The Trouble With Clever Nonsense & Theological Mischief

Wittgenstein wasn’t the only offender, just the most endearingly bonkers. Pope Leo is starting to show signs of a liking for useful ambiguity.

Written by Sean Walsh for Catholic Unscripted

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” - John 1:1

“Jesus answered ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’” - John 14:6

About a century ago English philosophy (philosophy in the English-speaking world) developed something of a crush on the natural sciences and tried to become a bit more like them. We know from real life that these strategies usually end in embarrassment.

Overdosed on metaphysics and bored by questions about the source and nature of knowledge the philosophers went for a catastrophic intellectual makeover, one which involved an unnecessary repudiation of much of what had gone before.

It was worse than that, come to think of it. The “revolution in philosophy” in the 20^th Century generated new tools of logical and linguistic analysis, which were then used to intellectually guillotine established traditions of philosophical inquiry.

What is the soul? How can we know what the world “is really like” outside the way we perceive and think about it? What makes this action good and that one evil? How can God be outside of space and time and yet still interact with the empirical world? Is beauty just in the eye of the beholder or is Bowie objectively better than Diddy (that one answers itself)?

The new philosophy interrogated the linguistic and logical assumptions behind such speculations and found them wanting, to put it mildly. It was not that these were questions which couldn’t be answered. It was more that to ask them was to indulge in a sort of nonsense.

It didn’t occur to the revolutionaries that the new methodologies were self-refuting -that they failed their own tests.