I originally posted this essay nearly 18 years ago, when I was influenced by the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) as “processed” by David Ray Griffin (1939-2022).
I was then also navigating (internally) my relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, wherein I was raised, educated, and married but which I had set aside, first in 1979 and again (and, I hope, finally) in 2017 for the dispensationalist eschatology and ecclesiology of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) buttressed by the Reformed apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987).
Natural law libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics, as filtered mainly through the person and writings of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), added another layer of tension to this journey, one that is reflected in part in Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic.
I had not yet returned to the view of the Bible to which He had once led me and from which, for reasons inexplicable to me, He let me wander. Despite that detour, I articulated concerns about the roots of the secularizing forces that have polluted Western culture over the past three centuries.
This essay asks questions that, for all their verbose inelegance, merit being disinterred from my old site and displayed on this one. Light editing, restructured paragraphs, and linked reference notes have, I hope, lightened the prospective reader’s burden. At over 7,000 words, it’s hardly a quick read, but I hope its contents will repay the effort of the hardy few who undertake to read it.
[Here is the original prefatory paragraph]
G. K. Chesterton once defended the amateur against the professional by aphorizing that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly” (What’s Wrong with the World [1910]; last sentence of Part Four, Chapter XIV). And so in the spirit of this site’s “workshop” character, I am posting my notes toward an investigation I unfortunately do not see myself returning to in the near future. The following is not an essay fit for a journal.
The scholarship cited in this unfinished piece suggests an affirmative answer to the title’s question. By displaying this yet unripe fruit, however, I acknowledge that I may have overlooked important sources or misinterpreted those I have used. I invite interested readers to show, if they can, that either of these potential failings of mine is more than a theoretical possibility. I hope the order of some of the paragraphs and the occasional repetition of points does not put any reader off.
Anthony Flood, October 13, 2006
Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? Notes on David Ray Griffin’s Implicit Counterpoint to Stanley L. Jaki
Thomas E. Woods has written a book that has an ostensibly Catholic apologetic purpose.[1] By locating the roots of the West’s choicest fruits (science, law, education, charitable institutions, economics, etc.) in the soil of Western Christianity, Woods offers an eloquent, if indirect, apologetic for the Catholic faith. By indirect I mean that his observations do not so much argue for the truth of what Catholics believe as challenge those who are so sure that what Catholics believe is false. Presupposing that it is irrational to malign one’s benefactor, Woods’ challenge trades on his reader’s being a beneficiary of the civilization that the Catholic Church built. In one chapter, however, he has unintentionally documented how the Catholic Church, while building Western civilization, planted, seeded, and watered the garden of that civilization’s weeds, namely, materialistic mechanism, upon which it is now in danger of choking.[2]
Woods never comments on this dialectical reversal, whose irony cuts much more deeply than does his correction of popular ignorance of, say, what really happened in the Galileo episode. In recent decades scholars have been paying increasing attention to extra-scientific influences in the rise of modern science.
What does not even surface as a question in Woods’ narrative is the possibility that an enterprise that we would recognize generically as science—sustained, experimental study of nature—not only might have developed other than the way it did, but that such an alternative was already incipient in Western Europe.
In fact, Catholic divines nipped that alternative in the bud ostensibly because they deemed it incompatible with revealed truth and more pragmatically because any loss on their spiritual monopoly was bad for business. That is, science as “a self-perpetuating field of endeavor” was “enabled by a Catholic milieu” (76) because Catholic divines prevented another milieu, equally Western and arguably on the way to establishing that field of endeavor, from flourishing. Continue reading “Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? A fresh look at an old essay.”