The theory of evolution proposes an explanation for how life in general and mankind in particular arose. It holds that that there was a long period in which natural processes gave rise to life and to the different life forms on earth.

This in no way conflicts with the idea of God. As the omnipotent Creator, he is free to create either quickly or slowly and either directly or through intermediate processes that he sets up.

He can even do a mixture of these things, such as creating the universe in an instant (as apparently happened at the Big Bang) and then having it experience a long, slow process of development giving rise to stars and planets and eventually life forms including human beings.

He can even intervene periodically in these processes going on in the universe, such as when he creates a soul for each human being or when he performs a miracle.

From its perspective, science can learn certain things about the laws governing the universe and the processes occurring in it. But that does nothing to eliminate the idea of God, for the question remains: Why is there a universe with these laws and these processes in the first place?

Consider an analogy: Suppose that after a thorough and lengthy scientific investigation of the Mona Lisa, I concluded that it was the result of innumerable collisions of paint and canvas which gradually went from indecipherable shapes and colors to a beautiful and intriguing picture of a woman.

My analysis of the painting may be correct. That is, in fact, what the Mona Lisa is and how it developed. But it by no means disproves nor makes unnecessary Leonardo Da Vinci as the painter behind the painting.

Furthermore, if we were the product of a purely random processes then we have good reason to doubt our mental faculties when it comes to knowing the truth. Why? Because our mental faculties would be the result of a random evolutionary process which is aimed, not at producing true beliefs, but at mere survival. But if that were the case then why should we trust the idea that we are the product of purely random factors? The mental processes leading to this conclusion would not be aimed at producing true beliefs.

Charles Darwin seems to have understood this when he wrote:

“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

This worry disappears if God was guiding whatever process led to us and if he shaped the development of the human mind so that it was aimed at knowing him, and thus knowing the truth.

"But," you might be thinking, "surely evolution contradicts the creation account in Genesis."

No, it doesn't.

The Bible contains many different styles of writing. History, poetry, prophecy, parables, and a variety of other literary genres are found in its pages. This is not surprising since it is not so much a book as it is a library – a collection of 73 books written at different times by different people.

As such it is important that we distinguish between types of literature within the Bible and what they are trying to tell us. It would be a mistake, for example, to take a work as rich as the Bible in symbolism and literary figures as if it were always relating history in the manner that we in our culture are accustomed to.

Much less should we expect it to offer a scientific account of things. If one is hoping to find a scientific account of creation then he will not find it in these texts, for the Bible was never intended to be a scientific textbook on cosmology.

Saint Augustine put it this way: “We do not read in the Gospel that the Lord said, ‘I am sending you the Holy Spirit, that he may teach you about the course of the sun and the moon’. He wished to make people Christians not astronomers.”

The Catholic Church is open to the ideas of an old universe and that God used evolution as part of his plan. According to Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers” (CCC 283).

When it comes to relating these findings to the Bible, the Catechism explains: “God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337).

Explaining further, it says:

“Among all the Scriptural texts about creation, the first three chapters of Genesis occupy a unique place. From a literary standpoint these texts may have had diverse sources. The inspired authors have placed them at the beginning of Scripture to express in their solemn language the truths of creation–its origin and its end in God, its order and goodness, the vocation of man, and finally the drama of sin and the hope of salvation. Read in the light of Christ, within the unity of Sacred Scripture and in the living Tradition of the Church, these texts remain the principal source for catechesis on the mysteries of the ‘beginning’: creation, fall, and promise of salvation.” (CCC 289)

In other words, the early chapters of Genesis, “relate in simple and figurative language, adapted to the understanding of mankind at a lower stage of development, fundamental truths underlying the divine scheme of salvation.” (Pontifical Biblical Commission, January 16, 1948).

Or, as Pope John Paul II put it:

“The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its makeup, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise but in order to state the correct relationship of humanity with God and the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God” (Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 3, 1981).

As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) explained:

“The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God...does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary–rather than mutually exclusive—realities.”

The recognition that the creation accounts must be understood with some nuance is not new, nor is it a forced retreat in the face of modern science. Various Christian writers form the early centuries of Church history, as much as 1,500 years or more before Darwin, saw the six days of creation as something other than literal, twenty-four hour periods.

For example, in the A.D. 200s, Origen of Alexandria noted that in the six days of creation day and night are made on the first day but the sun is not created until the fourth. The ancients knew as well as we do that the presence or absence of the sun is what makes it day or night, and so he took this as an indicators that the text was using a literary device and not presenting a literal chronology. He wrote:

“Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars—the first day even without a sky? . . . I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.” (De Principiis, 4:16)

What Origen was onto was a structure embedded in the six days of creation whereby in the first three days God prepares several regions to be populated by separating the day from the night, the sky from the sea, and finally the seas from each other so that the dry land appears. Then, on the second three days, he populates these, filling the day and night with the sun, the moon, and the stars, filling the sky and sea with birds and fish, and filling the dry land with animals and man.

The first three days are historically referred to as the days of distinction because God separates and thus distinguishes one region from another. The second three days are referred to as the days of adornment, in which God populates or adorns the regions he has distinguished.

This literary structure was obvious to people before the development of modern science, and the fact that the sun is not created until day was recognized by some as a sign that the text is presenting the work of God, as the Catechism says, “symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work’” (CCC 337).

Origen was not the only one to recognize the literary nature of the six days. Similarly, St. Augustine, writing in the A.D. 400s, noted: “What kind of days these were is extremely difficult or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!” (The City of God, 11:6).

The ancients thus recognized, long before modern science, that the Bible did not require us to think that the world was made in six twenty-four hour days.
 
 

 
 
(Image credit: For Wallpaper)

John Farrel recently wrote a column at Forbes.com entitled "Can Theology Evolve?", quoting from an epistle of Jerry Coyne:

"I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness."

Now, by "literal truth" Coyne undoubtedly intended "literal fact," since a thing may be true without being fact, and a fact has no truth value in itself. I do not know Dr. Coyne's bona fides for drawing doctrinal conclusions or for interpreting scriptures, although he seems to lean toward the fundamentalist persuasion. Nor am I sure how Dr. Coyne's assertion necessarily entails a falsification of human specialness (whatever he means by that). I never heard of such a doctrine in my Storied Youth¹ though it is pretty obvious from a scientific-empirical point of view. You are not reading this on an Internet produced by kangaroos or petunias.

It is not even clear what his claim means regarding the Fall. Neither the Eastern Orthodox nor the Roman Catholic churches ever insisted on a naive-literal reading of their scriptures, and yet both asserted as dogma the Fall of Man.

Now modern genetics does not falsify the Adam and Eve tale for the excellent reason that it does not address the same matter as the Adam and Eve tale. One is about the origin of species; the other is about the origin of sin. One may as well say that a painting of a meal falsifies haute cuisine.

Still, there are some interesting points about the myth of Adam and Eve and the Fall. Not least is the common late-modern usage of "myth" to mean "something false" rather than "an organizing story by which a culture explains itself to itself." Consider, for example, the "myth of progress" that was so important during the Modern Ages. Or the equally famous "myth of Galileo" which was a sort of Genesis myth for the Modern Ages. With the fading of the Modern Ages, these myths have lost their power and have been exploded by post-modernism or by historians of science.

On the Ambiguity of One

 
Dr. Coyne's primary error seems to be a quantifier shift. He appears to hold that the statement:

A: "There is one man from whom all humans are descended"

...is equivalent to the statement:

B: "All humans are descended from [only] one man."

But this logical fallacy hinges on an equivocation of "one," failing to distinguish "one [out of many]" from "[only] one." Traditional doctrine requires only A, not B: That all humans share a common ancestor, not that they have no other ancestors.

For example, all Flynn men and women share a common descent from one John Thomas Flynn (c.1840-1881) but of course we are also descended from other ancestors as well. In my case, that includes a Frenchman from the Pas de Calais, numerous Germans from the upper Rhineland, plus some folks from other parts of Ireland, all of whom were contemporary with the aforesaid John Thomas. If you think of a surname as an inherited characteristic from the father, it is easy to see how a group of people may have a common ancestor without having only one ancestor.

Dr. Coyne believes the mathematical requirement of a population numbering 10,000 somehow refutes the possibility that there were two. But clearly, where there are 10,000 there are two, many times over. Genesis tells us that the children of Adam and Eve found mates among the children of men, which would indicate that there were a number of others creatures out there with whom they could mate—perhaps no fewer than 9,998 others. So even a literal reading of Genesis supports multiple ancestors, over and above a single common ancestor.

Of course, this is not the usual poetic trope or artistic image of one man and one woman alone in a Garden in Eden, but then popular and artistic conceptions of evolution or quantum mechanics are not always precise and accurate, either. Not everyone has the time, inclination, or talent to delve into such matters very deeply, and the end of art is different from the end of philosophy—or genetics. Yet there may be a sense in which Adam (and Eve) were indeed alone.

The Red-Clay Men

 
Dr. Coyne makes much of Mitochondrial Eve not being contemporary with Y-chromosomal Adam; but these are common ancestors only in the strict male descent or the strict female descent. Christian doctrine holds only that all men are descended from Adam, not that they descend through an unbroken line of fathers. The same applies to descent from Eve through mothers, although oddly enough, that is not doctrine, for reasons adduced below. Since mito-Eve and chromo-Adam are not necessarily the Adam and Eve of the story, what difference does it make if they were not contemporary?

Now obviously, if all men are descended from Adam, then all men are descended from Adam's father, ne c'est pas? At one time, the possibility that Adam's father was a lump of clay was the cutting edge of science. After all, the word adam simply means "red clay." (And still does in Arabic.) When a man dies, his body corrupts, and becomes...red clay. It was not then unreasonable to early observers of nature that regardless how subsequent generations have been propagated, the first red-clay man came directly from red clay.

In other words, the mythos of Adam and Eve employed the best-known science of its time. Were it being originally written today, it would undoubtedly employ the imagery of modern science—just so people in AD 6,000 could laugh at its naiveté.

So why Adam and not his progenitor, Bruce?

 
Evolution points to the answer. Darwin tells us that at some point an ape that was not quite a man gave birth to a man that was no longer quite an ape. He was H. sapiens—or at least he likes to call himself that. He had the capacity for rational thought; that is, to reflect on sensory perceptions and abstract universal concepts. He could not only perceive this bison and that bison, but could conceive of "bison"—an abstraction with no material existence of its own. Poetically, we might say that a God "breathed" a rational soul into a being that had previously been little more than "red clay."

How long after the red-clay man was formed was the rational soul breathed in? The texts do not say. It may have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years, at least according to one Eastern Orthodox theologian²; and Thomas Aquinas in at least one place regards humanity in general as "one man." If there is a God and he did such things, he was not punching a time-clock.

Hence, Adam as first man, and not simply first man-like hominid.

Whaddaya Mean "First" Man?

 
There is an argument similar to Zeno's Paradox of Dichotomy that holds that sapient man arose by slow, gradual increments. That is, arguing from the continuum rather than from the quanta. Now, "a little bit sapient" is like "a little bit pregnant." It may be only a little, but it is a lot more than not sapient at all. There is, after all, no first number after zero, and however small the sapience, one can always cut it in half and claim that that much less sapience preceded it. But however long and gradual is the screwing-in of the light bulb, the light is either on or off.

Modern genetics finds that genetic change may be specific, sudden, and massive due to various biochemical "machines" within the gene. The ability to abstract universal concepts from particular sensory percepts is an either-or thing, no matter how much better developed it might become over time. You either can do it even a little bit or you can't do it at all. So, Adam may be considered the first man no matter how many man-like apes there were on his family tree.

And that includes those among his 9,999 companions. It is not clear how Dr. Coyne envisions the same sapient mutation arising simultaneously in 10,000 ape-men. It is not impossible, I suppose, but it does seem unlikely. So let us default to the sapiens/loquens mutation appearing first in one man and then gradually spreading through a population and, following tradition, let's call him Adam.

This in no way contradicts the existence of 9,999 other ape-men with whom Adam is interfertile. They may have been necessary to comprise a sufficient breeding population insofar as the body is concerned, but they need not have been sapient.

The Trent Affair

 
Consequently, what Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice were up to with Lilith among the 10,000 makes no difference, doctrine-wise. For that matter, what Eve was up to doesn't matter much, either! The anathemas of the Council of Trent mention only Adam. They require belief in original sin and related doctrines; they do not require belief in a factual Genesis myth beyond the simple existence of a common ancestor. (Which is why the church consistently taught that mankind was all one species and that all material beings with intellect and will, including hypothetical blemyae and sciopods, were "men.")

The anagogical point of the Genesis story was to teach a doctrine, not to relate a history. The truths are not in the facts. Dr. Coyne has discovered that naive-literalists have a coherency problem, but that has been known for centuries. Indeed, St. Augustine pointed it out 1,600 years ago:

"For if he takes up rashly a meaning which the author whom he is reading did not intend, he often falls in with other statements which he cannot harmonize with this meaning. And if he admits that these statements are true and certain, then it follows that the meaning he had put upon the former passage cannot be the true one: and so it comes to pass, one can hardly tell how, that, out of love for his own opinion, he begins to feel more angry with Scripture than he is with himself." (On Christian Doctrine, I.37)

In his book on the literal meanings of Genesis, wherein he extracted multiple literal meanings from different passages,³ Augustine wrote:

"In the case of a narrative of events, the question arises as to whether everything must be taken according to the figurative sense only, or whether it must be expounded and defended also as a faithful record of what happened. No Christian will dare say that the narrative must not be taken in a figurative sense. For St. Paul says: 'Now all these things that happened to them were symbolic.' And he explains the statement in Genesis, 'And they shall be two in one flesh,' as a great mystery in reference to Christ and to the Church. If, then, Scripture is to be explained under both aspects, what meaning other than the allegorical have the words: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth'?" (On the Literal Meanings of Genesis, I.1)

Note that he regards the figurative [anagogical] sense as the default, and other readings are layered upon this. He discusses how one knows when a figurative meaning is intended, and describes the various figures that are used in both literary and vulgar speech. Thomas Aquinas explains the four reading protocols used by the Church in ST I.1.10, but they go back at least a thousand years before him.

Homo loquens

 
Aristotle illustrated the difference between the sensitive animal form and the rational human form by saying that an animal sees flesh, but a human also sees what flesh is. It is the difference between knowing this bright red crunchy apple perceived by the senses and knowing about "apple" conceived by reflection of the intellect on the many individual apples of experience. And so we might imagine Adam sitting around the campfire after an exciting hunt and remembering the bison they had chased and the moment of truth and he suddenly utters the hunting cry that signifies "bison here!"—a cry that is in principle no different from those made by other animals, and possibly his fire-mates look about in alarm for the bison the cry signifies.

But Adam has done something different. He has used the sign as a symbol, one that refers to the bison-that-is-not-here-but-remembered. He has become sapient and has invented grammar.⁴ Or perhaps he was just born that way and like any small child reaching seven has just achieved the age of reason. But in all likelihood, his ability to speak in abstractions—to speak of 'bison' rather than any particular bison—is coterminous with his sapience.

Alas, none of his fire-mates understand, and he goes through life as lonely as a man who can speak when no one else can listen. (He has become the First Politician.) It is as if he is alone in a garden (since that is all that "paradise" meant.) For a while, he amuses himself by giving names to all the other animals, but that soon palls. Is there no one else he can talk with?

Then one day he meets a woman-with-words. Perhaps a woman from another band or tribe who has coincidentally received the same mutation, or perhaps someone who has simply cottoned on to what he has been doing. Sometimes an environmental cue is required to activate a gene. Here at last is someone he can talk to. (Perhaps he regrets this later, when she will not shut up. But that is a tale for another time.) The rest, as they say, is history. Later, some of his descendants will fly to the Moon, still chattering away.

Pleased to Meet You. Hope You Know My Name.

 
Like any animal, the red-clay ape-men were innocent. They lived, hunted, ate, mated, and died, pretty much in that order. What was good was what perfected their ape-manliness; but they did not know it was good. In a sense, they did not know anything. Like perfect Zen masters, they simply did. (See the zebras in the Underground Grammarian's essay, linked in the previous footnote.)

But Adam is different. Having a rational human form in addition to his sensitive animal form, he is capable of knowing the good. As Paul writes in Romans 2:12-16, the law is written in the heart.⁵ God being the author of natures is, in the Christian view, the author of human nature in particular; hence the law "written in the heart" was written there by God. But for Adam to know the good means that Adam is now capable of turning away from the good. Thus, when Adam wills some act that is contrary to what his intellect tells him is good, he is acting in disobedience to "God's commands written in his heart." A turning away from the good is called "sin" and, since no one had ever been capable of doing so before, it was the original sin. This is all communicated by allegory in the tale of the tree.

We can observe this today with children, who mature to a point when they begin to recognize good and evil. We call it the Age of Reason. Once upon a time, this recognition must have happened for the first time, and not necessarily in childhood. Today's children have parents and an entire society of other sapient beings to serve as examples and hasten the onset; but Adam had no one to teach him, so the realization could have come late. All of a sudden, he knew he had disobeyed the voice in his head, he was naked like an animal, he knew that someday he would die.

So death came into the world—not as fact, but as truth. Animals die in fact, but they do not know that they will. They live, as it were, one day at a time; and then one day they don't. "Truth is not just a judgment," writes Chastek, "but an affirmation of how this judgment stands to us with respect to its truth." Death became true when Adam realized it. (What a bummer that must have been. He probably invented whiskey next.)

And so he was expelled from the edenic existence of the innocent ape-men animals into a world of worries. Perhaps it was literal. How did the other ape-men react to the odd ones in their midst? Evolution proceeds through reproductive isolation. If Adam and the others like him had stayed in ape-man eden, his genes may have been lost in the larger gene pool and never achieved "take-off" concentration. So some sort of secession seems reasonable.

Maybe Adam and those he found like him started calling themselves "the Enlightened" or "the Brights" or even just "the Sapients" and this really annoyed the other 9,000 or so, who then drove them out as obnoxious little gits.

Original Sin

 
Most sin, the old joke runs, is not very original. But supposedly the "sin of Adam" has been inherited by all his descendants. This hardly seems fair. If we didn't do the deed, why should we bear the mark?

But this misses the mark. Thomas Aquinas made note that original sin is not a particular transgression, like a crime committed for which one deserves particular punishment, but is the origin or source of such positive sins. It is a predilection inherent to human nature.

Doctrine is concerned with the origin of sin, not the origin of species. Hence, "origin-al" sin. The only time Thomas Aquinas touches (in passing) on the origin of species, he ascribes its possibility to the powers inherent in nature itself as created in the beginning:

"Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning."

(We could take that further and say that the physical universe itself existed beforehand in various active powers, like gravitation or quantum mechanics. If only a physicist of the stature of Hawking would be courageous enough to say that in the beginning there was the word: "Let F=G(Mm)/d^2." But we digress.)

When Thomas Aquinas discusses Adam and Eve, he focuses on Adam. He goes so far as to say that had it been Eve who sinned, we would have no problem!

But how is this original sin transmitted to descendants? Again, we shouldn't suppose that no one has ever thought of these late-modern objections before. Aquinas writes:

"Yet if we look into the matter carefully we shall see that it is impossible for the sins of the nearer ancestors, or even any other but the first sin of our first parent to be transmitted by way of origin. The reason is that a man begets his like in species but not in individual. Consequently those things that pertain directly to the individual, such as personal actions and matters affecting them, are not transmitted by parents to their children: for a grammarian does not transmit to his son the knowledge of grammar that he has acquired by his own studies. On the other hand, those things that concern the nature of the species, are transmitted by parents to their children, unless there be a defect of nature: thus a man with eyes begets a son having eyes, unless nature fails. And if nature be strong, even certain accidents of the individual pertaining to natural disposition, are transmitted to the children, e.g. fleetness of body, acuteness of intellect, and so forth; but nowise those that are purely personal."

In ST II-1, Q.81, art. 1 he writes:

"For some, considering that the subject of sin is the rational soul, maintained that the rational soul is transmitted with the semen, so that thus an infected soul would seem to produce other infected souls. Others, rejecting this as erroneous, endeavored to show how the guilt of the parent's soul can be transmitted to the children, even though the soul be not transmitted, from the fact that defects of the body are transmitted from parent to child—thus a leper may beget a leper, or a gouty man may be the father of a gouty son, on account of some seminal corruption, although this corruption is not [itself] leprosy or gout. Now since the body is proportionate to the soul, and since the soul's defects redound into the body, and vice versa, in like manner, say they, a culpable defect of the soul is passed on to the child, through the transmission of the semen, albeit the semen itself is not the subject of the guilt."

So Aquinas has noted genetics, and has rejected Lamarckism, even if he doesn't know about genetics and says "semen" rather than "genes." This is what we might call Aquinas' "genetic" explanation. He identified original sin with concupiscence, hence with selfishness (or "wanting" as the Buddha put it). So he is here hypothesizing a sort of "selfish gene." (Perhaps we can find an evolutionary biologist willing to write a book about the selfish gene?)

However, Aquinas finds that this selfish gene is not quite sufficient, and adds a bit regarding "motion by generation," and says we must consider the human species as a whole ("as one man") and the sin (or defect) as applying to human nature per se, rather than to the acts of each particular man: "Original sin is not the sin of this person, except inasmuch as this person receives his nature from his first parent, for which reason it is called the 'sin of nature.'"

Conclusion

 
The mythos of Adam and Eve still makes sense when read in the traditional anagogical manner, not in spite of evolutionary learnings but because of them. Of course, Christians must always be wary of concordism, as atheists rightly point out. Being compatible with consensus science is a tricky thing—just ask the clerics who defended long-established geocentrism. If it ain't falsifiable, it ain't science; so we must allow the possibility that what we think we know about evolution is all wrong. That is why it is not a good idea to get too chummy with science, since you never know when she'll pack up her bags and leave you holding the bills.
 
 
Originally posted at TOFSpot. Used with permission.
(Image credit: The Blaze)

We'd also like to note that Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 

 
As many friends and readers know, I was an atheist for about a decade—roughly the 1990s, give or take. Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism. I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition. A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14. Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time—“That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc.—I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good. Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise—sola scriptura itself—has absolutely nothing to be said for it. Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that. Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends.

But I was still a theist for a time, though that wouldn’t survive my undergrad years. Kierkegaard was my first real philosophical passion, and his individualistic brand of religiosity greatly appealed to me. But the individualistic irreligion of Nietzsche would come to appeal to me more, and for a time he was my hero, with Walter Kaufmann a close second. (I still confess an affection for Kaufmann. Nietzsche, not so much.) Analytic philosophy would, before long, bring my youthful atheism down to earth. For the young Nietzschean the loss of religion is a grand, civilizational crisis, and calls for an equally grand response on the part of a grand individual like himself. For the skeptical analytic philosopher it’s just a matter of rejecting some bad arguments, something one does quickly and early in one’s philosophical education before getting on to the really interesting stuff. And that became my “settled” atheist position while in grad school. Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth—something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

But it takes some reading and thinking to get to that point. Kaufmann’s books were among my favorites, serious as they were on the “existential” side of disbelief without the ultimately impractical pomposity of Nietzsche. Naturally I took it for granted that Hume, Kant, et al. had identified the main problems with the traditional proofs of God’s existence long ago. On issues of concern to a contemporary analytic philosopher, J. L. Mackie was the man, and I regarded his book The Miracle of Theism as a solid piece of philosophical work. I still do. I later came to realize that he doesn’t get Aquinas or some other things right. (I discuss what he says about Aquinas in Aquinas.) But the book is intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for some books written by the “New Atheists.” Antony Flew’s challenge to the intelligibility of various religious assertions may have seemed like dated “ordinary language” philosophy to some, but I was convinced there was something to it. Kai Nielsen was the “go to” guy on issues of morality and religion. Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification was a doorstop of a book, and a useful compendium of arguments. I used to wonder with a little embarrassment whether my landlord, who was religious but a nice guy, could see that big word “ATHEISM” on its spine when he’d come to collect the rent, sitting there sort of like a middle finger on the bookshelf behind me. But if so he never raised an eyebrow or said a word about it.

The argument from evil was never the main rationale for my atheism; indeed, the problem of suffering has only gotten really interesting to me since I returned to the Catholic Church. (Not because the existence of suffering poses a challenge to the truth of classical theism—for reasons I’ve given elsewhere, I think it poses no such challenge at all—but because the role various specific instances of suffering actually play in divine providence is often really quite mysterious.) To be sure, like any other atheist I might have cited the problem of suffering when rattling off the reasons why theism couldn’t be true, but it wasn’t what primarily impressed me philosophically. What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief. If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed. Indeed, that there were no such arguments seemed to me something which would itself be an instance of evil if God existed, and this was an aspect of the problem of evil that seemed really novel and interesting.

I see from a look at my old school papers that I was expressing this idea in a couple of essays written for different courses in 1992. (I think that when J. L. Schellenberg’s book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason appeared in 1993 I was both gratified that someone was saying something to that effect in print, and annoyed that it wasn’t me.) Attempts to sidestep the evidentialist challenge, like Alvin Plantinga’s, did not convince me, and still don’t. My Master’s thesis was a defense of “evidentialism” against critics like Plantinga. I haven’t read it in years, but I imagine that, apart from its atheism and a detail here or there, I’d still agree with it.

I was also greatly impressed by the sheer implausibility of attributing humanlike characteristics to something as rarefied as the cause of the world. J. C. A. Gaskin’s The Quest for Eternity had a fascinating section on the question of whether a centre of consciousness could coherently be attributed to God, a problem I found compelling. Moreover, the very idea of attributing moral virtues (or for that matter moral vices) to God seemed to make no sense, given that the conditions that made talk of kindness, courage, etc. intelligible in human life could not apply to Him. Even if something otherwise like God did exist, I thought, He would be “beyond good and evil”—He would not be the sort of thing one could attribute moral characteristics to, and thus wouldn’t be the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Richard Swinburne’s attempt to show otherwise did not work, as I argued in another school paper.) The Euthyphro problem, which also had a big impact on me, only reinforced the conclusion that you couldn’t tie morality to God in the way that (as I then assumed) the monotheistic religions required.

Those were, I think, the main components of my mature atheism: the conviction that theists could neither meet nor evade the evidentialist challenge; and the view that there could be, in any event, no coherent notion of a cause of the world with the relevant humanlike attributes. What is remarkable is how much of the basis I then had for these judgments I still find compelling. As I would come to realize only years later, the conception of God I then found so implausible was essentially a modern, parochial, and overly anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception, and not the classical theism to which the greatest theistic philosophers had always been committed. And as my longtime readers know, I still find theistic personalism objectionable. The fideism that I found (and still find) so appalling was, as I would also come to see only later, no part of the mainstream classical theist tradition either. And while the stock objections raised by atheists against the traditional arguments for God’s existence are often aimed at caricatures, some of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers of religion. But they do not have force against the key arguments of the classical theist tradition.

It is this classical tradition—the tradition of Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, and Thomists and other Scholastics—that I had little knowledge of then. To be sure, I had read the usual selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Anselm that pretty much every philosophy student reads—several of Plato’s dialogues, the Five Ways, chapter 2 of the Proslogium, and so forth. Indeed, I read a lot more than that. I’d read the entire Proslogium of Anselm, as well as the Monologium, the Cur Deus Homo, and the exchange with Gaunilo, early in my undergraduate years. I’d read Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia and De Principiis Naturae, big chunks of Plotinus’s Enneads, Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Augustine’s Concerning the Teacher, and Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Road to God. I’d read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy -- hardly an unbiased source, to be sure—but also a bit of Gilson. I read all this while becoming an atheist during my undergrad years, and I still didn’t understand the classical tradition.

Why not? Because to read something is not necessarily to understand it. Partly, of course, because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do. But mainly because, to understand someone, it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks. You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his mouth. And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen—especially if you’ve fallen in love with one side of the question, the side that’s new and sexy because it’s not what you grew up believing. Zeal of the deconverted, and all that.

You’re pretty much just going through the motions at that point. And if, while in that mindset, what you’re reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at least no one in the “mainstream”), your understanding is bound to be superficial and inaccurate. You’ll take whatever happens to strike you as the main themes, read into them what you’re familiar with from modern writers, and ignore the unfamiliar bits as irrelevant. “This part sounds like what Leibniz or Plantinga says, but Hume and Mackie already showed what’s wrong with that; I don’t even know what the hell this other part means, but no one today seems to be saying that sort of thing anyway, so who cares...” Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on. How far can you go wrong?

Well the answer is very, very far. It took me the better part of a decade to see that, and what prepared the way were some developments in my philosophical thinking that seemingly had nothing to do with religion. The first of them had to do instead with the philosophy of language and logic. Late in my undergrad years at Cal State Fullerton I took a seminar in logic and language in which the theme was the relationship between sentences and what they express. (Propositions? Meanings? Thoughts? That’s the question.) Similar themes would be treated in courses I took in grad school, at first at Claremont and later at UC Santa Barbara. Certain arguments stood out. There was Alonzo Church’s translation argument, and, above all, Frege’s wonderful essay “The Thought”. Outside of class, I discovered Karl Popper’s World 3 concept, and the work of Jerrold Katz. The upshot of these arguments was that the propositional content of sentences could not be reduced to or otherwise explained in terms of the utterances of sentences themselves, or behavioral dispositions, or psychological states, or conventions, or functions from possible worlds, or anything else a materialist might be willing to countenance. As the arguments sank in over the course of months and years, I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning were no good.
 
 
Originally posted at Edward Feser's blog. User with author's permission.
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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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