Praise for the Pope
Yes, you read that right. Pope Benedict XVI has recently made an announcement I think is worthy of some praise. The Vatican is updating its rules on claims of miraculous visions or experiences, requiring more rigorous investigation. From the Daily Mail:
The first step will be to impose silence on the alleged visionaries and if they refuse to obey then this will be taken as a sign that their claims are false.
The visionaries will next be visited by psychiatrists, either atheists or Catholics, to certify their mental health and to verify whether they are suffering from conditions of a hysterical or hallucinatory character or from delusions of leadership.
The third step will be to investigate the person’s level of education and to determine if they have had access to material that could be used to falsely support their claims.
If the visionary is considered credible they will ultimately be questioned by one or more demonologists and exorcists to exclude the possibility that Satan is hiding behind the apparitions in order to deceive the faithful.
Okay, so it’s not perfect, but you have to admit, it’s a major improvement! The Pope, allegedly in favor of belief in talking snakes and men surviving for days inside the stomachs of enormous fish, thinks you might be delusional about that time you saw the Virgin Mary in your macaroni and cheese. Pope Benedict XVI has said, and implicitly stands for, many ideas and policies that I disagree with. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to congratulate him for making a solid move in the right direction.
The message from the Vatican here is that religious claims shouldn’t be believed automatically. Evidence should be carefully considered. The claimant’s motives should be considered. We’re all accustomed to thinking this way about the estimate from the plumber or the infomercial on late-night TV. However, most people aren’t able to think this way about religion, even the ones who are very savvy with home repairs. Now, the Pope is telling Catholics that they should do it. Sure, he still says that the Vatican gets the final call on what’s true and what’s not. It’s still the Vatican. However, it’s kind of a slippery slope towards wholesale skepticism of dogma, and the Pope will do a much better job of convincing Catholics to head that way than I ever could.
Thanks to John Armstrong for his rant that lit a fire under my skeptical behind about this, and also to RichardDawkins.net which posted the article I read first.
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Good, but you’re still making the mistake I complained about: confounding Catholics and fundamentalists. Benedict continues to follow the official dogma outlines in Fides et Ratio that “faith and reason are different methods of coming to knowledge, and as such cannot directly contradict each other”.
That is, the scriptural texts about “talking snakes and men surviving for days inside the stomachs of enormous fish”? Metaphors. Just-So Stories. I’m going to say this on its own line because it’s an important point that many people still do not get:
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH DOES NOT TAKE THE BIBLE AS BEING LITERALLY TRUE!
I’m surely not an expert in Catholic doctrine, so I apologize for missing the nuances. I guess those particular examples overstepped a line. I don’t understand how the idea that knowledge can be gained from both reason and from faith says that the Bible is not literally true. Wouldn’t believing the Bible to be true be gaining knowledge from one’s faith?
At any rate, Catholics must believe that the Bible is more than a nice parable. Clearly they take Jesus’s existence literally. I don’t know exactly where the line is, but I don’t think you’d argue with the basic point that Catholicism teaches things that are plainly inconsistent with scientific evidence.
If you actually read the catechism you’ll see that by now they take great pains to twist around in such a way to avoid conflict with scientific statements wherever possible. Take, for example, the whole rigamarole about transubstantiation — the philosophical doctrines of “substances” versus “accidents” — which allows them to keep the scientific truth that the consecrated wafer is still bread and the (to them) spiritual truth that it’s the body of Christ.
A violation of Ockham’s Razor? Sure. But at the end of the day from a scientist’s viewpoint it comes down to this: the Catholic Church believes that the scientific method is a perfectly valid epistemology, and doesn’t deny the truth of what science finds. They don’t ask to make policy based on denial of science, and they don’t ask for their alternative to science to be taught in science classrooms.