...Here was a man who insisted there was no conflict between faith and reason, who could easily and convincingly explain the reasonableness not just of religious faith but of faith in Jesus Christ, in His crucifixion and resurrection, and in the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church” He established on Earth. Here, too, was a truly educated man who grasped the entire sweep of Western civilization and, in a kindly and even mirthful way, could level devastating critiques of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and modernity’s blinkered, anemic understanding of human reason and the role it should play in answering ultimate questions.
Those interviews eventually prompted me to go back and read Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg address, which I remembered at the time only because of the feigned outrage it provoked among an ignorant and malicious corporate press that misread it as an attack on Islam. It wasn’t that, but it was an attack on the modern West’s narrow, “scientistic” view of knowledge and truth, a ringing defense of the inherent reasonableness and rationality of faith, and a call to include theology as a legitimate science, properly understood.
Benedict knew what should be obvious to all of us by now: We have serious problems with our modern view of science and knowledge, and with what he called the “dehellenization of Christianity.” At Regensburg, he described “the modern self-limitation of reason” and explained how “modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology.” Put another way, what we can know, and know with certainty, is more than what our instruments can measure and our scientific methods can replicate in a lab. Excluding questions about God from what we can know means “a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.”.
This was important, Benedict said, because if ultimate questions about human origins and destiny — the sort of questions raised by religion — have no place in the modern world’s view of what constitutes legitimate or scientific knowledge, then those questions “must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective.” The problem, he argued, is that if each person’s subjective conscience becomes the arbiter of right and wrong,
ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.
Benedict was not calling for a rejection of science or a turning back of the clock to pre-Enlightenment times, “but of broadening our concept of reason and its application.” If reason and faith could be brought together in a new way, we could rediscover what he called reason’s “vast horizons.”...