It was with some reluctance that I first got involved with Tribunal ministry, since as a Traditional Catholic I bemoan the annulment crisis in North America. The fact I was extremely also suspicious of canon 1095, the canon with lists the psychological grounds vitiating marital consent, and the canon under which most marriages before a tribunal are declared null, didn't help either.
However, my Tribunal experience has been a real eye-opener, especially in light of the contraceptive and divorce mentality I encounter in most people, including Catholics. In fact, these mentalities are so pervasive within North American society that after four days on the Tribunal I found myself declaring as many marriages invalid as the next judge, often on a canon 1095 basis, and wondering to myself whether any marriage attempted today in North America is valid. In short, as a Traditional Catholic canonist, I can safely say that since the sexual devolution of the sixties, the rise in marriage annulments has not been because of the Second Vatican Council and a more liberal application of canon law, but because of a selfish and unrealistic understanding of what marriage entails by your average person entering into it.
But then again, we're often looking at people who have grown up watching pornographic sitcoms, who have been subjected to sex-ed programs more graphic than a gynecologist textbook fifty years ago, engaged in pre-marital sex since their early teens, most often shacked up two or three times by the time they marry, see children as an inconvenience, and suddenly we expect them to enter into a sacramental Christian marriage?
...Stop witnessing the marriage of every baptized Catholic who walks into the rectory and asks for one. There is much discussion of the high number of annulment cases processed in the US, in particular, but I have just a couple of things to say. First, the majority of couples coming to the Catholic Church to be married are a)living together and b)contracepting and are c)rarely challenged on this by those preparing them for marriage. Many of them are barely catechized on anything, are not regular Mass-goers until Mama gets it into her head that they must be married in the Church and the pastor sternly berates them for not being registered and not having envelopes - a far greater sin that cohabitating, you know - and you're telling me that these marriages are not rife with potential problems with validity?
The reality that the mere _category_ of a species designation is irrelevant to moral capacity is something we are going to have to confront sooner or later. Classifications are simplifications for ease of use: they are rarely either consistent across all usages and examples or reflective of detailed reality.Now, I agree to an extent with the mutability of species categories over time. As I wrote about a while back under Speciation and Nominalism, our most basic definitions of what makes a species (the primary one being that members of the same species can reproduce and bear fertile offspring) get tricky when you go back through time. Since a species is a population rather than an individual, its existence gradually becomes apparent as population groups drift apart.
If you aren't prepared to consider that the other modern apes, our closest living relatives, who are separated from us only by generations and the death of the intermediates, might deserve some moral consideration, where are we? What is morality even good for other than making humans feel important?
You love your mother. Your mother presumably loved your grandmother just as well. And so on. Are you suggesting that somewhere along that chain of familial love, there is a break where killing one of our ancestors for convenience was acceptable? Where does the chain break (it has to at some point, I don't deny that). Ultimately, the only way one can rationalize the sort of break that must come is by discussing functional capacity. At which point we're forced to admit that a brine shrimp has more concern for its own existence than a blastocyst.
Mark: There are some who label as America haters and traitors those of us who don't justify torture whenever King George wants it.After things took this usual direction, the redoubtable Zippy stepped in to say, "Yeah and we need an excruciatingly nuanced definition of pornography before we will have any idea that it is wrong too."
Opponents: We abhor what happened at Abu Graib (which wasn't government approved anyway), but we think there might be some legitimate uses of some high pressure interrogation tactics that some people might define as torture:
Mark Supporters: See, you're trying to justify torture right now. Don't say you don't know what torture it is. You can use any friggin' dictionary in the world.
8. ...Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from who pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34).
Barr's essay addresses at some length the question of design in biology, but does not clearly affirm that reason can grasp the reality of design without the aid of faith. If my reading is correct (and I hope I am wrong), in that respect Barr has followed the overwhelming trend of Catholic commentators on the question of neo-Darwinian evolution, who gladly discuss its compatibility with the truths of faith but seldom bother to discuss whether and how it is compatible with the truths of reason.There seems to me to be something very right about this line of thing, and also something somewhat wrong. The cardinal makes a very important point when he says that we do not know about God's creation of the universe only through faith. We can approach these truths by means of human reason unaided by divine revelation, as some of the ancient philosophers living centuries before Christ did indeed do with some success. This point is not made nearly often enough, and I think that it is very much a good thing that this area (including it's dogmatic statement in Vatican I) is getting so much attention these days, despite the fuzzy thinking that often follows on hard upon the introduction of the debate.
Perhaps now that the role of fideism is in view, I can profitably return to the question of the essential meaning of the term "neo-Darwinism." If, as many seem to think, neo-Darwinism serves as a valid "design-defeating hypothesis" at the level of human reason but is rescued from any ultimately improper conclusions only by the intervention of theology, then it seems that my expansive definition is fully vindicated. If reason is incapable of grasping real teleology in living things and their history, then neo-Darwinism -- which obviously is incapable of taking into account theological truths -- can truly be said to be a theory that asserts, in the words of my original essay, that evolution is "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection." What so many Catholics seem to be saying is that, so far as we can determine with our unaided human intellects, according to even the "metaphysically modest" version of neo-Darwinism, there is no real plan, purpose, or design in living things, and absolutely no directionality to evolution; yet we know those things to be true by faith. In other words, a "metaphysically modest" neo-Darwinism is not so modest after all. It means a Darwinism that does not conflict with knowledge about reality known through faith alone. In the debate about design in nature, sola fides takes on an entirely new meaning.
If the Darwinist, taking up Descartes' and Bacon's project of understanding nature according only to material and efficient causes, studies the history of living things and says that he can see no organizing, active principles of whole living substances (formal causes) and no real plan, purpose or design in living things (final causes), then I accept his report without surprise. It is obviously compatible with the full truth that the world of living beings is replete with formality and finality. It comes as no surprise that reductionist science cannot recognize those very aspects of reality that it excludes -- or at least, seeks to exclude -- by its choice of method.As Schonborn seems to agree, there's nothing wrong with using a reductionist method to perform scientific inquiry, so long as one know that that is what one is doing. The problem comes in wheremarvelingmarvelling at how much modern science has achieved, makes the assumption that anything which modern science is incapable of examining (anything in the set of causes and subjects from which science intentionally excludes itself) either does not existstrictlyof stictly personal (or emotional) importance. Such idolatry of science is what Schonborn is getting at when he says:
Modern science first excludes a priori final and formal causes, then investigates nature under the reductive mode of mechanism (efficient and material causes), and then turns around to claim both final and formal causes are obviously unreal, and also that its mode of knowing the corporeal world takes priority over all other forms of human knowledge. Being mechanistic, modern science is also historicist: It argues that a complete description of the efficient and material causal history of an entity is a complete explanation of the entity itself -- in other words, that an understanding of how something came to be is the same as understanding what it is. But Catholic thinking rejects the genetic fallacy applied to the natural world and contains instead a holistic understanding of reality based on all the faculties of reason and all the causes evident in nature -- including the "vertical" causation of formality and finality.Now, I don't deny for a moment that a number of scientists, science enthusiasts, skeptics and "brights" behave in exactly this manner. One runs into these people all the time, and they're tiresome as well as being dead wrong. I think what Schonborn has identified is an intellectual temptation to which many scientists and those who place too much faith in science's ability to explain the world fall prey. However science itself as a discipline, because of these very restrictions which it places upon itself (and which, I would argue, necessarily stem from its methods of investigation) cannot say that formal and final irrelevantare irrelevent or do not exist. How can one dismiss the existence of something one intentionally refrains from investigating in the first place? While not for a moment denying that many individual people fall into the trap of this very folly, I would maintain that those (both theist and atheist) who are serious about finding the proper boundaries between science and the wider sweep of human knowledge would never claim that the mere fact that science ignores final and formal causality means that such forms of causality do not exist. (Though the atheist or agnostic might maintain that such forms of causality are mental constructs or fundamentally unknowable, he could not validly assert that science proves this in any way.)
Modern science alone may well be incapable of grasping the key truths about nature that are woven into the fabric of Catholic theology and morality. And theology proper does not supply these key truths either. Prior to both science and theology is philosophy, the "science of common experience." Its role in these crucial matters is indispensable.I think the cardinal in dead right in saying that we have incredible dearth of knowledge at this place and time regarding philosophy. And since one cannot form idea about many aspects of the world without resorting to philosophy, what results is that many people have very poorly formed philosophical ideas which they do not even realize fail to pass muster -- because they have never studied the basics of philosophy in the first place. Regardless of where the truth may lie in the debate over evolution (I happen to think that the field of evolutionary biology provides the best current explanation of the scientific evidence available) the errors that both sides make that are of significance specifically to Christians are philosophical. Indeed, many of the most egregious errors made by science enthusiasts boil down to what Schonborn terms the "genetic fallacy", that to explain a things physical precursors and history somehow explains its purpose and essence.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. While some biologists (and perhaps more to the point some introductory textbooks and popular science articles) spend a lot of time on how the genetic input to natural selection is "totally random", genetic mutations of various sorts are in fact controlled by a number of chemical and molecular factors. Only certain kinds of mutations can take place, and some are more likely than others. When authors go on about the "randomness" of variation (assuming that they do indeed know what they're talking about) they mean that one cannot predict which of the possible sorts of mutation will take place at any given time, of if a mutation will take place at any given time. This is very much the same sort of randomness within certain restraints that one sees in physics. I'm even more confused as to what Schonborn means by the environment being "not correlated to anything". It's true that ssearche does not seach for an overarching "plan" in the environment, but at the same time there are numerous factors (as well as wild card variables such as natural disasters) which control what sorts of variation one will see in the environment. Contrary to the delusions of Day After Tomorrow, the weather doesn't suddenly change patterns out of the blue....[W]e must observe that the role of randomness in Darwinian biology is quite different from its role in thermodynamics, quantum theory, and other natural sciences. In those sciences randomness captures our inability to predict or know the precise behavior of the parts of a system (or perhaps, in the case of the quantum world, some intrinsic properties of the system). But in all such cases the "random" behavior of parts is embedded in and constrained by a deeply mathematical and precise conceptual structure of the whole that makes the overall behavior of the system orderly and intelligible.
The randomness of neo-Darwinian biology is nothing like that. It is simply random. The variation through genetic mutation is random. And natural selection is also random: The properties of the ever-changing environment that drive evolution through natural selection are also not correlated to anything, according to the Darwinists.
I suppose the questions here are: What does Schonborn mean by "correlation" and what does he mean by "teleological"? As he says, it certainly seems to be true that evolution occurred (or at least that current evidence points toward occurredon having occured) and that our present world is the result. He also clearly concedes that this is not a "scientific" conclusion per se, so there's no question of arguing about whether this is the domain of science.But if [the Darwinian biologist] steps back and looks at the sweep of life, he sees an obvious, indeed an overwhelming pattern. The variation that actually occurred in the history of life was exactly the sort needed to bring about the complete set of plants and animals that exist today. In particular, it was exactly the variation needed to give rise to an upward sweep of evolution resulting in human beings. If that is not a powerful and relevant correlation, then I don't know what could count as evidence against actual randomness in the mind of an observer.
Some may object: This is a pure tautology, not scientific knowledge. I have assumed the conclusion, "rigged the game," and so forth. But that is not true. I have simply related two indisputable facts: Evolution happened (or so we will presume, for purposes of this analysis), and our present biosphere is the result. The two sets of facts correlate perfectly. Facts are not tautologies simply because they are indisputably true. If the modern biologist chooses to ignore this indubitable correlation, I have no objection. He is free to define his special science on terms as narrow as he finds useful for gaining a certain kind of knowledge. But he may not then turn around and demand that the rest of us, unrestricted by his methodological self-limitation, ignore obvious truths about reality, such as the clearly teleological nature of evolution.
Ass (refering to St. Francis's title of "Brother Ass" for the body) is exquisitely right becasue no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, loveable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. There's no living with it till we recognixe that one its functions in our lives is to play the part of buffoon....Lovers...feel an element not only of comedy, not only of play, but even of buffoonery, in the body's expressoin of Eros. And the body would frustrate us if this were not so. It would be too clumsy an instrument to render love's music unless its very clumsiness could be felt as adding to the total experience its own grotesque charm -- a sub-plot or antimasque miming with its own hearty rough-and-tumble what the soul enacts in statelier fashion.
The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, an to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon his is that he should make good tables. church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly -- but what use is all that if in the very centre of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie. Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman. And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred. Forgotten that a building must be good architecture before it can be a good church; that a painting must be well painted before it can be a good sacred picture; that work must be good work before it can call itself God's work.
--Creed or Chaos?
...the blessed "joyously forgive themselves" -- a thing, as we all know,extremely difficult in this life, because pride gets in the way. For instance -- that dreadfully silly and unkind thing you said to poor Miss Smith when you were quite a child. Even after all these years, it makes you turn hot and writhe on your pillow if you remember it suddenly in the middle of the night; and the fact that Miss Smith was so decent about it makes you feel all the worse. But in Heaven, when you have purged off the sin, you will rememer the wretched little episode only as a fact: you will be free for ever from the ugly shame that is the protest of your pride against being humiliated in your own eyes; and seeing Miss Smith as God sees her, you will rejoice in her beautifulo charity and though it had been something else. and not your unthinking cruelty, that called it forth.
Aquinas questioned whether "and thus death came into the world" could be literally accurate, because according to the Aristotelian philosophy creatures do not change in kind, and a change from being mortal to immortal would be a change in kind. (Aquinas argued that the "death" that came into the world was "death" in the spiritual sense often used in scripture, rather than "death" in the biological sense. Thus, Aquinas actually addresses the question that some ask about Genesis and biological evolution: how could there have been evolution before the Fall if death only came into the world after Adam's sin?)A commenter promptly called me on the assertion, and since I was working from a memory (which may have been second hand in the first place) I had to do a little homework before I came up with Summa, Part I, Question 97 where Aquinas deals with the question of man's immortality before the fall.
First, on the part of matter--that is to say, either because it possesses no matter, like an angel; or because it possesses matter that is in potentiality to one form only, like the heavenly bodies. Such things as these are incorruptible by their very nature.This actually reminded me a little bit of Tolkien's description of the gift given to the men of Numenor, that so long as they remained virtuous and did not try to grasp immortality, they could choose the time of their own deaths, releasing themselves to God rather than being driven from their bodies by frailty or illness.
Secondly, a thing is incorruptible in its form, inasmuch as being by nature corruptible, yet it has an inherent disposition which preserves it wholly from corruption; and this is called incorruptibility of glory; because as Augustine says (Ep. ad Dioscor.): "God made man's soul of such a powerful nature, that from its fulness of beatitude, there redounds to the body a fulness of health, with the vigor of incorruption."
Thirdly, a thing may be incorruptible on the part of its efficient cause; in this sense man was incorruptible and immortal in the state of innocence. For, as Augustine says (QQ. Vet. et Nov. Test. qu. 19 [Work of an anonymous author, among the supposititious works of St. Augustine): "God made man immortal as long as he did not sin; so that he might achieve for himself life or death." For man's body was indissoluble not by reason of any intrinsic vigor of immortality, but by reason of a supernatural force given by God to the soul, whereby it was enabled to preserve the body from all corruption so long as it remained itself subject to God. This entirely agrees with reason; for since the rational soul surpasses the capacity of corporeal matter, as above explained (76, 1), it was most properly endowed at the beginning with the power of preserving the body in a manner surpassing the capacity of corporeal matter.
Those who anxiously whittle down and attenuate the traditional Catholic faith to the point where it includes no affirmations whatever about physical, material realities (such as conception, virginity, crucified corpses, the earth, sun, stars, etc.), on the grounds that such matters fall within the competence of "science," do a very good job of what they set out to do: their theological bomb-shelter is indeed impregnable against any possible bomb which might be launched by physicists, geologists, historians, etc. No such missile could ever damage that kind of "faith," any more than a cloud can be damaged by firing a shot-gun at it: there is nothing solid there with which the shot might possibly collide. Nevertheless, if the Catholic Church ever came to adopt, or even officially permit, this scientifically-ever-so-respectable theology, her rational credibility would suffer death by the "asphyxiation" of self-contradiction. Let us see why this is the case.Now, I suspect that all of us would agree that a theologian who suggested that the Church back off from the truth of the virgin birth or the resurrection because physical science could disprove such assertions would be a deeply misguided thinker. The Church clearly teaches and has always taught that these events happened and happened 'literally' not in some metaphorical or symbolic sense. Throughout Christian history people who have denied the virgin birth or the resurrection have been invariably labeled as teaching heresy.
The Roman Catholic Church's basic stance toward religious truth is not that of a plodding investigator. Rather, it is that of a faithful witness. Unlike scientists who search for truth in nature, or Protestants who search for it in the Bible, the original Church dating back to Christ Himself claims to have possessed the truth already for two thousand years, handing it on faithfully and continuously from generation to generation.... This is why her theologians can never simply imitate the methodology of other disciplines, in which the mark of intellectual integrity is open-mindedness, and a modest willingness to acknowledge and correct past mistakes....
For the credibility of an investigator and that of a witness have to be judged according to very different criteria. An investigator only need avoid self-contradiction in what he says at any given time. Provided he does that, he may - and indeed, should - contradict what he said only yesterday, if he happens to have found new evidence overnight that his previous view was mistaken. But a witness in a court of law is subject to more exacting requirements. Unlike the investigator, he is asking us to believe certain things on the strength of his word, not on the basis of publicly available data which the rest of us can inspect and evaluate for ourselves. He is asking us to trust him as a reliable source of information which is otherwise inaccessible to the rest of us. This means that in order for him to be credible in the claims he makes, he must avoid not only contradicting himself while under cross-examination today; he must also avoid contradicting today what he said yesterday -or the day before. Once he gives his clear, emphatic, sworn testimony to something, he must forever stick by it, and be able to defend it, on pain of destroying his whole credibility. Now, things like creeds and dogmas and solemn papal or conciliar definitions are the emphatic "sworn testimony" of the Catholic Church in bearing witness to the truth of God as it is revealed in Jesus Christ and in the natural moral law. So are those doctrines which, even though not defined in such specific documents, have been taught by a solid consensus of Popes and Catholic Bishops round the world as being "definitively to be held."
If the Roman Catholic Church must forever persevere (under pain of a fatal self-contradiction) in affirming the dogmatic principle that there exists a category of "dual-citizenship" truths which are both revealed and physical/historical, one of the specific questions that arise when we apply this principle to the field of Scripture studies is whether the truth of the creation accounts (Genesis 1-3) falls into this category, or not. Few people professing to be Catholics will want to say that this opening section of the Bible is simply "false" or "untrue." The big question is, What sort of truth does the Holy Spirit want to communicate to us here?Good question. However, I have some concerns about how Fr. Harrison drills down into this topic. Fr. Harrison references an article in Pastoral and Homilitic Review by Fr. Stanley Jaki which he says boils down to the following syllogism:
Major - All Scripture (including Genesis 1-3) is inspired by God, and is therefore without error in all that the writers intended to assert.However, Fr. Harrison does not like this line of thinking:
Minor - Science has demonstrated that Genesis 1-3, understood as a factual, historical account of how the world and man began, would be in error.
Concl. - Therefore the author(s) of Genesis 1-3 did not intend to assert in these chapters a factual, historical account of how the world and man began.
Fr. Harrison believes that this "moonie" example is in fact a pretty good example of where Genesis biblical scholarship has taken itself in recent decades:Such is the facile solution offered by a "bomb-shelter" hermeneusis of Genesis. One just reduces the asserted content of the creation accounts to a few simple transcendental propositions (for instance, "God made everything good"; "God made man in his own image"; "God made everything there is with the greatest ease") so that their "true" meaning is safely secluded or cordoned off from any conceivable damage that could be occasioned by the bomb-blasts of empirical science....
Consider this little parable. In a certain far-off land the dominant religion includes the dogma that on the dark side of the moon there are large craters full of salt water. Comes the twentieth century and space-travel. Rocket-ships finally get to photograph all angles of the moon, including the dark side. The believers are cast into deep anguish and a crisis of faith by the terrible news that, while the new photographs indeed show plenty of craters, all of them are bone-dry! At first there is a reaction of rejection. The hierarchy assures the faithful that the photographs are all faked, as part of a Satanic plot. As time goes on, however, this becomes hard to sustain, since some astronauts of hitherto unquestioned orthodoxy themselves take part in a space-flight to the moon and see for themselves the faith-shattering emptiness of those great craters, reporting this sad news to their brethren on return. Many of the faithful leave the Church in disillusionment; but for others, faith does not remain shattered for very long. The more learned theologians soon come up with a "bomb-shelter" solution which satisfies well-educated, sophisticated believers. It can be set out in another syllogism.
Major - It is revealed truth that there are salt-water craters on the dark side of the moon.
Minor - Science has demonstrated that no water of any sort is observed in the craters on the dark side of the moon.
Concl. - Therefore there is invisible salt-water in the craters on the dark side of the moon.This eminently reasonable solution comes to be accepted by the bulk of the faithful, because after all, it is logical (the conclusion follows ineluctably from the premises); it is orthodox (the traditional dogma is faithfully preserved); and by accepting the minor premise, this revised faith is perfectly in line with the latest developments in science. Armed (and comforted) by this modern development in doctrine, the guardians of the new orthodoxy can afford to shake their heads condescendingly at the tiny minority of fundamentalists, who, in their naive literalism, regard the new theology as nonsense and continue to insist on the hypothesis of hoax and fraud in all the photographs and testimonies regarding the craters. These theological illiterates, locked into their narrow, fortress mentality which leaves no room for growth or flexibility, keep on stubbornly maintaining that if the traditional interpretation of moon-water turns out to be indefensible, the whole religion will be indefensible. The only perplexing thing for the more enlightened believers is that the great bulk of their contemporaries seem to agree with the fundamentalists on this last point. The new theology, designed especially to make faith more credible for modern scientific man, seems to hold little attraction for him. The churches keep on emptying, as a greater consensus grows outside the Church that there is, quite simply, no water of any sort on the dark side of the moon.
A century and a half after the existence of a "non-historical" literary genre for Genesis 1-3 was suddenly "deduced" from the studies (not in Hebrew literature, mind you, but in geology and biology) of scholars such as Lyell and Darwin, our exegetes are still looking for it.... And since our deduction about the existence of a "non-factual" literary genre in Genesis 1-3 was not based on methods even remotely connected with literary criticism, it is also unsurprising that we have not found what we are looking for, even after more than a century of searching.... Since all appropriate literary methods have so far failed to identify the creation accounts as belonging to any known "non-historical" genre (such as poetry, drama, apocalypse, fiction, midrash, allegory, parable, etc.), and since the field of literature (unlike that of nature) now contains very little unexplored territory, then it might be time to recognize honestly that this genre which just "has to" be there is one which is permanently undiscoverable by any method at all which human ingenuity can devise! In terms of the parable, our "water" has failed not only the visibility test, but also the tangibility test.Now, I've quoted a lot of Fr. Harrison's article. I hope you will forgive me the length, but I thought his approach was sufficiently novel (I haven't read anyone taking this approach to the creationism debate before) that it was worth being very clear (for those not up to reading all fifteen pages of the original article) on what Fr. Harrison is saying.
