Per Christum

Militant atheist Sam Harris attacks the Pope for daring to suggest that faith and reason aren’t incompatible:

While the pope succeeded in enraging millions of Muslims, the main purpose of his speech was to chastise scientists and secularists for being, well, too reasonable. It seems that nonbelievers still (perversely) demand too much empirical evidence and logical support for their worldview. Believing that he was cutting to the quick of the human dilemma, the pope reminded an expectant world that science cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps: It cannot, for instance, explain why the universe is comprehensible at all.

Well, we all knew this kind of response was coming, right? Benedict says that reason has been unnaturally narrowed to the domain of the empirically verifiable, and he is inevitably accused of attacking reason.

But we cannot know the existence of God in the same sense that we know the laws of nature. To say that the two modes of knowing must be the same, as Harris does, is itself unreasonable. Reason is not the same thing as science. Reason includes science, but it also includes philosophy. Harris is implicitly confining reason to the bounds of science.

Harris’s piece quickly degenerates into a vitriolic attack on the Catholic Church. Typical. But for a man who makes a living attacking Christianity, he is surprisingly ignorant of Catholic doctrine:

The pope suggests that reason should be broadened to include the empirically unverifiable. And is there any question these new “vast horizons” will include the plump dogmas of the Catholic Church? Here, the pope gets the spirit of science exactly wrong. Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable). And it does mean to exclude the gratuitously stupid. With these distinctions in mind, consider one of the core dogmas of Catholicism, from the Profession of Faith of the Roman Catholic Church:

“I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the Body and the Blood, together with the soul and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into Blood; and this change the Catholic Mass calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.”

While one can always find a Catholic who is reluctant to admit that cannibalism lies at the heart of the faith, there is no question whatsoever that the Church intends the above passage to be read literally. The real presence of the body and blood of Christ at the Mass is to be understood as a material fact. As such, this is a claim about the physical world. It is, as it happens, a perfectly ludicrous claim about the physical world. (Unlike most religious claims, however, the doctrine of Transubstantiation is actually falsifiable. It just happens to be false.) Despite the pope’s solemn ruminations on the subject, reason is not so elastic as to encompass the favorite dogmas of Catholicism. Needless to say, the virgin birth of Jesus, the physical resurrection of the dead, the entrance of an immortal soul into the zygote at the moment of conception, and almost every other article of the Catholic faith will land in the same, ill-dignified bin. These are beliefs that Catholics hold without sufficient reason. They are, therefore, unreasonable. There is no broadening of the purview of 21st-century rationality that can, or should, embrace them.

Well, well, well. It looks like Harris needs to brush up on his understanding of Transubstantiation. After all, it is quite embarrassing to make a mistake while attacking other people’s beliefs AND their spiritual leader. Any Catholic schoolchild would be able to explain the meanings of the terms substance and accidents.

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Harris also wrote a piece denouncing his fellow liberals who he believes are soft on terror. See AllahPundit’s take on it. Has Harris ever thought that maybe there is something intrinsic to secular humanism that causes people to be so wrong on this issue? Or that there is something to Christianity that allows people to think with moral clarity on it? Maybe it has something to do with this statement in the Regensburg address. It pretty much sums up the whole speech:

In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

But alas, Harris has no response to this statement. There is little to indicate in his piece that he had accomplished anything more than a surface level reading of the text. As Harris says in his introductory sentence:

The world is still talking about the pope’s recent speech–a speech so boring, convoluted and oblique to the real concerns of humanity that it could well have been intended as a weapon of war.

This is how Harris dismisses Benedict’s thought provoking speech.

He also thinks that the entire address was one long attack on the posivistic method:

While the pope succeeded in enraging millions of Muslims, the main purpose of his speech was to chastise scientists and secularists for being, well, too reasonable.

This wasn’t the “main purpose” of the Pope’s speech. The Pope was rather taking aim at the religious tendency to divorce faith from reason, a tendency that he traces back to the late middle ages. Modern unbelief is an effect of that tendency (one of many), but it is hardly the Pope’s main target. Indeed, if Benedict’s view is right, then secularism should be expected to become less prevalent once this harmful tendency fades away within religion.

The entire point of Benedict’s address was that reason divorced from faith is “incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.” Deep down, most secularists like Harris probably know that this is true. A society that does not understand the human motivations that drive religion, and more importantly, has nothing substantive to propose in the dialogue of cultures, will be unable to confront the ideological underpinnings of radical jihad. An empty secularism can only offer trite plattitudes about “equality” or “tolerance” will never be able to stand up to the threat of radical Islam.

To Harris, this whole speech is “boring, convoluted, and oblique to the real concerns of humanity.” But au contraire. It is a very relevant statement for our time. The Pope’s diagnosis of the problems facing Western civilization is fundamentally correct.