Madam, - Apropos William Reville's claim that the Catholic Church accorded a privileged position to reason, Morgan Stack asks (August 28th): "Is this the same church that argued against the existence of a spherical earth, that continues to argue against evolution and that refuses to recognise quantum physics? A privileged position to reason?"
Mr Stack has apparently swallowed whole the flat earth history of the now-discredited Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918) who originated the lie that Columbus had to overcome flat earthers in Spain to win backing for his voyage in 1492.
In fact every educated person of Columbus's time knew the earth was a sphere - because they were educated in Catholic universities which had taught the sphericity of the earth in some cases as early as the time of the Venerable Bede (AD 673-735).
In fact Columbus was opposed because he hopelessly underestimated the circumference of the earth - a mistake that would have killed him had it not been for the existence of the Americas - something he knew absolutely nothing about.
As for "the Enlightenment", it was the name given not by scientists to the 18th century arrival of the Newtonian understanding of the universe, but to self-glorificatory popularisers of that revolution such as Voltaire - who elected themselves as "the enlightened ones". Newton himself was a devout if unorthodox Christian. (And Voltaire invested in the African slave trade.) John Locke, whose thinking gave so much to the "human rights" philosophy of the American constitution, admitted his own debt to scholastic theologians who had stressed the dignity of every human individual. In other words, the "enlightened" notion of human rights emerged out of the Christian belief that we have binding obligations to one another - an understanding we are now in serious danger of losing.
As for the theory of evolution, I was taught in a Catholic school in the era of John Charles McQuaid that there was no fundamental incompatibility between Catholic teaching and evolutionary theory. That the same church would condemn quantum physics is even more laughable.
Christianity was never reducible to biblical fundamentalism.
Mr Stack has swallowed whole a historical paradigm that the huge majority of professional historians no longer support: of the Middle Ages as a period of stagnation, overthrown by a heroic secular enlightenment.
This is secularism's "Grand Narrative" - exploded by decades of research into the very considerable achievements of the Middle Ages.
William Reville is right. Secularist fundamentalists need to update their historical knowledge from the best secular sources, including Rodney Stark. It was the German atheist philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, who wrote recently: "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilisation. . . To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is post-modern chatter." -
Yours, etc, SEÁN Ó CONAILL, Greenhill Road, Coleraine.