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The Uncertain Frontier

The popular view of the relations between religion and science might be summed up as follows:

“Roman Catholicism is a religion of authority. The Catholic has to believe what his Church tells him to believe; Catholicism is, therefore, based, not on reason, but on blind faith. The ages of faith were uncritical, credulous, and superstitious.

“The Reformation, a step in the right direction, was the first serious attempt to free reason from the shackles of faith and to base religion not on blind faith but on reason. The attempt, of course, failed, and science, which alone is based on reason, has smashed the half-hearted compromise of Protestantism, just as Protestantism smashed Catholicism.”

The popular view is wrong on all points. The reasonableness of Catholicism is, of course, a question of opinion. That the Catholic Church appeals to reason in support of its claims, and does not ask the convert to accept its authority on trust until its authority has been proved by reason, is a question of fact that can be settled by referring to any recognized work of Catholic apologetics, such as Msgr. R. A. Knox’s The Belief of Catholics.

Medieval theologians, so far from distrusting reason, exaggerated the degree to which pure reason could solve the problems not only of this world but of the next. The Lutheran Reformation, so far from being an appeal from faith to reason was, on the contrary, a violent reaction against the exaggerated rationalism of the later scholastics, and to this day, science, as the distinguished mathematical philosopher Professor Alfred North Whitehead insists, “has remained an anti-intellectualist movement based on a naive faith.”

The Catholic argument may be summarized as follows:

Pure reason suffices to prove the existence of God, many of whose attributes can be discovered by philosophers without recourse to revelation; other facts about God, such as the nature of the Trinity, are not deducible by pure reason but are made known through revelation. Our next task, therefore, must be to discover whether God has revealed himself to man and to test by pure reason the credentials of any alleged revelation. We cannot, for instance, appeal to the authority of the Bible unless we have proved by reason that the Bible contains the revelation of God to man. And to do this, we must apply to the Bible the same critical tests that we should apply to any other book purporting to be historical.

The Catholic maintains that no unbiased reader can study the Bible without being impressed by the nobility of the view of God proclaimed in its pages and by the contrast between the gods of Greece and the God of the psalmist or of Isaiah.

The Old Testament, again, is the story of God’s dealing with a particular and favored nation. We are impressed by the sublimity of its teaching and by the reiterated message of God’s wish to save the world from the consequences of sin. We find scattered throughout its pages recurring hints and prophecies of a coming Messiah, the Savior of the world. When we turn to the New Testament, we find these prophecies miraculously fulfilled. The portrait of our Lord carries conviction. The evidence of the miracles he performed is very strong. It is impossible to explain the transformation of the apostles from a broken, dispirited company of disillusioned men into the triumphant evangelists of a gospel that conquered the world if we deny the Resurrection. There is no satisfactory explanation of the empty tomb other than the Christian explanation. No agnostic has ever produced a plausible hypothesis to explain why the Pharisees could not produce the body of Jesus when the apostles began to preach the Resurrection. No other hypothesis but the Christian fits the facts.

We find moreover that Christ declared his intention to found a Church that should endure until the end of time and that should guard his teaching from corruption. The subsequent history of the Church may fairly be described as miraculous, for in spite of its despised origin in a despised race, in spite of the most bitter persecution, it has gradually extended its sway throughout all the Western world. The Church again fulfils the role that Christ prophesied that the Church would fulfill. It has guarded his teaching from corruption. Heresy after heresy has raised its head in vain against the rock of Peter.

The Church in its nineteen centuries of existence has fulfilled the promises of the New Testament, just as the New Testament fulfils the Old Testament.

The true Church again will be distinguished from its rivals by the possession of certain “notes.” It will be universal and will claim to teach all nations; it will be one, that is, its members will agree in one faith and will be united under one head. No Church but the Catholic Church possesses all these notes nor fulfills all these qualifications.

The Catholic Church is, therefore, the Church that Christ founded. Her most important mission is to preserve from corruption the message that Christ came down among men to deliver.

The Catholic claims that he has proved her credentials without appealing to faith or to authority. “The approach to the Church is,” as Fr. Hugh Pope remarks, “through faith in the Bible regarded as a purely human narrative.” But once the authority of the Church is established by reason it is, of course, rational to accept on the authority of the Church doctrines that reason cannot independently prove or disprove. I can give my reasons for choosing a particular doctor, but can offer no reasoned proofs of my own for the accuracy of his diagnosis.

If a Martian reached this planet in a Martian plane, our first task, once we had contrived to master his language, would be to test by a rational process his claim to have come from Mars. If he could establish his case by reason, it would not be irrational to accept on his authority beliefs about life on Mars that human reason had no independent means of verifying.

Let me repeat once more that I am not concerned—at least in this book—to argue that the credentials of the Catholic Church can, in point of fact, be demonstrated by rational argument, but only to clarify the contrast between the Catholic rationalism and that distrust of the rational approach that characterizes not only Lutheranism and neo-Lutheranism but also the Victorian sect that usurped the name of “rationalist.”

Whether or not Thomas Aquinas succeeded in proving the existence of God by pure reason is a question of opinion, but it is a question of fact that a vast gulf separates Aquinas from Luther, who was intemperate in his abuse of rationalism, and also from modern Lutherans such as that distinguished scholar and theologian Dr. Emil Brunner, who writes:

“From the standpoint of the Christian faith there are two things to be said about the proofs for the existence of God in general. First, faith has no interest in them. The way in which the divine revelation produces the certainty of faith is quite different from that of proof, and it is completely independent of the success or failure of the process of proof. Secondly, the content of the knowledge ‘secured’ by these proofs is something quite different from the content of the knowledge of faith.”

There is only one statement in all this with which a Catholic rationalist would disagree: the statement that “faith has no interest” in the fact that the existence of God can be proved by reason. Such proofs are necessary to meet the pretended rationalist on his own ground and to reassure the Christian troubled by foolish doubts.

Dr. Brunner’s disdain for rational proof is mild compared with the angry scorn of Sørën Kierkegaard, the great Danish Lutheran, who writes:

“So, rather, let us mock God, out and out, as has been done before in the world—this is always preferable to the disparaging air of importance with which one would prove God’s existence. For to prove the existence of one who is present is the most shameless affront, since it is an attempt to make him ridiculous. But unfortunately people have no inkling of this and for sheer seriousness regard it as a pious undertaking. But how could it occur to anybody to prove that he exists, unless one had permitted oneself to ignore him and now makes the thing all the worse by proving his existence before his very nose? The existence of a king, or his presence, is commonly acknowledged by an appropriate expression of subjection and submission—what if in his sublime presence one were to prove that he existed? Is that the way to prove it? No, that would be making a fool of him, for one proves his presence by an expression of submission that may assume various forms according to the customs of the country—and thus it is also that one proves God’s existence by: worship.”

An interesting thesis for a D.D. [doctor of divinity] degree would be a history of Christian apologetics. In the course of centuries the apologetic technique has been developed to meet changing conditions. The emphasis on reason has become more and more pronounced, in proportion as those to whom the argument was addressed had become more and more skeptical. Peter and Paul could take the basic doctrines for granted—the existence of God, for instance—because those whom they sought to convert believed in God, but the modern Christian can take nothing for granted. Just as the great dogmatic definitions of the Church were hammered out in answer to particular heresies, so particular denials evoked new developments in apologetics. Beyond one contemptuous reference to what the fool hath said in his heart, there is no concern with formal atheism, as distinguished from idolatry, in the Old or the New Testament, for atheism is in the main a disease of old and urban civilizations, and the infidelity with which the prophets had to contend was not atheism but idolatry.

C. S. Lewis has written an excellent book on miracles, because he lives in a world in which it is necessary to prove first that there is no a priori reason that miracles should not occur, and secondly that the evidence for particular miracles is impossible to refute. But the Pharisees who crucified our Lord would have regarded both these propositions as self-evident. Nay more, they were quite prepared to believe that Jesus wrought miracles and, indeed, tempted him to perform a miracle of healing on the Sabbath in the hope that he would succeed “that they might accuse him” (Matt. 12:10). And when he did succeed, instead of accepting this miracle as evidence in support of his divine claims, they “made a consultation against him.”

It is even possible that the Pharisees believed that Jesus had risen from the dead. The brilliant camarilla who engineered the trial and forced reluctant Pilate to convict were not so stupid as to believe the official explanation that was the best they could invent to explain the empty tomb. They knew very well that the disciples had not stolen the body and may well have reflected that if Jesus could work miracles during his lifetime by the power of Beelzebub, Beelzebub might have worked a supreme miracle after his death.

Be this as it may, the fact that the Pharisees, so far from denying the miracles of our Lord, accepted them but attributed them to Beelzebub may explain the absence from the New Testament of the arguments with which the reality of the Resurrection is defended by a modern Christian. Paul and the apostles are content to affirm, but make no attempt to prove, the Resurrection. There is no evidence of their rounding on the Jews and asking, “What is your explanation of the empty tomb?” Those whom they sought to convert took for granted not only that God existed but also that God from time to time performed signs and wonders.

The second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles is an admirable illustration of apostolic apologetics, and the value of this chapter as an illustration does not depend on whether in point of fact those assembled on the day of Pentecost heard every man “speak in his own tongue.” Therefore not only the Christian who accepts Acts as historic but the skeptic who rejects the miracle of the tongues can agree at least in regarding this chapter as evidence of the kind of argument that the author of Acts regarded as persuasive.

Now on what does Peter base his argument? On the fulfillment of prophecy and on nothing else. The miraculous gift of tongues was important because it was the fulfillment of what had been “spoken by the prophet Joel.” Instead of attempting to prove that Christ rose from the dead, Peter uses the fact of the Resurrection as evidence that Jesus was the Messiah of whom David was speaking when he said, “Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.” For David was a prophet and knew that God had sworn to him with an oath that of the fruit of his loins one should sit upon his throne. Foreseeing this, he spoke of the Resurrection of Christ. For neither was he left in hell, nor did his flesh see corruption.

Again, instead of summarizing the evidence for the miracles of our Lord, he takes those miracles for granted and cites them as evidence that Jesus was “a man approved of God.” Peter, because he was speaking to Jews who were eyewitnesses or friends of those who had been eyewitnesses of these miracles, felt no need to prove the miracles that “God did by him in the midst of you, as you also know.”

The casual way in which Peter takes it for granted that all his audience are aware of the fact that Jesus worked miracles is a clear indication that even the enemies of the Christians were quite ready to admit that Jesus possessed supernormal powers.

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