FAITH AND REASON
(And Benedict's Regensburg Address)
by John Cooper
cosmicflyswatter.com

In this short essay we can think of no frame of reference that would focus the attention of our thinking on the subject of Faith and Reason more than the Papal Address at University of Regensberg, delivered by Benedict XVI on 12 September 2006. Here is a link to the Vatican translation of his address, provided by Zenit, "The World Seen From Rome."

It should be no surprise to anyone that I am greatly impressed with Pope Benedict's reasoning abilities. My limitations and lack of credentials do not leave me diminished in the ability to see clear thinking when it is in front of me. As I have stated before I do not believe that clear thinking about metaphysical subjects is hidden from the average person by anything other than the lack of the opportunity to pursue what only time and freedom would afford. Thank God for the Pauline Priesthood (the special, celibate and academically trained priesthood, whose prototype was Paul).

Our own foray into metaphysics left us with the notion that there is a Unity of Truth, and that the order that is seen in the physical universe must have corollaries in the spiritual. We therefore embrace the evidentiary and extant realities that Western philosophy is in itself the wellspring of any of the West's successes, and attribute them to the Providence of God and not to any deserving by one group of people over any other. So seems to be our Christian world view.

But there existed far greater thinkers on the subjects of metaphysics going back twenty five hundred years to the Ancient Greeks. And it is my opinion that the development of man's awareness on these subjects did not progress very much past six to eight centuries ago. Physical science has progressed tremendously and has helped mankind overwhelmingly. But man's state of his own understanding of himself is easily obscured by the prowess of his technological inventions, providing (forgive the Biblical metaphor) a lot of false gods.

The Pope, shortly after his address, was excoriated by radical ministers of misinterpretation for even mentioning a conversation that took place seven centuries ago. But Benedict was using it only academically. This diversion by others in no way diminished the brilliance of what he was saying, which was that violence is incompatible with the nature of God. Ironically, the speech made some folks violent. I am in agreement with everything the Pope had to say in this address and it is in my view a very important speech.

So here, in a layman's terms, I will attempt to explain how his arguments seem to me not only logical and true, but a good fit with our own conception of human perception itself, the prime preoccupation of cosmicflyswatter.com.

Faith is a form of belief not unlike all beliefs except that it carries a stronger confidence in its object. All beliefs are nurtured first in the imagination where images are constructed for internal consideration. And these images are planted by hearing and observing and then thinking about a subject. They are dependent upon reason for their validity. In our view, faith in the Living God is necessarily unprovable in time/space, and yet most reasonable.

But faith in God must be tied to reason or it assualts the autonomy of the mind itself. The concept of God must be reasonable first. Therefore the definitions that man applies to Him are critical. The amount of deep thinking that ancient philosophers and theologians exhausted on this subject is amazing. And the disagreements in positions taken by the great Catholic doctors during the Scholastic movements through the Renaissiance would give the average video game expert a headache.

But we are interested here in the metaphysics of human observation no matter how inextricably linked to theology they really are. If you are familiar with the Bible, then you know that the gospel of John starts out by paraphrasing and modifying the first words of the book of Genesis. He states that in the beginning was the word. The Greek word for "word" as Benedict points out is "logos" which means both word and reason. This makes a lot of sense since man cannot reason without words. John continues by saying that the word is God. Therefore God is also reason itself. Belief or faith in God cannot be anything but reasonable since it is the belief in reason itself. It is the positional elevation of reason in the hierachy of ones mind. It is the selection of a prime filter in a person's Lens Pole.

In the metaphysical concepts of the Lens Pole and the Earth Axis Perception theories of myself and Mr. Pinkerton we consider the concept of God as the Absolute. He is the Single Observer of reality that alone can see all things perfectly or as they actually are. All other observations are necessarily flawed or limited by the uncertainty of knowing position when focusing on momentum and the uncertainty of knowing momentum when focusing on position. Like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in particle physics, this uncertainty is the condition of relative points of view. They are the only points of view available to the little observers known as humans in time/space where we have our only provable existence. Only by imaging (imagining) the Single Perfect Observer does a human's frame of reference even approach transcending his relative and requisitely subjective point of view.

Therefore man must take care in how he imagines the Single Perfect Observer. Without revelation man is left with little but the mythology of his own vanities to image within his self. But God is the Single Observer in whose image we are made to imagine Him as best we can. If we do not see Him as Love above all things, we should have little use for Him. Without His being Love above all other mysteries He could be described best as a capricious tyrant.

But like the great physical mystery of gravity, God as Love is a one way force of attraction. It is the attraction to the source of all life itself. The human life is given and then set free in a universe of contrarieties, proceeding in choices until it must return to its source willingly or unwillingly. It is a cognitive life with the powers of imagination given in the image of the Provider, the Great Imaginer Himself, to be used freely for a time in space.

God revealed His name to Moses in the burning bush as "I AM." He told the human Moses that He is beingness itself. And we as little observers have personality and a beingness that is not efficiently accounted for by the streches of popular evolutionary fantasies.

The Ancient Greeks lacked the tools and the knowledge of the physical universe beyond unaided observation. The Greeks adventured into the superior of understanding the principles and precepts that ordered their observable reality. Today physical scientists with so much success to their credit have taken the opportunity to elevate the inferior by denying the existence of the superior.

Without the Single Observer of things as they actually are, man has no frame of reference upon which he may hope to know the truth. Without a hope that he may know the truth he can never be happy, since happiness depends on truth. And if there is no such thing as the truth then he has little reason to pretend to know anything.

Benedicts reasoning in his speech at Regensberg is a reminder that the wellspring of all Western Scientific thought including and especially secular understanding was and is the Church. "The World Seen From Rome" attempted to expand man's secular knowledge by the formation of the first Universities.

The Universe is One in the Single Perfect Observer. And man's access to All Knowledge can possess real clarity only in first accepting this Unity of Truth.

Therefore it is clearly the most reasonable thing of all to have faith in the Living God, whose signature is the very order that all science seeks to discover in the first place.