beating the enemy

No civilization has ever flourished without a God. Trillions of people have lived on earth and they were mostly religious people. Atheism as an intellectual mouvement is a recent phenomenon and agnosticism even more so. It started with David Hume over two centuries ago. Even today the proportion of atheists in society is insignificant and they are not taken too much seriously. The charges atheists make against religion is that it is based on faith, not demonstrable facts, thus religious people being irrational people.

Wait a minute. All the trillions of people who have lived on earth throughout the history of mankind are stupid people and a small modern minority is smart? I can't believe it. I think that the Church has some responsibilities in this state of affairs. She has been too much defensive against these charges and definitely needs help. Pope Benedictus XVI, for example, has been for a long time trying to reconcile reason and faith. I think he has been too soft at it and his efforts have been mostly misdirected.

What has to be done and what I believe can be done is not to reconcile reason and faith, but to show by reason that religion - Christian religion in particular -, in its essential building blocks is a profoundly rational system of ideas. There is no possible reconciliation with the enemy - atheistic and agnostic rationalism and its main consequence, cultural relativism. The enemy must be beaten on his own camp.

As I tried to suggest in my previous three posts, religion - I always mean Christian religion, in particular - is a complex system of rational ideas designed to maximize the duration, the quantity and the quality of human life. To show that the most important Christian beliefs and their associated radical uncertainty are eminently rational ideas, not faith-based beliefs, is the great intellectual enterprise that churchmen and the religious laity have before them. I think they can succeed - if they try, I mean.