The Faith of Reason

by Michael Schnibben

As many a secular-progressive surveys today’s political landscape, they are confident in the advance and eventual triumph of that ideal known as “progress.” Despite this unflagging faith, such people are nonetheless concerned that the forces of religion conspire to halt the impetus of progress and drag Western Civilization back into the Dark Ages. Many view religion as a residual element of mankind’s barbaric, superstitious past; something to be tolerated at best but ultimately educated out of the general population. An honest evaluation of Western history, however, reveals that the relationship between reason and faith is not the absolute dichotomy that some would wish to see it as. Rather, it is important that we, as Westerners, acknowledge the contributions that religion, and especially Christianity, has made to our ever-expanding perception of the universe. This article is to assure such individuals that Christianity has never been an impediment to progress and elucidate the intellectual foundations of the world’s largest religion.

Before we can truly understand the ways in which Christianity has impacted our modern perceptions of the universe, we must first understand how Christians view their own religion and the deity it worships. The Gospel of St. John begins with the sentence, “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Though the symbolic meaning of this phrase is somewhat lost to those of us who read only in modern English, it was not to those Christians who read the text in its original language: Koine Greek. In Greek, “word” is rendered as “logos,” a term whose meaning goes far deeper than its modern transliteration. The concept of logos, loosely meaning “reason,” was used by the Stoics of Hellenistic Athens to define the vital force responsible for the creation of the universe.

The conception of God, and hence, Christ, as the logos was adopted by early Christian philosophers, such as Justin Martyr and Anselm of Canterbury, who held God to be the absolute standard of perfection. They theorized that a perfect universe, created by a perfect God, would function according to divine laws which could be understood by the human capacity of reason. Because perfection itself was a concept reasoned into existence by the philosophers of Classical Greece, the ultimate goal of reason was to achieve perfection by acting in accordance with the divine laws that upheld the harmonious order of the universe. Christ, as God incarnate, was the logos personified; he was an entirely perfect human, and through him perfection was within the grasp of every human being. Christians place their faith in a reasonable God who created an ordered universe; the fallen state of mankind is regarded as an aberration in God’s original design, only by accepting Christ can we be redeemed and again in perfect harmony with God. Thus, faith and reason engender the same conclusion: as fallen creatures, we can only look to Christ for redemption.

The reasonable god of Christianity stands in direct contrast to the squabbling, petty deities that filled the pantheons of Greece, Egypt, and Rome. They exhibited human attributes and emotions, acted out of selfish desires, and offered no incentive for mortals to worship them other than the fear of divine retribution. This contrasted greatly with the Christian god, who always acts in accordance with the laws of reason to restore perfection in the universe; though mortals may not always understand God’s actions, Christians have faith that God’s intervention will always bring his creation closer to perfection. Because God acts in a reasonable manner, it is possible to apply the laws of reason to his revealed truth and perfect our understanding of him. From this attitude arose the science of theology, which seeks to build faith through the application of reason.

Much more than being a religion founded upon reason, however, the Christian Church was the focal point around which Western culture mustered after the disastrous collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD; for the next three and a half centuries the Dark Ages descended upon the Western World. During these barbaric and troubled times, the Church shone forth as a beacon of light in the darkness; so powerful that not even pillaging hordes of Huns, Magyars, Saxons, Norsemen or Saracens could destroy her. As the barbarians were slowly converted to the religion of Christ, the re-civilizing of the West proceeded in the halls of monasteries and cathedral schools, where the learning and culture of the ancient world was protected from the chaos outside. By the Middle Ages, these centers of learning had evolved into universities, where the clergy instructed new generations in the wisdom of the ancient world. The cultural renaissance that swept Europe at the dawn of the thirteenth century would have been utterly impossible without Christian Church, to whom it looked for inspiration as well as patronage.

The influence of Christianity on the modern world is felt well beyond the aesthetic arts; modern science is very much indebted to the Church. The first astronomer to challenge the geocentric model of solar system developed by Aristotle, Nicolas Copernicus, was a Catholic cleric whose research was financed by his uncle, the Archbishop of Warmia. Over a decade before Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1542, his work was well-known and received with much interest by many high-ranking clerics within the Church, among them Pope Paul III (1534-1549), to whom he dedicated the book. The heliocentric model of Copernicus, though imperfect in many ways, came to us through the patronage of the Catholic Church and the diligent work of one of her own clerics. Though received enthusiastically by the Catholic Church, Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon and a host of other Protestant “Reformers” vehemently opposed the Copernican model.

Of course, no discussion of heliocentricism would be complete without mentioning Galileo Galilei, who was hauled before the Inquisition and forced to recant his previous statements in 1633. Galileo was not condemned for his beliefs, but his insistence on their absolute truth without proper evidence, asserting that tides and waves are caused by the Earth’s movement; an argument now known to be erroneous. Despite the apparent backlash against astronomical science during the time of Galileo, the calendar in use today, the Gregorian Calendar was promulgated by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, when he issued Inter Gravissimas, a papal bull that dropped eleven days from that year, altering the ancient Julian Calendar. The new calendar took effect in the Catholic World on October 15, 1582; it would take Protestant nations well over a century and a half to adopt the new system, still in use today.

The influence of the Church on science has continued well into modern times; the Big Bang Theory, now the most accepted explanation for the beginning of the universe, was first developed by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium who first observed galaxies outside of the Milky Way. Though the American astronomer Edwin Hubble was ultimately given credit for the theory due to his discovery of redshift movement, it was nonetheless enthusiastically received by the Church. Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) even went so far as to declare that the Big Bang was the moment of “Fiat Lux” (“Let there be light.”) recorded in the Book of Genesis.

Far from being a force that has arrested the development of civilization, the Christian Church has been the single most powerful force behind the creation of the Western World. Its clerics kept classical culture alive during the Dark Ages, engendering a flowering of culture during the medieval period that continued through the Renaissance. The Christian Church believed in a reasonable, lawful universe centuries before Kepler, Newton, and Einstein would use mathematics to discover its inner workings, it has patronized and promoted ideas that challenged long-standing notions of scientific fact, fundamentally altering the way in which mankind views his universe. None of this contradicts Christian beliefs, as adherents to the Faith of Reason; Christians believe that reason, in conjunction with faith, can only bring one closer to God; what must be avoided are the uncompromising extremes: reasonless faith is fanatical, while faithless reason is heartless. Despite their disparate methods, both science and religion quest after the same ideal: truth. Only when each side realizes that will we be able to foster an environment of mutual respect and understanding.

Dominus Vobiscum