The Pope’s Disdain for Knowledge
January 31, 2012 in Atheism, Belief, bible, Catholic Church, Faith, Knowledge, Philosophy, pope Benedict XVI, Reason, Religion, Religious Persons, Truth
Montaigne called the human being Dasein, the being whose existence is a matter of concern for itself. We, as a species, are intimately concerned with what it means to be human and what the relationship of our species is to the rest of reality. Yet, despite unifying us as a species, this fundamental search for knowledge of the world has lead people to take divergent paths on this quest; over time, the methodologies employed by these disparate groups in their quest for knowledge have lead to competing worldviews – worldviews which are irreconcilable with one another. Two such disparate worldviews belong to the scientific community and to the religious community – though for the purposes of this post I will be focusing on the roman catholic religion. Whereas science promotes honest and open dialogue, as well as a peer-reviewed process, roman catholicism offers doctrine and frequently sanctions those who openly challenge church authority.
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Religions like that of roman catholicism claim to possess certain truths about the world, truths which are beyond questioning. In fact, within this religion, ‘knowledge’ of the world must be reconciled with the revealed truth of a god. Thus, regardless of how frequently catholic officials discuss such things as wisdom and the pursuit of knowledge, they are never really concerned with either of these pursuits: they have closed their minds to an honest reflection on reality, and thus have closed their minds to understanding it in any sort of accurate manner. This model of accruing ‘knowledge’ is directly opposed to the scientific method of coming to understand the world. Read the rest of this entry →
