Even if metaphysical questions
are not rejected in principle, there is a second objection to the God of
revelation. This was already formulated in the philosophy of the ancients, but
it has acquired far greater force in the modern scientific and technological
world.
It can be put like this: a
rationally constructed world is determined by rationally perceived causality.
To such a scheme the notion of personal intervention is both mythical and
repugnant. But if this approach is adopted, it must be followed consistently,
for what applies to God also applies equally to man.
If there is only one kind of causality, man too as a person is
excluded and reduced to an element in mechanical causality, in the realm of
necessity; freedom too, in this case, is a mythical idea. In this sense it can
be said that the personalities of God and of man cannot be separated.
If personality is not a possibility, i.e., not
present, with the ‘ground’ of reality, it is not possible at all. Either
freedom is a possibility inherent in the ground of reality, or it does not
exist. Thus the issue of prayer is intimately linked with those of freedom and
personality: the question of prayer decides whether the world is to be
conceived as pure ‘chance and necessity’, or whether freedom and love are
constitutive elements of it.
Joseph Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, p.20
Reflection – The attitude that the future pope Benedict
describes here is not a relic of 19th century positivist philosophy.
It is alive and well in the new atheism of our day. It is, in fact, the
essential premise on which the supposed opposition of religion and science,
faith and reason rests. Scientists and those who use their reason (we are told)
believe in an ordered universe of empirically observable and rationally
provable causes and effects, predictable and unswerving sequences of events
based on the interplay of natural forces.
Religious
people (who don’t use their reason) believe that Jesus fed 5000 people with
five loaves of bread, walked on water, and raised the dead. And so, in the
rather crudely thought out dialectic between science and reason, religion and
faith, it is the former that has all the credibility, the latter none.
Ratzinger
identifies well what is wrong with this rather simplistic division. Leaving
aside the obvious fact that many people of faith have been people of science
and reason as well (a fact borne out by any study of European intellectual
history), and so existentially there is clearly no real opposition between the
two, there is also no rational opposition between them either.
God
establishes a universe that runs, to a large degree, along basically
mechanistic lines, that has an ordered course of operation that can be studied,
learned, predicted, and then channelled to serve particular human ends—science
and technology, in a nutshell.
But the God
who ‘built’ the machine is also a Person not defined or limited by the machine,
any more than a human being who makes a machine is not a slave to that machine.
So this God can act, for reasons of His own, in the universe He made, to
achieve this or that end.
Miracles,
by the way, are not limited to biblical manuscripts or medieval legends. There
is a chronicled, documented history of miracles that is fairly consistent from
the time of Christ up to the present day. Atheists are sublimely uninterested
in all that, by and large. Personally, I have seen physical healings following
on prayer; people I know have experienced first-hand the miraculous multiplication
of food, generally in places where the poor are served. Perhaps atheists are not aware of that because they don't tend to hang out in those places...
But all of
that aside, Ratzinger makes here the very good point that to exclude this out
of court as an absurdity really does not end with God and prayer and miracles.
It extends, by strict logical necessity, to excluding real human freedom from
the scene, and with the exclusion of freedom, love too is a casualty of
atheistic materialism.
If there is
nothing but matter and physical forces playing against each other, if all
reality is to be interpreted only in this rubric of mechanism and strict
necessity, then human beings too are machines, essentially, and consciousness
and all that goes with it (the illusion of freedom, the illusion of love, the
illusion of spirit) is merely a spandrel, a meaningless by-product, an emergent
property that has no real significance or actual reality.
And if that
is repulsive to us (and I think it is both that and utterly ridiculous to boot),
then where on earth does freedom, love, and spiritual being come from in a
materialistic universe? If we are not just machines following our programming,
then how can the universe that produced us be only a machine, and how can there
be nothing else besides us that transcends the machine?
If we lose
God, we lose humanity. If we retain humanity, God sneaks in by the back door. And
not one word of this, not one implication of this, in any way, shape, or form,
weakens the commitment to scientific rigor, reason, or advance. It never has,
never did, never will.