| | Jim Tonkowich |  |
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| | | The sign on the wall in the professor’s office stated his worldview clearly and succinctly: “If It Can’t Be Measured, It Doesn’t Exist.”
While most of our friends and neighbors may not go quite that far, they nonetheless believe that what can be measured—that is, what can be known by science—is the “real” world of facts and truth. What cannot be measured—morality, theology, even things like justice and love—may exist, but is purely subjective. That water boils at 100˚ Celsius is everyone’s truth. The Christian Gospel, the meaning of marriage, and what constitutes a just law are values, not truths—except in the odd sense that Christianity may be “true” for me and not “true” for you.
Sharing the Christian message—a message that claims to be true for all people at all times—in this intellectual environment is a challenge, as you, no doubt, have discovered. And it was this very challenge that Pope Benedict XVI faced when he spoke to the German parliament, the Bundestag, on September 22. In his speech, Pope Benedict not only defended what he called “the true foundation of law,” but also gave us an example of careful apologetics and thoughtful evangelism tailored to the worldview of the secular West.
“Politics must be a striving for justice,” he began, and then quoted the fifth-century theologian St. Augustine, who said, “Without justice—what is the State but a great band of robbers?” Germans, the pope reminded his audience, are more aware than most people of what happens when the state is controlled by “a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.”
In most cases, he noted, majority vote can bring justice, but not all cases. After all, that “highly organized band of robbers” enacted genocidal policies that attacked all of humanity. In response, most of the German people went along with the crowd. True justice requires more than just measuring and stating facts.
Measurements and facts tell us what is. They never tell us what ought to be. That is, you can’t get from measurement to morality, from facts to justice. Science can take a poll and can tell us that most mothers love their babies. But a scientific poll cannot tell us that mothers ought to love their babies. What mothers ought to do is a question of morality and religion. In a just-the-facts worldview, however, these are, as the pope put it, “extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word.” Morality and religion belong in the private world of our subjectivity and, thus, far from any debate in any public square.
Yet at the same time, secular people want to make moral statements. They want to say that certain things ought to be. These are the anomalies in their worldview that, for the most part, they choose to ignore unless someone points them out. The pope did just that by bringing up one particularly striking anomaly: the secularists’ favorite idol, the Earth.
We have, he said, “come to realize that something is wrong with our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives.”
Environmentalists happily move from what is to what ought to be. Earth has a dignity and rights. Green is good. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—or else. Nature, they seem to indicate, has a nature beyond mere scientifically verifiable facts. “We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly,” said the pope.
I can see the heads at the Bundestag nodding agreement and then stopping suddenly as he added, “Yet I would like to underline a point that seems to me to be neglected, today as in the past: There is an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will.”
No self-respecting secular member of the Bundestag—or the U.S. Congress for that matter—will disagree over the need to respect the nature of the Earth. Fine, said the pope, if Earth has a nature that is objective, how can we deny that human beings have an objective nature as well? And if we have to work with, not against, Earth’s nature, doesn’t it stand to reason that we have to work with not against human nature? Questions of life, liberty, marriage, human rights, and ecology (to name only a few) must take into consideration this fixed human nature if justice is to be done. But a fixed human nature is precisely what secular people want to reject despite the fact that they can’t live without it.
After pointing out the anomalies, the pope pushed the point a bit further. If Earth has an objective nature that moves us from what is to what ought to be, some rational will must have endowed Earth with its nature. “Is it pointless,” the pope asked, “to wonder whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose a creative reason, a Creator Spiritus?” Rather than being a subjective “truth,” God is a necessary objective truth.
Like the members of the Bundestag, many of our neighbors unreflectively hold to a secular and positivist worldview. The “scientific” notion that only facts and functionality matter pervades their thinking. Religion and ethics, as sociologist Christian Smith has demonstrated, are viewed as subjective, private, and personal.
At the same time, beginning with the environment, people want to make objective claims about what we ought to believe and how we ought to live. Going green, they claim, is an objective moral obligation. They want it both ways, something that is impossible.
This fact, as the pope understands and demonstrated in this speech, can be the lever that pries open the closed and ultimately futile worldview infecting our neighbors. Breaking their illusion is an act of genuine love.
Pope Benedict has given us an outstanding example of how that love can be applied. Studying his arguments can reinforce our own worldview and prepare us to supply an answer “to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).
Copyright 2011 James Tonkowich. All rights reserved. Originally published November 29, 2011 at BreakPoint.org.
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