Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization
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"Gregg's book is the closet thing I've encountered in a long time to a one-volume user's manual for operating Western Civilization." —The Stream "Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization offers a concise intellectual history of the West through the prism of the relationship between faith and reason." —Free Beacon The genius of Western civilization is its unique synthesis of reason and faith. But today that synthesis is under attack—from the East by radical Islam (faith without reason) and from within the West itself by aggressive secularism (reason without faith). The stakes are incalculably high. The naïve and increasingly common assumption that reason and faith are incompatible is simply at odds with the facts of history. The revelation in the Hebrew Scriptures of a reasonable Creator imbued Judaism and Christianity with a conviction that the world is intelligible, leading to the flowering of reason and the invention of science in the West. It was no accident that the Enlightenment took place in the culture formed by the Jewish and Christian faiths. We can all see that faith without reason is benighted at best, fanatical and violent at worst. But too many forget that reason, stripped of faith, is subject to its own pathologies. A supposedly autonomous reason easily sinks into fanaticism, stifling dissent as bigoted and irrational and devouring the humane civilization fostered by the integration of reason and faith. The blood-soaked history of the twentieth century attests to the totalitarian forces unleashed by corrupted reason. But Samuel Gregg does more than lament the intellectual and spiritual ruin caused by the divorce of reason and faith. He shows that each of these foundational principles corrects the other’s excesses and enhances our comprehension of the truth in a continuous renewal of civilization. By recovering this balance, we can avoid a suicidal winner-take-all conflict between reason and faith and a future that will respect neither.
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Short but deep book. Half a discussion about Reason vs Faith and half apologia for Christianity. Although I agree with the author's characterization of Islam, the same could be said of medieval Christianity, with pogroms, Inquisition, Jew burning and the like.
Reason, Faith and the Struggle for Western Civilization by Samuel Gregg
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This is a well-written, well-informed and erudite survey of Western intellectual history.
Author Samuel Gregg starts with Pope Benedict's Regensberg Address and its observation that Christianity was based on the theological principle that God was Reason in contradistinction to Islam which conceived of God as Will. Gregg then follows up Christianity's definition of God as Logos and subsequent Christian intellectual history from Augustine through the modern era. This thinking was responsible for notions of freedom of choice, reason and constitutionalism.
Gregg also follows Pope Benedict's diagnosis of “pathologies of faith and pathologies of reason.” These pathologies include, Prometheanism (the idea that man can be recreated by changing society), relativism, nihilism, Nietzscheanism, and Scientism, all of which totalize science at the expense of faith. Gregg follows Pope John-Paul II's observation that both science and faith are necessary, that mere faith reduces to superstition, whereas mere science removes the goal or content for which science exists.
Gregg's book is erudite. The reader is introduced to writers, ideas and concepts that are old friends if he has an acquaintanceship with the literature of Western ideas, but, for those who don't this is a good entry point.
For myself, I appreciated Gregg's linkage of Justice Kennedy's “sweet mystery of life” passage in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to the philosophy of Nietzsche. I have often wanted to turn the tables on another Supreme Court decision with the aphorism that “while the Constitution does not incorporate Mr. Spencer's Social Statics, it seems that it does incorporate Nietsche's “Beyond Good and Evil.”
This is an intelligent, mind-stretching discussion on the connection between faith and reason in the West, where the West has gone wrong, and what might be done to correct the problems. It is worth the time spent.
