Essay Three - Chapter Two: Christianity and the Crisis of Culture

Essay Three: What does it mean to believe?

Chapter Two: Can Agnosticism be a Solution?

There are two basic structural analogies of the perspectives on religious faith: friendship and revelation.

Friendship:

• It may be true that it is impossible for each individual to know everything within the network of human relationships.
• So they participate by faith in the knowledge of others.
• Nevertheless, we remain in the sphere of human knowledge that is accessible.

Revelation:

• Faith in revelation passes the boundaries of knowledge, typical to human life experience.
• Revelation remains an object of faith.
• This surpasses realities that are accessible to the knowledge of our experience.
• There is no one in this field in whom we can put our trust. AS no one could have direct knowledge of religious faith.

The questions of our society include: Is this faith compatible with modern knowledge? Would it be more prudent for man to wait to pass judgement on religious faith until science can have definitive knowledge? Atheism claims to know too much and has a dogmatic element of its own. At most one can take his nonexistence as a hypothesis, on the basis of which to explain the universe. It is never possible (scientifically) to go beyond the sphere of the hypothetical in this question, because you can never scientifically be certain that God does not exist.

This reality points to the unsurpassed limits of the human condition.That man has a capacity to know man as being. (Again this is metaphysics, the study of being). As the scientific atheism is impossible to prove, it becomes urgent to know whether the question of God indeed surpasses the human condition. This is where the limits of science must not be confused with the limits of existence.

Ratzinger encourages us to  not be hasty in a "rational" response to agnosticism, rather patiently examine it as a plausible answer, to discover whether it can apply to humanity and science. Can it answer the question of existence? The humility of a philosopher, they begin by discovering what is first. Can man be content to live under the hypothetical formula 'as if God doesn't exist.' The question of God is a practical problem that touches every part of our lives. So we are faced with two alternatives. 

Either we live as if God existed or we lives as if God did exist. Man cannot remain neutral on the question of God. It is not to be avoided, changed or resisted. 

"Where everything and the foundation of everything, are involved, the one who endeavors to comprehend is inevitably challenged to get involved with the totality of his being, with all the faculties of perception he has been given. And his search for knowledge must aim not only to collect a large number of individual details, but as far as possible to grasp the totality as such." (p90)

Essay Three - Introduction: Christianity and the Crisis of Culture

Essay Three: What Does it Mean to Believe?

Introduction

A mode of natural 'faith' is indispensable in our daily life. So when answering the questions of faith's necessity or whether or not it is merely a juvenile transitory fancy. We must look to what is first. In our daily life we make use of technologies, which for the most part, we do not have the expertise to say how or why the thing works. While our experiences verify that such technologies do exist and do work based on basic principals. We are relying on those credible knowledgeable persons who do have the knowledge to say how a thing works. We are filled with knowledge of common experiences (a-priori) and rely by a natural faith on the wisdom of others. 

Nevertheless it is not a pure faith bereft of any confirmation, hence it is a lesser faith, yet it is the basis which all men might understand. (p82)

Essay Two - Chapter Three: Christianity and the Crisis of Culture

Essay Two: The Right to Life

Chapter Three: "We Must use Our Eyes"

If you don't read any other part of this book, read this chapter. This chapter changed my life! So here's a summary of its goodness, which is not nearly rich enough.

The decision of abortion begins with the choice not to look at the baby. Hence the world hides its existence with words like fetus of zygote. They choose not to see the other because if they were to look at him, the unique and  unrepeatable life would make demands on their liberty.

In their suffering they turn away from humanity. When it is in our suffering that we may truly answer the question "Who am I?" For example it was after Christ had been scourged that pilot cried "Ecce Homo" or "Behold the man." (John 19:5) As discovered in metaphysics: man is, the baby is (exists), necessarily his dignity also exists. (Metaphysics: the philosophical study that is concerned with the basic causes and nature of things)

 

Affirming this dignity begins when we affirm our own dignity. In the security of this knowledge we can truly look at the other in a way that affirms them and allows them to be free. When I see man as a thing, I forget my dignity and his.

The context for this respect for life comes from faith in creation. That each man is created in the image of God. In this way Christianity is a remembrance of that look of love from the Father upon humanity. Therefore the task of announcing the dignity of man falls on those who see man in his dignity. The Christian is among the world the life which animates it, as the soul with the body. In affirming the dignity of others, while at the same time loving those who hate you and rising above the flesh, the Christian can purify the world and its dignity.