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cpayne
Guest
Well, sort of–but that’s not necessarily a total write-off of the century. I think what we saw was the last gasp of Enlightenment-era optimism (and not a moment too soon)–the idea that Technology and Science and the Totally Rational Human were going to Save The World from itself. Especially, the world needed to be saved from pessimistic, irrational, superstitious religion (in general) and Catholicism (in particular). This attitude started back with the 1600s-1700s philosophes (N.B. not “philosophers”), flourished in the late 1800s with the rise of Darwin, Huxley, H.G. Wells, and so on. But it should have ended; people like T.S. Eliot converted because they saw the delusion behind it. People like Dawkins today are clinging to it (have you ever noticed that virtually everything he says and writes could have come directly from the “village atheist” arguments of the 1890s with not a change, except for a few references to modern science?).
When people abandoned THAT point of view, they seemed to think they had no options but irrationality and relativism. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” So we have paradoxes now such as people using advanced technology to cast horoscopes, people with advanced degrees who can’t fill in a missing premise in a syllogism, people who think their emotions are an adequate guide to moral decisions, and so on. They don’t think Christianity can speak to them at all.
The good news (why I don’t think the century was a total loss): People are so hungry for anything real. My (secular) students are actually grateful for logical arguments for God, rational moral teachings, really any kind of genuine knowledge at all. I mean, they KNOW they don’t know anything much–they know the education they received was for the most part years of baby-sitting. Any time I have a student who is intelligent, reads and writes well, and grasps arguments, I assume that student is a Christian. 90 percent of the time I am right.
This really does seem to be a “seize the moment” kind of time for the Catholic Church. Fides et Ratio, forward!
(Wow, did I rattle on or what?
Must have needed to get that off my chest. But I’m okay now. Anyone for a pizza?)
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Truthstalker
Guest
I think of “All Quiet on the Western Front” where a soldier went home on leave and discovered that his philosophy books gave no solace, no answers for what he had gone through. All his Nietzche and Hegel and so forth was meaningless. His culture had been robbed from underneath him. The West has been gutted, the foundations destroyed (Ps 11); it has tottered along like a dead man; without anything except a numbing sense of upheaval and loss of value it is ripe for revolution and rediscovery. The future is death, says the West, and we are reaping the bitter fruit of liberal theology: relative, and so value-less, without referent; evolving, and so without final truth and hence hope, and intellectual to an extreme, and so without faith. Soldiers came home from war, but the war was at home in them.
I think ideology was rejected in America after WWII: ideology meant communism or fascism. Consumerism and science were far easier systems, especially with a patina of Christian morality. Some found Jesus in the 60s, while others lost Him.
In the meantime, in the quiet corners of the world, prayer went on, the church went on, oddly unchanging until Vatican II, which I sometimes think no one on the globe yet understands what THAT was all about. I think it may be several hundred years before we do.
Maybe the 20th Century was the age of unreason but perhaps now we are in the age of rationalization. I see people trying to justify their behavior for all sorts of reasons.
Just an after dinner thought. Let me invoke The Motto (“to those who know what I’m talking about, I just proved I don’t know what I am talking about”).
I think ideology was rejected in America after WWII: ideology meant communism or fascism. Consumerism and science were far easier systems, especially with a patina of Christian morality. Some found Jesus in the 60s, while others lost Him.
In the meantime, in the quiet corners of the world, prayer went on, the church went on, oddly unchanging until Vatican II, which I sometimes think no one on the globe yet understands what THAT was all about. I think it may be several hundred years before we do.
Maybe the 20th Century was the age of unreason but perhaps now we are in the age of rationalization. I see people trying to justify their behavior for all sorts of reasons.
Just an after dinner thought. Let me invoke The Motto (“to those who know what I’m talking about, I just proved I don’t know what I am talking about”).
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Ani_Ibi
Guest
Ah, yes.
The Death of a Million Excuses.
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Genesis315
Guest
It was about reaching out to and re-evangelizing all the people you just spoke about. It was really quite simple. Read each and every document the Council Fathers produced and you will see one theme–the modern world needs Catholicism and we want to go out and meet people where they are to share it with them
–given the attitudes of the modern world, sitting in the corners wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
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Ani_Ibi
Guest
cpayne said:
but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
They don’t think.
I haven’t found that. But perhaps they are pre-Christian.
In what way? If Philosophy is to speak to us in times such as these, what form must it take?
cpayne said:(Wow, did I rattle on or what?
Sure. Pizza sounds good.
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cpayne
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On the one hand, we have a sort of re-birth of logical analysis of ideas, especially re-presenting and defending basic theistic beliefs. On the other hand, we have some forms of Christianity doing a very aggressive, passionate, but maybe not very well grounded, evangelism. I guess I have in mind a combination of the two: A passionate evangelism of the logical defense of theism. To a degree, a lot of this is already going on–Philosophy of Religion is where a lot of the action is in philosophy. (Also philosophy of mind, of course.)
A side note: I am so grateful to God to allow me to do for a living what I would be doing anyway for nothing: talking all the time to non-believers about the ideas of believers.
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Ani_Ibi
Guest
What do you do?
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cpayne
Guest
I’m a philosophy and religion instructor at a secular two-year college. I’m the head of this department. (But that doesn’t really mean much, as I am also the secretary and the only instructor in this department.)
I assume from your reference to students that you are also an instructor?
I assume from your reference to students that you are also an instructor?
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Ani_Ibi
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Kewl.
Pottery, painting.
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anthony022071
Guest
The 20th Century was an age of unbridled progress in science,technology,totalitarianism,work-systems,atheism.
It was an age of pathologies of reason and science, as our Pope would say.
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cpayne
Guest
Hence the discussions with John Doran over “different ways of thought”?
“Pathologies” of reason: That’s a good phrase. “The attempt to be purely rational is irrational, as the most rational people have always known.” --C.S. Lewis. Not a word for word quote, but pretty close.
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Truthstalker
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In contrast, I suppose, to someone else’s pope, seemingly a stout admirer of pathologies.:whacky:
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Ani_Ibi
Guest
Yes, and with Truthstalker.
cpayne said:
I like it too.
cpayne said:
He sounds like a hockey fan.
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anthony022071
Guest
The Pope has written extensively on the pathologies of reason,progress,science,technology,medicine which go back to ideas like “Whatever can be done,should be done” or “Whatever is good for science,capitalism,etc., is truly good.” He knows exactly what the philosophical problems are today.
“But there also exists a pathology of reason that is completely detatched from God,as we have seen in the totalitarian ideologies that parted company with God and wanted to construct the new man,the new world.”
“…intellectual developments tend ever more toward destructive pathologies of reason. Was not the atomic bomb already a transgression of boundaries,where reason refused to be a constructive force but instead sought its strength in the ability to destroy? Now that reason is reaching for the very roots of life in its investigation of the genetic code, there is an increasing tendency to stop seeing man as a gift of the Creator (or of “nature”) and to make him a product. Man is “made,” and what what one can “make” one can also unmake. Human dignity dissolves. And where are we then to find an anchor for human rights? How is respect for man – even the one who is conquered,weak,suffering,or handicapped – to survive?”
Values in a Time of Upheaval, page 109-110
“But there also exists a pathology of reason that is completely detatched from God,as we have seen in the totalitarian ideologies that parted company with God and wanted to construct the new man,the new world.”
“…intellectual developments tend ever more toward destructive pathologies of reason. Was not the atomic bomb already a transgression of boundaries,where reason refused to be a constructive force but instead sought its strength in the ability to destroy? Now that reason is reaching for the very roots of life in its investigation of the genetic code, there is an increasing tendency to stop seeing man as a gift of the Creator (or of “nature”) and to make him a product. Man is “made,” and what what one can “make” one can also unmake. Human dignity dissolves. And where are we then to find an anchor for human rights? How is respect for man – even the one who is conquered,weak,suffering,or handicapped – to survive?”
Values in a Time of Upheaval, page 109-110
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Ani_Ibi
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When I was at school, my prof used to make the distinction between invention and creation. We were taking a book called Lillith by George MacDonald. Lillith believed that she had invented herself.
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cpayne
Guest
Highly recommended book along this line: “Begotten or Made?” by Oliver O’Donovan. Remember the contested line from one of the Creeds: Christ is “begotten not made” of the Father (and therefore equally God with the Father). O’Donovan’s question is, “What happens to the treatment of Human B by Human A when Human B is ‘made’ genetically by Human A, not begotten?” “Made” seems to imply a lesser being, while we “beget” equals.
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Greg27
Guest
I think the 20th century was the age of unreason, in the sense there was a massive rejection of authority, tradition and rationality in favour of pluralism, skepticism, irrationality, materialism and consumerism, and also a rejection of virtue and ethics (at least in their absolute or religiously-informed forms).
Some of these rejections go back to the Renaissance and Enlightenment and have been very positive, especially when it came to the explosive growth of science. But a lot of it was also very negative, particularly in terms of the madness of movements like Nazism and Communism which destroyed millions of human beings to create ‘paradise on Earth.’
Hopefully in the 21st century a more reasonable balance between doubt and faith will be achieved in all areas of human life.
Some of these rejections go back to the Renaissance and Enlightenment and have been very positive, especially when it came to the explosive growth of science. But a lot of it was also very negative, particularly in terms of the madness of movements like Nazism and Communism which destroyed millions of human beings to create ‘paradise on Earth.’
Hopefully in the 21st century a more reasonable balance between doubt and faith will be achieved in all areas of human life.
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