble receptivity to faith requires recognizing true and rightful authority. "For, just as among the authorities in human society, the greater authority is obeyed before the lesser, so also must God be above all" (Confessions 3:8). What Augustine could not find in Mani, he discovered in the person of Jesus Christ, his Church, and the Church’s teachings. All three are in evidence in the opening chords of theConfessions:

But "how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe without a preacher?" Now, "they shall praise the Lord who seek him," for "those who seek shall find him," and, finding him, shall praise him. I will seek thee, O Lord, and call upon thee. I call upon thee, O Lord, in my faith which thou hast given me, which thou hast inspired in me through the humanity of thy Son, and through the ministry of thy preacher. (1:1)

For Augustine, there is no conflict between Christ, his Body, and his Word. Christ, through his Body, demonstrates the truthfulness of his Word, as Augustine readily admitted: "But I would not believe in the Gospel, had not the authority of the Catholic Church already moved me" (Contra epistolam Manichaei 5:6; see also Confessions 7:7). Holy Scripture, the Word of God put to paper by men inspired by the Holy Spirit, possesses a certitude and authority coming directly from its divine Author and protected by the Church:

Now who but thee, our God, didst make for us that firmament of the authority of thy divine Scripture to be over us? For "the heaven shall be folded up like a scroll"; but now it is stretched over us like a skin. Thy divine Scripture is of more sublime authority now that those mortal men through whom thou didst dispense it to us have departed this life. (Confessions 13:15)

Humility and Harmony

 
"The harmony between faith and reason," wrote Benedict XVI in his third audience on Augustine, "means above all that God is not remote; he is not far from our reason and life; he is close to every human being, close to our hearts and to our reason, if we truly set out on the journey." Augustine’s life is a dramatic and inspiring witness to this tremendous truth, and it is why his Confessions continue to challenge and move readers today, 16 centuries after being written.

The young Augustine pursued reason, prestige, and pleasure with tremendous energy and refined focus, but could not find peace or satisfaction. It was when he followed reason to the door of faith, humbled himself before God, and gave himself over to Christ that he found Whom he was made by and for. "In its essence," Gilson wrote, "Augustinian faith is both an adherence of the mind to supernatural truth and a humble surrender of the whole man to the grace of Christ" (The Christian Philosophy 31).
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with author's permission.
((Image credit: Patheos)