The document is certainly not “rationalist” or “scientific” in its approach, but at the same time I was surprised by how little doctrinaire Christianity is present in it. (But maybe this is true of Catholic thinking generally, and my surprise is due to my being more familiar with Protestantism.) God is mentioned throughout, but as a highly abstract and rarefied concept (the God of the philosophers, as opposed to the God of Abraham) to which the likes of Plato, Aristotle, or even the Enlightenment-era deists would have little objection. Jesus is only mentioned a few times.
I think philosophically speaking, yes, this would be the general vibe to expect from Catholic theology rooted in the classic scholastic tradition. Medieval theologians were big on rationality being an important thing, and human thought being the way to better understand God. The notion of a conflict with science really only arose more recently when factual claims that actively contradicted symbolically important concepts emerged (heliocentrism, evolution), and even then the Catholic church has long since found ways to work those into its doctrine and overcome the contradictions, and it’s only Protestants that keep having the issue of creationist weirdos.
But I still think their perspective is deeply rooted into theism. It’s essentially a worldview in which the orthogonality thesis isn’t true because all that is “truly” rational is drawn to God, which makes it good—and therefore, all that is not drawn to God must be bad and irrational. This is assumed as a postulate, not as something to prove or question, and everything else follows.
I think philosophically speaking, yes, this would be the general vibe to expect from Catholic theology rooted in the classic scholastic tradition. Medieval theologians were big on rationality being an important thing, and human thought being the way to better understand God. The notion of a conflict with science really only arose more recently when factual claims that actively contradicted symbolically important concepts emerged (heliocentrism, evolution), and even then the Catholic church has long since found ways to work those into its doctrine and overcome the contradictions, and it’s only Protestants that keep having the issue of creationist weirdos.
But I still think their perspective is deeply rooted into theism. It’s essentially a worldview in which the orthogonality thesis isn’t true because all that is “truly” rational is drawn to God, which makes it good—and therefore, all that is not drawn to God must be bad and irrational. This is assumed as a postulate, not as something to prove or question, and everything else follows.