How we know

This is a golden age of scientific discovery. Nevertheless, the most basic things about ourselves remain a mystery. What is consciousness, for example? It is clearly correlated with processes happening in the brain, but that’s not what I mean. What is it, in the sense of what is it made of? It obviously isn’t made of matter or energy. Matter and energy are things we think about, things we are conscious of, but they are not what we are conscious with.

And how do we know what is true or false? Not because one neuron has triggered another. The reasons we give for our beliefs depend on logic and the laws of thought, not on what happens to be going on in our head. If another neuron had fired, it wouldn’t have changed the truth or falsity of the statement I have just made.

Catholic philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas have a theory of knowledge. In one way, it is quite close to modern empiricism. It says we base our knowledge on what the senses reveal to us. (Nihil in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu.) But it is what we do with what the senses give us that make it interesting. The Thomistic theory says that we subject it to a process of

Tolkien and Hopkins

You might like to compare Tolkien's "Ainulindale" (the Elvish account of the creation of the world through music, in The Silmarillion), with the following meditation on the Exercises of St Ignatius by Gerard Manley Hopkins, taken from The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (OUP, 1937), pp. 348-51.

"The angels, like Adam, were created in sanctifying grace, which is a thing that affects the individual, and were then asked to enter into a covenant or contract with God which, as with Adam, should give them an original justice or status and rights before God. The duties of this commonwealth were, for them, to contribute each in his rank, hierarchy, and own species, towards the Incarnation and the great sacrifice. Sister Emmerich saw this under the figure of the building of a tower: it might perhaps also be called a temple and a church. It was in fact the Church and the heavenly Jerusalem. It is also compared to a concert of music, the ranks of the angelic hierarchies being like notes of a scale and a

WYD - 3

The last part of Sophie's talk in Rio, HUMANISING ECOLOGY.

 Taking all of this into account, it means that we need a humanistic ecological vision that takes account of the special nature of human beings, as well as the ecosystem in which we belong. This vision, as Pope Benedict said, should take in “not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations”; that is, our “duties towards the human person” (Caritas in Veritate, 51). For all these things are part of what we mean by the nature of human beings. We are social by nature. We are born into families. We find meaning in our lives through loving and serving others. We have a dignity that can be expressed in the form of rights and duties.

Pope Benedict taught us that Christianity tries to balance the value of the human person with the value of nature as God’s creation. The Book of Genesis – as well as the Psalms and many other parts of the Bible, which praise the glories of nature – teach Christians to be responsible and gentle and wise in the way we behave towards the world around us. The virtue of

WYD – 2

Sophie's talk in Rio continued.

One of the symbols of the ecology movement is a famous photograph of the earth from space that was taken by one of the Apollo spaceships on a lunar mission in the late 60s. It showed people very vividly that we all live on one extremely beautiful and delicate planet. It tells us that all creatures on the earth are dependent on the ecology and resources of planet earth. Political boundaries between one nation and another are invisible from space, and so the image also came to represent a way of transcending our national differences and our enmities in order to work for the preservation of the planet we share.

But the image also teaches us something else. We are just one among many

World Youth Day 2013

Sophie Caldecott (now Lippiatt) is representing her family at WYD this year, having been invited by Creatio to speak on Faith and the Environment to the young people there. It is a talk she and her dad wrote together, representing the concern of two generations for the world that we will hand on to the next. Ecology should be part of everyone's education. Taught the right way, without the intrusion of ideology, it can help to awaken a deeper appreciation for God's creation in its complexity and interdependence, as well as a sense of moral responsibility. In fact a concern for ecology and conservation runs deep in the family. Her uncle Julian is a professional conservationist. Leonie, her mother, also has a deep interest in the subject, and her great-grandfather, an artist, was involved in setting up the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Sophie's talk on 24 July began like this:

Through the pontificates of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, ecology has become an important part of Catholic social teaching. In 2011, Pope Benedict said, "The importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly.” In his

Communio

The Spring 2013 issue of the international review Communio is on the topic of education. It includes a classic article by philosopher Robert Spaemann called “The Courage to Educate”, which presents a series of important questions about the state of education. “Why has it become necessary to point out something self-evident? Why has it become necessary to be courageous to educate?” Spaemann asks. He sketches an outline of what education really is—a formation of the human being—and then points out a number of ways this idea has been mistreated. It seems we no longer believe that education is about an affirmation of the future—in a word, that it is worth truly educating our children. He writes that “we must ask ourselves what resources we are actually living on, and the questions of how our children should live can only give impetus to do so. Many things that are being said publicly today can actually be said only by people who have no children or who have written off their children.”