By THOMAS JACKSON - GUARDIAN.CO.UK
Added: Tue, 08 Feb 2011 18:09:35 UTC

Thanks to Jums and Timecatcher for the link

Richard Dawkins's 'understanding of Catholic theology seems to be nil'.

My problem with Richard Dawkins is not that he is an atheist. I admire that. It's that he's a Protestant atheist. Religion, many think, has been slain by the experimental method of science. Beginning with Galileo's experiments on free fall, science has succeeded because it is value-free, objective and proves its points not by nebulous belief but by rigorous logic and verified proof. This is a complete misunderstanding.

The history of the experimental method shows us that, far from being value-free, it was deeply enmeshed with a Protestant myth, as in its post-Protestant phase it continues to be. At fundamental issue in the Reformation was the Catholic idea of nature as a sacrament. In the Catholic view nature is a single organic being with a soul. God is not outside nature but within it, the material world is his body so to speak. The whole point of Thomas Aquinas's five ways, so deeply misunderstood by Dawkins, is to show that God is to be identified with Aristotle's first cause, the first link within the causal chain of being. "God is within the universe, and that innermostly", Aquinas wrote.

To the reformers this was the grossest idolatry. To them, God was quite other. They would show, by science, that the universe is a collection of machines, testifying to the wisdom of their manufacturer by their most marvellous ingenuity. Interrupted by the errors of Rome, the work of the Redemption "whereby the human race seeks to recover its right over nature" wrote Francis Bacon, rights that had been lost in the Fall, is to be restored by science. Robert Boyle's declared agenda is to show that natural events are controlled by laws that their supernatural lawgiver has laid down. Isaac Newton's investigations of gravity and motion are mixed up with his numerological analyses of scriptural texts, esoterically prophesying the final downfall of the Great Whore of Babylon. For William Paley the eyes are astonishingly delicate machines "constructed upon the same principles upon which we ourselves construct optical instruments".

All of this is the polar opposite to the thinking of the stalwartly Catholic Galileo. Astonishingly, the Dialogo and the Discorsi make it clear that many of the crucial experiments he describes he had never performed. And those he did perform do not always work. Two swinging pendulums of unequal weights do not keep time. Then why did he do them? He was not interested in experiments as verifications of material fact but as expressions of immaterial reality. Far from destroying the medieval conception of nature bound into one because it is an expression of the beauty of God, he saw himself as its champion. Deeply affected by the rediscovery of the Platonic myth of beauty in Renaissance Italy, he believed with Plato that earthly things are imperfect copies of heavenly archetypes, only glimpsed fitfully through mathematics.

Read on

TAGGED: COMMENTARY, RELIGION, RICHARD DAWKINS