A Dark Age on the one hand, a Dark Age on the other

The current issue of the Catholic Herald (the U.K.'s 'other' Catholic newspaper, whose editor-in-chief is the estimable--in spite of his unwarranted aversion to Opus Dei--Damian Thompson) features an essay by George Weigel, the acclaimed biographer of the Servant of God Pope John Paul II and dread neo-conservative, on Pope Benedict XVI's leadership and mission, focussing on theses advanced in Joseph Ratzinger's 2005 book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures.

"... Then, in light of these propositions, the Holy Father lays down a challenge: “In the age of the Enlightenment, the attempt was made to understand and define the essential norms of morality by saying that they would be valid etsi Deus non daretur, even if God did not exist... [Today], we must... reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believing friends, and it is the advice I should like to give to our friends today who do not believe. This does not impose limitations on anyone’s freedom; it gives support to all our human affairs and supplies a criterion of which human life stands sorely in need.”..."

Mr Weigel ends his essay by suggesting two possible scenarios for Western civilisation:

"... I dislike the role of Jeremiah, as I am sure Pope Benedict does. But it is neither cynicism nor despair to note that two possible Dark Ages loom on the horizon of the 22nd century: there is the Dark Age of a technologically manufactured and morally stunted humanity, created by the unwise deployment of the new, Promethean knowledge given us by genetics; and there is the Dark Age in which an anti-humanistic theism fills the vacuum created by atheistic humanism and extinguishes the Western experiment in freedom whose deepest roots run to the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages. ..."

Ronald Dworkin and Peter Singer on the one hand, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden on the other: what awful alternatives.