On Cultivating the Mind that is Catholic | Brian Jones | Catholic World Report
For Catholics, the intellectual life is not something reserved for the academic elite.
Reading blogs is not typically something I care to tread into. More often than not, it seems that blogs have become merely an outlet for those who neither want nor seek genuine and fruitful intellectual discussion. This is, of course, not a denial that good blogs exist, or an assertion that good ones ought not to exist, but a simple observation that blogs have enabled anyone to say practically anything without having to provide a reasonable and coherent defense for those positions. While recently reading an article that analyzed St. Thomas Aquinas’ conception of the relationship between science and faith, I stumbled across the following comment from one anonymous blogger:
Religion deals with fiction, or at the very best supernatural stuff that cannot be disproved but is still implausible. Science is about making statements that can be made with certainty. There is no overlap between religion and science. Religious public relations people try to say that there is, but in reality, religion has no relation to science at all. Religion is about believing in stuff without evidence.
In reading these sentences, I couldn’t help but recall the Catholic novelist, Walker Percy, who once provided the following astute insight regarding this philosophic view of reality: “This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, ‘Scientific humanism.’ That won’t do. A poor show” (Conversations with Walker Percy, “Questions They Didn’t Ask Me,” 417).
Dr. Michael Tkacz, philosophy professor at Gonzaga University, has often drawn attention to the fact that our contemporary culture understands religion to be merely “private, nonrational, and unverifiable,” whereas science is “public, rational, and verifiable.” Science deals with objective, empirical facts about reality and religion provides the ethical tools and resources of how to live with this reality. However, from this perspective, it is important to remember that these two spheres of life cannot and do not overlap since they pertain to two distinct and separate orders of reality. Tkacz has also highlighted that this intellectual dualism is not only fostered in secular culture and universities, but in our Catholic universities and institutions of learning and formation as well. Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution Ex Cordae Ecclesiae has provided an in-depth elucidation of what a university ought to be, most especially a Catholic university. Anyone familiar with this document, and the status of Catholic higher education in this country, cannot deny how far off course we have gone, by desperately striving to become homogenous with the Ivy League schools, those so-called “peer institutions.”
Catholic culture has unjustly inherited from her institutions of higher learning a dismantling of the integral relationship between faith, science, reason, and the necessity of cultivating a genuine intellectual life, what Father James V. Schall has rightly labeled “the Catholic mind.”
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