É sempre uma imensa alegria ler textos que honram a grande tradição intelectual católica. Este é o caso da palestra(lecture), do Cardeal Walter Kasper, presidente do Conselho Pontifício para a Promoção da Unidade dos Cristãos, que inagurou a nova série de lectures -John Henry Newman Lecture - organizada pelos “Catholic Halls” da Universidade de Oxford. Patrocinada pelo jornal britanico The Catholic Herald, ela “honours and promotes John Henry Newman's vision of a rich mutuality between the Christian faith and the intellectual life: of faith as constantly seeking understanding, and of reason as perfected in faith”
"The new actuality of God
In the philosophical and theological tradition one proof for the existence of God was derived “exconsensu gentium”, “on the basis of the consensus of all peoples”. The argument postulates that there is no people so savage, no man so primitive that his spirit is totally devoid of any conception of deities.
In the ancient world this consensus was seen as a sign of divine legitimation. There was a
conviction that this unanimity could not rest merely on convention, that it is grounded in a law of nature.1 In the tradition of Plato, the idea of God was until well into the modern era believed to be innate to mankind. The psalmist too says: “Only the fool says in his heart, there is no God” (Ps14,1; 53,1).
Is that still true today? In our age, is it not instead the wise, or those who consider themselves as such, who say precisely that there is no God – and who believe that they can dismiss the idea of God of earlier ages as a God delusion. So the proof of God on the basis of the unanimity of the peoples seems at least for us Europeans to be an idea that has had its day. Surveys confirm that in respect of religion we Europeans rank last on the world scale, and other cultures are surprised that we have renounced the consensus gentium and – viewed from the perspective of universalcultural history – have chosen to follow a separate path.
Doubtless, even among the scientific community in Europe we can still find a substantial number of esteemed scientists for whom God is not dead but a living reality who determines their lives and their thinking. But there are also many to whom God means nothing. They live etsi Deus non daretur. In the ancient world, and in religions in general, God or the divine represent the actual and true reality, while the world by contrast is in danger of being seen merely as appearance or as a shadow reality. For many of our contemporaries, however, it is precisely the reverse. The observable tangible reality, the reality which can be perceived and grasped by the senses, the calculable and predictable reality which we can manipulate, is the actual reality, while the reality of God is suspected of being a mere reflection of the empirical world, a construct, an ideology, a projection or an illusion.
Both practical and theoretical atheism alike were for a long time regarded as the keynote of the age.2 At the end of the 19th century Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God and
celebrated this death as the great emancipation of mankind. In the 20th century his message was turned into a designation and an analysis of the age. Following Hölderlin, Martin Heidegger spoke of the absence of God, and Martin Buber of the eclipse of God in our time. Imprisoned by the Gestapo and facing imminent execution, two great Christian witnesses of the resistance, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Jesuit Alfred Delp, envisaged the coming of a godless and religion-less age in which the old religious vocabulary would lose its power and become incomprehensible. The Second Vatican Council, too, considered atheism to be among the most serious phenomena of our age (Gaudium et spes [GS], 19). Then in the 70s and 80s the secularisation thesis was able to gain a firm foothold, claiming that the inexorable march of modernisation processes would by its very nature virtually inevitably result in progressive secularisation. Faith in God seemed to be a lost cause.
Today atheism is by no means dead, it has reappeared not so much in the guise of philosophy as in the guise of science, and with nothing short of missionary zeal. Books such as Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion, in particular, rank on the bestseller lists.3 We can of course question whether this kind of atheism is not itself a lost cause. It can hardly be maintained that it represents the summit of contemporary thought. It reiterates in a heavy-handed and distorted manner 19th century positions which have long been considered a thing of the past. As its bestknown critic, A. E. McGrath – himself a scientist – has demonstrated in detail, it is essentially an atheistic fundamentalism. McGrath speaks of an atheism delusion."
1 This proof of God is found already in the Stoa of antiquity (Cicero, Tusc. Disp. I,30; cf. De natura deorum 2,5).Among the Church Fathers this idea was taken up above all by Clemens of Alexandria (Strom V,14).
2 Individual references in: W. Kasper, Der Gott Jesu Christi (1982), reprint Freiburg i. Br. 2008, 50 f
3 This is true above all of R. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2007. For analysis and critique see: A. McGrath,
Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life, Oxford 2004; and McGrath Der Atheismuswahn. Eine
Antwort auf Richard Dawkins und den atheistischen Fundamentalismus, Asslar 2007.
Fonte: The Catholic Herald
Para ler a versão completa da palestra: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/kasperlecture/index.shtml
