Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Well, it looks like we will be moving back to San Antonio after having been away for almost the entire decade.  The sad end to this apostolate has opened the door to a promising new apostolate in San Antonio.  A new school called the Mexican American Catholic College will begin offering courses in the fall.  I will be serving as their academic dean.  I have been meaning for some years to recover my long dormant Spanish (I pray that it is dormant and not lost) and this new position with this bi-lingual school makes that a pressing requirement.

In the waning weeks of our school of theology here in Champaign, I have had the opportunity to more clearly appreciate the gift that this apostolate was.  The time spent with students and staff, I do not take so much for granted any longer.  One such experience was my panel participation last Tuesday night in which our FOCUS missionaries hosted a campus wide  “Stump the Catholic” panel discussion.

Students from across the U of I campus were invited to bring their questions and boy did they.  One enterprising atheist student posted on reddit, soliciting questions in order to “demolish” us. Most of the questions from the floor were the old fare that one would expect to hear.  Some students clearly were taken aback that there were such solid answers to questions of which they had assumed that all serious Catholics must be ignorant.  Not all, however, allowed themselves to experience this ephiphany.  In reading about B16’s address this morning to the Pontifical Biblical Commission I am reminded of important insights that help to explain why with some questions, for example those which deal with Scripture, it is notoriously difficult to satisfy some people.

CNA reports that the Holy Father discussed the issues of contemporary biblical interpretation and reminded his audience that authentic interpretation of Scripture can only take place with the Church.  This is a very important point that needs to be understood.  Benedict goes into the justification in the article and so I will not repeat that.

However, let me offer that a proper anthropology can illustrate why this is so.  Such an assertion as Benedict’s is, of course, very offensive for those who subscribe to the notion that critical approaches to biblical exegesis are the only appropriate tools for “enlightened” minds.  These people who place themselves outside of the Church’s tradition take such a claim as one smacking of intellectual suppression.  It seems to me that this very mindset is the problem keeping them from considering the legitimacy of the Pope’s statement.

I would say that Benedict’s assertion is a corollary to St. Augustine’s sage insight articulated in the dictum: “I believe that I might understand.”  Belief is in fact a prerequisite to understanding the divine mysteries.  But belief is often misunderstood.  I recall the exchange of open letters between the late Carl Sagan and a priest from the Christophers (whose name I do not recall) a number of years back about Sagan’s unbelief.  It came down to the fact that Sagan was fearful of believing because he felt that belief surrendered the intellect and made him vulnerable to exploitation.

The US culture does in fact promote this type of thinkingthrough a still strong but fading fideistic current.  However, trust, belief, and faith are eminently human.  The less of them we possess, the more we surrender our capacities to fulfill ourselves has human beings.  We can see that we need trust just to live.  There is no place one can go in which he does not have to in some way, rely on another.  A quick (and adequately reflective)  audit of daily life will verify the level of interdependence we have on one another as well as the unreflective trust we immediately place in others upon whom we depend.  Moreover, we cannot have a relationship unless we trust.  The depth of a relationship is dictated by the level of trust between the two parties comprising the relationship.  We cannot fulfill ourselves as human persons without these deep, trusting, giving relationships with others.

We are in fact, created to trust.  Trust and belief do not require one to suspend his reason.  Far from it.  In fact, in order to mature in faith it demands active engagement of the intellect.  However, it begins with trust.

Trust is the first step in belief, in faith.  To be skeptical, is an anti-human disposition.  Now skepticism is not the same as prudential caution.  If the consequences are grave for misplaced trust and/or the probability high that one’s trust might be abused in less than grave situations, caution is very reasonable.  However, skepticism (as I am defining it anyway) is an act of the will against trust before even opening one’s mind to consideration of the rationale for the acceptance of a proposition.  In other words, one has prejudged; he has made made up his mind without fairly considering the evidence.  This is termed unjust prejudice and it is why prejudice is wrong.  Skepticism, as distinct from prudential caution, is simply prejudice or bigotry. To be truly human one must first trust; man is one who believes.

This is an initial step in recognizing why understanding Scripture requires one to be in communion with the Church but of course there are a few more to go. Once we trust (with prudential caution) we then are open to hearing, understanding, and considering a proposition .  This proposition is one in which we are asked to believe.  It is not a rare event mind you, to take on trust the propositions of others.  It is something we do countless times throughout the day. Those who tabulate such things claim that over 90% of what we “know” we have accepted in trust from others without verifying it for ourselves. If the proposition is reasonable and the proposer is credible and competent then it is eminently reasonable to begin the process of trusting the proposition.  Of course, various persons are going to have a variety of questions to be answered before determining any such proposition is reasonable.

At this point, one is open to the final stage in Christian faith and that is to accepting the gift, the theological virtue of faith which elevates and perfects the natural trust and belief of the hearer.  This theological virtue is that which deepens and broadens the understanding of the proposition in addition to being able to hold the conviction with unshakable certainty.  It is this experience of faith and of God’s love which gives one deeper and more profound insights into the propositions which convey the mystery of faith.

This experience of faith and love is nothing more than the experience of communion with God which human beings acheive through union with Christ.  Union with Christ is by definition, communion in His Church the fullness of which is the Catholic Church. The anthropology of trust makes understandable why one must be in the heart of the Church to understand its profound mysteries and why this communion does not entail suppression of one’s intellect.

B16’s statement has deep Trinitarian, Christological, ecclesiological and anthropological implications.  One of which suggests that those who uncritically accept the philosphical baggage that comes with the history of higher criticism will never be able to understand the authentic meaning of Scripture.  Criticism is a very useful tool but to assume that one must adopt skepticism toward divine revelation or toward the Church in order to perform the various methods of biblical criticism is to disqualify oneself from being a Catholic biblical scholar and to remove the liklihood that one will come to an authentic exegetical result.

It means that athiests and other methodological skeptics will never be convinced through intellectual argument alone.  They must first experience conversion, a softening of the heart.  It is the reason that our young atheist mentioned above subsequently claimed victory and why many in the Catholic bibilical academy will unfortunately go to their graves rejecting many Church teachings and steadfastly rejecting the use of any exegetical tools other than criticism.  We must pray for a change of heart for those who are thus instransigent so that they may be set free in order to more effectively use their heads.

I saw that Tom Hoopes had a post today over at NCRegister that really is quite moving.  It is about a little, seven year old girl named Emma whose biological mother was an unwed 16 year old who had initially planned to abort Emma but had changed her mind.  Emma’s mother said about her change of heart:

Something told me not to go through with it because God has a special plan for this little girl…

Emma is by all accounts, a very spiritually mature 7 year old.  In her innocence she teaches her adoptive parents and she also teaches me:

The report says Emma was 3 the first time she mentioned the Pope. She saw him on TV in the hospital and sat up in bed. “That’s my new pope,” she told her mother. “That’s my new pope. Do you think I can ever meet him?”

Watson didn’t pay much attention to the request. But over time she saw how serious her daughter was.

The Make-a-Wish Foundation doubted a child would request to see the Pope, Watson said. So several people wrote letters on her behalf.

“Ever since Emma began talking, she has spoken about prayer and wanting to become a nun,” wrote Dr. Hrair Garabedian, a Spokane cardiologist. “Again, I am surprised by her complete devotion to God, but it does not surprise me at all she has requested a visit with the pope.”

“Emma is a very special child and in some spiritual way, old beyond her years,” said another letter to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Watson said Emma is joyful, never complains, and has a deep faith.

Mrs. Watson told the Associated Press:

“Some small part of us thought we were doing something good by saving this sick little girl, not realizing it was God’s plan all along to save us – from selfishness, from not getting caught up in the little things of life. One of the biggest things we’ve learned is to take things one day at a time and try not to worry about tomorrow.”

Reading a bit about this little girl and was something of an integrating experience for me.  In contemplating the teaching impact of a little one whose life was spared, a life the world demands never be allowed to leave the womb alive, one is drawn to return to the mystery of Providence. Providence is often a truth that we explore only when we are forced to decide for it or against it.  That is, we have no choice but to trust in God and that He has a plan for us or to despair.

This Lent was an unusually good spiritual experience for me in this regard. It began with a very humbling episode.  March 3rd was our 25th wedding anniversary and I had planned on giving my wife with a trip to Rome which we had more or less been saving for.  Instead, I had to cancel those plans and give her the news of my pink slip I had received the day before, on the first Monday of Lent.

Of course there was good that came out of this disappointment.  It caused me to contemplate how much of what I was doing was for God and how much was for me.  It allowed me to realize that I could not, of my own capacities, provide the security and protection for my family that most men feel the obligation to provide.  It shook me out of my spiritual comfort and complacency and challenged me to again surrender myself to God’s merciful Providence.

Lent this year was an experience of continual effort to trust when I could not see the pathway forward.  It was a continual effort to give myself to my students even though I would not be able to see them through to the end of their studies…and to give them even more since the time was now so short.  It was a continual challenge to continue to give myself totally to the apostolate about which I was continually tempted to separate from emotionally, the apostolate that had told me that I would no longer be able to serve with them.

This experience was in some small way, an experience of solidarity with Jesus.  Though, I did recognize that it was very small.  Previous to my own impending unemployment, I was continually drawn to thoughts and prayers for friends, like Hierothee, who have been much more affected by the lack of teaching jobs than I.  I recognized that there were many others who were coming to the end of their financial ropes and did not know where they would be living very soon.  So, it was not so much that I did not recognize or appreciate the relative magnitude of my experience, rather it was that I had not fully ascertained its personal importance for my spiritual life.

I still had not adequately recognized the increase in faith, minuscule as it might be, God had drawn from me in the experience and how he had used it to prune from me my unholy attachment to the trappings of the apostolate I was serving and the false sense of security I put in my own efforts rather than in Him.

It was the story of this little girl who wants to see “her Pope,” presumably because he manifests to her the God in whom she places all of her trust, which provided me the pure grist, separated from the chaff of the experience, I needed to see those aspects of my Lenten experience which I had permitted to purify me and those for which I still needed to permit purification.  This side of heaven there will continually be disordered attachments to the things of the world, even holy things that make use of the created order.  I can only believe that this little innocent girl will teach others even greater things about the joy and comfort that comes from putting our hope only in the Lord, but for me, one whom some call “professor”, she has taught alot.

Here is the latest line-up for Dappled Things:

It’s funny-eerily funny, some might say-how Lent falls upon you just as you’ve finished reading that last story, savoring that last poem from the Advent/Christmas issue of Dappled Things. What follows? A desert: a literary desert of forty-plus days that you must endure before rejoicing at last in the glory of Easter-and the delights of the new issue that comes with it! Dear reader, your days of penance are over: the Lent/Easter 2009 edition of Dappled Things, our most exciting issue to date, is now available online!

Once again we are blessed with a particularly strong batch of fiction pieces, including the grotesque and darkly humorous Black Market by August Roulaux-an abortion story like none you have read before-a profoundly affecting examination of a father’s struggles to reembrace his daughter in Fiorella de Maria’s Aftermath, and the terse, gripping subtlety of John Farrell’s A Circle of Cypresses, which delves deeply into life, death, marriage, love, and human yearning in deftly crafted prose:

“I am so sorry,” she said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

But Mr . Peebles didn’t need any prompting. “I’m glad you’re all right. The sergeant there, or captain, at the police station said neither of you was hurt, and that’s a good thing.”

She nodded without remembering to say yes.

“Are you there, Mrs. Gordon?”

“I just feel . . . I suppose it’s us-I mean we should’ve been the ones calling  you.” Mrs. Gordon.  It was  the first  time  since their wedding  celebration  anyone  had  referred  to  her  as Mrs. Gordon.

Looking for something meaty? In our feature article, “Prudence and the Providence of Plot“, Br. Bruno M. Shah, O.P., takes questions of fiction, as developed by E. M. Forster, and applies them to larger philosophical questions of the narrative of human life in the context of man’s journey toward (or away from) God:

An author’s insight into human nature cannot be exhausted by his characterizations. Somehow, homo fictus possesses a transcendent meaning that is capable of “opening out” beyond the novel’s horizon of mundane action. But what is this trans-narratival dynamism about, and what does it have to do with our own, concrete lives?

This little taste will have whetted your appetite-but the full article is only available in our printed edition! For those of you who have still neglected to subscribe, this must be the final spur!  Subscribe without delay!

Our offerings for Art & Photography feature a single artist. Sarah Ortiz, recently returned from a trip to Granada, Nicaragua, provides us with a vivid and striking photojournal. In the exquisite colors of everyday life, Mrs. Ortiz captures the earthy splendor of the human scene.

We have a striking collection of poetry-vivid and clever as with Robert MacArthur’s “The Cheshire Cat,” or full of haunting longing as with Fiorella de Maria’s “Widow’s Walk“. Returning poet R. S. Mitchell ponders the deep causes of this dappled universe in his mind-teasing, masterfully crafted poem “Reading Pascal at Mint Springs“:

Feel the earth of your situation

and smell the lake and, beyond, see

circling vulture, run of ridge,

for the puzzled trees bespeak

the jigsaw jointure of impression,

yellow and green and sheen of lake.

As always, our editors are eager to provide you with reviews and interviews. This issue, our intrepid editor-in-chief Katy Carl single-handedly gives us the fruits of her conversation with author Andrew McNabb, as well as a review of his new story collection, The Body of This. A second review deserves particular mention: Amor de Lohn is the first published collection of poetry by Gabriel Olearnik. His name should be familiar to you all, as he was first published here, in Dappled Things! Many congratulations to Mr. Olearnik!

Alongside these fascinating features, we offer two editor-produced essays: A Tribute to Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, written by one of his young former collaborators at First Things, our own Mary Angelita Ruiz; and, for those who remember Katy Carl’s insightful discussion of Self-Gift and the Literary Vocation, we offer a complementary reflection from another side of the artistic life, as Eleanor Bourg Donlon speaks of Publishing for Papists: Marketing the Literary Vocation.

These are just a few of the many, many more excellent fiction pieces, essays, poems, and works of art we have to offer you this issue.

Wishing you many blessings during the Easter season,

Bernardo Aparicio
President, Dappled Things

The noted Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, has recently published a wonderful book of Christian apologetics, entitled Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. In it, he takes on the so-called “new atheists,” Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, et. al. It is, as anyone who knows about Hart’s work would expect, brilliantly written and engaging to read. Hart takes apart the atheists precisely at the point at which they are the most vulnerable: on the level of historical knowledge.

Usually, when the topic of the new atheism comes up, it is assumed that the battle that these intrepid, self-proclaimed enemies of religion are fighting is the age-old one of science versus religion. It is tempting, in countering their propoganda, to bring out arguments drawn from natural theology for the existence of God. It would seem, on the surface, that cosmological arguments for God’s existence might break their spell of scientism.

But Hart does not bother with natural theology. Such arguments, he realizes, are quite beside the point. These new atheists are not so much sharp-minded partners in a life or death debate, genuinely open to philosophical questioning, but symbols of a decrepit culture that has proudly forgotten its past. These men have no idea where they or their ideas come from, and they really could not care less. They are not proponents of scientific wisdom who see religion as a threat to knowledge. One might actually have some sympathy for them if they were. No. They are not intellectual worthies. They are, instead, men who fairly beseech us to forget about our historical origins.  

With the true nature of these erstwhile locutioners of religion  in mind, Hart focuses his discussion largely on the historical plane.  How else could one deal, for instance, with a boastful and anti-scholarly journalist, Christopher Hitchens, drunkenly claiming that “religion poisons everything?” Is such a man truly open to philosophical debate or theological knowledge? Perhaps the best thing to do is to pound him over the head with the hammer of his own ignorance of history. Hart wields the hammer, but he does so with a deft touch.

After all, history teaches, contrary to Hitchens’s bombastic jeremiads, that religion is the root of all culture and civilization. Without religion there would have developed no art, music, poetry, architecture, science, or political organization. Were all of these poisoned from their inception? Do the monuments of antiquity hold absolutely no beauty or wisdom?

All ancient cultures and civilizations were established on a cultic, ritual basis. Every human activity was referred to liturgy and seen in terms of its sacral significance. Modern culture and civilization likewise have a cultic basis. They are, of course, based on the liturgical life of the Church. Every positive, human value of our modern social existence that we take for granted, from our science to our modern sense of the inherent dignity of human life, the very foundation of our modern political order, is a vestigial presence of the Church’s cultic influence.

Hart brings out the Christian basis of modern civilization in his book. He does so with great style and verve. But he sounds a troubling note: we should not, he insists, be too hasty in attributing modern civilization to the Church. After all, he argues, modern civilization is largely barbaric.

How does he reconcile these claims, namely, his claim that the Church is the foundation of our culture and his claim that modern civilization might rightly be thought of as barbaric?

I hope to bring out the intricate balancing of these themes in Hart’s book in a series of posts, time permitting. I hope to do a summary of each chapter. I’ll start in the next day or two with chapter one, “The Gospel of Unbelief.” It is an enjoyable book, highly recommended, and I hope that my little posts might do it some justice.

A couple of things to pass along:

First, apparently our feed addresses have changed since our sever crash week before last so if you use Bloglines or one of the other aggregators you may need to reestablish our feed address.  Sorry about that.

Also, I would like to pass along the request from the Cardinal Newman Society to sign the petition against Barack Obama’s being honored by the University of Notre Dame.  The intransigence of Fr. Jenkins is unfortunate but I think that this is an important opportunity to draw the attention of Catholic Institutions to their obligations as such.  Here is the e-mail CNS is sending out with the particulars:

Dear Friend:

Thank you for signing the petition at NotreDameScandal.com, opposing the University of Notre Dame’s planned honor to President Barack Obama, despite his dangerous record on life issues.

More than 264,000 Catholics have signed the petition at NotreDameScandal.com, including many priests, Notre Dame families, college presidents and even some bishops!

But The Cardinal Newman Society needs your help again… to recruit MORE signers!

Notre Dame still has not yielded, and we need more Catholics to stand up and be counted.

Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has urged faithful Catholics to “do what you are supposed to be doing: to call, to email, to write letters, to express what’s in your heart about this”!

Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, a champion of Catholic identity, has specifically urged Catholics to sign the petition at  NotreDameScandal.com!

At this stage, and in addition to prayer, the single most important thing that the lay faithful can do THIS WEEK is to drive the number of signers on the petition even higher!

The petition has had a dramatic impact.  Nearly every media article and broadcast about the Notre Dame scandal – at MSNBC, FOX News, EWTN, TIME magazine, U.S. News & World Report, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and more – has pointed to the LARGE NUMBER of protesters at  NotreDameScandal.com!

And how often to we see nearly three dozen bishops so publicly decry scandal in the Church?

These bishops – including leading Cardinals and Archbishops – have declared Notre Dame’s planned honor a “travesty,” “unconscionable,” “indefensible,” “a public act of disobedience to the Bishops,” and “seemingly without regard for the mission of the Catholic Church in the United States“!

Please, take a few seconds to forward this e-mail to at least five friends and family, and encourage them to sign the petition at NotreDameScandal.com TODAY!

You see, at 7:00 a.m. Monday morning we are going to print the first wave of petitions, and what a statement it would make if Father Jenkins and the bishops (including some of our friends in Rome) saw that we had 300,000, 350,000 or even 400,000 Catholics demanding that Notre Dame live up to its Holy mission!

As much as pro-abortion Catholics want to make this a partisan issue, you and I know that at its core this scandal is about Catholics and Catholic institutions standing up as a witness for life and for our Holy, catholic and apostolic faith at this moment in history when it is under constant attack.

Please, it is critical that we get as many people as possible to sign the petition this week!

And you can do something else to help out: go to NotreDameScandal.com, click on the “Donate Now” button on the left, and send The Cardinal Newman Society even a small (tax-deductible) contribution.  Or simply click here.

My entire staff and I have devoted nearly every hour to this protest since the moment the scandal broke, and to be honest with you this effort is breaking our budget. If necessary, The Cardinal Newman Society will go broke to help stop the Notre Dame scandal… but I hope that is not God’s plan for us.

Would you please consider a gift of $5, $15, $30, or even $100 or more to help us in our 16-year fight combating scandals on Catholic campuses and working to renew Catholic higher education? Thank you!

May God bless you for your faithful witness to the truth, and may He inspire Father Jenkins to withdraw this scandalous honor!  Please keep watching NotreDameScandal.com for the latest breaking information on this story.

Yours in Christ,

Patrick J. Reilly

President, The Cardinal Newman Society

P.S. First priority: PLEASE HURRY, help us recruit more signers at NotreDameScandal.com TODAY!  And if you can help us with even a small donation, we would gratefully welcome you as a member of The Cardinal Newman Society and a partner in one of the most exciting projects in the Catholic Church today – the renewal of faithful Catholic education!

I started this post last week and was close to being finished but lost it all when I went to save it.  I am just now having a chance to return to it so you have had a week’s reprieve…but no longer…

A number of months ago, I read through Dinesh D’Souza’a What’s So Great About Christianity.  This was D’Souza’s response to the aggressive atheists’ attack on religion of recent years.  I congratulate him for taking on such an important task.  I also have to say that I am impressed at the breadth of material that a “policy wonk” was able to sift through and to apply.  In many respects, he did a masterful job in assimilating and articulating a variety of significant issues and arguments

Regrettably, that is not uniformly the case.  In fact, in reading some of his arguments one gets the sense that he is at least as influenced by Protestant thought than by the Catholic intellectual tradition even though he is Catholic.  For example, D’Souza cites St. Thomas Aquinas the same number of times as he does Martin Luther and few would argue that when it comes to natural theology, a good part of the purpose of his book, there is absolutely no comparison between the two.  In the end, I suspect that it is a lack of adequate familiarity with Catholic thought that gives this book the appearance of a potpourri of arguments rather than a coherent, systematized response to fundamental errors in atheism.

In what I consider to be a fatal flaw for this book, D”Souza invokes Immanuel Kant as a modern philosopher who provides what the author believes to be an unassailable defense against the atheists’ materialist reduction of reality.  D’Souza summarizes his thinking on Kant in this article he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor just before his book was released:

Kant erected a sturdy intellectual bulwark against atheism that hasn’t been breached since. His defense doesn’t draw on sacred texts or any other sources of authority to which people of faith might naturally and rightfully turn when confronted with atheist arguments. Instead, it relies on the only framework that today’s atheist proselytizers say is valid: reason. The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know – reality itself. This view says we can find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. It holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

In his 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. Kant showed that human knowledge is constrained not merely by the unlimited magnitude of reality but also by a limited sensory apparatus of perception.

Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, namely sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient? What makes us think that there is no reality that lies beyond sensory perception?

What appeals to D’Souza about Kant is that the latter seems to provide a rational solution to the reductive, materialist assumption of atheists.  Kant appears to provide a sound basis for showing the atheist that he is assuming too much when he declares his ability to rule out the existence of anything but the material world.  It seems to me that this is a novel reading of Kant.  I am not an expert on Kant, but I do not think that Kant employed his thinking against atheists’ materialist reductionism.  Nevertheless, even if the implications of Kant’s thinking do provide this consequence, the costs that come with accepting Kant are simply too high.  We can begin to see the implications of Kant’s thinking by reading more of what D’Souza has to say about him:

Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or “take” on it. Kant’s startling claim is that we have no basis for assuming that a material perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. I can tell if my daughter’s drawing of her teacher looks like the teacher by placing the portrait alongside the person. With my eyes, I compare the copy with the original. Kant points out, however, that comparing our experience of reality to reality itself is impossible. We have representations only, never the originals. So we have no basis for presuming that the two are even comparable. When we equate experience and reality, we are making an unjustified leap.

It is essential to recognize that Kant isn’t diminishing the importance of experience. It is entirely rational for us to use science and reason to discover the operating principles of the world of experience. This world, however, is not the only one there is. Kant contended that while science and reason apply to the world of sensory phenomena, of things as they are experienced by us, science and reason cannot penetrate what Kant termed the noumena – things as they are in themselves.

Some critics have understood Kant to be denying the existence of external reality or of arguing that all of reality is “in the mind.” Kant emphatically rejects this. He insists that the noumenon obviously exists because it is what gives rise to phenomena. In other words, our experience is an experience of something. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see Kant as positing two kinds of reality: the material reality that we experience and reality itself. To many, the implication of Kant’s argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human perception and human reason.

And herein lies the rub.  It matters not whether Kant tries to take experience seriously or not.  It matters not whether he denies the existence of external reality or not.  The consequences of his thinking end with the same result.

Kant is very similar to Descartes but with even more deliterious consequence.  Descartes was attempting to overcome the epistemological skepticism of his day when he began the modern inward turn with his cogito ergo sum.  In doing so, he accepted in principle ( at least hypothetically) the fatal error that one might be distrustful of all that he knows through experience. Descartes tried to rebuild, with mathematical precision, a solid philosophy that did away with all skepticism.  Unfortunately, attempting to create a philosophy which uses as its foundation and starting point, one’s self-awareness as the only sure point of knowledge, is impossible.  It did not take very long for his entire system to be deconstructed.  David Hume accepted Descartes implicit epistemological skepticism and took it to its logical dead end.

Unfortunately, Immaneul Kant accepted Hume’s fundamental epistemological skepticism but not his methodological skepticism about the empirical world.  Thus, Kant, like Descartes, attempted to build a philosophy that explained how one could function in the empirical world while denying the ability to know anything beyond.  It did not take long for Kant’s system to be likewise dismantled, though his thinking about religion and God were problematic in and of themselves.

Kant indeed draws an insuperable barrier between the world of experience, the phenomenal world, and reality itself, the noumenal world.  D’Souza does not address Kant’s own explicit implications of this lack of access to the noumenal world.

For Kant, St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Five Ways,” his proofs for the existence of God, are invalid.  In fact, for Kant there is no possibility for any speculative knowledge about God or any reality beyond phenomenal experience.  The human intellect just has not capacity in this regard and so it is doomed to failure.  Thus, D’Souza is being intellectually inconsistent by citing Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal dichotomy and St. Thomas’ natural theology in the same work.

So does Kant believe in God?  He does, but Kant’s belief is not one of faith nor is it a product of speculative induction.  It is a curious deduction that is based, apparently, solely upon pragmatic necessity.  He starts with the premise that we must be moral and for a variety of reasons concludes that we must believe in God if we are to live a moral life.  The implications of this are clear.  Kant’s position leaves us with the functional demand to believe in God without the intellectual frame work to make such belief reasonable.  We can see from this the metaphysical basis for atheism: faith is simply morality, faith is unreasonable, faith is fideistic, etc. In fact, most acknowledge Kant as the father of German Idealism and many have recognized German Idealism as a significant progenitor of modern atheism.

It is ironic that D’Souza would select a modern thinker who is arguably a significant contributor to the development of modern atheism as a defense against it.  Even more, that he would use the precise epistemologically skeptical theory that promoted its development.  Fr. Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, in his book The Mass and Modernity, argues that Kant reduces religion to morality and the implications of such are destructive to Catholicism.  Kant rules out the use of pure reason and eliminates our access to God.  He rejects supernatural divine revelation and our ability to speculatively reason about God or any reality beyond our experience.  He rejects Church structure, Sacraments, prayer, etc. as anything more than a time conditioned, concrete manifestation of the human attempt to establish a moral structure for life.

Moreover, it is ironic that D’Souza would tear asunder that one point of common reference between atheists and the Catholic intellectual tradition, that is our reason and its ability to know the created (for Catholics anyway) world as it is.  Chesterton pointed out that these points of agreement are instrumental in establishing dialogue and debate in order to change minds and hearts.  This is one truth that we cannot afford to throw away.  The Catholic intellectual tradition provides a much greater wealth of resources to refute the materialist reduction of atheism without the penalty we must pay to saddle up with Kant.  If we are looking for a compelling argument that can ultimately unmask the atheists’ naivete about the limits of their thinking, well I will only say that Kant can’t do it.

. . . I hope.  Did you miss us?

Shelray has been working with our host to get us back on-line.  It turns out that our shared server crashed over the weekend and it took them a couple of days to rebuild it.  It also took them time to realize, I think, that it was a faulty server and not our account that had been causing the CPU to run amok.  If it happens again, I suppose we will be looking for a new host.

Any way, we will get back to posting shortly.

For those who visit us regularly, if there are any such souls, you will have noticed C-L-S has been down all day.  You will also notice that our site has lost several of our recent posts along with a host of comments.  It is not exactly clear what happened but something ran wild eating up our CPU allocation.  We were not able to gain access to the site so our host provider started deleting files until the problem was resolved.  Well the problem is now resolved sans a few posts that probably will not be missed by anyone.  Thanks for your patience.

A good friend of mine who is a PA has been keeping tabs on the attack on conscience of both health care providers and patients in the health care industry. He recently pointed to two medical news outlets (Today In Medicine & Medical Watch) which carried a New York Times article about studies looking at the relationship between end of life decisions and religious belief.

The NYT entitled the article: “Religious Belief Linked to Desire for Aggressive Treatment in Terminal Patients,” while the medical news aggregators used the title, probably having picked it up from another source: “Devout terminally ill patients may be more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging treatment, study suggests. ” The NYT is well known for its promotion of culture of death ideology and this article is no exception. However, it is a report about a study which is to be published in JAMA.

The med news aggregators assembled the story from a variety of sources, who had expounded upon the NYT piece and here is what they came up with:

Devout terminally ill patients may be more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging treatment, study suggests.

The New York Times (3/18, A18, Rabin) reports, “Terminally ill cancer patients who drew comfort from religion were far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care in the week before they died than were less religious patients.” According to research team member Holly G. Prigerson, MS, PhD, of Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the finding seems to contradict what some people tend to generally accept as true: “Spiritual patients are more likely to say their lives are in God’s hands.” But, “to religious people, life is sacred and sanctified,” Prigerson maintains.

In fact, she says, “there’s a sense that by not going for life-prolonging care, they’re letting God down,” the Los Angeles Times (3/18, Kaplan) adds. A number of “other recent studies have made similar connections.” For example, “religious cancer patients who had unsuccessful chemotherapy treatments were twice as likely to want heroic end-of-life measures, according to a report last year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.” And, a “2005 study in Annals of Behavioral Medicine found that patients with advanced-stage lung or colon cancer were more likely to want life-preserving CPR, mechanical ventilation, and hospitalization if they believed in divine intervention.” The current study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, adds to the assertion that “faith in a higher power can often lead to more aggressive treatment than is medically warranted.”

In fact, the study reveals that the highly devout patients they interviewed “were three times more likely than others to receive intensive, invasive medical procedures,” USA Today (3/18, Szabo) reports. They “also made fewer preparations for death, such as filling out ‘do not resuscitate’ orders, writing living wills, or giving someone power of attorney, according to the study of 345 patients” recruited from medical facilities throughout the country between 2003 and 2007. The participants were predominantly Christian.

Although some “79 percent of patients reported that religion helped them cope to some extent,” just one-third “of highly religious patients had a do-not-resuscitate order, compared with half of patients who weren’t as spiritual,” Bloomberg News (3/18, Lopatto) points out. Instead, “they wanted physicians to take ‘heroic measures’ to keep them alive.”
Meanwhile, “the researchers also observed that positive religious coping was significantly associated with being black or Hispanic, and that those with a high level of positive religious coping tended to be younger, less educated, less likely to be insured, less likely to be married, and more likely to have been recruited from sites in Texas than those with low levels of religious coping,” according to Medscape (3/17, Nelson).

The “mechanism underlying the association between religious coping and aggressive life-saving measures is unclear,” MedPage Today (3/17, Neale) reported. The investigators hypothesized, however, that “highly religious patients ‘may choose aggressive therapies, because they believe that God could use the therapy to provide divine healing, or they hope for a miraculous cure while intensive medical care prolongs life.’”

Duke University Medical Center psychiatrist Harold Koenig, MD, told WebMD (3/17, Boyles) that “the study underscores the importance of discussing religious beliefs within the medical setting.” Even though another “recent study” showed “that only about seven percent of physicians actually talked to their dying patients about religious or spiritual issues,” Dr. Koenig says that “there is also research finding that when doctors engage in discussions about spirituality with cancer patients, the patients trust them more.” In addition, “incorporating spiritual counseling into end-stage medical care results in better quality of life and less aggressive medical intervention prior to death.” Prigerson agreed, noting that “aggressive end-of-life medical interventions have costs that go far beyond patient quality of life.” Not only do aggressive treatments “have huge costs for society,” she contended that “many of these interventions” also “result…in more patient suffering.”

The Boston Globe (3/18, Cooney), Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch (3/17, Crane), BBC News (3/17), AFP (3/18), CBC News (3/17), and HealthDay (3/17, Gordon) also covered the story.

The focus of the article appears to make the point that doctors need to be vigilant about people exhibiting a strong faith because they are draining society of resources that might go to more productive people. A couple of things to note here. The author is concerned first, with the economic impacts to society of what she considers to be unwarranted, aggressive treatment. Second, she is concerned with “more patient suffering.”

This, I suspect, is utilitarianism at its finest. As the summaries do not indicate the nature of what is considered “aggressive treatment” it is hard to know what the author means. However, feeding tubes and breathing assistance are now considered extraordinary care in some cases. Even actively taking a life is being euphemistically referred to as “being allowed to die.”

The economic value of the life versus the cost to society has become a primary concern for too many responsible for giving “care”. This eugenic mindset is a frightening trend that seems to be gaining traction in the medical community. Of course, it is being couched also in the pseudo-compassionate concern for ending suffering as a further justification for eugenic murder. In fact, the “choice” to end suffering is the main plank in the strategy. However, lurking not far off in the shadows are the bean-counters who seem itching to put on price on everyone’s head.

A second consideration is the reason for highlighting being religiously devout. It is not clear what this even means. It clearly does not provide anything insightful, as if being religiously devout refers to a monolithic set of beliefs. The summaries show that there are also other factors that are correlated as well such as age, economic status, level of education, marital status. Why do not one of these not merit top billing?

I suspect that what we have here is a utilitarian, eugenic mindset that naturally is going to see people of faith as those opposed to their attempts to establish as a “good death” framework for parceling out care and ending “senseless” suffering. This thinking is not new. However, what only a few years ago was on the fringe has become mainstream in Europe and with the ascendancy of a europhile Congress and presidential administration the push to go mainstream in the US is sure to heat up. This will be especially true as the new administration moves to establish a state run heathcare that will not bust the budget.

The eugenicists are right in recognizing that their foes will be people of faith, which is why it will become more are more challenging to be an faithful Catholic in the years to come.