| More pope here |
[Sep. 16th, 2006|06:33 pm] |
Benedict's sermon (that caused all the trouble) ultimately amounts to special pleading.
He argues that we should "we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable". This seems like a straw man. You can have reasoned discussions about ethics that aren't based on empirically verifiable premises but are nevertheless productive.
In so far as there's a conflict between faith and reason, the issues are:
1) When religion makes faith-based claims about empiricially verifiable phenomena, such as evolution. In this case, the religion runs the risk of simply losing.
2) When religious spokespeople make claims to having a particular authority on ethical issues, despite the fact that that authority is no more empirically verifiable than authority based on any other foundation.
If he's arguing for a level playing field for all bases of belief, that's fine. But it seems like he's arguing that reason should give religion a free pass and that's wrong. |
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