How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [88]
One problem of trying to have both faith and reason within the same sphere is in using the language of reason to describe the process of faith. When John Paul II wants to have it both ways, his language is not only circular but fuzzy as well: “Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence.” If we are going to mix reason and faith, then it is reasonable to ask what it can possibly mean to have an “inner eye” that opens the mind. St. Augustine, to whom John Paul II turns for clarification, is no help in his equally tautological and woolly reasoning: “To believe is nothing other than to think with assent … . Believers are also thinkers: in believing, they think and in thinking, they believe … . If faith does not think, it is nothing. If there is no assent, there is no faith, for without assent one does not really believe.”
Another problem in wedding religion and science is in dealing with subjects appropriate in one sphere but not in the other. This forces one into the uncomfortable position of simultaneously embracing and rejecting science. For example, John Paul II eloquently expresses “my admiration and in offering encouragement to these brave pioneers of scientific research, to whom humanity owes so much of its current development, I would urge them to continue their efforts without ever abandoning the sapiential horizon within which scientific and technological achievements are wedded to the philosophical and ethical values which are the distinctive and indelible mark of the human person.” Yet shortly before this praise, he noted with distress that “Scientism is the philosophical notion which refuses to admit the validity of forms of knowledge other than those of the positive sciences; and it relegates religious, theological, ethical and aesthetic knowledge to the realm of mere fantasy.” Only those in the conflicting-worlds or same-worlds tiers would so categorize these forms of knowledge. As we saw, science cannot solve such problems, so in holding the same-worlds model the Pope is forced to lay siege to science because it “consigns all that has to do with the question of the meaning of life to the realm of the irrational or imaginary.” Such questions can only be “irrational” when inappropriately treated as subjects of rational analysis. When kept in their appropriately separate worlds such questions cannot produce conflict or paradox.
At the beginning of Fides et Ratio, John Paul II references I Corinthians 13:12, to make the point that reason without faith leaves one’s perception and comprehension faint and fragmentary: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully.” That vision and understanding, as we have seen, can only be achieved when these two different methods are employed in these two different worlds.
MORAL COURAGE AND NOBILITY OF SPIRIT
I witnessed a poignant example of the power of religion in the second mode (a moral guide to human life and an institution for social bonding) while on a trip to the South in late 1998 to visit a close friend on the eve of his campaign for election to the United States Senate. Michael Coles was running on the Democratic ticket, and on the Sunday morning before the election I joined him and the other Democratic candidates as they visited six different black Baptist churches in and around the Atlanta area. (Since 85 percent of the black vote goes to the Democratic party, these visits were to answer the question asked by a brochure being distributed at one of the churches, entitled “The Black Church Vote: Will God hold us accountable for who governs?”) Among the churches we attended were the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, the Ray of Hope Christian Church, and, most movingly, the late Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. The statue of a father holding his newborn child to the sky, adjacent to the church and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, is emblematic of this second mode of religion captured