THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
31
unreasonable, believable or not, solely as a consequence of who wins.
Once again, the situation is identical to all the ones before. Either
there is an unbridgeable gap, this time between 'belief' and 'reason':
[Insert your favorite irrational belief here] < - - - - -
and please place all rationality,
everything we can ever learn,
discover, or think about, over here.
or (in the end) 'reason' can exist, or 'belief' can exist, but not both:
Reason Belief
| |
(belief) Reason (reason) Belief
Of course, in real life it is often easy enough to be logically
inconsistent. There are plenty of real-life scientists who without great
discomfort believe 'religious' things that they know are logically
contradicted by the assumptions of their science. There are also plenty
of believers who quite happily use every last bit of the fruits of modern
science, up to the very inch where those fruits start to be inconvenient
to their beliefs.
There is no question that such accommodations are possible, that
they happen all the time, and that most people don't suffer all that
much from making them, whichever side of the fence they happen to
be on.
This situation is so 'normal' in real life that it is worth making a
small digression here to discuss it a little. After all, if many, maybe
even most, people can live fairly happily while holding ideas that even
they admit seem to be contradictory, it becomes a little difficult for me
to justify asking you to take the time to read a book like this one,
which is about ideas about the Catholic faith, and making those ideas
coherent!
Are ideas important at all? Why bother trying to get them right and
making them coherent, if we are only rarely troubled, scarcely
inconvenienced, when they are neither right nor coherent?
Actually, if we take Covenantal Theology seriously, there is no real
answer to this problem, outside of the Eucharist. Again, that is meant
literally -- another indication of how radical, how childish, a book it is.
You'll probably have to read many more chapters of this book to
begin to understand how literally Covenantal Theology asks us to take
the idea that there's no real answer to the problem outside of the
Eucharist, but it is possible to see some of the difficulties even outside
of the arguments Covenantal Theology presents. So, yes, experience
sometimes shows that, over the long haul, ideas do matter, they do
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.