A chara, – Prof David McConnell claims (September 24th) that "Science has been taking the place of faith for many people for thousands of years from Cicero to Galileo, Kant, Darwin and Einstein". This is surely a somewhat questionable claim. All of these great thinkers, including Einstein, believed in one way or another in a reality beyond the natural world that empirical science explores.
Had Prof McConnell used the terms “reason” instead of “science” and “religion” instead of “faith”, then the sentence would have made some sense. In other words, “reason has taken the place of religion since Cicero, etc”. And there is a certain truth in this assertion.
Religion is the complex of values and rites that surround the nodal experiences of life, such as birth, marriage, death, and the inauguration of political authorities; it is not to be identified with faith, which also finds expression in and through such rites. It was the ancient Greek philosophers who discovered the fullness of reason, ie its ability to grasp the existence of that which transcends the empirical world. (Cicero got his inspiration from them.) This discovery was by means of a critique of both the religion they had inherited and the narrowing of reason to rationalism by their contemporaries, the Sophists.
From the start, Christian thinkers found their allies in the Greek philosophers (and so recognised the importance of Cicero and preserved his texts for posterity). Christian faith, like that of the Old Testament prophets, also involved a profound critique of religion as mere ritual. The irony is that the Humanist Association of Ireland is developing into an ersatz religion by providing alternative rituals for birth, marriage, and death – and being represented at the inauguration of the President.
Reason – our capacity for truth – is, in its fullness, one that has not lost its capacity for wonder, and so is open to the transcendent. By comparison, the rationalism of the modern scientific mentality assumes, with no convincing evidence, that nothing exists apart from the empirical realm. Reason, in short, needs faith to keep it open to the beyond – just as faith needs reason, if it is not to narrow its vision and degenerate into mere ritualism or, worse, fanaticism. Reason in its fullness is therefore critical of a merely ritualistic religion, including that offered by the new atheist church in Ireland or by the Catholic Church, should it allow itself to be reduced to simply being a provider of rites of passage for its own community – to the detriment of that faith which moves mountains and, more challengingly, opens minds. – Is mise,
Rev Dr D VINCENT
TWOMEY, SVD
Professor Emeritus
of Theology,
Maynooth, Co Kildare.