NOTE: Today we wrap up our six-part series by Karlo Broussard on a metaphysical proof for God's existence. You can reach reach of the prior posts below:

• Part 1 - Why Must There Be at Least One Unconditioned Reality?
• Part 2 - The Absolute Simplicity of Unconditioned Reality
• Part 3 - The Absolute Uniqueness of Unconditioned Reality
• Part 4 - The Key Divine Attributes of the Absolutely Unique and Simple Unconditioned Reality
• Part 5 - Key Attributes: Perfection and the Three Omnis
• Part 6 - Important Features of the Metaphysical Proof

 
The current post is the final installment of a six part series on a metaphysical demonstration for God’s existence from the notion of ontological conditions.   Although I completed the demonstration itself in the fifth installment, I wanted to highlight a few reasons why this sort of metaphysical demonstration is so important with an eye on some common objections from atheists.

First, this sort of approach to God’s existence is important in the modern debate between atheism and theism because for such an approach the temporal duration of the universe – whether it had a beginning or not – is irrelevant.

Upon hearing this metaphysical demonstration many will think that the series of conditioned realities spoken of in the first post is a temporal series that extends back into the past; therefore this approach is often perceived as an argument for the universe having a beginning and the Creator being the cause of that beginning. Such a perception inevitably gives rise to the whole debate about whether or not we can know that the universe had a beginning. But this is not what the argument of this series consists of.

Recall that the series of conditioned realities spoken of in the first installment did not extend back in time (e.g., I needed my father to come into existence, my father needed his father, etc.) but it extended downwards so to speak to the most fundamental levels of physical reality. This is what philosophers call an essentially ordered series (or a hierarchical series) versus an accidentally ordered series (or temporal series).

The accidentally ordered series is exemplified with the series of dependence involving me, my father, his father, and so on. The idea is that although I needed my father to come into existence, I do not need my father to exist in order for me to exist right here and right now. In other words, my father’s existence is accidental and not essential for me to exist right here and right now.

But, in an essentially ordered series, the existing conditions that a conditioned reality (e.g., the cat) is dependent on are essential for its very existence right here and right now. It is essential to the cat’s existence that the cells, the molecules, the atoms, the protons, the quarks, etc. exist right here and right now. This is the sort of series that the demonstration involves.

As such, an eternal universe (a universe without beginning and without end) would still need God as the ground of its eternal existence – eternally fulfilling the conditions necessary for its existence. God would still be needed to answer the question, “Why does the universe exists at all (even if eternal) rather than not?” So, if at some time in the future scientists discover some piece of data that begins to alter the common view of an absolute beginning of time and physical reality, there is no need for the theist to fret for he or she remains standing on solid ground with this sort of metaphysical demonstration.

The second reason why this demonstration is important is because it adequately responds to the misconception that our assertion that God is unconditioned is an arbitrary exception. Recall how we began in the first installment trying to account for the existence of the cat and such an endeavor led us to a series of conditioned realities that needed other conditioned realties to exist. We then arrived at an unconditioned reality, namely God, that stopped the series. Now, many think this is an arbitrary exception to the series of conditioned realities.

But our conclusion that God is unconditioned reality is not arbitrary at all. The reality that we arrive at in order to explain the existence of the cat here and now is unconditioned by logical necessity. As we demonstrated in the first installment of the demonstration, to postulate that there is no unconditioned reality (Hypothesis ~UR) in trying to explain the cat’s existence is to end up with an intrinsic contradiction – namely the denial of the cat’s existence when the cat in fact exists. Since hypothesis ~UR is false, then hypothesis UR, namely that there is an unconditioned reality grounding the existence of the cat, must be true.

The third point of importance follows from the second. Our claim that the series cannot regress ad infinitum is not one of probability but one of logical necessity. For example, some theists who argue for God’s existence using the Kalam cosmological argument stop the infinite regress of causes in a causal series by appealing to Ockham’s razor. It is argued that we need not posit anymore causes once we arrive at the transcendent cause of the universe because Ockham’s Razor states we should not multiply causes beyond necessity. In other words, we arrived at an explanation for the universe and there is really no need to explain the explanation.

But in the metaphysical demonstration as presented in this series, we’re not saying that the series cannot regress ad infinitum because of Ockham’s Razor but because of the very nature of the sufficient condition that we arrive at as the explanation for the cat existing right here and right now. The nature of this condition is that it is unconditioned; thus the series of conditions cannot regress any further.

The fourth reason for the importance of this approach to God’s existence is basically the same as the third but stated in a different way. We can see how the question, “Who created God?” is an incoherent question. If God by his very nature is unconditioned reality, then the question, “Who created God?” is tantamount to asking, “What is the condition for the unconditioned reality?” This is akin to asking, “Who is the bachelor’s wife?” Obviously this is an incoherent question if one understands that a bachelor has no wife. Similarly, to ask, “Who created God?” or “What is God’s condition?” is seen as incoherent if one understands that God, by definition, has no conditions. Therefore, the question, “Who created God?” is a moot point.

Finally, the fifth reason why this type of metaphysical argument is so important in the modern debate is because it escapes the common objection from the fallacy of composition. The fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. For example, it is fallacious to reason that because each Lego brick weighs 1.64 grams the whole wall of bricks weighs 1.64 grams.

Some atheists perceive this fallacy in the present argument. They will argue that even though each individual thing within the universe might need conditions fulfilled in order to exist it does not follow that the universe as a whole needs conditions fulfilled in order to exist. Therefore, it’s fallacious to argue that the universe as a whole is a conditioned reality that needs God to fulfill its conditions.

Now, besides the fact that this argument does not hold water because the conditionality of each thing in the universe is not quantitative in nature but qualitative (and thus the universe as a whole would be a conditioned reality needing conditions fulfilled in order to exist), the argument does not work against the metaphysical approach of this series because the demonstration never argues for God from the universe as a whole needing its conditions fulfilled. It starts with one thing in the universe, namely a cat, and then reasons to the one unconditioned reality as the ground of its existence.

It is true that in the end we must conclude that the universe as a whole finds its existence grounded in the one unconditioned reality but it is a consequence of the argument and not a part of it. At least for this argument, belief that the universe as whole finds its existence grounded in the one unconditioned reality presupposes that the one unconditioned reality exist. The reasoning is as follows: 1) Because there is only one unconditioned reality in all of reality, everything else in existence besides the one unconditioned reality (the universe and the whole of the created order) is a conditioned reality; 2) Every conditioned reality has its existence grounded in the one unconditioned reality. 3) Therefore, the universe as a whole (and the whole of created order) has its existence grounded in the one unconditioned reality. Since the universe’s existential dependence on God is a consequence of the argument and not a part it, this type of metaphysical demonstration escapes the fallacy of composition.

So, in conclusion, with the metaphysical demonstration and its importance in the modern dialogue on God’s existence now in place, I believe we can conclude that the acceptance of God’s existence stands on the firm foundation of reason. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states in paragraph 156, “faith is by no means a blind impulse of the mind.” The acceptance of God’s existence does not require that one leave his or her reason at the door. Furthermore, this type of metaphysical argument for God’s existence (and many others like it) shows how the perception that theism is intellectually shallow and naïve is simply a myth. Atheism by no means has the intellectual high ground. It is theism that does so since it is theism that gives a sufficient answer to the most fundamental question, “Why does something exist at all rather than not?” That answer, as demonstrated in this series of posts, is God.
 
 
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"Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all of its conquerors," wrote G. K. Chesterton.

Faith is the Christian word. Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., in his masterful theology of faith, The Assurance of Things Hoped For, writes, "More than any other religion, Christianity deserves to be called a faith". He points out that in the New Testament the Greek words for "faith" and "belief" occur nearly 500 times, compared to less than 100 for "hope" and about 250 for "charity" or "love." Which is not to say, of course, that faith is more important than love, since Paul makes it clear that love is the greatest of the three theological virtues: "So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:13).

But there is no doubt—pun intended—that faith is essential to being a Christian and to having a right relationship with God, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews states, emphatically and succinctly: "And without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Heb. 11:6).

The daunting work of defining and analyzing faith has been described, with perhaps a dose of knowing humor, as the "cross of theologians." As with hope and love, the virtue of faith can appear initially rather simple to define, often as "belief in God." But some digging beneath the surface suggests a far more complicated task, as some basic questions suggest: What is belief? How is faith obtained? Is it human or divine in origin? How should man demonstrate his faith? What is the relationship of faith to the will, to the intellect, and to the emotions?

The Catholic, meanwhile, must respond to charges against faith: that it is "irrational" or that it is the cause of conflict and violence. In recent years a number of popular, best-selling books written by atheists have called into question not only tenets of Christianity—the historical reliability of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, the Resurrection, and so forth—but the viability and rational soundness of faith itself.

One such book is The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, which repeatedly—mantra-like—uses words such as "ignorant" and "irrational" in making the case that religious faith is not only outdated, but overtly evil. Every religion, Harris muses, "preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidenc e is even conceivable. This puts the ‘leap’ in Kierkegaard’s leap of faith" (Harris, The End of Faith, 23). He adds: "Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible" (Harris, The End of Faith, 25).

Calling Christians and other religious believers stupid and unreasonable is often the default argument for Harris; it is also an approach, crude yet often effective, embraced by many who believe that religious faith is an offense to enlightened, modern man. With that basic opposition in mind, let us take up two basic tasks: defining what faith is and answering some of the charges against belief.

Do I Trust the Chair?

A witticism goes: "Everybody should believe in something; I believe I’ll have another drink." It is more accurate to say that everybody does believe in something, even if it is belief in the ability to live without belief. Of course, even the skeptic understands that life in the material world requires certain types of belief or faith, using those terms broadly and non-theologically: the belief that stop lights will work correctly, faith that I will be given a paycheck at the end of the month, the trust that my grasp of basic math will keep me on the good side of the IRS.

One argument posits that sitting upon a chair is an act of faith, so even atheists have faith when they sit on a chair in, say, a home they are visiting for the first time. If for some reason I doubted the chair in question would hold my weight, I could ascertain its load-bearing capabilities by asking my host to sit in it first, thereby ridding myself of concern (and likely puzzling or offending my host). The argument only goes so far when it comes to faith in what cannot be seen, touched, or proven by scientific means. It does, however, suggest what many people are reluctant to admit: that all of us have beliefs and we live our lives based on those beliefs, even if we never articulate or define them. As Joseph Ratzinger observes in Introduction to Christianity, "Every man must adopt some kind of attitude to the basic questions, and no man can do this in any other way but that of entertaining belief." (Introduction to Christianity [2nd ed.], 71)

We, as creatures, have limited, finite knowledge, and so must make decisions—practical, relational, philosophical—without the luxury of proof. We use common sense and rely on our experience and, significantly, on the experience and testimony of others. I may not know for certain that the chair will hold me, but I conclude it is rational to think it will, based on certain observations: The chair looks well-constructed; it appears to be used on a regular basis; and it is in the home of someone who isn’t the sort of person to ask guests to sit on a chair that might fall apart upon human contact. Sitting on the chair is a reasonable thing to do. Implicit here is the matter of trust. Do I trust the chair? Do I trust my host? And, more importantly, do I trust my perception and assessment of the chair?

Consider another example. You receive a phone call at work from your best friend, who is also your neighbor. He exclaims, with obvious distress, "Your house is on fire! Come home quickly!" What is your reaction? You believe your friend’s statement—not because you’ve seen a live shot of your house in flames on a Channel 12 "news flash" but because of your faith in the truthfulness of the witness. You accept his word because he has proven himself worthy of faith in various ways. Trust in testimony and witness is an essential part of a theological understanding of faith.

God’s Gift and Our Response

The Old Testament emphasizes trusting in God and obeying his utterances, which were often (although not exclusively) entrusted (there’s that word again!) to patriarchs and prophets: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Samuel, Jeremiah, and others. But while there are many men and women of faith in the Old Testament, trustworthiness and faithfulness are most clearly ascribed to God: "Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments …" (Deut. 7:9). The well-known narratives of the Old Testament are accounts of faith and faithfulness (and much faithlessness), all deeply rooted in a covenantal understanding of God’s revelation of himself to man. It is God who initiates and it is God who gives wisdom, understanding, and faith.

The New Testament places more emphasis on the doctrinal content of faith, focusing upon man’s response to the message and person of Jesus Christ. Again, faith is a gift that comes from God, accompanied by God’s promises of life. "No one can come to me," Jesus declares, "unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day" (John 6:44). Paul repeatedly states that faith is intimately linked with trust and obedience, referring to the "obedience of faith" (Rom. 1:5), exhorting the Christians at Philippi to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12), and telling the Galatians that circumcision is not the issue of concern, "but faith working through love" (Gal. 5:6). Faith is portrayed as a living, vital movement that brings man into a grace-filled union with the Father, through Jesus, in the Holy Spirit. According to James and John, while faith is distinct from good works, it is never separate from them, for they display the reality of faith: "Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith" (Jas. 2:18), and "this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us" (1 John 3:23).

Needless to say, the Old and New Testaments together present a complex and rich tapestry of understandings of faith, including elements, Cardinal Dulles writes in his study, "such as personal trust, assent to divinely revealed truth, fidelity, and obedience" (Assurance, 17).

At the Threshold of Belief

Augustine and Aquinas stressed that the object of belief cannot be seen or directly perceived, nor proven by mere logic. If you can prove it, you don’t need to believe in it. And yet, as Josef Pieper explained in his essay, "On Faith," the believer must

know enough about the matter to understand "what it is all about." An altogether incomprehensible communication is no communication at all. There is no way either to believe or not to believe it or its author. For belief to be possible at all, it is assumed that the communication has in some way been understood. (Faith Hope Love, 24)

God has revealed himself in a way that is comprehensible to man (in an act theologians call "divine condescension"), even if man cannot fully comprehend, for example, the Incarnation or the Trinity. Reason and logic can take man to the door of faith, but cannot carry man across the threshold. "What moves us to believe," explains the Catechism, "is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: We believe because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived" (CCC 156).

Belief can also rest upon the testimony of someone else, as Paul states: "But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14). Aquinas succinctly remarks: "Now, whoever believes, assents to someone’s words…" (Summa Theologiae II:2:11). Pieper points out, however, that this leads to a significant problem: that no man is superior enough spiritually to serve as "an absolutely valid authority" for another man. This problem is only solved when the One who is above all men communicates with man. This communication, of course, reaches perfection in the Incarnation, when God becomes man—that is, when the Word, God’s perfect communication, becomes flesh. And this is why, to put it simply, the historicity of Jesus Christ and the witness of those who knew him is at the heart of the Catholic faith.

Faith is ultimately an act of will, not of emotion or deduction. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting Aquinas, teaches, "In faith, the human intellect and will cooperate with divine grace: Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace" (CCC 155). This submission is called "the obedience of faith" (CCC 143). Logic, reason, and recognition of authority go only so far; an act of will, dependent upon God’s grace, is required for faith to be realized. Yet this response of the will is not an impersonal act, like selecting numbers for the lottery, but an intensely personal response. "We believe, because we love," wrote John Henry Newman in a sermon titled, "Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition." "The divinely enlightened mind," he continued, "sees in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship,—the Object correlative of its own affections; and it trusts him, or believes, from loving him."

So much for understanding what faith is. What are some of the popular, common criticisms of faith that need answering?

Faith is contrary to reason. Harris puts it in this provocative form: "And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs are. This is not surprising, since most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths" (The End of Faith, 72). Yet the claim, "I don’t need faith!" is ultimately a statement of faith. If reason is the ultimate criteria of all things, can the skeptic prove, using reason, that reason explains everything about reality? To say "I will only trust that which I can logically prove" begs the question: "How do you know you can trust your mind and your logic? Aren’t you placing your faith in your reason?"

Thus atheism requires belief, including faith in (choose one) the perfectibility of human nature, the omniscience of science, the equality of socialism, or the steady conquest of political, technological, and social progress. But reasoned observation shows that the "truths" produced by these philosophies and systems of thought are lacking and incomplete; they cannot provide a satisfactory answer to the big questions about life, reality, and existence. The belief in science is a good example. The Catholic Church recognizes that science, the study of physical realities through experimentation and observation, is a valid source of truth. But this is quite different from believing that science can and will provide the answers to every question put forth by man. That is a belief—commonly called scientism—that cannot be proven but rests upon the unstable premise of materialism, which is a philosophical belief, not a matter of proven scientific study. For example, Harris writes that there "is no reason that our ability to sustain ourselves emotionally and spiritually cannot evolve with technology, politics, and the rest of culture. Indeed, it must evolve, if we are to have any future at all" (The End of Faith, 40). If that isn’t an overt statement of dogmatic faith, what is?

Put simply, the Church believes that reason is limited and not contrary to faith. True faith is not irrational, but supra-rational. In the words of Blaise Pascal, author of Pensées, whose rational genius is difficult to deny (unless one wishes to be unreasonable about it): "Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them" (Pensées, 68). So faith does not contradict the facts of the material world, but goes beyond them.

Faith is a crutch for those who can’t handle the difficulties of life.I once worked for a delightful Jewish lady who was married to a self-described atheist. She once told me, with obvious frustration, that he would often tell her that faith in God was simply "a crutch." This is not an argument at all; it is simply of way of saying, "I’d rather trust in myself than in God." But belief in self only goes so far; it obviously does not save us from death, or even suffering, disease, tragedy, heartache, depression, and difficulties. Everyone has a "crutch," that is, a means of support we turn to in the darkest moments. These can include power, money, drugs, sex, fame, and adulation, all of which are, by any reasonable account, limited and unsatisfying when it comes to the ultimate questions: What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? Who am I? Harris, for his part, spends a considerable portion of the final chapter of his book arguing that Eastern mysticism is a thoroughly rational and legitimate means for living a full life. In the end, his book says, "Religion is evil. Spirituality is good." But spirituality does not provide answers; religion does.

Faith is the source of superstition, bigotry, and violence. We’ve all heard variations on this theme, mouthed by the increasing number of people indoctrinated to believe that nothing good ever came from Christianity and that every advance in human history has been due to the diminishing influence of Christian thought, practice, and presence. Never mind that the bloodiest and most savage century in human history was dominated by forms of atheistic Marxism (e.g., the Soviet Union) and neo-pagan Fascism (e.g., Nazi Germany), accounting for the deaths of tens of millions. Harris insists that Communism and Nazism were so bad because they were religious in nature:

Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: Although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. … Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational. (Harris, The End of Faith, 79)

This is actually quite true, and provides further evidence that every "ism"—even atheism, materialism, and the "pragmatism" endorsed by Harris—is religious in nature. History readily shows that man is a religious animal who thinks religious thoughts and has religious impulses. As Chesterton wrote in Heretics:

Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence. This latter situation is certainly possible; in fact, it is the situation of the whole modern world. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. ("Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy")

Chesterton suggests elsewhere that if you wish to be free from contact with superstition, bigotry, and violence, you’ll need to separate yourself from all human contact. The choice is not between religion and non-religion, but between true religion and false religion.

Christian faith, then, is not contrary to reason. Nor is it merely a phantasmal crutch built on pious fantasies. Neither is faith the source of evil. Faith is a supernatural virtue, a gift, and a grace. Faith is focused on God and truth; it is the friend of wisdom. "Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion," wrote Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, "The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and faith" ("Man and Mythologies"). The challenge for every Catholic is to give assent and to have faith, while the Catholic apologist must strive to show that such assent is not only reasonable, but brings us into saving contact with the only reason for living.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers.
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Since its release last November, Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists has quickly become one of the most popular new books on atheism (as of now it has 200 reviews on amazon.com). As someone who has also recently written a book on atheism, though from a far different perspective, I was eager to see Boghossian’s method for “creating an atheist.” In this book review I’ll cover the good, the bad, and the ugly in A Manual for Creating Atheists.

The Good

 
Surprisingly, this book isn’t about creating atheists...per se. According to Boghossian,

“The goal of this book is to create a generation of Street Epistemologists: people equipped with an array of dialectical and clinical tools who actively go into the streets, the prisons, the bars, the churches, the schools, and the community – into any and every place the faithful reside—and help them abandon their faith and embrace reason.”

Epistemology is a discipline within philosophy that focuses on defining knowledge and analyzing how we know what we know. Rather than blindly shout conclusions (which Boghossian no doubt thinks street preachers do), a “street epistemologist” helps others reliably acquire knowledge about the world. When it comes to that goal he’ll find no opposition from me.

Boghossian’s strength lies in his treatment of the Socratic method, or the artful use of questions in order to lead someone to a particular conclusion. This appears to be something he has a lot of first-hand experience in using. According to Portland State University’s website (where Boghossian teaches), he earned a doctorate in education while developing Socratic techniques to help prison inmates increase their reasoning abilities in order to see the error of their ways and to hopefully commit fewer crimes in the future. Boghossian’s ability to use the Socratic method is on display in most of the chapters through sample dialogues between himself and people who exhibit “poor reasoning abilities.”

Boghossian also gives his would-be street epistemologists advice that I would also give to anyone learning apologetics—you don’t need an answer for every objection and you should humbly admit ignorance when it occurs. In Boghossian’s words, “You need to become comfortable in not knowing and not pretending to know...“

But Boghossian’s street epistemologists have a very specific mission beyond just helping people think more clearly—“Your new role is that of an interventionist. Liberator. Your target is faith. Your pro bono clients are individuals who’ve been infected by faith.”

And that’s where the book starts to go downhill.

The Bad

 
Throughout the book Boghossian says that the quickest way to make someone an atheist is to attack not their religion or their idea of God, but their faith. This is because faith is ultimately what grounds all religious claims. So what is faith? According to Boghossian, faith is belief without sufficient evidence because if you had the proper amount of evidence then you wouldn’t need faith. I’d respond by saying that religious faith is a trust in God and generic “faith” is just a trust in someone or something. For example, we have “faith” that the laws of nature are uniform across time and space even though we don’t have nearly enough evidence to confirm that belief (see the problem of induction).

Now, Boghossian vehemently denies faith is a kind of trust and claims it is instead a kind of knowledge. I disagree and would simply say that faith is the way people justify their claims of religious knowledge. “How do you know Jesus lives?” The believer might say in response, “I have faith in what the Bible or the Church says” or “I have faith in what Jesus has revealed to me in my heart.” Clearly faith is just a trust in a certain kind of evidence that is used to justify religious claims, be it testimonial or experiential.

Boghossian also gives the issue a rather nasty spin when he says faith is, “pretending to know what you don’t know.” The use of the word “pretending” seems inaccurate because it assumes the religious person knows deep down that his beliefs are not justified and he is engaging in a kind of malicious charade. This stands in contrast to the person who "thinks he knows what he knows but is actually mistaken." When it comes to false religious beliefs, I think the overwhelming majority of those beliefs are a product of "thinks he knows, but is mistaken" instead of "pretends he knows, but is wrong."

So this is the main issue Boghossian must answer, “Is the faith religious people have justified? Do they have a rational basis for holding these beliefs?”

I’ll admit sometimes they might not, but you need a serious argument to say religious belief is never justified. Boghossian’s main argument for the claim they are never justified is that because knowledge acquired by faith arrives at contradictory conclusions, such as the Christian’s affirmation of Jesus as the Son of God and the Muslim’s denial of that claim, this means that faith leads many people into error and so it can’t be trusted. But by that logic, reason is unreliable because philosophers use it and arrive at very different conclusions about all sorts of things. All a lack of consensus proves is that some people make faulty inferences based on faith, no that we shouldn’t have faith in either religious testimony or religious experiences.

I also didn’t think that Boghossian interacted enough with Alvin Plantinga (who he refers to as a “Christian apologist” instead of as one of the world’s most famous philosophers of religion). Plantinga’s reformed epistemology claims that if God exists then religious belief in God is justified because God has the ability to make belief in him “properly basic,” or justified apart from inferences based on evidence. In response, Boghossian simply tosses out the “Great Pumpkin” objection to reformed epistemology (an objection Plantinga himself has addressed) and calls it a day. But because the justification of “faith-based” beliefs is the central topic of Boghossian’s book, I think his reply to this kind of epistemology should have been more extensive.

Refutations That Are Greatly Exaggerated

 
What if the street epistemologist encounters someone who has “given a reason for the hope that is within him” (1 Peter 3:15) and doesn’t just rely on a gut feeling?  According to Boghossian, the street epistemologist needn’t worry about those reasons because,

“in the last 2400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny. Not one. Aquinas’s five proofs, fail. Pascal’s Wager, fail. Anselm’s ontological argument, fail. The fine-tuning argument, fail. The kalam cosmological argument, fail. All refuted. All failures.”

That’s quite a claim. I was excited to turn to the footnote and see the evidence for this claim, but when I got there I was dumbfounded. Aquinas’ arguments are simply described. Boghossian neither critiques the arguments nor even provides a reference to such a critique such as Anthony Kenny’s book on the subject or even the terrible critiques Dawkins offers in The God Delusion (although I believe critiques like these have been ably answered by scholars like Ed Feser).

According to Boghossian, Victor Stenger is said to have refuted the fine-tuning argument in his 2011 book The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, but other writers have posted their own rebuttals to his arguments. In addition, Stenger doesn’t refute the fine-tuning argument so much as he attacks its central premise that the universe is finely tuned for life. In doing so, he goes against other well-known non-theistic cosmologists (like Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees) who at least accept that the universe is fine-tuned for life (even though they don’t think God is the fine-tuner). This should give us caution about Stenger’s conclusions.

In regards to the kalam cosmological argument, Boghossian simply says, “The possibility that the universe always existed cannot be ruled out” and then calls this the “death-knell” of the argument. He makes this claim without bothering to critique the scientific and philosophical evidence for the finitude of the past or even reference someone who has done that (like Wes Morriston).

I was hoping that chapter 7, which is called “anti-apologetics 101,” would provide at least some solid answers to arguments in defense of the faith, but here too I was sorely disappointed.¹ In answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing,” Boghossian simply quotes Adolf Grunbaum and says there’s no reason to think a state of something has to be explained and pure nothingness does not. To me this just shows a woeful lack of understanding of both the principle of sufficient reason and the philosophers who have addressed the issue.

While there are serious and thoughtful critiques of natural theology, Boghossian fails to make one and, distressingly, doesn’t seem to even be aware of such critiques.

The Ugly

 
Finally, the anti-religious rhetoric in the book is over-the-top. Boghossian says that if a street epistemologist doesn’t convince someone to give up his faith, then the person is either secretly giving up his faith while trying to “save face” or the person is literally brain damaged (chapter 3). In a chapter called “Containment Protocols,” Boghossian says we should stigmatize religious claims like racist claims, treat faith like a kind of contagious mental illness that should be recognized by medical professionals, read apologist’s books but buy them used so they don’t make a profit (“Enjoy a McDonald’s ice cream courtesy of the royalty from my purchase of your book, Pete!”), and promote children’s television shows where “Epistemic Knights” do battle against “Faith Monsters.”

The advice I would give atheists who are interested in this book would be to model the Socratic approach Boghossian teaches but don’t use his rhetoric when you’re talking to believers. For believers, I’d say that this is a good window into the attitude of popular “skeptic-based atheism.” Knowing what’s in this book can help you explain to the “street epistemologist” that you aren’t brain damaged. Instead, you have good reasons to think that what you believe is true and the street epistemologist should examine those reasons with an open mind and charitable attitude.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.

NOTE: This fictitious dialogue takes place between two friends, Chris, a Catholic, and Sal, a sincere skeptic, and centers on some basic questions here at Strange Notions regarding faith, reason, and the existence of God.

Sal: Chris, before we go any further in our conversations about Christianity, I have to ask you a very basic question.

Chris: Ask away.

Sal: Do you think this is going to get us anywhere, arguing about religion?

Chris: What you mean by "arguing"?

Sal: Fighting with words.

Chris: I don't want to do that. We're friends, not enemies. What I mean by "arguing" is just "giving reasons".

Sal: Trying to prove something, right?

Chris: Yes.

Sal: Well, I'm not sure that's going to get us anywhere either.

Chris: Neither am I, but I'm not sure it isn't, either. So if there's a chance, let's take it. Let's try.

Sal: Why?

Chris: If a lot of people say a great prize is behind a door, should you try to open it, or not?

Sal: You should, but what does that have to do with arguing?

Chris: The prize here is the truth about God and the meaning of our lives, whatever that truth may be. That's what we're both committed to, isn't it?

Sal: Truth, yes.

Chris: And isn't that valuable, like a prize?

Sal: Yes, if we ever find it.

Chris: Shouldn't we try? Shouldn't we knock at the door?

Sal: What's the door?

Chris: Honest dialogue. Looking for reasons.

Sal: Reasons to believe?

Chris: Yes. Or not to believe.

Sal: I don't think it'll work. I don't think you can reason your way into religion.

Chris: Oh, neither do I. But you might reason your way to the place where you can believe - like walking to the beach, and then swimming. Walking to the beach is like reason and swimming is like faith. You have to go to the place where you can swim before you can swim. And you have to go to the place where you can believe before you can believe.

Sal: You mean you have to prove it first by reason before you can believe it?

Chris: No, not at all. But I think it's your reason that's holding you back from believing. I think your reason is asking some good questions that no one has ever answered for you.

Sal: That's true.

Chris: So if we can find the answers to those questions, we can at least make faith possible for you. Then it's up to you, of course.

Sal: I see. You agree, then, that religious faith is a matter of personal choice.

Chris: Of course.

Sal: But reason and logic isn't the way we usually make personal choices. Therefore it's not the way to make the choice about religious faith.

Chris: That sounds like pretty good logic, Sal. Let's examine your argument. What do you mean by a "personal choice"?

Sal: What's right for one person can be wrong for another.

Chris: I see. You mean things like getting married or not, or deciding on a career, or how to spend money.

Sal: Right. There's no one right way for everybody.

Chris: But religion isn't like those things, Sal.

Sal: I thought you agreed it was a personal decision.

Chris: I did. But it claims to tell you something that's true for everybody. What's personal is your response to it.

Sal: What do you mean, "true for everybody"? What religious things are true for everybody?

Chris: Things like God and Heaven - whether they're true or not doesn't depend on you, or on your personal choice, any more than the sun does.

Sal: But if I believe it's true, then it's true for me, and if I don't then it isn't true for me.

Chris: Do you think that believing something makes it true?

Sal: True for me, yes.

Chris: But really true? Objectively true?

Sal: There's no objective truth. Truth is subjective.

Chris: Really?

Sal: Yes.

Chris: Truly?

Sal: Yes.

Chris: I don't think so. Am I wrong? Is this a truth I don't see?

Sal: Yes.

Chris: An objective truth, then. It's an objective truth that there is no objective truth.

Sal: Oops.

Chris: And you were so logical a minute ago!

Sal: Wait a minute. We're talking about religious truth. That's subjective.

Chris: You mean nobody can be right or wrong about religious truth?

Sal: Right.

Chris: Except you?

Sal: What do you mean?

Chris: You first said nobody can be right or wrong about religious truth. Then you assumed you were right about religious truth when you said it isn't objective.

Sal: You're tangling me up in my words.

Chris: No I'm not. You said it yourself. You tangled yourself up. You contradicted yourself.

Sal: Well, what I mean to say is that nobody can prove whether there really is a God or not.

Chris: Oh, but that's a different question, whether anybody can prove it. Surely God might exist without your proving it. Plenty of things exist that you can't prove, don't they?

Sal: Like what?

Chris: Like the fact that I'm thinking about the color yellow now. Or the fact that I honestly care about you. Can you prove those things?

Sal: No.

Chris: Then things can be true without our proving them.

Sal: Yes.

Chris: So God might be true even if we couldn't prove him.

Sal: O.K., but we can't prove him. No one can settle religious questions. So I think it's a waste of time to argue about them.

Chris: I see. And why do you think no one can settle religious questions?

Sal: I just think so, that's all.

Chris: You have no reasons to think that?

Sal: Sure I do.

Chris: I think you can guess what my next question is going to be.

Sal: You mean, what are my reasons?

Chris: Good guess.

Sal: Well, you can't prove God like you can prove other things, like galaxies and germs and scientific stuff.

Chris: You mean you can't use the scientific method.

Sal: Right.

Chris: And you think the scientific method is the only way to prove anything.

Sal: Really to prove anything, yes.

Chris: Can you prove that?

Sal: What?

Chris: What you just said: that the scientific method is the only way to prove anything.

Sal: Hmmm. I guess not.

Chris: Then you contradict yourself again. You say you should believe something only if it's proved scientifically, yet you believe that even though it isn't proved scientifically.

Sal: Pretty clever.

Chris: No. I'm not trying to be clever. I'm trying to show you that your faith in science isn't scientific. It's a faith.

Sal: Let me ask the questions for a minute.

Chris: All right.

Sal: Do you think there are other ways to prove things besides the scientific method?

Chris: Yes.

Sal: And can you guess what my next question is going to be?

Chris: "What are they?"

Sal: Yes. What are they?

Chris: Common sense, experience, intuition, insight, reasoning, and trustable authority. We use everything we have to look at all the evidence.

Sal: And how do you know which of those methods to use?

Chris: You use the method that fits your subject matter. You don't use the scientific method to understand people you love, for instance, any more than you use love to understand math or chemistry.

Sal: What do you use for God?

Chris: He's a person, so you use the method that fits persons: love and faith.

Sal: That's naive. Unscientific.

Chris: But it's right for persons. Look. Science is rightly critical and distrustful. It accepts nothing until it's proved. Nature treated as guilty until proven innocent, so to speak. But people are innocent until proven guilty. If we treated people the way science treats nature, we'd never understand them. The only way to understand them is to trust them, not to distrust them. And to love them.

Sal: Just shut your eyes and believe, eh?

Chris: No. Open your eyes and believe.

Sal: But "love is blind."

Chris: Not real love. Real love sees the other person's inside, like an X-ray.

Sal: But sometimes it makes mistakes. Sometimes you trust somebody and he lets you down. Trust doesn't always pay.

Chris: But it's a chance worth taking, isn't it? To live without loving anyone, without trusting anyone - that would be Hell, wouldn't it?

Sal: Yes.

Chris: Worse than being let down, wouldn't it?

Sal: I guess so.

Chris: Well, it's the same with God. It would be even worse never to try him, never to trust him at all, never to give him a chance, than to trust him and then be let down. But he won't let you down.

Sal: So you say.

Chris: I'm not asking you to believe it because I say it. I'm asking you to test it, like a good scientist. Faith is like an experiment. It's testable, like trusting a human being. Life is like a laboratory, and loving someone - whether a human being or God - is like an experiment. It's something you do, and you learn by doing.

Sal: I see. It either works or not.

Chris: Yes.

Sal: But I have to have reasons for doing this experiment of believing in God because you're asking me to put myself in the test tube. It's not a light little thing.

Chris: I'm glad you see that. It's not a little thing at all. All right, let's look at some reasons for believing in God next time.

Sal: O.K.
 
 
Excerpted from "Faith and Reason" in Yes or No: Straight Answers to Tough Questions about Christianity by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1991), 23-30. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Autism After 16)

The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich once commented that “faith” is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary. I’m increasingly convinced that he was right about this. The ground for my conviction is the absolutely steady reiteration on my Internet forums of gross caricatures of what serious believers mean by faith.

Again and again, my agnostic, atheist, and secularist interlocutors tell me that faith is credulity, naïvete, superstition, assent to irrational nonsense, acceptance of claims for which there is no evidence, etc., etc. And they gladly draw a sharp distinction between faith, so construed, and modern science, which, they argue, is marked by healthy skepticism, empirical verification, a reliable and repeatable method, and the capacity for self-correction. How fortunate, they conclude, that the Western mind was able finally to wriggle free from the constraints of faith and move into the open and well-lighted space of scientific reason. And how sad that, like a ghost from another time and place, faith continues, even in the early twenty-first century to haunt the modern mind and to hinder its progress.

This wave of contention comes at a time when the Catholic Church is winding down its own "Year of Faith.” Which makes it a good time, it seems to me, to clarify what Catholics do and don’t mean by that obviously controversial word.

I will begin with an analogy. If you are coming to know a person, and you are a relatively alert type, your reason will be fully engaged in the process. You will look that person over, see how she dresses and comports herself, assess how she relates to others, You'll Google her and find out where she went to school and how she is employed, ask mutual friends about her, etc. All of this objective investigation could take place even before you had the opportunity to meet her. When you finally make her acquaintance, you will bring to the encounter all that you have learned about her and will undoubtedly attempt to verify at close quarters what you have already discovered on your own.

But then something extraordinary will happen, something over which you have no real control, something that will, inevitably, reveal to you things that you otherwise would never know: she will speak. In doing so, she will, on her own initiative, disclose her mind, her heart, her feelings to you. Some of what she says will be in concord with what you have already found out, but much of it—especially if your relationship has deepened and your conversations are profound and intimate—will be new, wonderful, beyond anything you might have discovered on your own.

But as she speaks and as you listen, you will be faced with a choice: do you believe her or not? Again, some of what she says you might be able to verify through your own previous investigation, but as she speaks of her feelings, her intentions, her aspirations, her most abiding fears, you know that you have entered a territory beyond your capacity to control. And you have to decide: do you trust her or not? So it goes, whether we like it or not, anytime we deal with a person who speaks to us. We don’t surrender our reason as we get to know another person, but we must be willing to go beyond our reason; we must be willing to believe, to trust, to have faith.

This is, I think, an extremely illuminating analogy for faith in the theological sense. For Catholics (and I would invite my Internet friends to pay very close attention here), authentic faith never involves a sacrificium intellectus (a "sacrifice of the intellect"). God wants us to understand all we can about him through reason. By analyzing the order, beauty, and contingency of the world, there is an enormous amount of “information” we can gather concerning God: his existence, his perfection, the fact that he is endowed with intellect and will, his governance of the universe, etc. If you doubt me on this, I would invite you to take a good long look at the first part of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

Now one of the truths that reason can discover is that God is a person, and the central claim of the Bible is that this Person has not remained utterly hidden but has, indeed, spoken. As is the case with any listener to a person who speaks, the listener to the divine speech has to make a choice: do I believe him or not? The decision to accept in trust what God has spoken about himself is what the Church means by “faith.”

This decision is not irrational, for it rests upon and is conditioned by reason, but it presses beyond reason, for it represents the opening of one heart to another. In the presence of another human being, you could remain stubbornly in an attitude of mistrust, choosing to accept as legitimate only those data that you can garner through rational analysis; but in so doing, you would close yourself to the incomparable riches that that person might disclose to you. The strict rationalist, the unwavering advocate of the scientific method as the only path to truth, will know certain things about the world, but he will never come to know a person.

The same dynamic obtains in regard to God, the supreme Person. The Catholic Church wants people to use reason as vigorously and energetically as possible—and this very much includes scientific reason. But then it invites them, at the limits of their striving, to listen, to trust, to have faith.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Fine Art America)

"I think one reason why religion is often seen in a negative light today is that people misunderstand dramatically what we mean by faith, hope, and love. The distortion of those three has led to all kinds of problems."

 
 
(Image credit: Gmalcarde)

Prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins have consistently chastised religion for thwarting scientific research. But Professor Dominique Lambert, a respected expert in theoretical physics and the philosophy of science at the University of Namur, Belgium, believes not only does the Catholic faith, when correctly applied, not hinder science, but gives it vital intelligibility, meaning, and purpose.

In this interview, Professor Lambert speaks about the necessity of a harmonious relationship between faith and science and why the Catholic faith is best equipped to provide it.

Q: Can you explain what you mean by your assertion that only with faith is it possible to give complete intelligibility to science?

Lambert: In this dialogue, we have to say first of all that I cannot extract from science some theological point of view. In other words, science is producing many questions—rational and coherent questions—which are beyond the scope of its own methods. For example, the question of the ultimate foundation of existence, the meaning and history of existence—life, values, questions of a metaphysical and ethical nature—these are in fact produced by scientific activity but cannot be solved within the borders of scientific method.

Q: But atheists will insist that science can offer all the answers. Why is this not so?

Lambert: Because methodologically, science puts into brackets this question of meaning, the foundation [of existence]. The source of the existence is not solved by science because science presupposes this assumption, but rationally you need some explanation. For example, you can say: “I believe the world is a source of existence” or I can say, “Rationally, no, the existence of the world is received from a cause that is external to the world.” So you have a rational question but the answer cannot be formed because of methodological reasons. Intelligibility in fact needs some other explanation than this.

[With the Christian faith] you can shed some light on scientific findings. You can discover that many questions of a foundational value of meaning can receive some kind of intelligibility coming from this source of intelligibility. If you start from point of view of a believer, then you can get some coherent answer, with an increase in intelligibility. This point of view respects science completely, because you don’t modify science and you don’t try to extract from science that which is not science. You respect its autonomy, but you shed some light on it, [giving] an answer and an increase in intelligibility.

This is important. It’s not straightforward because we can, for example, adopt a religious position but one which will decrease the intelligibility of the world. But, in fact, we can prove that Christian belief is not like this. The Catholic tradition, for example, can shed some light and provide some elements as answers to fundamental questions, completely respecting the autonomy of science while at the same time increasing the intelligibility of science.

Q: You say that Richard Dawkins and other such atheist scientists try, in their own way, to offer a metaphysical perspective to science, but this doesn’t work. Could you explain more?

Lambert: His [Dawkins’] way of looking at religion, his way of giving to science some metaphysical power, does not respect the epistemological level of science. In fact, he is giving to science some metaphysical power that science does not possess. I respect his point of view, but we can in fact show that Dawkins gives to science some non-scientific powers.

Q: You also have observed a common trait among Nobel Prize winners in science, that they almost always write about philosophy after receiving their awards. Why is this and what does it say about science and faith?

Lambert: This is, for me, a clue that science is not self-sufficient. Many, many great scientists are writing books on their activities, but books which are in fact philosophical works. This is normal, but it’s important to look at this phenomenon, because it shows us that in fact science cannot be self-sufficient. Science produces metaphysical questions and, in fact, great scientists tend to solve these problems. This is normal because their scientific activities produce these questions.

The problem is to believe that these solutions belong to science, or to believe that a philosophical solution is given immediately by science. It’s not true. We cannot say biology leads to atheism because we cannot extract from science something that is not scientific. But we can say, for example, that a religious, theological point of view can illuminate scientific research and can help to extract some coherent meaning.

We have to realize that sometimes it doesn’t work. For example, I can assume some theological point of view, and I realize it can be completely incoherent with the scientific research. Take American creationism in the literal sense: if we adopt this point of view we will discover it does not respect the contents of contemporary biology—there is a kind of contradiction and it doesn’t work. But in the Catholic Church, we have a theology of creation whose point of view respects evolution and so on completely, but gives to evolution an additional meaning which is not directly present in the scientific research but that scientific research is coherent with this point of view.

Q: It is therefore essentially about respecting philosophical and Christian methods, allowing the two to come together?

Lambert: Yes, and both are articulated without any confusion and without destroying the link completely, because it is important, on the one hand, to methodologically distinguish the levels. But it is important on the other hand to unify them by a kind of articulation which is not concordism [the practice of identifying a scientific fact or theory with a particular phrase or passage in the Bible].

Q: You also talk about faith giving hope to science. Could you explain more?

Lambert: If we are believers or atheists, we are carrying out the same science, but a religious attitude can change the way we do science. Of course, your ethics, your ontological perspective is influenced by your theological point of view or religious attitude, and this gives you a kind of optimism. Msgr. Georges Lemaître, who discovered the Big Bang theory, said that science is the same for atheists and believers, but religious beliefs give you a nice optimism and hope, hope in the enigma of the universe as a solution. Of course, it doesn’t change the science, but it gives you an optimism of hope and maybe it changes, not science, but your life.

Q: Would you say it also gives life to research?

Lambert: Yes, it gives you some meaning to your scientific life, a sense of your scientific practice and action. You can have other nice motivations, but faith gives you a nice impulse and realization that all of this world has a deep meaning to be discovered. That is the solution to the enigma, as Msgr. Lemaître said.

I would also like to emphasize that, regarding the relationship between science and faith, it is important to avoid two kinds of problems: those coming from concordism and discordism. We need to avoid them and instead need some kind of articulation. In fact, in the Catholics tradition we have this quest for articulation because we have the nice tradition of fides et ratio [faith and reason], intellectus quaerens fidem [seeking to understand faith], and fides quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding]. The First Vatican Council condemned rationalism—that is, reason alone without faith—but also fideism, faith without reason. It’s very nice to realize that in the Catholic tradition we have such a dynamic articulation between fides et ratio. I think this tradition proffers absolute respect but without breaking the autonomy of science and theology.
 

 
 
Originally posted at ZENIT. Used with permission.
(Image credit: YouTube and Fundp)

Pope Benedict XVI dramatically underscored the importance of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) recently. In a series of general audiences dedicated to the Church fathers, Benedict devoted one or two audiences to luminaries such as St. Justin Martyr, St. Basil, and St. Jerome, while dedicating five to Augustine. One of the greatest theologians and Doctors of the Church, Augustine’s influence on Pope Benedict is manifest. "When I read Saint Augustine’s writings," the Holy Father stated in the second of those five audiences (January 16, 2008), "I do not get the impression that he is a man who died more or less 1,600 years ago; I feel he is like a man of today: a friend, a contemporary who speaks to me, who speaks to us with his fresh and timely faith."

The relationship between faith and reason has a significant place in Augustine’s vast corpus. It has been discussed often by Benedict, who identifies it as a central concern for our time and presents Augustine as a guide to apprehending and appreciating more deeply the nature of the relationship. Augustine’s "entire intellectual and spiritual development," Benedict stated in his third audience on the African Doctor (January 30, 2008), "is also a valid model today in the relationship between faith and reason, a subject not only for believers but for every person who seeks the truth, a central theme for the balance and destiny of all men."

This is a key issue and theme in Augustine’s Confessions, his profound and influential account of his search for meaning and conversion to Christianity. Augustine testifies to how reason puts man on the road toward God and how it is faith that informs and elevates reason, taking it beyond its natural limitations while never being tyrannical or confining in any way. He summarized this seemingly paradoxical fact in the famous dictum, "I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe" (Sermo 43:9).

Falsehoods about Faith

 
There are, as we all know, many distorted and shallow concepts of faith, reason, and the differences between the two. For self-described "brights" and other skeptics, reason is objective, scientific, and verifiable, while faith is subjective, personal, and irrational, even bordering on mania or madness. But if we believe that reason is indeed reasonable, it should be admitted this is a belief in itself, and thus requires some sort of faith. There is a certain step of faith required in putting all of one’s intellectual weight on the pedestal of reason. "Secularism," posits philosopher Edward Feser in The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism,

can never truly rest on reason, but only "faith," as secularists themselves understand that term (or rather misunderstand it, as we shall see): an unshakeable commitment grounded not in reason but rather in sheer willfulness, a deeply ingrained desire to want things to be a certain way regardless of whether the evidence shows they are that way. (6)

For many people today the source of reason and object of faith is their own intellectual power. To look outside, or beyond, themselves for a greater source and object of faith is often dismissed as "irrational" or "superstitious." As the Confessions readily document, Augustine had walked with sheer willfulness (to borrow Feser’s excellent descriptive) down this dark intellectual alleyway in his own life and found it to be a dead end. He discovered that belief is only as worthwhile as its object and as strong as its source. For Augustine—a man who had pursued philosophical arguments with intense fervor—both the object andsource of faith is God.

"Belief, in fact" the Thomistic philosopher Etienne Gilson remarked inThe Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, "is simply thought accompanied by assent" (27). There is not and cannot be tension or conflict between reason and faith; they both flow from the same divine source. Reason should and must, therefore, play a central role in a man’s beliefs about ultimate things. In fact, it is by reason that we come to know and understand what faith and belief are. Reason is the vehicle, which, if driven correctly, takes us to the door of faith. As Augustine observed:

My greatest certainty was that "the invisible things of thine from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even thy eternal power and Godhead." For when I inquired how it was that I could appreciate the beauty of bodies, both celestial and terrestrial; and what it was that supported me in making correct judgments about things mutable; and when I concluded, "This ought to be thus; this ought not"—then when I inquired how it was that I could make such judgments (since I did, in fact, make them), I realized that I had found the unchangeable and true eternity of truth above my changeable mind. (Confessions 7:17)

Get through the Door

 
However, while reason brings us to the threshold of faith—and even informs us that faith is a coherent and logical option—it cannot take us through the door. Part of the problem is that reason has been wounded by the Fall and dimmed by the effects of sin. Reason is, to some degree or another, distorted, limited, and hindered; it is often pulled off the road by our whims, emotions, and passions.

But this is not why natural reason, ultimately, cannot open the door to faith. It is because faith is a gift from the Creator, who is himself inscrutable. In Augustine’s intense quest for God he asked: Can God be understood and known by reason alone? The answer is a clear, "No." "If you understood him," Augustine declares, "it would not be God" (Sermo52:6, Sermo 117:3). The insufficiency of reason in the face of God and true doctrine is also addressed in the Confessions. Writing of an immature Christian who was ill-informed about doctrine, the bishop of Hippo noted:

When I hear of a Christian brother, ignorant of these things, or in error concerning them, I can tolerate his uninformed opinion; and I do not see that any lack of knowledge as to the form or nature of this material creation can do him much harm, as long as he does not hold a belief in anything which is unworthy of thee, O Lord, the Creator of all. But if he thinks that his secular knowledge pertains to the essence of the doctrine of piety, or ventures to assert dogmatic opinions in matters in which he is ignorant—there lies the injury. (Confessions 5:5)

Augustine’s high view of reason rested on his belief that God is the author of all truth and reason. The Incarnate God-man, the second Person of the Trinity, appeals to man’s reason and invites him to seek more deeply, to reflect more thoroughly, and to thirst more intensely for the "eternal Truth":

Why is this, I ask of thee, O Lord my God? I see it after a fashion, but I do not know how to express it, unless I say that everything that begins to be and then ceases to be begins and ceases when it is known in thy eternal reason that it ought to begin or cease—in thy eternal reason where nothing begins or ceases. And this is thy Word, which is also "the Beginning," because it also speaks to us. Thus, in the gospel, he spoke through the flesh; and this sounded in the outward ears of men so that it might be believed and sought for within, and so that it might be found in the eternal Truth, in which the good and only Master teacheth all his disciples. There, O Lord, I hear thy voice, the voice of one speaking to me, since he who teacheth us speaketh to us. (Confessions 11:8)

Another example of Augustine’s high regard for reason and for its central place in his theological convictions is found in his experience with the teachings of Mani. As Augustine learned about the Manichaean view of the physical world, he became increasingly exasperated with its lack of logic and irrational nature. The breaking point came when he was ordered to believe teachings about the heavenly bodies that were in clear contradiction to logic and mathematics: "But still I was ordered to believe, even where the ideas did not correspond with—even when they contradicted—the rational theories established by mathematics and my own eyes, but were very different" (Confessions 5:3). And so Augustine left Manichaeanism in search of a reasonable, intellectually cogent faith.

Know the Limits

 
Reason, based in man’s finitude, cannot comprehend the infinite mysteries of faith, even while pointing towards them, however indistinctly. For Augustine this was especially true when it came to understanding Scripture. Early in his life, reading the Bible had frustrated and irritated him; later, graced with the eyes of faith, he was able to comprehend and embrace its riches:

Thus, since we are too weak by unaided reason to find out truth, and since, because of this, we need the authority of the holy writings, I had now begun to believe that thou wouldst not, under any circumstances, have given such eminent authority to those Scriptures throughout all lands if it had not been that through them thy will may be believed in and that thou might be sought. For, as to those passages in the Scripture which had heretofore appeared incongruous and offensive to me, now that I had heard several of them expounded reasonably, I could see that they were to be resolved by the mysteries of spiritual interpretation. The authority of Scripture seemed to me all the more revered and worthy of devout belief because, although it was visible for all to read, it reserved the full majesty of its secret wisdom within its spiritual profundity. (Confessions 6:5)

The contrast between reading Scripture before and after faith is one Augustine returned to often, for it demonstrated how reason, for all of its goodness and worth, can only comprehend a certain circumscribed amount. While reason is a wonderful and even powerful tool, it is a natural tool providing limited results.

Man, the rational animal, is meant for divine communion, and therefore requires an infusion of divine life and aptitude. Grace, the divine life of God, fills man and gifts him with faith, hope, and love. Faith, then, is first and foremost a gift from God. It is not a natural virtue, but a theological virtue. Its goal is theosis —that is, participation in the divine nature (see CCC 460; 2 Pt 1:4). The Christian, reborn as a divinized being, lives by faith and not by sight, a phrase from St. Paul that Augustine repeated: "But even so, we still live by faith and not by sight, for we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope" (Confessions 13:13).

Recognize Rightful Authority

 
Humble receptivity to faith requires recognizing true and rightful authority. "For, just as among the authorities in human society, the greater authority is obeyed before the lesser, so also must God be above all" (Confessions 3:8). What Augustine could not find in Mani, he discovered in the person of Jesus Christ, his Church, and the Church’s teachings. All three are in evidence in the opening chords of theConfessions:

But "how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe without a preacher?" Now, "they shall praise the Lord who seek him," for "those who seek shall find him," and, finding him, shall praise him. I will seek thee, O Lord, and call upon thee. I call upon thee, O Lord, in my faith which thou hast given me, which thou hast inspired in me through the humanity of thy Son, and through the ministry of thy preacher. (1:1)

For Augustine, there is no conflict between Christ, his Body, and his Word. Christ, through his Body, demonstrates the truthfulness of his Word, as Augustine readily admitted: "But I would not believe in the Gospel, had not the authority of the Catholic Church already moved me" (Contra epistolam Manichaei 5:6; see also Confessions 7:7). Holy Scripture, the Word of God put to paper by men inspired by the Holy Spirit, possesses a certitude and authority coming directly from its divine Author and protected by the Church:

Now who but thee, our God, didst make for us that firmament of the authority of thy divine Scripture to be over us? For "the heaven shall be folded up like a scroll"; but now it is stretched over us like a skin. Thy divine Scripture is of more sublime authority now that those mortal men through whom thou didst dispense it to us have departed this life. (Confessions 13:15)

Humility and Harmony

 
"The harmony between faith and reason," wrote Benedict XVI in his third audience on Augustine, "means above all that God is not remote; he is not far from our reason and life; he is close to every human being, close to our hearts and to our reason, if we truly set out on the journey." Augustine’s life is a dramatic and inspiring witness to this tremendous truth, and it is why his Confessions continue to challenge and move readers today, 16 centuries after being written.

The young Augustine pursued reason, prestige, and pleasure with tremendous energy and refined focus, but could not find peace or satisfaction. It was when he followed reason to the door of faith, humbled himself before God, and gave himself over to Christ that he found Whom he was made by and for. "In its essence," Gilson wrote, "Augustinian faith is both an adherence of the mind to supernatural truth and a humble surrender of the whole man to the grace of Christ" (The Christian Philosophy 31).
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with author's permission.
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On Friday, Pope Francis released his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, which means “The Light of Faith.” Even though the encyclical is addressed to “the bishops, priests, and deacons, consecrated persons, and the lay faithful,” I hope that non-Christians will read it as well. Why? Because Francis explains in stark terms the differences in how “faith” is understood by believers and non-believers.

He begins by explaining that to Christians, faith is illuminating, and is described by Christ as a light:
 

1. The light of Faith: this is how the Church’s tradition speaks of the great gift brought by Jesus. In John’s Gospel, Christ says of himself: "I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness" (Jn 12:46). Saint Paul uses the same image: "God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts" (2 Cor 4:6).
 
The pagan world, which hungered for light, had seen the growth of the cult of the sun god, Sol Invictus, invoked each day at sunrise. Yet though the sun was born anew each morning, it was clearly incapable of casting its light on all of human existence. The sun does not illumine all reality; its rays cannot penetrate to the shadow of death, the place where men’s eyes are closed to its light. "No one — Saint Justin Martyr writes — has ever been ready to die for his faith in the sun".[1]
 
Conscious of the immense horizon which their faith opened before them, Christians invoked Jesus as the true sun "whose rays bestow life".[2] To Martha, weeping for the death of her brother Lazarus, Jesus said: "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" (Jn 11:40). Those who believe, see; they see with a light that illumines their entire journey, for it comes from the risen Christ, the morning star which never sets.

 
In stark contrast, non-believers tend to envision faith as a “blind leap,” or as a turning-away from the light of reason:
 

2. Yet in speaking of the light of faith, we can almost hear the objections of many of our contemporaries. In modernity, that light might have been considered sufficient for societies of old, but was felt to be of no use for new times, for a humanity come of age, proud of its rationality and anxious to explore the future in novel ways. Faith thus appeared to some as an illusory light, preventing mankind from boldly setting out in quest of knowledge.
 
The young Nietzsche encouraged his sister Elisabeth to take risks, to tread "new paths… with all the uncertainty of one who must find his own way", adding that "this is where humanity’s paths part: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to be a follower of truth, then seek".[3] Belief would be incompatible with seeking. From this starting point Nietzsche was to develop his critique of Christianity for diminishing the full meaning of human existence and stripping life of novelty and adventure. Faith would thus be the illusion of light, an illusion which blocks the path of a liberated humanity to its future.

 

3. In the process, faith came to be associated with darkness. There were those who tried to save faith by making room for it alongside the light of reason. Such room would open up wherever the light of reason could not penetrate, wherever certainty was no longer possible. Faith was thus understood either as a leap in the dark, to be taken in the absence of light, driven by blind emotion, or as a subjective light, capable perhaps of warming the heart and bringing personal consolation, but not something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way.
 
Slowly but surely, however, it would become evident that the light of autonomous reason is not enough to illumine the future; ultimately the future remains shadowy and fraught with fear of the unknown. As a result, humanity renounced the search for a great light, Truth itself, in order to be content with smaller lights which illumine the fleeting moment yet prove incapable of showing the way. Yet in the absence of light everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil, or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.

 
What I’ve observed is that many of the people who understand faith in this way seem genuinely unaware that this isn’t how believers view faith. If that describes you, or those you know, it behooves you to read this encyclical. It’s relatively short (only four chapters), well written, and thorough, quoting from Nietzsche, Dante, Martin Buber, the Church Fathers, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Guardini, Wittgenstein, Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Paul II, and T.S. Eliot, amongst others. Who knows? It just might change the way you approach the topic of religion.
 
 
Originally posted at Shameless Popery. Used with author's permission.
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When people hear that my husband and I began exploring Catholicism in 2005, one of the first questions they often ask is, “What about the sexual abuse scandals? Didn’t that scare you away from the Church?”

They’re usually surprised when I report that the answer is no; in fact, the scandals and the negative media coverage actually increased my faith in the Church. Here’s why:

Getting the Facts Straight

 
One of the first things I did was to look into the numbers behind the sexual abuse cases. Was I heading into an institution that was filled with sexual predators, as the media would have me believe? I was shocked to find that, by even the most anti-Catholic organizations’ estimates, only about 2 percent of Catholic priests had even been accused of sexual misconduct. And certainly the cover-ups by members of the hierarchy were deplorable, but my research led me to see that that was common in all organizations, not just the Church. To list just one of the many examples, in Washington there were 159 coaches accused of sexual misconduct with minors over a 10-year period. Ninety-eight of them continued to coach or teach. And how did the school hierarchies respond? To quote this article:

"When faced with complaints against coaches, school officials often failed to investigate them and sometimes ignored a law requiring them to report suspected abuse to police. Many times, they disregarded a state law requiring them to report misconduct to the state education office.
 
Even after getting caught, many men were allowed to continue coaching because school administrators promised to keep their disciplinary records secret if the coaches simply left. Some districts paid tens of thousands of dollars to get coaches to leave. Other districts hired coaches they knew had records of sexual misconduct."

In another example, Carol Shakeshaft and Audrey Cohan looked at 225 cases of abuse by educators in New York City. Shakeshaft reported:

"All of the accused admitted sexual abuse of a student, but none of the abusers was reported to the authorities, and only 1 percent lost their license to teach. Only 35 percent suffered negative consequences of any kind, and 39 percent chose to leave their school district, most with positive recommendations. Some were even given an early retirement package."

I could go on, but you get the idea. After investigating the issue, I found that, sadly, there is nothing different going on in the Catholic Church than in any organization where men are in contact with children, and that it’s an unfortunate fact of human nature—and not something unique within the Church—that people in hierarchy tend to look the other way when it comes to bad conduct by the people who report to them.

However, unlike the coaches or the school teachers, the Catholic clergy were supposed to be men of God. What are we supposed to make of it when even they commit atrocities like sexual abuse? Pondering that question was one of the key things that led me decide to become Catholic.

Understanding Who Guides the Church

 
While I was researching Catholicism, I seemed to be surrounded by the message that the Catholic hierarchy was corrupt to the core. Not only were negative stories about the Church splashed all over the media, but I’d happened to pick up some historical biographies from times and places that were heavily Catholic, and many of those books gave the impression that every bishop who ever lived had a personal harem that he only left long enough to go steal from the poor and kick puppies. I knew that these were heavily biased accounts that not only exaggerated a lot of the bad deeds, but that also overlooked all the incredible priests, bishops and popes throughout the ages who radiated the love of Christ. However, being surrounded by all this negativity did remind me that not every Catholic is a saint, and that sometimes even people in the hierarchy do bad things.

I found myself in a strange place: On the one hand, I was blown away by the wisdom I’d found in this Church. Reading the great works of Catholic theology left me feeling like I’d discovered the secret owner’s manual to the human life; the Catholic worldview was like the box top that made all the puzzle pieces of the human experience come together in a coherent whole. In the Catechism I saw a seamless, perfectly consistent moral code that was as compelling as it was counterintuitive—and when I tried following it, I found a peace and joy that I have never encountered before.

Yet on the other hand, I had all these reminders that Catholics are sinners too sometimes—that, in fact, even their leaders aren’t exempt from committing some of the most deplorable sins known to man.

It was when these two things collided that I realized: I don’t think people can do this on their own.

Ironically, the more the culture tried to paint the Catholic Church as full of sinful people, the more convinced I became of its truth. I didn’t believe that ordinary people could come up with a set of teachings that contained unparalleled wisdom; maintain them consistently across all times and places, even despite tremendous pressure to recant; and then keep it all going for two thousand years. And even if the media had been right that the priesthood and episcopate were full of corrupt and immoral people, that would have only made the situation more inexplicable in purely human terms—corrupt and immoral people are always the first to sell out and preach whatever message the culture wants to hear in order to get more power for themselves.

In short, I saw something divine at work here.

The Catholic Church has claimed all along that this is an institution “powered by” God, so to speak. It was founded by Jesus Christ, not humans, and a divine Force continues to guide it to this day. Just as he did with Sacred Scripture, God uses imperfect people to proclaim his perfect truth. It’s a crazy claim, particularly hard to believe in this age when atheistic materialism dominates the culture. But I think that the constant negative portrayals of Catholics in popular culture can be a boon to our faith in this department. Because every time the world reminds us that our natures are no less fallen than anyone else’s, it’s a reminder that our Church, its sacraments, and its teachings could not exist without Someone helping us out.
 
 
Originally published at the National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Jeremy Sarber)