Sunday, September 15, 2019

The World is Either Meaningful or Meaningless --Ratzinger and Einstein


"...[B]elief in God does not claim to offer a fictitious and abstract union of different modes of action; it claims to be more than a subjective conviction inexplicably juxtaposed to a godless objectivity. It claims to reveal the essence, the root, of the objective, to bring into sharper focus the demands of objective reality. It does so by leading to that source which unites object and subject and offers the only true explanation of their relationship. Einstein pointed out that the relationship of subject and object is, ultimately, the greatest of all puzzles, or, more exactly, that our thinking, our mathematical worlds conceived solely in our consciousness, correspond to reality, that our consciousness has the same structure as reality and vice versa.85 That is the principle ground on which all science rests. It acts as though this were a matter of course, whereas, in fact, nothing is less so. For it means that all being has the same nature as consciousness; that there is present in human thought, in human subjectivity, that which objectively moves the world. The world itself has the same nature as consciousness. The subjective is not something alien to objective reality; rather, this reality is itself like a subject. The subjective is objective, and vice versa. This affects even the language of natural science, which here, under the pressure of objects, often reveals more than its users are aware...[e.g. In neo-Darwinism {N}]ature...has appropriated the very place ascribed in the Old Testament to wisdom."

85 Quoted here from Josef Pieper, "Kreatürlichkeit bemerkungen über lie Elemente eines Grundbegriffs", in Ludger Oeing-Hanhoff, Thomas von Aquin 1274-1974 (Munich: Kösel, 1974). 47=70. Quotation is on 50.

Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989, 71.
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