Benedict spoke recently on faith and reason during his recent visit to his native Bravaria. Gerald Augustinus at The Cafeteria is Closed blog has a translation of the homily from the German text.
We believe in God. That is our fundamental decision. But once more the question: Can one still do that today? Is that reasonable? Since the “Enlightenment” at least part of science is busily trying to find an explanation of the world in which God becomes superfluous. And thereby He is supposed to become superfluous for our life as well.
In the end, there are two alternatives: What stands at the beginning: creating reason, the spirit of a Creator who causes everything and lets it unfold – or the un-reasonable that without reason miraculously comes up with a mathematically ordered cosmos, including man and his reason. But this reason would only be a random product of evolution and, in the end, something unreasonable, too.
We Christians say: I believe in God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth – in the Creator Spiritus. We believe that the Eternal World, reason stands at the beginning, the origin and NOT un-reason (“arationality”? he means something devoid of reason, in the sense of being outside of the parameters of reason). With this faith, we need not hide, with it we need not fear to be on the wrong path. Let us rejoice in being allowed to know God and let us try to make the reason of faith accessible to others, as Saint Peter commanded the Christians in his day -and ours- in his first letter. (1 Peter 3,15)
Read the entire translated text. Pray that Benedict can stem the tide of secularism in Europe.
