The Guardian 23 July, 2008
Faith or knowledge
In welcoming the Pope to Sydney Kevin Rudd said "Some say there is no place for faith in the 21st Century. I say they are wrong. Some say that faith is the enemy of reason, I say also they are wrong. Because faith and reason are great partners in our human history and in our human future. Rich in humanity, rich in scientific progress…"
The fact is that faith (meaning a belief in a supernatural creator) is inimical to science.
The Oxford Dictionary describes faith as, among other things, "divine truth apart from proof". The authors of the dictionary may have had the Catholic Church in mind when it said: "belief founded on authority".
On the other hand reason is described as: "The intellectual faculty characteristic especially of human beings by which conclusions are drawn from premises. It goes on to describe reason as those who "use argument with person[s] by way of persuasion… to "form or try to reach conclusions by connected thought".
The Dictionary of Philosophy, a Communist publication, says of faith that it is the "recognition of something as true without proof … Blind faith in the supernatural (God, angels, devils, satan, etc) is part of any religion".
Science, on the other hand, is "the field of research directed towards obtaining further knowledge of nature, society and thought. It comprises all the conditions and elements of research."
In the face of the march of science the Catholic Church, in particular, attempts to find a way to marry faith and science. This is what is behind Kevin Rudd’s remark, obviously meaning that the Church is "rich in scientific progress" and that "faith and reason are great partners".
The previous Pope attempted to find a way to bring faith and science together when he invited to the Vatican a group of scientists including Stephen Hawking.
There are many examples of how blind faith works out in worldly practice. For centuries the Churches, hand in hand with the colonial powers, have been fighting to preserve their domination over the minds of humanity. This struggle has used both sanguine and peaceful means and the claim by Kevin Rudd that the Pope is "an apostle of peace" and is the "light of the world at a time when the world has so much darkness" is a continuation of this.
One suspects that Kevin Rudd’s reference to "darkness" refers to the advance of science and the world-wide decline of religious "faith", the upsurge of people’s movements for social change and the advance of socialist ideas which are based on the scientific investigation of society and an understanding of the changes taking place.
In the wall-to-wall media coverage of the Catholic World Youth Day, whether it be print, radio, television or internet, it would be hard to find any reference to science. It was all about faith. Faith is the stock-in-trade of religion and could never subject its faith to the scrutiny of science. Rather faith is described by the religious as being above or beyond science.
There was one daily midst all the media hype, the Australian Financial Review (July 17), that took a more sobre approach. Its readers worship market forces. Their prayers were not heard, as can be seen from the headline of the paper’s coverage (on page 3!) which ran: "Pilgrims bring their faith but no spending money".