Many people believe that Catholicism, because it is a dogmatic religion, stifles free thought and free speech. “How nice for you,” some will say to a Catholic convert, “Now that you’re a Catholic, you won’t have to think anymore.” Or, “It must be nice to be a Catholic and have such ‘certainty.’” This is said with a snuffling, cynical laugh because by ‘certainty’ they often mean that one has become a mindless robot—a Kool Aid drinking cult member following the demands of his leader in white, without thinking.

Another jab Catholic converts often hear is, “Of course there are some folks who need that kind of certainty.” The subtext here is, “You’re not really smart enough to think things through for yourself, and you are probably emotionally and socially insecure and immature so you need to belong to a mutual self-love group which offers its members certainty in all things.”

Like any criticism leveled against the Church, this one is partially true. There certainly are cults that offer their members mind-numbing ‘certainty’. There are emotionally insecure and immature people who need to belong to such cults. We have to admit that there are some Catholics like that, and that there are, sadly, some Catholic sub-groups, religious orders, and movements in which members have sometimes behaved like this.

However, abuses do not undo right uses. My typical response to the charge that, “You Catholics all thoughtlessly follow your leader, believing and doing whatever he tells you” is that “You clearly don’t know very many Catholics. The vast majority take little notice of what their leader tells them and have scant understanding either of the dogmas or the moral teachings of their Church.”

But that is to make a cynical response. Instead, there is a more reasoned argument, and it is this. Let us ask foundational questions. Either there is such a thing as truth or there is not. If there is no such a thing as truth, then every man may think what he likes and the world is absurd. If there is such a thing as truth, then because we are creatures who use language both in thought and speech, we must be able to put that truth into words.

We put that truth into words in many different ways. We tell stories, we write poems, we discuss and debate and reason our way into truth, and one of the ways we express the truth is through propositional theological statements. These statements, or resolutions, are not the whole truth, but they state truth in a propositional way as precisely and completely as possible. This statement of theological truth we call dogma.

If this process is possible at all, then a church (which is founded to proclaim and live the truth) must in some sense be dogmatic, and if it is at all dogmatic, then it must be in the business, at least in a minimal sense, to declare that dogma be necessary. If the dogma wasn’t necessary, then it wouldn’t be dogma. In other words, that church must have the authority to say, “This particular proposition is true. That means you must believe it if you belong to this Church because the Church lives to proclaim and live the truth. It can’t be true sometimes, but not at other times. It can’t be true for me, but not for you. If it is true, then it's true always and everywhere for all people whether or not they understand it."

Now this is something solid, something real. It is a rock on which to build a worldview. Without such a thing as dogma (and the authority to declare a belief a dogma), the Church is built on the shifting sand of subjective personal opinion. This will eventual cause the whole worldview to collapse. But when you build on rock, you stabilize 'free thought,' not stifle it. Dogmas may seem to suppress free thought because, by virtue of declaring some things true, they must necessarily declare other things to be false. To say, "My apple is red” is  also to say “My apple is not blue.”

Dogma is demanded not because it gives all the answers, but because it gives the foundation upon which to ask the right questions. Dogma gives thought wings because it gives thought a structure.

Even when a person dissents from Church teaching and denies the dogma, they are still affirming the necessity for dogma, otherwise what would they have to rebel against? Even the person who kicks a rock proves that the rock exists. Indeed, it is arguable that it is the person who kicks the rock who is most affected by the rock, for by kicking the rock they have hurt their foot. Therefore even the ‘free thinker’ who rejects dogma proves the reality and solidity of that dogma.

Therefore dogma gives thought structure. It not only gives thought a structure, but dogma, combined with tradition, give a person a context and structure for a unified world view. There are corridors in the mind, shelves of knowledge which are cataloged, galleries of art to enlighten. There are libraries of great minds which illuminate, biographies of the wise and righteous to guide. Catholicism, rooted, nurtured, and flourishing within the Western classical tradition, provides a unique and irreplaceable structure in which truly free thought can flourish.

Without this structure and context, the ‘free thought’ is simply a jumble of impressions and emotional reactions, conditioned by a scrap of propaganda here, a bit of education there, and a swirl of sentimental reactions sparked up by popular culture. It becomes like playing tennis without a net. Totally ‘free thought’ is free, but it is not thought—it is an expression of opinion, or an exclamation of emotion.

Dogma provides the structure necessary for real thought. To end, consider the creed, which many 'free thinkers' consider restrictive—an antiquated formula for a dying religion. It is a straight jacket, a set of blinders, a cage for the mind. But Catholics don't see it this way. It's not a cage to constrict, but a ladder on which to climb. It's the stairway on which to ascend, the map for the journey. And, as we all know, it's the climbing, the ascent, and the journey which matter most.
 
 
Originally posted at Standing On My Head. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Mud Preacher)

NOTE: 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.
 

Philosopher Dale Tuggy recently quoted a famous passage from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola:
 

"To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls. Because by the same Spirit our Lord Who gave the ten Commandments, our holy Mother the Church is directed and governed."

 
This is a favorite quote of skeptics looking for a proof text demonstrating the manifest irrationality of the Catholic understanding of the Church’s authority. Dale does not seem to be making quite so strong or aggressive a claim, but he does regard Ignatius' position as “unreasonable” insofar as it amounts, as Dale tells us, to the view that “tradition trumps sense perception.”

But that’s simply not what Ignatius said. For one thing, he says nothing about “tradition” in the passage quoted. He speaks instead of what the “Hierarchical Church” decides. True, when the Church formally pronounces on some matter in a fashion that requires the assent of the faithful, she always does so in light of tradition. But tradition per se is not what is at issue in this passage. What is at issue is the epistemological status of the Church’s pronouncements themselves. That narrows things considerably, because while the Church does pronounce on many things, and while it is by no means only those pronouncements presented as infallible to which the faithful are expected to assent, the range of actual pronouncements is still narrower than the deliverances of tradition. (For example, there is support for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in tradition, but you will not find a formal pronouncement on the matter until relatively recently, which is why Thomas Aquinas was in his time free to disagree with it.)

Secondly, the subject matter of those pronouncements always concerns those areas in which the Church claims special expertise, namely faith (i.e., theological doctrine) and morals—matters which are relevant to “the salvation of our souls,” in Ignatius' words. The Church does not claim special expertise or authority in purely secular matters. This is just basic Catholic theology, with which Ignatius was of course familiar. The stuff about black being white if the Church decides it is meant as hyperbole—which should be clear to any charitable reader, and certainly to anyone who knows that the Church has never claimed any special expertise in the physics, physiology, or philosophy of color perception per se.

Thirdly, Dale suggests that what Loyola says about sense perception would seem to entail as well that tradition “would also trump a strong intuition of falsehood—as when a set of claims appears self-inconsistent." That makes it sound as if Ignatius' view, and the Church’s, is that we ought to ignore what we know about logic if it seems to conflict with Church teaching. But the Catholic position is that even where theological mysteries are concerned, apparent logical inconsistencies can be and should be exposed as illusory. The Church rejects any attempt to pit revelation against reason, whether motivated by skepticism or by fideism. She teaches that while there are theological truths that cannot be arrived at by unaided reason, these truths nevertheless must not and do not conflict with reason. We must accept both the Church’s teachings on faith and morals and logic, and if there seems to be a conflict, the theologian has a duty to show why this appearance is illusory.

Fourthly, the Church’s teaching about the epistemological status of her own pronouncements on matters of faith and morals is itself grounded in reason. She doesn’t say, in circular fashion, “You must accept what the Church teaches vis-à-vis faith and morals. Why? Well, we just told you why: because that is itself something the Church teaches!” The Catholic position rather follows from the Catholic understanding of divine revelation. The Catholic view is that the occurrence of a divine revelation is something that should be and can be confirmed via its association with miracles, where the occurrence of the miracles in question itself can and should be confirmed by rational arguments.

Still, if such revelation is to be efficacious, it cannot come to us merely in the form of a set of prophetic oral teachings passed on from generation to generation, or a book, or the declarations of a series of councils (though of course it can and does include these). For by themselves such sources of revelation are inherently subject to alternative interpretations, and being mere words on a page they cannot interpret themselves. In particular, they cannot tell us what they mean when the meaning is not entirely clear, and they cannot tell us how we are to apply them to new and unforeseen circumstances.

Hence, if a revelation is to be efficacious, it must be associated with an authoritative interpreter. And since the human lifespan is relatively short, that interpreter cannot be identified with some particular individual human being if the revelation is to be efficacious over a period of centuries. It has to be embodied in an ongoing institution, and ultimately in an executive office whose occupants have supreme authority to have the final say in matters of controversy.

Moreover, divine assistance must preserve this authority from error just as it preserved the original revelation from error. For if the authority can err in its interpretation and application of the revelation, the latter will, once again, be of no effect, even if free of error itself. In short, you can’t have an infallible Bible or infallible ecclesiastical councils without an infallible institutional Church and an infallible Pope. Without the latter, the interpretation and application of the former become arbitrary in principle, as every private interpreter becomes an authority unto himself.

Obviously this is bound to be controversial, and various details and qualifications would need to be spelled out in a complete treatment of the issue. The point for our purposes here is that the Catholic position is grounded in an argument about how a divine revelation given at some point in history has to be transmitted and applied if it is going to be transmitted and applied effectively. (If you want a more detailed presentation of the argument, see the book by fellow Strange Notions contributor Mark Shea, titled By What Authority?. It offers an excellent, popular exposition.)

It should be clear, then, that the Church—and Ignatius, in summarizing the Church’s view of her own authority—is not saying “tradition trumps sense perception,” nor, contrary to what skeptics suppose, is it advocating a shrill fideism. Its claim, stripped of hyperbole, is rather: “Given the Catholic understanding of revelation—an understanding the Church herself insists is and must be in harmony with reason—we are obliged to assent to the Church’s formal pronouncements on matters of faith and morals rather than to any private interpretation that might conflict with those pronouncements.” Whether or not one agrees with this claim, it is hardly the jarring call to irrationalist dogmatism skeptics make it out to be.

Now, Dale might respond: “That’s fair enough as far as it goes. But what happens when we apply Ignatius' principle, as you claim it should be understood, to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in particular? In at least that case, isn’t the result pretty much the view I attributed to Ignatius—namely, that we ought to reject what sense perception tells us when it conflicts with tradition, or at least with the formal pronouncements of the Church?”

But that is not the result. Or, if the result is that we ought to reject what sense perception tells us, this is so only in a loose, innocuous, and uncontroversial sense. To see how, consider Jim and Bob, who are identical twins with similar personalities. You approach someone you take to be Jim, begin a friendly conversation, and after a few minutes say “Well, I’m late for a meeting. Nice chatting with you, Jim!” He responds: “I’m not Jim, I’m Bob!” If we conclude that your senses deceived you, are we committing ourselves to a shockingly irrationalist skepticism about sense perception? Are we endorsing a bizarre Bob-oriented fideism according to which “Bob’s say-so trumps sense perception”? Obviously not. Indeed, strictly speaking, it wasn’t really your senses that deceived you in the first place. The man you were talking to really does look like Jim; your senses told you as much, and they were right. The trouble is that you drew the wrong conclusion from this fact, because you failed sufficiently to consider that Bob looks and acts the same way.

Something similar can be said of one’s sense perception of the Eucharist. One might judge that it is bread that one is looking at, touching, tasting, etc., even though it is not bread at all, but the Body of Christ. But to say that one’s senses are deceiving one in this situation is to speak loosely. As in the case of Jim and Bob, strictly speaking your senses are not really deceiving you at all. They told you that the accidents of bread were present, and they really were present. (Aquinas thinks so. Why? Precisely because “it is evident to sense” that they are.)

The trouble is that you drew the wrong conclusion from this fact, insofar as you assumed that the presence of the accidents entails that the substance of bread must be present as well. That is to say, you failed to consider that the accidents might still be present even if the substance is not. As in the case of Jim and Bob, what is going on here is not that what sense perception tells you should be “trumped” by something else. It is, in both cases, something far more mundane—the senses are accurate as far as they go, but haven’t given you the whole story, and since you failed to realize this you drew a mistaken conclusion. This happens all the time, and hardly only when non-Catholics come to Mass.

“But I don’t buy the metaphysics and theology underlying the doctrine of transubstantiation!” you exclaim. Fine, but that is irrelevant to the point at issue, which is that there is nothing in the doctrine per se, nor in the Church’s claim about her teaching authority, nor in Ignatius' colorful statement of that claim, that entails some bizarre pitting of tradition against sense perception. If one wants to reject the doctrine, or the Church’s claims about her own authority, shouting “You claim that tradition trumps sense perception!” is not a good reason to do so.

Dale offers a further consideration against the Catholic position, as expressed by Ignatius. He says: “Suppose, contrary to fact, that Mother Church had long, strongly asserted that uneaten, consecrated wafers never rot. Then, you’re cleaning up the church, and find a wafer that you remember the priest dropping during Mass some months ago. It is rotten—covered with bread mold. You can feel, smell, and see the rot. Surely, you can (and will) reasonably believe that the wafer is rotten.”

Apparently Dale thinks this hypothetical scenario poses a problem for the Catholic view of the Church’s teaching authority. But it’s hard to see how. Consider another hypothetical scenario: Suppose, contrary to fact, that the Bible had asserted that all Volkswagens are poached eggs. Then, you’re cleaning your Volkswagen one day, and you happen to notice that it is not a poached egg. You can feel, smell, and see that the Volkswagen has no poached egg-like qualities at all, and many qualities that are incompatible with its being a poached egg. Surely you can (and will) reasonably believe that the Volkswagen is not a poached egg.

Now, having formulated this scenario, would you rush to the computer and write up a blog post entitled “Protestantism: The Bible Trumps Sense Perception”? Would you think you’ve discovered a powerful objection to the authority of the Bible? Presumably not; in any event, I doubt Dale would think you had. For the argument seems to be: “We can make up a story where the Bible asserts something at odds with a veridical sense perception. Therefore the Bible is not in fact authoritative.” And this argument is clearly no good. What matters to assessing the Bible’s authority is what it actually says, not what we can imagine it saying in some weird story we’ve made up. But this argument seems parallel to Dale’s implicit argument against Ignatius' view of the Church’s teaching authority. If the one argument has no force, then, neither does the other.
 
 
Originally posted at Edward Feser's Blog. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Twitrcovers)

Are you smarter than an atheist? I am, at least according to a quiz put out by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life.

The quiz has 32 questions, of which atheists in America got an average of 20.9 questions right. American Jews got 20.5, American Mormons 20.3, American Protestants 16.0, and American Catholics 14.7.

I got all of them, but that’s nothing special since this is the field I work in professionally. I’m expected to know my own field. Give me a comparable quiz on another topic and watch the number plummet. I can say with great confidence that if you gave me a 32-question quiz on sports—something many people would do very well on—I would be lucky to get even a handful of questions right.

However, what are we to make of the numbers regarding the different groups? Pretty dismal for Catholics, right?

Not necessarily; it depends on what you mean.

This is not a case of “Catholics don’t know their own faith but other groups do know theirs.” The quiz is not religion-specific. It’s pan-religious. So the majority of questions on the quiz do not relate to the faith of the person taking the quiz, but to other people’s faiths. And therein lies a significant reason for why the numbers line up as they do.

What do the three high-scoring groups have in common? They are all religious minorities in America. That’s significant because a religious minority has special reason not only to understand its own religion (so as to reinforce its intra-group religious identity) but also to understand the religions of those around it (because of the need to understand how to interact with the majority religion that surrounds it). A person in a religious minority has special reason to understand both the basics of his own faith and the basics of the majority faith. A person in the majority faith has special reason only to understand the latter.

A Jew in Israel or an atheist in China would have less reason to know the basics of Christianity than a Jew or an atheist in America.

When you look at the two mainstream American religious groups—Protestants and Catholics—they score both less than the minorities and quite close to each other (only 1.3 questions separating them, which may well be within the poll’s margin of error).

Then there’s selection bias in who chose to take the poll. Perhaps atheists are more motivated to take a (rather long) 32-question quiz than Catholics. Who knows? This is a perennial problem of surveys.

The questions in the poll are also likely to distort results in other ways, too. I counted at least three questions that were Mormon-specific but only two that were Catholic-specific. Who is that going to advantage?

There were also three questions on what public school teachers are and aren’t allowed to do in America regarding religion. That is a subject that atheists will be far more focused on (and thus likely to get right) than ordinary Christians. (It’s also worth noting that Catholics have their own parallel school system and many do not even use the public schools, giving them less reason to be familiar with the details of what is allowed.)

These last questions also aren’t actually about religion but about American politics regarding religion. Something similar applies to another set of three questions regarding what the majority religion is in particular countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan). Those aren’t questions about religion but about the demographics of other countries. (Hey, everybody! Quick! What’s the majority religion in Gambia? It sure tells you a lot about religion if you happen to know that the answer is Islam, doesn’t it? You’re much more informed about religion if you know that.)

So...it’s not the most informative quiz in terms of religious knowledge. Nor is the news for Catholics as bad as the raw numbers suggest. The quiz simply isn’t a test of how much Catholics know about their own faith.

That’s not to say that Catholic religious education hasn’t been a disaster in the last generation. It has been. It’s not exclusively the fault of the clerical class. Parents in many families did not do their part to see to their children receiving a proper religious education. But when many elements of the clerical class have been actively and deliberately subverting the teaching of Catholic doctrine, it’s going to contribute to the poor state of religious knowledge among Catholics today.

One bit of sort-of-encouraging news from the Pew survey was that 55% of Catholics were able to correctly identify their Church’s teaching regarding the status of bread and wine in the Eucharist. That’s not nearly what it should be, but it’s at least better than the Gallup poll a number of years ago that started the false rumor that it was far less.

This quiz isn’t the greatest, but quizzes are fun, so have at it:
 

Take the quiz: Are you smarter than an atheist?

 
Originally posted at JimmyAkin.com. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Laugh Spin)

What Now?

If you like the information I've presented here, you should join my Secret Information Club.

If you're not familiar with it, the Secret Information Club is a free service that I operate by email.

I send out information on a variety of fascinating topics connected with the Catholic faith.

In fact, the very first thing you’ll get if you sign up is information about what Pope Benedict said about the book of Revelation.

He has a lot of interesting things to say!

If you’d like to find out what they are, just sign up at www.SecretInfoClub.com or use this handy sign-up form:

Just email me at jimmy@secretinfoclub.com if you have any difficulty.

In the meantime, what do you think?

Maybe you're an atheist who has been reading and commenting here for a while. Or perhaps this is your first visit to Strange Notions. Whatever the case, the question remains: what should you do if Catholicism begins making sense? Leah Libresco faced that question head on in June 2012 when, after months of wrestling with her lifelong atheism, she decided to enter the Catholic Church. In this article, Leah offers advice for those in the same boat today:
 

So you think you might be a Catholic?

Maybe you’re a former atheist who plans to convert to Catholicism, or maybe you’re still an atheist but are a little uncomfortable with how plausible Catholicism seems as an alternative hypothesis. Either way, you want to spend a little time exploring Catholicism and figuring out how and whether to convert. This article is for you.
 

But I don’t know what to decide!

Luckily, you don’t have to decide. Catholicism is either true or not, before and after you change your mind. Gravity doesn’t fluctuate between true and false depending on your beliefs, and neither does the Church. So your job isn’t so much about deciding as it is learning about and recognizing the world you already live in.

Recognition does carry certain responsibilities. If you try to ignore gravity, you’ll quickly find yourself bruised or worse. If Catholicism seems to be true, but you choose to ignore it, you deny yourself opportunities for healing and strength in the face of Man’s broken nature. So, if you think Catholicism might be true, due diligence calls for at least some further investigation.
 

Ok, what then? How do I investigate?

Sites like Strange Notions will certainly help, but you may also want to join a Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) class. Contact a nearby parish and ask to be connected with the RCIA teacher (the priest or office staff should be able to help.) If you’re looking on the parish website, you probably want to email the Director of Religious Education (DRE). RCIA classes are meant to help you understand Catholicism, so you can figure out whether you accept it. When you say ‘Amen,’ we want to make sure you know exactly what you’re getting into, and are consenting with a willing and joyful heart. RCIA classes cover basic Catholic theology and help you get a handle on how your new faith is lived.
 

But what if I’m not sure?

Enrolling in RCIA classes isn’t a promise to convert. The first time I attended RCIA classes, I didn’t plan to convert; I just wanted to learn about Catholicism directly from the Catholic Church. And I was still unconvinced by the time Advent rolled around. The other students in the class were making a public declaration of their intention to convert, so I dropped out of the class. The next year, after a bit more reading, arguing, and thinking, I enrolled again, this time meaning to stay to the end.
 

What should I tell my parents/friends/coworkers/cat?

It’s fine to take a little time before discussing your thoughts with friends and family. You’ll want to speak to them eventually, but you’re allowed a little time to come to peace with your decision before you wade into fights or discussions. Remember, there’s a lot of philosophical diversity among atheists, so the points that were convincing to you may not be compelling to someone who starts with very different assumptions. I find it helpful to approach stressful discussion not as debates, but as explanations. At the end of the conversation, I want my friend to understand what my reasoning was even if she may still disagree with.
 

But what if a friend brings up a question I don’t know the answer to?

It’s alright not to have answers to every question you get asked. If your friend says something like, “But isn’t the translation of the third word in the second Epistle contested?” It’s fine to say, “I don’t know. But that word isn’t really what my conversion hinged on. So I might be curious about looking it up, but I don’t know the answer now, and that’s not what changed my mind.” It can also be helpful, for you and your friend, to table a disagreement until you speak to an expert or consult a reference. If you weren’t already an expert in Church history or other specialized topics, you should expect to encounter a lot of questions you don’t know the answers to offhand. Your friend’s questions may help spur your interest, but you shouldn’t treat them as a high-stakes pop quiz.
 

What if my strained interactions are with the Catholics I’m newly meeting, not the atheists I already knew?

The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints, but that saying is a lot more comforting when we’re thinking about how we’ll be welcomed and healed, instead of about who we’re likely to encounter in the waiting room. The Church is small-c catholic—it’s for everyone—so you’re at least as likely to run into some people who rub you the wrong way as you are at a dinner party.

The Church is different, not because it promised that everyone you meet will be well suited to you or kind, but because it informs you that you have a familial relationship to all these strange, abrasive people, and they to you. Catholics across the world are brothers and sisters in Christ, and we sometimes struggle to live together as a family, but we always desire it.

When you enter the Church, you may find it easier to receive patience or to know how to love your less-than-neighborly neighbor when you can ask Christ for grace and light through the sacraments. For now, ask for help in prayer, and ask other people or priests for help navigating a difficult relationship.
 

What will happen after I convert?

I would say that the terrifying and wonderful thing is that you’re in direct, personal contact with the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Every moment of wonder you’ve experienced as the resolution chord booms in a symphony, every moment of humble awe as a stranger or friend went out of their way to show you love (or every moment of surprise as you discovered the depths of love you were capable of giving), and every moment you felt the sudden relief of pieces falling into place (whether doing a puzzle, writing a math proof, or reaching the denouement of a mystery novel) were all shadows and images that were trying to point you toward God, the Person they resembled.

Think of what you would do if you were trying to teach someone a new language. First you’d point to objects and declare the nouns that corresponded. You might be able to act out verbs. And, after a while, your student might begin to pick up grammar by trial and error.

God shares himself with us through these glimpses of the transcendent. He meets us where we are, and tutors us in the language we speak. But, as you cleave to Him and His Church, you begin to have the opportunity to speak back and learn what was always meant to be your natural language.