Are we up to the challenge to answer what made men turn from brute force and decide to reason with one another?

Pope Benedict XVI is asking the West to examine our beliefs, the way the ancient Greeks did, and ponder the question: Do we really know what we are talking about when we talk about faith, reason, God, and community?

In a beautifully written philosophical essay by Lee Harris in The Weekly Standard, Socrates or Muhammad?, Mr. Harris tells us that Pope Benedict believes that the encounter between the message in the Bible and Greek thought was providential, was of immense importance to world history, and it is “a legacy that is under attack, both from those who do not share it, namely Islam, and from those who are its beneficiaries and do not understand it, namely, Western intellectuals.”

The man behind the Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, worries that we think we know what we are talking about when we talk about difficult things life faith and reason because we are limited by “modern reason”, which is a narrower concept than reason under the Greeks.

Why? Because, as Harris points out,

…The Greeks felt that they could reason about anything and everything--about the immortality of the soul, metempsychosis, the nature of God, the role of reason in the universe, and so on. Modern reason, from the time of Kant, has repudiated this kind of wild speculative reason. For modern reason, there is no point in even asking such questions, because there is no way of answering them scientifically.

… Modern reason argues that questions of ethics, of religion, and of God are outside its compass. Because there is no scientific method by which such questions can be answered, modern reason cannot concern itself with them, nor should it try to. From the point of view of modern reason, all religious faiths are equally irrational, all systems of ethics equally unverifiable, all concepts of God equally beyond rational criticism. But if this is the case, then what can modern reason say when it is confronted by a God who commands that his followers should use violence and even the threat of death in order to convert unbelievers?

…Can modern reason really stand on the sidelines of a clash between a religion that commands jihad and a religion that forbids violent conversion?

… can modern reason hope to survive as reason at all if it insists on reducing the domain of reasonable inquiry to the sphere of scientific inquiry? If modern reason cannot…see that [Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus’] religion is more reasonable than the religion of those who preach and practice jihad, if it cannot condemn as unreasonable a religion that forces atheists and unbelievers to make a choice between their intellectual integrity and death, then modern reason may be modern, but it has ceased to be reason.

...The typical solution to the problem of ethics and religion offered by modern reason is quite simple: Let the individual decide such matters himself, by whatever means he wishes. If a person prefers Islam over Christianity, or Jainism over Methodism, that is entirely up to him. All such choices, from the perspective of modern reason, are equally leaps of faith, or simply matters of taste; hence all are equally irrational. Ratzinger recognizes this supposed solution, but he sees the fatal weakness in it.

…If the individual is free to choose between violence and reason, it will become impossible to create a community in which all the members restrict themselves to using reason alone to obtain their objectives. …Brute force and terror quickly extinguish rational dialogue and debate.

…Modern reason, to be sure, cannot prove scientifically that a community of reasonable men is ethically superior to a community governed by violent men. But a critique of modern reason from within must recognize that a community of reasonable men is a necessary precondition of the very existence of modern reason. He who wills to preserve and maintain the achievements of modern reason must also will to live in a community made up of reasonable men who abstain from the use of violence to enforce their own values and ideas. Such a community is the a priori ethical foundation of modern reason. Thus, modern reason, despite its claim that it can give no scientific advice about ethics and religion, must recognize that its own existence and survival demand both an ethical postulate and a religious postulate. The ethical postulate is: Do whatever is possible to create a community of reasonable men who abstain from violence, and who prefer to use reason. The religious postulate is: If you are given a choice between religions, always prefer the religion that is most conducive to creating a community of reasonable men, even if you don't believe in it yourself.

…Modern reason cannot hope to prove these postulates to be scientifically true; but it must recognize that a refusal to adopt and act on these postulates will threaten the very survival of modern reason itself. That is the point of Ratzinger's warning that "the West has long been endangered by [its] aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby." Because it is ultimately a community of reasonable men that underlies the rationality of the West, modern reason is risking suicide by not squarely confronting the question: How did such a community of reasonable men come into being in the first place? By what miracle did men turn from brute force and decide to reason with one another?

[Pope Benedict XVI] [Reason] [Christianity] [Islam] [jihad] [Western civilization]