Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The Problem with Certainty

In 2005, in his last homily given to the College of Cardinals before being elevated to the papacy, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger famously warned, “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”


There's another problem with certainty that the Pope and other orthodox believers don't address: Human fallibility. They assume that if they get The Word from on High, that they not only get it from an infallible source (very doubtful), but that they understand it infallibly. However, as we've learned to our sorrow over the centuries, even the most devoutedly kind and generous believer can indeed be in error. I don't need to use the most famous examples from history. Just look at your own decidedly fallible life, as I look at mine.

Our own highest goals may or may not be our own desires, but our self-knowledge certainly should warn us against Believing without a care to whether we are actually correct in our beliefs.

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