The Joy of the Truth » Good, True and Beautiful

The Dark Side of Science as Religion

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:50:45 +0000

A dark side can be found for anything. Certainly the Catholic Church has had its dark moments. After all, it is full of sinners. However, one can convincingly make the argument that the dark side of Catholicism is not due to its doctrine, but due to the failure of people to live up to its doctrine. When science attempts to replace religion as the source of meaning in life, the dark side becomes inherent in its doctrine. After all, for a naturalist the purpose of life stops at the propagation of the species. Naturalists are confronted with personal angst when they face death. Neither are platitudes absent from such a worldview. Telling a widow that her husband will “live in on our memories” is nothing short of a naturalist platitude. There is no afterlife, but our individual lives continue in the memories of others and in the genes we managed to hand down to the next generation. What true value can an individual life have in such a philosophy?

A scientific religion would probably have few mystics. However, one who might qualify for the role would be H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s modern Gothic horror fiction carries a single message – the universe is brutally apathetic about the individual person. His horror is often grounded in secular evolutionary philosophies – the monsters in one story turn out to be de-evolved human beings. Supernatural elements tend to be alien or demonic forces, with no recourse to supernatural Goodness in sight. Horrors go on under the surface of human awareness all the time, and the universe doesn’t care.

One story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” begins with a doctrinal statement about Truth.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

In Catholic thought, the disassociation of elements of truth leads to error. We do not read the Bible as a collection of proof texts (that is why most Catholics do not memorize chapter and verse), but as a whole. We do not support science separated from philosophy, theology and divine Wisdom. The totality of Truth leads to He who is Truth, Goodness and Beauty Himself.

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We Have Come Full Circle

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:43:32 +0000

If it seems at times that my blog posts are not in sync with current events, it’s because most of them are a product of my meandering ponderings as I work in the garden, take a shower, or spend (distracted) time before the Blessed Sacrament. I was mulling on these thoughts as I was clearing my garden, getting it ready for winter.

I was thinking about our culture’s obsession with what it calls “science.” How did we get to the point where scientists can comment on areas of life not observable by science (such as God) and be embraced as experts? How did we get to the point where scientists assume that knowledge within the realm of science are matters of personal conviction rather than objective truth? How did we get to the point that “scientists” make assumptions about where human life begins, the side-effects of contraception, contraception and abortion as “women’s health,” in-vitro fertilization as the best option for infertile women, a biological genesis of homosexuality, etc. are made without scientific evidence? Then it occurred to me. Our culture is once again embracing “authority” as a source of truth.

Arguments using authority as a source for truth used to be very common. People who had proven themselves as trusted experts in an area were cited as proof in support of a thesis. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas often cited “The Philosopher” (Aristotle) and “The Apostle” (St. Paul). It was not necessary for Aquinas to prove what these two authorities said; the fact that they said it was proof enough. Such weight of proof was based on trust. Cited authorities had proven themselves and general consensus trusted their conclusions. Of course, for Catholics the ultimate authority was God. Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition were trusted because throughout history God had proven Himself trustworthy.

Many historians mark Descartes as the beginning of the rejection of arguments by authority. His famous dictum, “I think therefore I am,” was an assertion that the only truth of which one can be absolutely certain is his own thought. In truth, rejection of authority began before Descartes. After the medieval period of history culture began to turn more and more toward humanism, rejecting God as the source of all truth. The Protestant Reformation damaged trust in authority by casting doubt on the authority of Sacred Tradition and on the Magisterial authority instituted by Christ. Interpretation of scripture, which was seen as the only legitimate authority remaining, was left up to each individual. The Renaissance was a celebration of human ability, even though much of the subject matter in art and literature was still religious. Arguments by authority were cast in suspicious light. By the enlightenment arguments by authority were completely rejected in favor only of truth that could be proven by science and reason. By the twentieth century even reason had been rejected so that only science was considered a trustworthy source of truth.

Today scientists and “professionals” are trusted as authorities because the assumption is made that their claims to truth are based on science. There is a very large difference between the modern and the ancient reliance on tradition. Whereas the traditional use of authority was based on trust of the individual, modern use of authority is based only on the often erroneous assumption of scientific validity. “Well, he has a PhD, he must know what the science says about the subject.” Furthermore, while an appeal to authority was traditionally seen as a valid proof for an argument, it did not stand alone. Even appeals to divinely inspired authority (Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition) were paired with further proof from reason and science. Today, the word of an authority is typically accepted uncritically without need for further proof.

In one sense we have come full circle, back to the use of authority as proof. On the other hand, our current resting point is not the same place at all. While we continue to reject established authorities such as Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas and even God Himself, we readily and uncritically embrace unproven authorities simply because of their social status as “professionals.” In the end, by ignoring solid claims to truth through science, reason and trusted authority and embracing the unfounded opinions of so-called “professionals,” we have set ourselves up to be duped.

A related book at the From the Abbey Bookstore!

The Truth of Things by Marion Montgomery.

Against the modernist belief that truth is subjective, Montgomery promotes a return to classical philosophy and logic. She uncovers a world of academia where meaningless themed classes such as “the Literature of Vampires” have replaced systematic learning. Marion Montgomery also analyzes how this trend has affected our culture as a whole. Anti-intellectualism has even grasped the Catholic culture, and we need to be aware of its presence. Montgomery’s writing is academic and heady. You may find it difficult to absorb for long periods of time. However, this is one of those books for which perseverance pays off. The ideas Montgomery presents are absolutely enlightening.

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Thinking and Intelligence aren’t the Same as Wisdom

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:14:57 +0000

I was talking to my mom about politics yesterday. We were sharing our frustration with all of the negative ads that seem to be hitting a crescendo in the last week before the election. We were also sharing our incredulity at the number of Catholics and non-Catholic Christians who seem to be defending their vote for the pro-choice Barak Obama, even though he has promised to sign the “Freedom of Choice Act” into law as his first act as president. I shared with my mother one example of my frustration.

A recent editorial in our local newspaper made the following claim:

It really makes me sad and I can’t see how anyone with a Christian conscience can vote McCain-Palin ticket. Vote for McCain, vote for the alcohol industry. Oh, they are against abortion but apparently not against liquor and they neglect to mention that the McCains are making a killing, in more ways than one, on the alcohol industry. I guess you aren’t as dead when you have been killed by a drunken driver. Try telling that to the family of the mother and 10-year-old daughter who were killed by a former surgeon after his third drunken driving offense.

I don’t want to see anyone killed but I think it would be poetic justice if it was your family and not mine killed or maimed by alcohol which is the industry McCains make a living from. How can you be this blind.

Apparently McCain has family members who are high up in the management of some major businesses in the alcohol industry. Therefore, a vote for McCain is a vote in favor of drunk driving and alcoholism. Therefore, the writer of this letter concludes that a vote for McCain is just as pro-death as a vote for Obama. Q.E.D.

If I need to explain to you how ridiculous this argument is, I’ll buy you a pizza and a beer some time and we can talk.

My expression of frustration was, “People just don’t think.”

My mom replied, “Oh, people are thinking. That doesn’t mean they’re thinking right.”

Ah, the wisdom of my mother. That must be where I get it from, eh?

My mom’s statement hit me because I had just been reading about the supernatural virtue of temperance in the book Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann. This is the book on which I have been meditating during Eucharistic adoration each week. What struck me was a small paragraph on intellectual intemperance.

Fr. Vann said that there are two kinds of intemperance of the mind

to use the truth simply as a means of profit & pleasure
to twist the truth and pervert it

Both of these errors sacrifice reverence for the truth, which is an expression of Truth Himself.

It occurred to me that the problem with American culture is not that we don’t think at all (which might be considered the sin of intellectual insensibility), but that we use our intelligence to rationalize evil. Rationalizing evil actually commits both aspects of intellectual intemperance. When we rationalize, we use parts of the truth to explain away an evil for our own profit and pleasure, and we have to twist and pervert the truth in order to make it fit our desires.

The American culture has become very good at rationalizing evil. Moreover, doing so has become a firmly entrenched habit. The problem is not that America is less intellectual than it should be, or that people do not think. The problem is that American does not know how to correctly handle truth. We think, and we are proud of our “enlightened thinking,” but we do not think rightly.

Way to go, Mom. You put your finger right on it.

The Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann.

family

Cheaters Never Prosper

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:37:00 +0000

Ok, “cheaters never prosper” is a cliche. But so is “every law was meant to be broken,” yet we hear this saying much more often – in word or idea. Our country is currently suffering from the greedy cheating of people associated with the Annie Mae and Freddie Mac companies. In 2002 we heard about a number of scholars who had plagiarized or otherwise misrepresented themselves and their scholarly work. At that time, U.S. News and World Report carried the article, “Our Cheating Hearts.”

The article begins:

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once claimed that “mutual cheating is the foundation of society.” For as long as there have been rules, it seems, there have been cheaters.

I would like to know the context of Pascal’s statement. He was, after all, a Catholic scholar and I find it difficult to believe that he was so defeatist. This statement, like “every law was meant to be broken,” indicates (with a wink and a smirk) that cheating is natural to human beings.

When we are faced with human depravity, we tend to defend our sensibilities in two ways. First, we try to shrug it off by convincing ourselves that it is inevitable or normal or inevitable. Second, we try to find a psychological explanation.

What’s going on here? Doesn’t anyone play by the rules? On Wall Street, the one-two punch of greed and competition is to blame, says journalist James Stewart. His coverage of the 1987 stock crash and insider-trading scandals earned him a Pulitzer and became the foundation of his bestseller Den of Thieves. All that money sloshing around, he says, “can drive people into a frenzy. . . . You’re thrown in that competitive situation at a very early age and exhorted to win at all costs.” And that win-at-all-costs ethic, critics say, is the foundation of the cheating culture.

In Hollywood, “you can get away with your embezzlements and your lies, and your murders, but you can never get away with failing,” according to Dominick Dunne, celebrated chronicler of the powerful and notorious. The pressure to succeed–and the fear of failure–Dunne says, is the perfect prescription for cheating. It may also be the root of widespread cheating among students. Consider: Seventy-four percent of high school students admitted to “serious test cheating” last year. That’s more than double the number who admitted this in 1969.

Certainly an overemphasis on success leads to cheating. I see this in high school students and their parents, or example. Sometimes we even get parents defending or even abetting the cheating by their children and offering the excuse, “Well, she has to get into college and she can’t do that without a good grade in this class.”

Obsession with success and the willingness to sacrifice integrity show a degradation of priorities and a false sense of happiness – a willingness to sacrifice transcendent goods such as honesty, truth and integrity for the sake of temporal, imperfect, and insecure goods such as money and success. Obsession with success brings constant dissatisfaction and cheating does nothing to alleviate the unhappiness caused by a disordered life.

Of course, there are other reasons for cheating as well:

But pressure to succeed isn’t a complete explanation. Undeniably, there is an almost romantic appeal to “beating the system”–particularly if the system, whether it’s the speed limit or the stock market, is perceived as rigged or unfair. Take the tax code, for instance. Nearly everyone thinks he or she pays too much or that others don’t pay enough. So Americans cheat to the tune of $195 billion a year, according to the Internal Revenue Service. That amounts to a whopping $1,600 per taxpayer.

While the first cause of cheating is a false sense of true happiness, the second is a false idea of the purpose of authority. “Sticking it to the man” has been in vogue since the 1960′s. Actually, it has been part of the American culture since the American Revolution when True Whigs held a philosophy that held all authority suspect. Americans hold that individuals need to grab all they can for themselves while authority attempts to keep them from it.

However, the truth is that authority is intended to lead us to authentic goodness, especially when our own weaknesses or ignorance would make attaining that goodness more difficult if not impossible. Often our attempt to “stick it to the man” or to “beat the system” are like my two-and-a-half-year-old’s stubborn refusal to wear pants.

And think about the reasons people give for cheating. We steal cable because “the prices are a rip-off.” We fudge insurance claims because “the rates are sky high.” We pocket office supplies because “the company can afford it.” All these rationalizations suggest people are perversely cheating to restore fairness. Is this tolerable?

Yes, sometimes the explanation of why we cheat is just that we’re selfish and whiny. We tend to think we are never getting enough because we are never satisfied with what we have.

So, whether we are revealing our messed-up priorities, our hubris, or our selfishness, we sacrifice much when we cheat. Cheaters destroy their personal integrity – the virtue of being who you were created to be. What’s more, since human beings are created to receive Truth, cheaters do great harm to justice between them and others, therefore isolating them from the bond of trust that creates a society. And what do we gain? A stapler? A few hundred dollars that we’ll spend foolishly anyway? A good grade that won’t even be remembered ten years from now? Even those people who rise to positions of power and prestige by cheating live with the constant fear that they will be found the fraud.

Furthermore, all sin does harm to society

No wonder many are now asking if there’s been a major shift in cultural standards–whether cheating and deceit have become accepted tools of the trade in the never-ending quest for success.

We have an innate sense that cheating is evil. U.S. News & World Report, the consummate supporter of bad science, explains:

Yet there is tension here as well. As great as the urge to cheat may be, we also have an almost hard-wired hatred of cheaters and a deep-seated urge to punish them. In fact, studies have shown people will go to great lengths to ferret out and punish cheaters, even when doing so is costly and offers no material gain. According to sociologists, this instinct to punish rule-breakers may date to hunter-gatherer societies, which were highly egalitarian–there were no hierarchical leaders. So when it came to sharing food, for instance, these minisocieties had to work as a group to punish any freeloaders.

It amazes me that everything can be traced back to the “hunter-gatherer” era of human history, as if this era (inexplicably) forever defined human nature. Truth be told, every time the “hunter-gatherer” era is used as an explanation for modern human behavior, the connection is based on a total guess. There is no evidence. This pseudo-scientific explanation is a “socially acceptable” alternative to the acceptance of natural law. We know that cheating is bad because human beings were created for Truth.

As Catholics, we know through Divine Revelation that human beings once knew the perfect life, but that Original Sin damaged our intellect and our will. Therefore we are tempted toward sin and deceit, yet we still hold goodness as our ideal. Cheaters never prosper – not because they are never successful but because they sacrifice the reality of who they are meant to be for the myth of what they wish they had.

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Enjoying the Gift but Loving the Giver More

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:09:59 +0000

In our diocesan parenting program, “Teaching the Way of Love,” one of the points we make is that we need to teach our children how to receive love well in addition to teaching them how to give love. I tell the story of Christmas at my parents’ home and at the home of my in-laws.

At my wife’s family’s Christmas celebration the kids are turned loose at a designated time and everyone rips into their gifts in an atmosphere of joyful chaos. Adult eyes are everywhere, watching our own children opening gifts, trying to watch for our nieces and nephews opening the gifts we got them, watching our children try to steal their cousins’ toys, receiving words and hugs of thanks all at the same time.

At my own family’s Christmas celebration, everyone receives their gifts and then we take turns opening one gift at a time. So one person opens one gift, shows it to everyone, says thank you (with words – hugs come later), and then the next person opens one gift. The children get a little antsy to be able to open their gifts, but they do enjoy watching everyone else open theirs (and have to be reigned in once in a while when their desire to help gets a little overbearing). It takes a very long time to get through all of the gifts, and we’re usually hot and tired afterward. But the ritual is accomplished with much eating and much laughter.

I then ask the audience, at which celebration would you rather be the giver of the gift? Despite the fact that my description of my parents’ celebration always seems more boring than the actual event, the audience invariably chooses it over the celebration of my in-laws. Why? Because everyone is watching the recipient of the gift open it, taking the time to see what the gift is, taking time to appreciate it together, and sharing in the love behind it. Even gag gifts make their way into this ritual, signifying our knowledge of each other and an appreciation of our family’s collective sense of humor. The giver of the gift is appreciated at least as much as the gift itself.

Teaching our children to receive gifts well perhaps needs to go beyond reminding them to say “Thank you.” It may require parents to teach their children how to

recognize gifts that come in not-so-obvious forms that might otherwise go unappreciated
appreciate the meaning behind certain gifts, “This was your grandfather’s carving knife. He gave it to you because he hopes you’ll enjoy wood carving as much as he did.”
take the time to appreciate one gift before rushing on to another
learn how to appreciate gifts that were not on the wish list
learn how to accept disappointing gifts with graciousness and love

The main idea is to teach our children that the gift is a sign of love from the giver. The gift is meant to be enjoyed, but the giver of the gift should be appreciated and loved more. Think of the implications of teaching our children the art of receiving a gift well. Especially when they realize that all created goods are gifts from God, given to us as signs of His love.

What would it mean to move through life enjoying the gifts, but loving the Giver more? It would mean living a life of supernatural temperance. Temperance as a natural virtue helps us to find a balance in the enjoyment of physical goods and pleasures that is healthy for us spiritually and physically. Supernatural temperance adds to that healthy balance the awareness that every physical good and pleasure is imbued with the meaning of the love of God. When we focus on the Giver more than the gift, we are able to enjoy the gift even more because we receive both the goodness of the gift and the love of the Giver.

The implications for human relationships are the same. We would interact with others in an attitude of gratitude and love, recognizing all the ways that they offer themselves as gifts to us (and, of course, returning the gift of love in service to them as well). Battling selfishness and greed would be made easier by the enjoyment of the love of neighbor.

The implications for chastity are amazing. What would it mean to see sex within our romantic relationships as a gift? What would it mean to receive that gift well, to focus on the love of the giver more than on the gift itself? Sex before marriage would be seen as ripping into the gift early, without regard to the giver (since it does not yet reflect the true commitment of married love). However, the gift of one’s sexuality (the ability to give and receive love as a man or as a woman – which extends beyond the act of sex or even the context of romance) would be shared in the context of true love. Sex within marriage would be seen as a mutual gift of love, not just a means to pleasure. Of course, the pleasure is enjoyed as well – and even more since it comes with the awareness and sharing of love.

Focusing only on the gift (materialism) offers only temporary and incomplete happiness. Focusing on the giver leads to enjoyment of the gift, plus appreciation of the love of the giver. What a beautiful way to live our lives.

Check out these books at the From the Abbey bookstore about giving and receiving love.

Crystal Star Angel is about a boy who wins a special gift by discovering the true meaning of love. This is a great book for teaching children about giving and receiving gifts. This is a Christmas story.

Divine Pity explicitly makes the argument about supernatural temperance and the importance of loving the giver more than the gift.

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The Joy of the Truth » Good, True and Beautiful

The Dark Side of Science as Religion

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We Have Come Full Circle

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