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Hume: The Natural History of Religion
Hume was an Enlightenment thinker who notably influenced the relationship between rationality and religion with his work The Natural History of Religion. Hume concludes that simple theism is all our limited rationality can comprehend. Anything beyond simple theism perverts our natural desire to worship our creator and is religiously irresponsible.
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Romanticism
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment.
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Latter Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment is the era in Western intellectual, scientific and cultural life, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority. Immanuel Kant and David Hume are notworthy thinkers in this movement -
Kant: On the Failure of All Attempted Philosophical Theodicies
Theodicy, which Kant defines as a defense of God’s wisdom in light of the apparent lack of purposefulness in the world, is not the task of science but a matter of faith. Authentic theodicy lies in recognizing the limits of human reason while remaining sincere in our thoughts. -
William Paley: Natural Theology
Paley argues by way of the watch maker analogy that we can learn about the Deity from his works of creation. He calls this natural theology, the knowledge of theology which can be gathered from nature and providence. -
Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Faust: Part One
In Part One of Goethe’s drama, Faust despairs over the fact that all his sapiential pursuits have resulted in ignorance. Faust makes a pact with Mephistopheles that this demon will help him seek all human and divine knowledge. We can read Faust’s eventual redemption after a life of earnest seeking as a positive take on the relationship between rational science and Christianity. -
Caspar David Friedrich: Winter Landscape with Church
An example of Romantic visual art, Friedrick brings us to the Divine through nature. The expansiveness of the stark winter scene and the diminished perspective may be ways of capturing God’s incommunicability.
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Isaac. Hecker: Aspirations of Nature
Hecker, an American influenced by the Romantics in Europe, presents Catholicism as commensurate with the highest aspirations of humanity. -
On the Origin of Species
Darwin’s thinking significantly influences an anthropological understanding of God, self, and other. In fairness to the complex dialogue between evolution and religion two points should be made. One, neither an articulation nor defense of Darwin’s theory is blindingly simple. Two, where evolution has often come into conflict with religious belief it has sought to explain natural phenomena rather than engage in deicide. -
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Isaac Hecker Meet
Emerson and Hecker are two noteworthy American Romantics with distinct views of religious truth. Emerson was waiting for a truth Hecker believed could be encountered here and now. -
The Descent of Man
Darwin’s thinking significantly influences an anthropological understanding of God, self, and other. In fairness to the complex dialogue between evolution and religion two points should be made. One, neither an articulation nor defense of Darwin’s theory is blindingly simple. Two, where evolution has often come into conflict with religious belief it has sought to explain natural phenomena rather than engage in deicide. -
Pascendi Dominici Gregis
In this encyclical Pius X condemns modernist ideology as resting primarily on the philosophical position that human reason is confined to sense perceptions. The mutual exclusivity of science and faith by reason of the diversity of their objects is a position resulting from ignorance and pride regarding the right use of human reason. -
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: 1881-1955
Teilhard seeks to reconcile religious faith with his academic interests in natural science. The result is a new mysticism that embraces the scientific advances of modernity. To this extent Teilhard is often listed as one of the Nouvelle Théologie theologians. -
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Nouvelle Theologie
A mid-20th century school of Catholic theology that sought to replace traditional scholasticism by embracing the influence modern thought was having on theology. This movement heavily influenced the Second Vatican Council. -
Humani Generis
In this encyclical Pius XII addresses some of the false opinions that arose from the Nouvelle theologie and evolutionary movements. The Church presents itself as not afraid to face a future with new questions and improvements while it is clear that it must reject the opinions that threaten to undermine the foundations of Catholic Doctrine. -
Second Vatican Council
The Church took this opportunity to express itself in the modern context. Modernity was changing the way the world thought about itself and the Church was no exception. -
Stephen Hawking
Hawking is working on a unified theory of physics, a theory that would explain everything in the universe. Only a handful of people in the world have the technical background to follow his thought. He is also noteworthy for bringing these issues to the public sphere in A Brief History of Time.
