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)