Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961

"The Challenge of Technical Excellence to the Catholic Intellect"Items in this folder are from Sub-sub-Series 5: Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present. This sub-sub-series contains texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present. In addition to these, in Father Ong's "General Files" series there are copies of dozens of addresses and/or papers that have never been published, plus notes for still other unpublished addresses, lectures, etc. Many of these were eventually published in one form or another -- many, however, were not.THE CHALLENGE CF TECHNICA·LEXCELLENCE TOTHECATHOLIC INTELLECT by the Reverepd Walter J. Ong,S. J. , Professor of English, St. Louis University, An Address delivered January 30, 1961, at the Advanced Workshop for the Impr-ovement of Catholic Schools of Medical Technology, held at the Coronado Hotel, Saint Louis, Missouri, as transcribed from the recorded proceedings of the Workshop. The technological age in which we are living at present is a mystery. It has come into being as a result of a great many historical changes,. patterned changes, which are themselves part of the total pattern of the evolution of our universe. We know something about the pattern of some of these changes but there are so many changes and they are so involved with one another and so tied up with all that is tragic and all this is hopeful in man's complex history that it is impossible for us even to begin to explain them all. In speaking to you this morning, all that I can hope to do is to present for your consideration some thoughts, central thoughts, I hope, concerning tile pattern of development out of which- our technological age has emerged, with special reference to the significance of this pattern for Chris-tians and particularly for those of you in medical technological work. In religious circles particularly, but in other circles as well, it is common to interpret our age of technology in the terms of the secularization of society. You have all heard this line of thought. A popular account of the present situation, so interpreted, might run as follows. In the old days men everywhere worshipped a god, or least a group of gods. Everything in human life had a religious, or semi-religious, or quasi-religious, cast. Man's birth was surrounded with,r,e.tigious ceremony; the boy or girl was integrated into the larger life of the tribe' or city in religious ceremonies; the ordinary business of adult life--hunting, farming, dom-estic activity, and so on--was carried on in a r.eligious setting. From such a state of affairs, however, man has deviated. He has deviated by secularizing much of hia existence, He has paid more attention to things of this world and, horrible thought, .even to technology. Secularization reached its peak, we are told, first in western society and from here it is spreading to other aegmente of mankind. In this interpretation, religion used to be in much better condition than it is in today, we are told. Religiously, man is progressing slowly downhill, things are getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and they've always been getting worse. The more 'he learns about the world around him, the more attention he pays to it--developing science and technology--the more he must neglect God. Earlier ages were ages of farthbut the present age is the age of the machine. Faith and the machine are antagonistic to one another- -we must choose between ,them. There are sey~ral difficulfie s ,with this interpretation. First of all, there are the excesses of early religion. For when society was so thoroughly permeated with religious observances many things which we see in perspective now were quite wrong- -terribly wrong- -were often justified on religious or on pseudo-religious grounds. War, murder, slavery and 'all sorts of sexual excesses have been justi-fied in the past on what are supposed to be religious grounds and still are so justi-fied in many countries. Secondly, attention to this world, man's work in this world and on this world, is itself a good. If people do not know how to control natural forces, it is because they have not fully realized what was in God's command to the first members of our race, as seen in the very first chapters of Genesis where God tells Adam and Eve not merely to increase and multiply, and fill the earth but also to subdue it and rule over it. ' " There are further difficulties in this interpretation. Religion has obviously prof-ited tremendously from technology and science. The Catholic Church iII particu-lar has profited from technology and science." The sense of community which is essential for a church founded on love would be virtually imposatblefn a worldas populous and diverse as ours if it were not for technological means of communica-tion. I think we could even conjecture about the workings of Divine Providence in asking ourselves why the public revelation begun with Abraham and completed in Jesus Christ was not given sooner. We could conjecture that it was not given sooner because man was not technologically developed enough to assimilate it. Scattered around the surface of the 'earth, earlier members of the human race had to exist for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years in small groups lost to one another. How effective could the Good News of the salvation of all mankind really be before any men could know where even most other men were, or even that there were other men of civilizations vastly different from thetrvown? What could universal charity have meant to a world of preliterate paleothic cultures? For centuries the Church was hampered in her missionary efforts by a lack of those technological developments which later on made rapid transportation and instantaneous communication possible. A meeting such as this one this morning, of course, is made possible by technological developments. The prominence of get-togethers, discussion groups, meetings of all sorts--religious, political, scientific--is a phenomenon of our own age. We live in an assembly culture. Ex-cept for neighborhood groups, meetings were relatively rare in an earlier period. Now, it sometimes seems that we have to attend national meetings every week. The f~r-flung contacts of which meetings such as this are examples and which are absolutely necessary for the global organization of man, are made possible by technology. The danger of abusing technological developments does not lessen the fact that had technological advance come earlier contacts between men could have profited and much more of the world could seemingly have received the gos-pel of Christ at a much earlier time. Furthermore, the early religiosity of man could overreach itself in ways which make it evident that a certain amount of secularization such as that associated with technology was absolutely essential and was a positive religious good. Reli-gion cannot tolerate total secularization of man's life, but when religion is called upon to do things which are not proper to religion the cause of religion is badly served. Religion is not supposed to supply for natur-al science or technology .. Indeed, it cannot supply for them. But it has been made to supply for such things, with results which at times have been disastrous to religion. Let us take an example when an earlier religious sensibility interpreted thunder as the voice of God such an expression was warranted not only for poetic and met-aphorical reasons but also on philosophical grounds. If God is the ultimate cause of all things He must cause thunder and rain too. This is simple, isn't it? But the ultimate, infinite action of God, divine causality, is not easy to grasp. Activ-ity and causality at a lower pitch corne horne much more readily to us. When we speak of the causality that God exercises we are speaking about a causality that is different from every other causality we know. It is only analagous to the other causes. It should not be confused with them. God's own causality does not work quite the way any other causality works. We tend to suppose that it does because causal ity, and activity generally, at what we might call a lower pitch of being comes horne much more readily to us. The relationship of rain and clouds and the sun and the atmospheric condi.tions fall much more directly within our range of understanding than does God or His actions as .such. There are the things with which natural science or physical science deals: rain, clouds, sun, atmospheric conditions, and their relationship to one another. But in earlier ages, before man had much natural science, before man had an adequate knowledge of the constitu-tion and activity of the physical world, and when he did have some confused notion of God or some myths about a plurality of gods responsible in some or another for thts natural world, man's tendency was, understandably, to allow his.theologizing to substitute for SCientific explanation. Thus there was a tendency, in thinking of thunder as the voice of God, to think of it, not merely in the ways in which we have just indicated--poetically, metaphorically, or in another way, philosophically--but to think of thunder also as the voice of God in such a way as to imply that God was causing,this noise in a manner somewhat like in which a man might cause the noise corning from a drum he is beating. This is not God's kind of causality. You are in a bad way if you think that is the sort of thing God does when he causes something. Religion is badly served by this kindqf,:thinking. The difficulty, you see, with this view begins to show up as soon as ~Jiere is provided an explanation of just what there is in thunder which does cor-respond somewhat to the beating of a drum; namely, the movement of air masses disturbed by a discharge of electrfctty. This action is something like the drum-beat, isn't it? But if one has attempted to explain physical phenomenon in another way, by direct recourse, of the sort just indicated, to God's action, seen itself as a kind of sensible phenomenon, one is here in great difficulty. As soon as a satis-factory physical explanation of the phenomenon in question is provided the field of God's action is curtailed. When you have a satisfactory drumbeater now, in this action of electricity on the air, God Himself is no longer needed as an explanation. He begins to recede from the scene. He shrinks, and the more physical explana-tion you get the less need you have for God. As scientific explanation grows larger and larger God Himself seemingly grows smaller and smaller. The example of thunder which I have used is crude but it is representative of what was going on ;;ita more sophisticated level as our technological age emerged in the 17th, 18th and,. more particularly, the 19th century. This, inCidentally, is why I asked Sister Marcella Marie to mention to you that last littleitem"'Oll'thebibUorapby, "Darwins's Vision and Christian Perspectives, " because you will find in that book a much more detailed explanation -by.Professor James Collins of jUst how this phenomenon which I am now referring to took place. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, when the foundations for modern science and modern technology were being laid, there was a tendency to provide so-called proofs of the existence of God and the necessity of religion based on what man did not know about the physical universe. Common use was made of the so-called "design" argument in an unfortunate form. Newtonian physics explained a great deal of the design of the universe, the argument gees, but it does not explain everything. The design is too intricate. There are too many details. It is so intricate that it surpasses all the formulae of Newtonian physics. Therefore, it is argued, God must exist to account for this tremendous design- -to explain what you can't explain by Newtonian physics. This is the same as the "explanation" of thunder all over again, isn't it? This argument is, of course, false- -what is called for under the circumstances is to refine our understanding of physics--get a better physics--develop physics--if we want a more complete and delicate expla~ nation ofthe complexity of physical things. God is not what you don't know about physics. This refinement of understanding has, in great part, been achieved over the past few hundred years. One of the ultimate refinements was that resulting upon the discovery by Darwin and Wallace of the principle of natural selection which operates, as we know, in the evolution of living organisms. With these developments in the physical and biological sciences many persons who had known only the ineffective design ar gument for the existence of God revised their thinking and many of them simply decided that God was superfluous. He represents, as was commonly said in the 19th century, nothing more than what science is going to be in the future. God is the course in physics you haven't taken yet. Of course, the effective way to prove the existence of God is to prove his existence not from what we do not know or cannot explain but froin what we do know in real-ity, working with the fact that what we do know implies that God exists. The way to prove God's existence is to start from something we know about an existing reality, such as a fact of real movement: this thing moves here and now. From such a real fact, one can proceed to prove God's existence. This actual change here and now takes place: then you argue from what you know- -from an analysis of what happened--from what you do know, not from what you do not know. This is no time,of course, to undertake such a proof. The point I wish to make here is that the disastrous elimination of God from the present scene in the minds of some people, the over-secularization of the present world, was due, as the history of ideas makes clear, in great part to the mistaken religiosity of earlier man. Excess breeds excess. There is a very valid sense in which we can say that earlier human societies were, in many ways, over-religious--or even better, that they were falsely religious, that they exaggerated the religious at the expense of the secular. I make these points to show that a certain amount of secularization was badly called for and should be welcomed by all truly religious persons. The Catholic Church is perfectly at home in the world which has been selectively secularized. The Church wants the world to be selectively secularized. Our religious outlook, of cour-se, must be as truly pervasive as ever. It must extend to all of man's > '. activities-