In the
previous posting on this subject — the reason for having “core values” in
the first place — we looked at the link between solidarity and core
values. After all, if solidarity means
accepting the principles that define a group as that group and no other, it
makes sense that the principles be clearly defined or you won’t know who
belongs to that group.
Oddly enough, the
modern craze for “inclusiveness” at all costs (rather than the principle of
participation), although often justified as bringing about “solidarity,” is
actually the opposite of solidarity.
Inclusiveness is often taken to mean that you exclude no one for any
reason . . . except, of course, for those who obviously shouldn’t be included,
such as anyone with whom you disagree or don’t like . . . such as anyone who doesn’t
meet your definition of “inclusive.”
The principle of
participation, on the other hand, assumes as a given that anyone who wants to
participate has learned and accepted the conditions for participation. Where inclusiveness sometimes boils down to
coming up with reasons to keep people out, participation is concerned with
getting people up to speed to bring them in.
It’s a whole different orientation.
Having a clearly
articulated statement of core values, then, acts as a kind of filter. If you don’t agree with them, why are you
even bothering to join or remain in the group?
If you change your mind about them, why are you staying in? And if you accept them, why aren’t you at
least trying to act in conformity with them?
Anyway, to get on
to the first of CESJ’s Core Values (the
full list of which can be seen here for quick reference), CESJ begins at
the beginning:
There is an ultimate Source of
all creation and of all universal and absolute values such as Truth, Beauty,
Love and Justice, which represent the highest ends of human actions. Many
people call this Source, God.
The first
question that comes to many people’s minds is, If CESJ is not a religious
organization, why are they dragging God into this? And which God? Isn’t CESJ being just a little bit presumptuous?
And what’s this shtick about “Ultimate
Source”? If CESJ is a religion, why not
just come out and say so without all this pseudo Star Wars drivel?
These are all the
same basic question, viz., why are we using dirty words like “God” and
trying to convince people CESJ is not a religion?
 |
| Aristotle |
Well, the “God” to
which CESJ refers is not the God of any particular faith, but the God of
reason. That’s not a different God, of
course. If we define “God” as a perfect
Being, then there can only be one. Reason
tells us that multiplicity necessarily implies imperfection. Thus — logically — any faith or philosophy that
defines God as a perfect Being by reason, whatever else that faith or
philosophy believes about that Being by faith does not change the simple
assumption of a single, perfect Being.
Aristotle called this perfect Being “the God of the philosophers” because
It is — or can be — discerned purely by reason.
Right away we
have to qualify Aristotle’s statement.
As Mortimer Adler pointed out to the outrage of a number of people
before they realized the validity of his position, to say that the existence of
“God” can be proved by human reason alone is not the same thing as saying that the
existence of God has been proven — to state that something can be done is not
the same as having done it.
We happen to
accept Aquinas’s proofs of God’s existence (and don’t really understand Anselm’s),
while Adler did not (although we didn’t see any difference in what Aquinas and
Adler said), but we both agree that the existence of God can be proved by human
reason alone. Even the Catholic Church has
stated that as an infallible doctrine:
If anyone says that the one, true
God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that
have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema. (Vatican
I, Canon 2.1.)
 |
| Aquinas |
This is
consistent with Aristotle’s comment in the Politics that man is the
rational animal. (Politics, 1252a.) Yes, he meant
adult, Greek human males (mostly), but we take it to mean all human beings, as
did Aquinas when he corrected Aristotle.
Man being the
rational animal, anything that shifts the human person away from reason as the
foundation of a faith or a philosophy contradicts essential human nature, that
is, what it means to be human. Taking “essential
human nature” and “natural law” as equivalent terms — defining “natural law” as
“the universal code of human behavior” — we conclude (and omit the pages of
argument) that human understanding of truth is that which conforms to reality, reality
being something independent of the human mind that perceives it. (Mortimer J. Adler, Truth in Religion: The
Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990,
21-22. Cf. J.M. Bocheński, The Methods of Contemporary Thought. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968,
3-5, 6.)
This is an
important point, because many people today think that accepting the existence
of God is purely a religious issue, and either has nothing to do with real life
or actually contradicts it. Both theists
and atheists make this same mistake.
They confuse conclusions and beliefs based on religious faith, with
those derived from scientific enquiry, and assume that what the “other side”
believes is necessarily false if it does not match exactly their interpretation
of what they hold by faith or reason.
 |
| G.K. Chesterton |
Of course, people
can also have the advanced disease in which they accept contradictions even as
they admit they are contradictory! As
G.K. Chesterton once remarked, such people “split the human head in two” —
Siger of Brabant said this: the Church must be right theologically, but she can be
wrong scientifically. There are two truths, the truth of the supernatural
world, and the truth of the natural world, which contradicts the supernatural
world. While we are being naturalists, we can suppose that Christianity is all
nonsense; but then, when we remember that we are Christians, we must admit that
Christianity is true even if it is nonsense. In other words, Siger of Brabant split the human head in two, like
the blow in an old legend of battle; and declared that a man has two minds,
with one of which he must entirely believe and with the other may utterly
disbelieve. To many this would at least seem like a parody of Thomism. As a fact, it was the
assassination of Thomism. It was not two ways of finding the same truth; it was
an untruthful way of pretending that there are two truths. (G.K. Chesterton, Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. New
York: Image Books, 1956, 92-93.)
As the late Dr.
Ralph McInerny commented of this tendency, “[T]o suggest that in these
circumstances one could go on believing is to make a mockery of both faith and
reason. The believer would be someone who believes that A is true but who knows — thanks to Scripture scholarship — that -A [Opposite-A] is true, and who still thinks it is all right for him to go on
believing that A is true.” (Ralph M.
McInerny, Miracles: A Catholic View.
Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1986, 22.)
 |
| Mortimer Adler |
Now, forcing religious
beliefs on others violates free will and offends against human dignity. It also fails to take into account that while
scientific truth and religious truth are both true, they are different truths,
and are proved or accepted in different ways.
As Adler commented in a discussion of knowledge and opinion,
Religious belief or faith would
lose all its efficacy if it were reduced to mere opinion. But the grounds on which it makes such a
claim are so utterly different from the criteria we have employed to divide
genuine knowledge from mere opinion that it is impossible within the scope of
this discussion to put religious faith or belief into the picture we now have
before us. (Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in
Modern Thought — How They Came About, Their Consequences, and How to Avoid Them. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985,
105-106.)
Thus, CESJ
accepts that there is an ultimate Source or Creator, that the Nature of that
Creator consists of absolute good, and that this can be proved by human reason
(not that it necessarily has been), but nothing more. Anything else is based on faith that, while
it cannot contradict reason, also cannot be proved empirically; it is
necessarily an abstraction.
And if you think
that is deep, wait until you see the next posting on this subject. . . .
#30#
