But if the Second Vatican Council could chuck aside Pope Leo XIII's encyclical AETERNI PATRIS (1879), couldn't the Third Vatican Council in the future chuck aside Pope Paul VI's encyclical HUMANAE VITAE (1968) and its misguided and mistaken teachings regarding artificial contraception and other matters of sexual morality? Not if the nine bishops on Committee on Doctrine can help it!
Now keeping in mind that there is today supposedly no one favored philosophy in the Roman Catholic Church, the nine bishops nevertheless declare, "An epistemology that denies to human reason the capacity to grasp the intelligibility of nature and to discern an intrinsic order of nature is too skeptical to be compatible with a Catholic understanding of the human person as created in the image of God and a created order that has come into being and is sustained in being by the eternal Logos" (page 11). Let us consider this statement carefully.
The nine bishops have claimed that the basic problem with Salzman and Lawler's reasoning is rooted in epistemology. But epistemology is a branch of philosophy. This seems to imply that even though no one philosophy is supposedly favored in the Roman Catholic Church today, the only acceptable epistemology is one that is nonskeptical and nonrelativist. But perhaps the bishops would argue that no one philosophy has a monopoly on nonskeptical and nonrelativist epistemology, which is of course true.
For example, Jurgen Habermas holds a nonskeptical and nonrelativist epistemology in his materialist philosophy (a.k.a. naturalism), but of course he is not working with natural-law theory, as Salzman and Lawler are. In a similar way, James H. Fetzer works with deontological moral theory in his agnostic philosophy, but with an implicit commitment to a nonskeptical and nonrelativist epistemology, as we will see below.
Related Reading: For a thought-provoking example of an ancient Greek philosophy of skepticism, the interested reader should see the English translation of Sextus Empiricus' treatise about epistemology titled AGAINST THE LOGICIANS (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Interestingly enough, the medieval Islamic thinker Ibn Taymiyya, whose thought has deeply influenced our contemporary Islamist terrorists, published a treatise with a somewhat similar title that has been translated into English as IBN TAYMIYYA AGAINST THE GREEK LOGICIANS (Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1993). For a rigorous nonskeptical contribution to the medieval debates about epistemology and logic, the interested reader should check out the recent English translation of Peter of Spain's seminal work, LANGUAGE IN DISPUTE: AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF PETER OF SPAIN'S TRACTATUS CALLED AFTERWARDS SUMMULAE LOGICALES (John Benjamins Publishing, 1990). Peter of Spain was elected to be Pope John XXI, but shortly thereafter he had the great misfortune to be standing under a roof that collapsed and killed him in 1277. But his work that became known as SUMMULAE LOGICALES had enormous influence.
As the nine bishops on the Committee on Doctrine may understand, the bishops who were convened by the emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicea in the fourth century (325) did not gravitate toward a philosophy of skepticism such as Sextus Empiricus'. The Council of Nicea famously formulated the Nicene Creed that many Christian churches today still cling to, including of course the Roman Catholic Church. But the Catholic named Arius did gravitate toward a philosophy of skepticism about certain big ideas formulated in the Nicene Creed, and his skepticism helped create one of the most persistent so-called heresies, Arianism (a.k.a. the Arian heresy).
Related Reading: For an accessible account of the spirited debates in antiquity that contributed to the formulation of the Nicene Creed, the interested reader should see Philip Jenkins' book JESUS WARS: HOW FOUR PATRIARCHS, THREE QUEENS, AND TWO EMPERORS DECIDED WHAT CHRISTIANS WOULD BELIEVE FOR THE NEXT 1,500 YEARS (HarperOne, 2010).
By definition, a strong philosophy of skepticism would in principle "den[y] to human reason the capacity to grasp the intelligibility of nature," the denial of which would preclude all forms of modern science. A nonskeptical and nonrelativist epistemology should be preferred to preserve and support modern science. But there is a considerable difference between a strong philosophy of skepticism and expressing skepticism about certain inflated claims in traditional natural-law theory. The latter kind of skepticism is best understood as disagreeing with certain carefully targeted claims.
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