Double Truths and Dualism

Persia was a land that has known dualism. The ancient Iranian religion, Zoroastrianism, posited, according to W. B. Henning, “that the world had been created by a good and an evil spirit of equal power, who set up to spoil the good work.”[1] In the third century, Manichaeism developed from this thought of a cosmic struggle of good and evil. It was a cluster of various belief systems, patching together an incoherent religion. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes it as “purported to be the true synthesis of all the religious systems then known, and actually consisted of Zoroastrian Dualism, Babylonian folklore, Buddhist ethics, and some small and superficial, additions of Christian elements.”[2] Islam absorbed this dualism, especially apparent when the relationship between faith and reason was debated.

Averroes was the first to propose a contradiction between faith and reason. He could not resolve the dichotomy between Islamic ‘revelation’ and philosophy. Instead, he held Aristotle to be infallible, and if his writings contradicted the Quran, then the Quran must then be interpreted allegorically. This brought him in tension with other Muslims, and Greek philosophy was eventually banned in Islamic Spain. Because of this conflict, science halted in the Islamic world, according to James V. Schall:

The solution that such thinkers came up with, when spelled out, was remarkable. They did not deny that contradictions existed. They said that Allah could will one thing on Tuesday and its opposite on Wednesday. The latest affirmation is always the binding one but it can change tomorrow. In thinking these notions through, things became ever more complicated.
If the will of Allah could affirm one thing on Tuesday and its opposite on Wednesday, he could do the same thing with all the laws of nature. Since truth is not grounded in logos, but in voluntas, the only way we could know that the sun will arise in the morning is if God wills it and we believe it. He could will that it not come up. These presuppositions mean that we cannot really rely on “nature” for anything.
In this perspective, nobody but Allah does anything. It is blasphemy to suggest otherwise. If we make a fortune one day but lose it the next, in both cases it is the will of Allah. Our enterprise has nothing to do with it. Our skills or lack thereof mean nothing. Science cannot really exist in such a world. No incentive is found to investigate “nature” if it can be otherwise at every instant.[3]

The Islamic world had no great achievements post-Averroes. Science became impossible, and philosophy was dead. It was an unfortunate fate, for many great thinkers were produced during the so-called Islamic Golden Age. Many were ahead of their time, such as Avicenna who anticipated David Hume and the unintelligible rejection of causation. The great Persian philosopher wrote: “Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.”[4] In response to him and other Islamic philosophers, Al-Ghazali of the fideist Ash’arite school said: “The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary…. Their connection is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side, not in being necessary in itself, incapable of separation.”[5] Al-Ghazali shunned reason and philosophy wholesale, finding truth to only be residing in revelation. Unfortunately, since Islamic philosophers could not sufficiently make the Quran and ancient philosophy synthesize well, Al-Ghazali’s opinion won out in the end.

When Averroism spread among the Latins, Aquinas resolutely condemned them, for he correctly responded that there was no conflict between faith and reason. The Catholic Church has always maintained this position, a tradition to be found among the earliest Patristic Fathers. Clement of Alexandria, writing in the third century, was clear on this issue: “Do not think that we say that these things [Christian doctrines] are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason.”[6] Saint Augustine warned of interpreting Scripture in a scientific light:

It is often the case that a non-Christian happens to know something with absolute certainty and through experimental evidence about the earth, sky, and other elements of this world, about the motion, rotation, and even about the size and distances of stars, about certain defects [eclipses] of the sun and moon, about the cycles of years and epochs, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and the like. It is, therefore, very deplorable and harmful, and to be avoided at any cost that he should hear a Christian to give, so to speak, a “Christian account” of these topics in such a way that he could hardly hold his laughter on seeing, as the saying goes, the error rise sky-high.[7]

Yet today many will claim that there is an inherent struggle between faith and science (with science representing pure reason, the only standard of truth), with the examples brought up of the Galileo controversy and modern Protestants who believe in a young Earth and condemn evolution.

There are three things to point out here.

First, the Galileo affair is commonly misunderstood. One of Galileo’s early works was dedicated to Pope Urban VIII while the latter was still a Cardinal.[8] Urban VIII even congratulated Galileo on his 1612 work, Letters on the Sunspots, his first published work describing the Copernican system.[9] However, the theory was considered to be just a theory since overwhelming proof had not yet been demonstrated, not even by Galileo. As Jerome Langford wrote, “The Jesuit astronomers had confirmed his discoveries; they [waited] eagerly for further proof so that they could abandon Tycho’s system and come out solidly in favor of Copernicanism. Many influential churchmen believed that Galileo might be right, but they had to wait for more proof.”[10] Further, “Part of the blame for the events which follow must be traced to Galileo himself. He refused the compromise, then entered the debate without sufficient proof and on the theologians’ home grounds.”

Also important to note is the role the Protestant Reformation played in this debacle. As Thomas Woods observes, “The Church, sensitive to Protestant charges that Catholics did not pay proper regard to the Bible, hesitated to permit the suggestion that the literal meaning of Scripture— which at times appeared to imply a motionless Earth— should be set aside in order to accommodate an unproven scientific theory.”[11]

Urban VIII continued to praise Galileo for his work, saying that he was a person “whose fame shines in the sky and is spread over the whole world,” and also said that Copernicanism is not, and would never be, declared heretical by the Church. However, without sufficient proof, the Pope asked the astronomer to continue to treat it as an as-yet unproven theory, to which Galileo obliged, at least initially. Only when Galileo proclaimed the Copernican theory as proven was he censured, but he still continued his scientific studies while under house arrest.

Based on this information, it cannot be said that the Church fought against science; rather, it was so insistent on the scientific method that it called for sufficient proof before declaring a theory to be true.

Second, Protestantism is imprisoned to sola scriptura, a heretical doctrine which, surprisingly, cannot be supported by Scripture. The Bible itself was codified through oral tradition by Catholics, which refutes the entire proposition that the Bible is the sole authority of faith. Without the Church, there would be no Bible for Protestant Reformers to remove seven books from.

Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest, had no issue with an old and expanding universe, for he was the first to posit the Big Bang theory. On evolution, Pope Pius XII said that “the Church does not forbid that…research and discussions…take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.”[12] As long as it is maintained that the intellectual soul of the first modern human—Adam—was created by God through a miraculous cause, evolution does not contradict faith. In fact, Charles Darwin was influenced in his theory of evolution by the French Catholic scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Another early Catholic proponent of evolution was Wilhelm Heinrich Haagen, who was the first to present “evolution described from the geologic record” in 1869.[13]

Author Rodney Stark wrote: “The Scholastics were fine scholars who founded Europe’s great universities and who were the first to formulate and teach the experimental method; it was they who launched the rise of Western science.”[14] The famous English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that science grew because of the “faith in the possibility of science … derivative from medieval theology.”[15] If there was still any question as to how the Church views the relationship between faith and reason, Pope John Paul II declared at the beginning of his encyclical Fides et Ratio, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”[16] He went so far as to say that philosophy is one of the “noblest of human tasks.”

But resorting to the Bible alone has become even more pernicious in recent decades, especially due to how influential Fundamentalism has become. Pew Research Center found that 38% or 66% of White evangelical Protestants deny that humans evolved, depending on the question format.[17] A Gallup poll revealed a similar result, with 56% of American Protestants believing that man did not evolve.[18] The BioLogos Foundation survey which received responses from 743 Protestant pastors of various denominations in America reported that 54% of the interviewed pastors subscribe to Young Earth Creationism.[19]

Unsurprisingly, then, many Americans are of the opinion there is a conflict between faith and science. 59% of Americans believe there is a science and religion conflict, according to Pew Research.[20]

Which leads to the third point: it is not science which is at conflict with faith, but Scientism. Modern ‘science communicators’ have taken the role of televangelists, with truth only being capable of understood by scientists. They have hand-waved away any suggestion of the usefulness of philosophy, instead unknowingly promoting the scientific method which itself necessitates philosophy to understand objective reality. One example of the dichotomy between modern scientists and scientists of the early 20^th century can be seen by comparing Werner Heisenberg and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize “for the creation of quantum mechanics,”[21] had this to say of science and philosophy:

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.[22]

In contrast, Tyson, a ‘science communicator’, said that

My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, “What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?”[23]

Such is the unfortunate perception of reality elucidated by modern popularizers of science.

Niccolò Machiavelli put his own spin on double-truths. Deeply involved in the political realm of Renaissance Florence, his famous work, The Prince, is a shrewd guide for acquiring and preserving political power. In it, he wrote that a prince cannot always abide by the law if he wishes to rule efficiently:

And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion. Therefore it is necessary for him to have a mind ready to turn itself accordingly as the winds and variations of fortune force it, yet, as I have said above, not to diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so, but, if compelled, then to know how to set about it.[24]

Modern political theory, drawing from Machiavelli, strongly incorporates the double-truth theory. What may be true of the moral law need not apply to governance, claim legislatures. Usury is “violence against nature” as Dante defined it, but regulation of vice need not apply to society, for the promotion of sin is a pragmatic tool for controlling the masses. Allowing the populace to indulge in their passions, such as pornography, drug use, and birth control tames reason and supplants it with appetite, preventing any sort of coherent and unified opposition against oligarchy from arising.

Justice Anthony Kennedy is a perfect example of espousing double-truths, where his political views trump his Catholicism. When Kennedy supported abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he elucidated his, and the Americanism, ideology, which is: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”[25] In the same vein, he said: “We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.”[26] But Kennedy never seemed to ask himself why the Catholic Church teaches that abortion is an act of murder, and that the state should never sanction it. His belief was in direct contradiction to the Vatican II conciliar document Gaudium et spes, which condemns the beliefs of those “people who having lost faith in life extol the kind of foolhardiness which would empty life of all significance in itself and invest it with a meaning of their own devising.”[27] The corrective approach, the document continues, is to follow the Church, which “believes that the key, the center and the purpose of the whole of man’s history is to be found in its Lord and Master.”

Ronald Reagan, who nominated Kennedy, said that “the twin beacons of faith and freedom have brightened the American sky. At times our footsteps may have faltered, but trusting in God’s help, we’ve never lost our way.”[28] These were meant to be complementary, not contradictory, yet Kennedy pitted them against each other in his rulings.

Kennedy had no problem with saying in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission:

this Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.[29]

He again allowed the American zeitgeist to take precedence over Catholic teaching in the Obergefell decision, the case which legalized homosexual marriage. The majority opinion he wrote reads:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.[30]

Kennedy’s opinions were exactly what John Adams had warned about: “Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”[31] Kennedy extolled liberty as the highest good; of course, when exalted to the realm of sacredness in a secular society, the concept becomes devoid of morality. Goethe, in his usual eloquent prose, said it best: “Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.”[32]

A friend of Kennedy, Judge Bill Clark, said that Kennedy was someone who was “unusually influenced” by his political environment.[33] Although Kennedy had been pro-life earlier in life, “his pro-life convictions failed him and his nation when tested and influenced by peers.” In this sense, he is demonstrative of an American form of Averroes. Whereas Averroes upheld Aristotle as being infallible, Kennedy glorified the Americanism status quo which predominates the moral law. Religion for both of them took a back seat to their ideal of knowledge.

[1] https://iranicaonline.org/articles/dualism

[2] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09591a.htm

[3] https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/01/31/the-two-truths-revisited/

[4] https://libquotes.com/avicenna/quote/lbp1e1o

[5] E. Michael Jones, Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2020), 319.

[6] Stark, Rodney. Bearing False Witness (p. 138). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

[7] https://strangenotions.com/bill-nye-ken-ham-and-the-catholic-third-way/

[8] Stark, Rodney. Bearing False Witness (p. 164). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

[9] Woods Jr., Thomas E.. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (p. 70). Regnery History. Kindle Edition.

[10] Ibid, 71.

[11] Ibid, 71-72.

[12] http://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html