Let's turn to the question then that Ratzinger takes up middle of [page] 99.
“Even today,” he says at the top “we do not limit ourselves to the question: ‘What
can I do?’
We also ask: ‘What ought I to do, and who am I?’”
Because we're going from technological questions, right, what is possible, to moral and philosophical
questions, what is obligatory, what, what am I?
Questions of philosophical anthropology, questions of existential import, questions of personal
identity: What am I?
What kind of [person] am I?
What kind of people are we?
What kind of research should we fund?, etc.
What kind of values will inform what I do and what we do?
“There are of course cosmological evolutionist systems that elevate the non-existence of
God to the level of an obvious truth of reason and claim thereby to demonstrate that the
truth is precisely that there is no God.
But this type of general theory of knowledge betrays its own methodological character in
essential points: the enormous gaps in our knowledge are filled by a series of mythological
‘theatrical props’ with a fictitious rationality that will not deceive anyone.
It is an obvious fact that the rational character of the universe cannot be explained rationally
on the basis of something irrational!
This is why the Logos that is at the origin of all things remains more than ever the best
hypothesis.”
Let’s talk about that.
STUDENT: Logos is logic, right?
What’s that?
STUDENT: Is Logos logic?
Logos means reason or logic.
But also discourse and truth and it’s one of the names of God in the Christian traditions.
That's actually what he's getting at, is that, when he says Christianity is a religion of
logos, he says it is a religion of reason, especially in its Catholic form.
And therefore to believe in God is to believe in reason in some way.
It means to have a sort of obligation to have a worked out philosophy, philosophical explanation.
So what does he call, what does he talk about, what does he mean at the top of this page,
by “these cosmological evolutionist systems”?
STUDENT: The Big Bang Theory?
I don't think he's thinking about the Big Bang in particular.
I think he's thinking about something more on the line of an evolutionist, an evolutionary
account of being, the Big Bang would fit into it…
STUDENT: [unintelligible] Yeah, this is sort of, this is the…
STUDENT: [unintelligible] It might, though I don't think social darwinism
is a necessary consequence of actually having a certain theory about the origin of human
beings.
You don't have to become a social darwininst.
You could, but it doesn’t look like it’s obligatory.
STUDENT: What I meant [unintelligible] survival of the fittest…
Yeah, that is, apply that, apply that in the social sphere and you’ve got social darwinism.
It’s a kind of political and ethical viewpoint.
I don't think it follows, it harmonizes with but it's not a necessarily consequence of
this.
To call it a cosmological system is to say it's a theory of, a theory of the universe
and the cosmos and its ultimate origin.
We’re familiar with this with this point of view and this narrative: human origins
are evolutionary and materialistic in character.
Mentions…
I think what Ratzinger is focusing on here on page 99 is that under this, this system
elevates the belief that there's no God to realm of an obvious truth, not even really
worth discussing.
And most crucially for the question I’ve raised in this class, there's no intelligence
behind things.
Meaning that once you understand how this happened, it's something that has no further
rational explanation.
So there's no rational explanation for why humans are the way they are beyond this.
I mentioned this, I think, last class when I said, “Why is it that we do what we do?”
Well, it has to be because it helped our ancestors to survive, to become our ancestors, to thrive
and outcompete in the environment, the material environment in which they found themselves.
There's no other explanation for it, right.
Evolution doesn't pick and choose the beautiful, except if the beautiful is advantageous to
survival and success.
We have reason.
We have some impulse towards religion.
These things must have been adaptive at some point in our species’ past.
You guys are familiar with this general line of thinking?
Or at least if I’m articulating it now, it makes a kind of sense, it’s not completely
unknown.
What's Ratzinger’s critique though?
He says, here at the bottom, “It is an obvious fact the rational character of the universe
cannot be explained rationally on the basis of something irrational,” exclamation point.
What is his line of attack on this?
He’s saying basically this this entire system is inadequate, it doesn't work, there's something
wrong with it.
He begins with the rational character of the universe: the universe has rational character.
It is rational in a certain fashion, maybe by meaning precisely what we talked about..
It seems to be governed by laws which are intelligible, understandable.
Intelligible laws.
That if we want to provide an explanation for this universe…
What's his objection to the cosmological system, the evolutionary system he's just referred
to, that I’ve sketched out here?
STUDENT: Would you repeat the question?
What's his objection to this cosmological explanation for the universe, this evolutionist
account of the universe?
He says there's a problem.
STUDENT: [unintelligible] Right, that's it.
That's a problem here.
The evolutionist account says the universe has a non-rational origin.
There's no rationality in the coming-to-be of the universe, there's no creation story.
There is no rationality in the development of the universe, including the human beings
who are part of it, and the human knowledge and thought that is part of it.
So that's option one.
The problem here is that we’re trying to use the non-rational to explain the rational.
What that means I think ultimately is that the rational isn't what it claims to be.
We think of rationality as giving us access to the way things truly are, as uniting us
to reality in a certain sense.
It looks very difficult to account for that kind of unity with reality on the assumption
that what's really happening here has ultimately a non-rational origin and foundation.
A sort of hard evolutionist account of rationality might be: that rationality is a tool that
our ancestors developed which helped them to survive in their environment, to outbreed
their competition.
It all comes down to differential reproductive success.
Plus accidents, accidents can happen.
Bit of luck involved in evolutionary fate.
But if we have reason, a highly developed faculty reason today, but other animals do
not, it's because at some point in the past a highly developed faculty of rationality
aided in our survival, relative to other candidates for survival who didn't make it.
That's the only way to account for the existence of a faculty or a feature, on a purely biological
evolutionary account.
You guys with me so far?
This I think is what's in the background, what Ratzinger is, is presuming in the background
of his case.
What's his alternative?
“This is why the Logos that is at the origin of all things remains more than ever the best
hypothesis.”
Logos here means reason, but also for Ratzinger it means God, a God who is rational and who
has created the universe, right, this is the origin and foundation, explanation of the
universe.
Why is the universe law governed?
Why are these laws accessible to human intellect?
Why is it that we who are fallible and broken in so many ways are able to actually understand
something like relativity theory, with great deal of effort obviously?
How are we able to grasp the way things are?
Well it's because both our minds and the things that we are knowing come from this common
origin in the reason, the Logos, of God.
God has made the world so as to be open to knowledge by our minds.
He's made us with the capacity to know the reality that He's made.
And this also then takes you to the edge of the insight that maybe God also has made us
with the capacity to know God to some degree and in some way, in some fashion.
So the universe is not a fundamentally irrational place, it's a rational place because of this
divine Logos, because it came from and is in some sense returning to the reason that
is its ultimate foundation.
The choice he's presenting here is kind of between a fun, a view that he thinks ultimately
has to say the sort of bottom level ground floor foundational account of ourselves and
the world is not rational.
So that what we get at higher levels may be only the appearance and the illusion of rationality.
Versus he thinks a rationality that is true to itself, for which he says the best hypothesis,
but not certainly the only one, not one that we are compelled to believe, but the best
hypothesis is the Logos Hypothesis.
That yeah there is some kind of divine being, maybe organized religion has it wrong about
the details but in the general cosmological sense in terms of explaining the universe,
this explanation he thinks is superior to this one because this one involves a kind
of contradiction that you try to pull rationality out of irrationality.
If that's the case, rationality isn’t what it seems to be from the start.
That might just be the hard truth, you know.
You can be a consistent evolutionist and say it's just a bitter pill to swallow.
You have to realize that all the things that we thought were knowledge that we thought
were grasping reality are in fact artifacts of this adaptive faculty that we have, that
aided our ancestors in surviving, that aids us in surviving now.
But that's that's what's really going on there.
It's not something more rational than that.
We just have to accept it.
Thoughts on this?
I’ve spent a long time on this one page and this one argument because it seems to
me that this is something that sort of gets at a major theme of the course, which is the
intelligibility of the cosmos.
The question of, if we're going forward in our minds, with our lives outside of philosophy,
we'll be thinking about quite a few different things, whether your major is accounting or
it’s physics or chemistry or criminology.
Philosophy is one of these things which deals with our overall sort of cosmological world
picture, our idea of our explanation the universe and our place in it.
Ratzinger is speaking to features of these things right here.
A sort of materialist account which would be evolutionary and satisfactory in some ways,
but not ultimately satisfactory in the intellectual sense, he thinks.
Versus this other system which he's asking people to take a chance on.
This wager type argument.
Thoughts on this?