Comments on the Pope’s

Encyclical on Hope
With Additional Comments on Father Jonathan Morris’s
Letter to Richard Dawkins

By Sally Morem

Each of us has built up a mental model of Reality within our minds. Hope is that
sentiment that leads us to expect, at least tentatively, that things will be better than
we now perceive them to be over a period of time.

With that definition in place we can ask: Must we be Christian in order to have
hope? Must we be at the very least religious? I say no. The sentiment of hope is
endemic to human beings under certain situations, just as a sense of pessimism is
under other situations. It is a rough judgment of ongoing positive trends or an
anticipation of a reversal of negative trends. It can be fostered by religious faith,
but not by necessity so.

The Pope also explicitly cites the Christian hope of an afterlife, of being, of heaven.
Is the non-religious assumption of a final ending of consciousness, of the very end of
our being at death, then at variance with hope? Not necessarily. IF you assume that
life goes on for others, for those you love and admire, THEN you CAN hope for your
good influence to continue with them. You can hope that your family and your
nation do well and do better. You can hope that the world will improve—a little or a
lot. These sentiments aren’t restricted to those who believe hope can only be for
one’s own continuation in an afterlife or else hope is meaningless.

Having dealt with the Pope’s Encyclical, we can deal with Father Morris. Morris
discusses the Problem of Evil and the Christian assumption that disbelief in God led
directly to the horrendous mass murders of the 20th century.

First, the Problem of Evil is specifically a Christian problem. They build a mental
model of the universe in which an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect being, God, is
in charge. To borrow a formulation made by critics of Big Government, “Any God
powerful enough to create the universe is powerful enough to make sure His
intelligent, sensitive creatures live reasonably comfortable, decent lives.” The
problem for Christians is that humans, by and large, are not that fortunate.
Explain, please, the mismatch between the overwhelming power of the Deity and its
underwhelming results.
Disbelievers vaporize the Problem of Evil by dispensing with belief in God.

Secondly, the nasty side of human nature led directly to mass killings just as it has
over the millennia—in a phrase: Power Hunger. Don’t think for one second that
mass killings were invented by Nazis and Communists. Modern transport and
deadly chemical technologies made their evil work much more efficient, true, but
astonishingly large mass killings have been documented to have taken place in the
ancient world, Medieval Europe, early modern Europe (such as during the Thirty
Years War), as well as during the 20th century. The people who conducted these
atrocities suffered from a surfeit of belief, not its lack.

Once we wield Occam’s Razor, the unifying explanation for those evils is revealed to
be unopposed, overweening Power Hunger. No need to offend the Razor by
bringing in multiple entities of explanations: Atheism AND Power Hunger, for
example.

Father Morris: “As human beings, we should ask the question what will cure us of
such human weakness.”

And I, in my hard-headed knowledge of human nature must answer: Nothing.

All we can do is ameliorate it, mostly by making it very difficult for power hungry
ideologues to ever gain control over the levers of political power. We Americans
have become very skilled at that sort of thing, mainly due to the excellence of our
Constitutional polity. In short, what Father Morris sees as a religious problem is
actually much more of a political problem, and only well thought-out, American-
style solutions will suffice to keep would-be mass murderers at bay.

Prevention is about all we can reasonably hope for.

Father Jonathan’s letter can be found here:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,316363,00.html

The Pope’s Encyclical, “Spe Salvi” (Saved in Hope), can be found here:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-
xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html