Faith and reason are in harmony and are not in competition, Cardinal
Peter Turkson has said at the annual Cardinal John Henry Newman Lecture
at St John’s College, Oxford.
Speaking at the event, which was
sponsored by The Catholic Herald, Cardinal Turkson, the head of the
Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, cited Tony Blair’s statement
that “we cannot try to run the world without understanding what touches
people’s hearts”.
“Man has made progress in the technical
sciences. Man has had noteworthy success in the domain of the material
world,” he said. “A being who asks questions and searches for the truth
also lives by faith. The fact that human reason cannot grasp every
reality does not imply the non-existence of such a reality. It would be
absurd for a physicist to deny the existence of psychic phenomena, just
because they could not be observed by the methodology of physics.
Observing this requires a different methodology."
“The truth of
faith cannot be opposed to the truth of reason, but neither can truth be
arrived at by reason alone. Faith and reason are attracted to each
other. There is a harmony between the two. There is therefore no
competition between reason and faith. The service of faith and reason in
public life is the establishment of truth.”
The cardinal also
spoke about the need for religion, saying: “A coercive external system
is not enough for the creation of a good society. There needs to be an
internalisation.”
The cardinal, who was recently in the Ivory
Coast brokering peace, also paid tribute to the crowds who came to see
Pope Benedict XVI in Britain last September, and praised the Hyde Park
crowd for its support for the Church’s anti-poverty pledge.