Religion suppresses critical thinking.

Question

Religion teaches you to defer to authority — Scripture, tradition, the magisterium — rather than to think for yourself. It rewards belief and punishes doubt. The catechism is a list of conclusions to be memorized, not arguments to be tested. A worldview that demands submission of the intellect is incompatible with the intellectual maturity that defines an adult.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

The Summa is a book of objections.

The structure of the Summa Theologiae — the central work of Catholic theology, studied for seven centuries — is not a list of conclusions handed down from above. It is a series of quaestiones, each of which begins with the objections to the position the author will eventually defend, stated in their strongest form. It seems that God does not exist, because… The Catholic tradition's flagship intellectual document opens, repeatedly and on every important question, with the case against itself.

This is not an accident of style. It is a methodological commitment. The truth, on the scholastic understanding, is reached through disputatio — through the testing of positions against their strongest objections, the canvassing of authorities, the exposure of one's own conclusions to the most rigorous available challenge. A medieval theology student was required to argue the case against Catholic doctrine before he was permitted to argue for it. The intellectual culture this produced was, by the standards of any age, unusually adversarial and unusually rigorous.

The objection mistakes catechetical instruction — which is appropriate for children learning the basics of the faith — for the entirety of the Catholic intellectual tradition. The catechism is the floor, not the ceiling. The ceiling is six centuries of scholasticism, the modern Catholic philosophical revival, and the ongoing magisterial dialogue with science, philosophy, and culture. Anyone who has spent ten minutes in the actual literature knows this.

John Henry Newman · Answer

I have written a defense of conscience that the Church has accepted.

The Catholic tradition holds that conscience is the proximate norm of moral action — that a person is bound, before any external authority, to follow his own well-formed conscience, even against the directives of his superiors. I shall drink to the Pope, if you please — still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards. I wrote this, and I wrote it as a cardinal, and the Church canonized me. The doctrine is not contested.

What the objection mistakes for "submission of the intellect" is in fact a mature relationship between individual conscience and inherited wisdom. The Catholic does not abandon his judgment when he assents to doctrine; he integrates his judgment with two thousand years of accumulated reflection by minds at least as serious as his own. To dismiss this inheritance as authoritarianism is to mistake humility for cowardice. The man who believes nothing he did not derive from scratch is not free; he is impoverished, cut off from the entire intellectual capital of his species.

Genuine intellectual maturity consists in knowing when to defer and when to dissent — and in cultivating the discernment that makes the distinction. The Catholic tradition has been working on this discernment longer than any rival has existed. It is not perfect at it. But it is not the cartoon of robotic submission the objection requires.

The Catechism · Answer

Faith and reason are the two wings on which the human spirit rises.

The Catholic Church, far from condemning the use of reason, holds that faith and reason are mutually reinforcing rather than opposed. Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason. The same God is the source of both, and the genuine conclusions of either, properly arrived at, cannot contradict the genuine conclusions of the other.

The Church therefore not only permits but requires the rigorous exercise of reason in the examination of the faith. The motives of credibility — the rational grounds for taking the Christian claim seriously — are the proper object of philosophical investigation. The compatibility of revealed doctrine with what is known by science, history, and philosophy is to be defended, where it is genuine, and where apparent contradictions arise, both sides are to be examined honestly. Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God.

The image of religion as the suppressor of inquiry is a polemical fiction, contradicted by the historical record of Catholic universities, Catholic scientists, Catholic philosophers, and the Church's own magisterial teaching on the autonomy and dignity of the natural sciences. The objection survives only by ignoring what the Church actually teaches in favor of a caricature it would be easier to refute.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

The free man and the obedient man are the same man.

The objection assumes a particular picture of the autonomous adult: the one who derives every conviction from his own resources, defers to no authority, and treats inherited wisdom as suspicion-by-default. This is a recent picture, and it has not aged well. The man who genuinely tries to live this way ends up either reinventing the wheel — laboriously deriving conclusions his ancestors had refined over millennia — or, more commonly, simply absorbing the prejudices of his immediate social class while flattering himself that he reasoned them out.

There is a real form of intellectual submission that is incompatible with adulthood: the surrender of judgment to authority that has not earned it. The Church has produced this from time to time, as has every institution of any age. But there is also a form of intellectual reception — sitting at the feet of the saints and the doctors, reading them with care, allowing oneself to be taught — which is not infantile but the precondition of any real thinking. I read it; I argued with it; eventually it argued me down. This is how minds grow.

The truly infantile position is the one that says, I will accept nothing I have not personally derived from first principles. No adult lives this way about anything. The Catholic tradition is unusual not in expecting reception of inherited wisdom but in being honest about the expectation. The atheist receives his inheritance too. He just calls it common sense.

Religion suppresses critical thinking.

The objection, in full

Faith and reason are the two wings on which the human spirit rises.

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