Recovering our Christian Intellectual Tradition
By Sam Zeno Conadero and Thomas White, First Things.
Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 2: On the Rational Credibility of Christianity, by Thomas Joseph White, O.P., was released on March 15. Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J., recently interviewed Fr. White about the book for First Things. The following has been edited for clarity and length.
Sam Zeno Conedera: What do you consider the greatest challenge to the “rational credibility of Christianity”?
Thomas Joseph White: Challenges to Christianity change from epoch to epoch and across different cultures in a given age, including our own. Today in the northern hemisphere there are two central challenges to Christian belief that are prevalent, culturally speaking. The first is what Pius IX called “indifferentism,” the idea that all religions and worldviews are equally arbitrary or implausible. At base this is a form of skepticism that leads to spiritual resignation; it is the mark of intellectual discouragement and malaise or despair. It frequently arises from affluence and cultural distractions such as wealth, pleasure, and ambition. The culture of secular liberalism may hope to aspire to something more than this, but it is not clear that it succeeds.
The other challenge is scientific naturalism, the hypothesis that human beings are merely highly complex material entities, evolved from random and accidental cosmic processes of physics and biology. The laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are the best and virtually the only resource we have to explain reality, and there is no other answer to why human beings exist. Enjoy the view; you will be dead soon.
Most people fail to believe either of these notions in their pure form, but many find their intellectual and spiritual lives stilted by one of them or some combination of the two. This effectively keeps many people today from being religious or from taking Christianity seriously at an intellectual level. It also should be said that most people have almost no access to Christianity in a university context or in their work environment, however intellectual the latter may be. Our specialized university and work formation play little to no part in our quest for meaning.
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