Harris on Ratzinger at Regensburg

There is perhaps no more exciting thinker living than Lee Harris, a student of philosophy and some time owner of an auto tint shop, whose first book Civilization and Its Enemies, proposed the present unpleasantness as a war between the western team and the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

Now he has published a long article entitled “Socrates or Muhammed?”
in theWeekly Standard about—what else—the recent speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg.

But, he confesses, the pope does not speak as the infallible head of the Roman Catholic Church.

He stands before his learned audience not as the
pope, but simply as Joseph Ratzinger, an intelligent and thoughtful man, who makes no claims to any privileged cognitive authority. He has come, like Socrates, not to preach or sermonize, but to challenge with questions.

The question that Ratzinger formulates is the basic question that has dogged us ever since Kant.

The Greeks felt that they could reason about anything and everything--about the immortality of the soul, metempsychosis, the nature of God, the role of reason in the universe, and so on. Modern reason, from the time of Kant, has repudiated this kind of wild speculative reason. For modern reason, there is no point in even asking such questions, because there is no way of answering them scientifically.

But how do we deal with a religion like Islam that asserts that reason has nothing to do with it? What is the position of the atheist who believes in reason when confronted with a culture like Islam for which reason does not enter into it?

Ever since Kant the intellectual and cultural elite have asserted that it is a matter of subjective choice what people believe about God. But Ratzinger challenges this notion.

He has thrown out an immense challenge to modern reason and to the modern world. Is it really a matter of subjective choice whether men follow a religion that respects human reason and that refuses to use violence to convert others? Can even the most committed atheist be completely indifferent to the imaginary gods that the other members of his community continue to worship?

To put it crudely, does it matter to an atheist whether he lives in a society with a dominant religion that respects human reason or a society with a dominant religion that uses violence to convert others?

Lee Harris has a forthcoming book for next year. It is called The Suicide of Reason.

But first, read the Weekly Standard article.

“Read the whole thing.”