The Critical Difference… Between Thinking And Knowing
By DONALD DeMARCO
The Freedom from Religion Foundation, established in 1976, is a non-profit organization that advocates for atheists, agnostics, and non-theists. It now has a weekly half-hour television program called Freethought Matters. As an antidote to religion, it is shown on Sunday mornings in a dozen major cities at the time that most Americans attend church.
Ironically, the notion of being a “freethinker” appeals to those who do not know much about thinking. The same can be said about the word “freedom” which is almost always misunderstood. At the same time, people who see religion as an enemy of thinking fail to comprehend neither the nature nor the purpose of religion.
G.K. Chesterton, a convert to the Church of Rome, remarked: “To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking but to learn how to think.” Courses in logic, a non-religious subject, have been offered in virtually every Catholic college and university ever since the Church established universities. Logic teaches us how to think but not what to think.
St. Augustine, St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, St. John Henry Newman, and St. John Paul II were not exactly slouches when it came to thinking. They had no trouble integrating thinking with religion, or reason with faith. By contrast, the so-called freethinkers are embarrassingly one-dimensional.
The great danger of freethinking is to rely almost exclusively on one’s own limited abilities. This is an attitude that would not be tolerated in science or, in fact, any other profession. Education is based on the idea that what the most honored people in the field have had to say is worth appreciating. Learning, in fact, is recognizing the fact that others have figured out many things that we could not have figured out by ourselves.
In the very first article of the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas states: “It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by God, besides philosophical science built up by human reason.”
Nor does it make any sense to assert that atheists are freethinkers. It is a historical fact that atheists do not share the same conclusions. There must be a common ground that makes sharing and living together in peace a possibility. But atheists, in general, are hampered by keeping their thinking free of specific conclusions, especially those promoted by people of a religious persuasion.
If “freethinking” means a form of thinking that is unbounded, then it is nothing more than a mental exercise that is essentially meaningless. Thinking, in the strict sense, is not free. It is bounded by truth. The purpose of thinking is not merely to think, but to attain truth. A hundred freethinkers will arrive at a hundred different conclusions, though none of them attains the truth.
A ticket entitles the owner to attend a concert, but if he holds on to the ticket, he misses what the ticket is for, namely to allow him to attend the concert. Likewise, freedom is not a terminal value. Rather, it creates the opportunity for a person to attain what the freedom is for, namely to apprehend a truth. Freedom, therefore, is not “free.” It is in the service of truth.
Rene Descartes made a heroic attempt to reduce philosophy to mere thinking. Unfortunately, his thinking got trapped in his ego. His famous phrase, “I think therefore I am,” assured him of his own existence but that of no one else. Descartes could not get beyond himself to validate the existence of others. In other words, his isolated thinking could not lead to knowledge of the external world. For St. Thomas and his kin, man is a “knower.” Since Descartes, who is alternately remembered as both the “Father of Philosophy” and the “Father of Confusion,” man is no longer a knower, but a thinker.
In his Introduction to Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, Anton C. Pegis contrasts thinking with knowing when he asks, “What is thinking but dis-existentialized knowing? Free thinking, then, is the ticket to nowhere, the paddle without the water, the heart without love, the mind without its ability to know. In the natural ordination of things, thinking leads to knowledge, knowledge leads to truth, truth leads to wisdom.
The “free thinker” is stuck at the starting gate. He has wheels, but no traction. Thinking would “matter,” as the TV program Thinking Matters contends, if it were productive. But remaining free, dissociated from knowledge, truth, and wisdom, it really does not matter. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, does matter because it incorporates thinking into a vast field which adds to knowledge, truth, and wisdom, the notion of salvation.
Free thinking is an impoverished idea. It is like a baseball manager who believes that only first base matters or a man who believes in first dates only. Free thinking may appeal to proud individuals who resist being taught and proclaim that they know all they need to know in life solely through their own efforts. But the real thinker is the one who acknowledges his own limitations and directs his thinking to something beyond thinking.
Aristotle’s god was “a thinker thinking a thought.” He was self-contained, having no concern for anyone or anything other than himself. God, according to Christian philosophy, is the being who loves. The freethinker, in this regard, prefers to imitate the god of Aristotle. But Aristotle’s god had the excuse of being a god. Human beings cannot claim this privilege.
It would seem, in the final analysis, that the real thinker would prefer to spend Sunday mornings at a church rather than tuning in to Freethought Matters.
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(Donald DeMarco, Ph.D., is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario.)
