Platonism and Enchantment

Part 6, Antiskepticism

Einstein famously declared, "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." 

We are so accustomed to assuming that our minds accurately reflect reality, especially in how we can discover lawful relations and mathematical truths, that we fail to appreciate just how mysterious and miraculous it all is. 

You might not know this, but a lot of mathematicians are Platonists, convinced that mathematics is not construction of the human mind but is, rather, an ontological discovery. In this view, the Pythagorean Theorem exists independently of human minds, a truth that is simply a property of being whether consciously apprehended or not.

Christianity is Platonic in the sense in that we confess that the world possesses an inherent rationality, what both Greek philosophy and Christian theology call the Logos. But that's only half of the equation. The human mind must, in its own right, image the Logos, be capable of mirroring the rationality it encounters in creation. There is here a "fit" between the logos of the human mind and the Logos we discover in creation. This fit makes knowledge possible. This is why Lloyd Gerson describes Platonism as "antiskeptical," for Platonism contends that "knowledge is possible."

In his famous address at the University of Regensburg concerning faith and reason, Pope Benedict XVI drew out these connections between Greek philosophy and Christian faith. As Benedict declared, "the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy." This connection, Benedict continues, is rooted in the Logos of God and is a bridge between Greek and Christian thought:

Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1). 

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history...The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

The "fundamental decision" Benedict is describing here is the Platonic/Christian conviction concerning the intelligibility of the cosmos on the one hand and the rationality of the human mind on the other--a Logos/logos connection between Ontology and Mind--that makes universal knowledge possible. Without this correspondence, our encounter with reality would reduce to illusion and radical subjectivism. Shared, universal knowledge of the cosmos would be impossible. The Pythagorean Theorem would become a relative truth. 

Benedict therefore concludes that science simply has to accept the fundamental metaphysical mystery that sits at the heart of its project. Einstein's observation about the incomprehensible comprehensibility of the cosmos. As Benedict observes:

Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought -- to philosophy and theology...The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur -- this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.

The money line, for me, is this: "The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality..."