I remember the first time I read St. Thomas Aquinas’ proofs of God’s existence. Although I was already a believer and although I found them a wonderful adventure in Catholic theology, I thought they were circular. Sure, I thought, if you believe in God and you expect the proofs to prove the existence of God, then the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause, the Argument from Contingency, the Argument from Degree, and the Argument from Design all convincingly follow from postulates to conclusion. But if you are not a believer, they might sound like constructs to support a predetermined conclusion.

The conclusion: “ . . . and this we call God.”

Well of course. Were the proofs supposed to surprisingly disprove God?

I have continued to study these proofs as well as the other arguments and writings of St. Aquinas. I still find them intellectually satisfying exercises that help me understand my faith. What I am about to say has nothing to do with the arguments, but with how they might be perceived:

To a non-believer, I can totally see how they seem like the reasoning begins with the conclusion in sight and is therefore contrived.

A circular argument is logically valid if the premises are true, so again, I am not referring to the integrity of the proofs but rather to their ability to persuade a non-believer. I want to be clear about that.

Maybe I am projecting my personal struggles. In that case, suffice it to say those arguments would have fallen flat on my faithless ears when I was not ready to believe. The language of St. Thomas, or any other densely theological discourse, would have sounded as strange to me as an unbeliever as a pretend language I had no desire to grasp. Even now, I feel a twinge of guilt in admitting that I remain somewhat diffident about these grand arguments as evangelization tools, especially when I see how enthusiastic other Catholics are about using them. But when I read comments from atheists who call these arguments circular, I feel a twinge of guilt too. I want to interject into the discussion and say, “Hey, Christian apologist, the atheist has a point. They can seem circular.”

Undoubtedly there are believers and converts who were compelled to faith by the force of persuasion in these arguments and proofs, and I do not discredit any of those pathways to faith. But if a non-believer tells an evangelizing believer that the arguments for the proofs of God’s existence sound circular, the point ought to be graciously conceded (or at least respectfully engaged). It is unreasonable to expect a non-believer to see arguments and proofs through a believer’s eyes, and I think such a dismissal on the non-believer’s part is a clue to move on rather than continue arguing.

I will always relate to the materialist because I remain an incurable reductionist. I cannot help it. I was trained to see the world as a meticulous sort of materialist. Chemistry taught me to see all matter as a symphony of interacting atoms and molecules carrying out their deterministically orchestrated routine. And let me tell you, it is magnificent! If you find that reading essays and friending friends on computer screens has enriched your life, you can thank materialism for the materials to do so. Same goes for liking your jeans and shirt.

My reductionism has consequences though. I struggle not to think of the human person as a soul driving the body-machine and meat-brain because I think of the body and brain as animated matter, but I cannot put my finger on what “animate” actually means since it is a concept that cannot be measured. I therefore relegate it to some metaphysical arena I am untrained to deal with and call it “life.” But that takes me no farther in comprehension, even as I sit on the porch with my coffee, watching my organic-inorganic multicomposite assemblies (aka my children) run laughing across the yard. I know the body and soul are united in the person. I just do not have the mental files to sort it out yet, but I am trying because this is the very foundation of our human dignity.

I also struggle with what to make of dogs. For all we know, they are automata governed by biological instinct, but I cannot reconcile such machinistic dog-existence with the way our hound, Rufus, held his head on his last day. Suffering and deteriorated from bone cancer though he was, that noble dog lay sprawled and waiting to die until the whole family was home. He took his last breath with his head still up ten minutes after my husband got home from work, and then he laid his head down and died. He never once whimpered. Our family witnessed superhuman loyalty in Rufus.

I also struggle to get my head around the afterlife. Every day is a march reeling toward the inescapable end of our life on earth, and I cannot even begin to imagine what it is like to die. Nothing in chemistry can confirm whether the soul actually does live on. I believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting completely in faith, “the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” My profession is my proof. When I profess what I believe, I am no longer afraid of death, even though I am utterly perplexed by the idea of a glorified body.

I also struggle with miracles. I accept they happen, but nevertheless I still think of them in material terms because whatever happens in the material world is still material, carrying out some orchestrated routine, even if it is the Hand of God overriding the whole created order for the sake of communicating His love to searching souls. This is a quibble, but St. Thomas thought that angels can do something which is outside the order of corporeal nature, yet they cannot do anything outside the whole created order. So if angels have a comprehension of matter beyond human comprehension (which means scientists ought to befriend them), how do we humans know whether something that appears to be a miracle is indeed a miracle and not an angel doing something outside the order of corporeal nature and beyond human comprehension? I have witnessed what might be considered miracles, but I have no idea how to talk about these experiences, which probably explains why I get hung up on quibbles.

And I struggle with how to evangelize. I did not convert because people preached to me. I thought to seek out the Catholic Church because the Catholics I had known during the span of my life all had something solid I admired. I also do not like debates as tools for evangelization because if any of the atheists I have encountered online were actually sitting in my kitchen, I would not want to talk about evidence and proofs. I would want to get to know them as people, cook something good for us to eat together, and if appropriate, pour us some of that heavenly substance that geniuses (or perhaps angels) produce from vineyards.

Because of my reductionist outlook rather than in spite of it, I do not think the hard logic of theological proofs of God could have sparked the flame of conversion in my heart. Perhaps that is why they do not resonate with me. People sometimes assume that a scientist convert must have been swayed by the logic, but honestly, I had enough logic. I needed something more. I needed faith, hope, and love. My metanoia had to be a desire to lead a different life, a holier life for the sake of my loved ones, a willingness to peer beyond the material world for the sake of understanding something bigger, an assent to the truths of faith and the fullness of the Divine Revelation, which I discovered are guarded by the Catholic Church. That discovery was when I truly appreciated the proofs of God's existence because they greatly aided me in grasping my faith, but my conversion was not a matter of sifting through logic puzzle pieces until I saw the picture. It was a reaching up to a light. I needed Christ.

It was a choice. I remember making the choice to accept that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, a most circular argument in my head, something like this: “I believe. This is what I believe. This is why I believe. And this I call the Body and Blood of Christ.”

Sure, at times I wondered if I was deluding myself. When I prayed the long and memorized prayers, I knew I was training my brain. I struggled, but only until I realized something about faith, something I knew as a child but had never realized.

When I learned chemistry, I had faith in the chemists and physicists who came before me and whose work filled my text books. I had faith in my instructors. I had faith in the data listed in the manuals. I had faith in the peer-reviewed journals I absorbed to remain current in my field and faith in the reviewers who granted me publication. I knew I could not do every experiment or procedure myself to prove to myself everything I read or learned. I accepted authority of my own volition. I learned what was to be taught. I memorized what was to be memorized. I repeated certain facts until I appropriated them. And my knowledge of chemistry became part of who I am, through circular logic.

Although I have never seen an electron, I believe they exist. I accepted that they exist before I learned what they are and what they do. My rationale went something like this: “I believe. This is what I believe. This is why I believe. And this I call an electron.” Every proof I find convincing is a proof I am willing to believe. Believing that the universe is orchestrated by God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth was probably the most satisfying intellectual assent I have ever made as a scientist. In the light of faith, I finally understood why I love science.

So, to the atheists, I am not really sure what to do except offer a blanket apology to all those I have interacted with in the past. Looking back, I admit that there were periods along my journey where I had the idea that—even though the proofs were not what convinced me—I needed to wield Aquinas to convince you to have faith because I thought that was how to effectively evangelize, and surely it is for some. But I am sorry for treating you the way I would not want to be treated.

I know what it feels like to take the leap of faith, and for me anyway, it was and still is terrifying. I did not know what faith would demand of me, and I still do not know what it will demand of me tomorrow. I had to face up to some horrible things about myself, and I had to make changes unsure of how they would affect me. I consented to becoming the mother of seven children, but the thought of seeing one of my children die fills me with so much dread I sometimes wonder if my life would have been objectively less painful without them, and then I banish that thought because I know it would have been painfully empty too, immeasurably so.

I did not and do not know if I could or can do what faith might demand, which sets me up for failure, which sets me up for fear, which plunges me into anxiety. But my faith continues to grow stronger. Do you want to know why? My faith grows stronger because I agree to accept the grace offered to me, almost as if I were placing my hand on a glass of water handed down by God Himself and drinking it in. (Alas, I need material props to envision grace.) When I drink the grace in, something happens that is like a charge running straight through my blood and neurons straight to my heart and mind, and I am infused with a courage I cannot describe, except to call it the purest, most brilliant lovelight. And it is thrilling.

Life does not get easier with faith. Mine got harder in a lot of ways, but I can soar above anxiety, suffering, and pain because I have a confidence, peace, and joy that lifts me.

Faith comes as a gift only when you are willing to accept it. Faith requires the courage to do something radical—to leap out of the entrapment of circularity. Faith is kind of like flinging yourself into an unknown abyss only to realize you can fly, which yeah, defies all logic.

"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.
(Image credit: The Daily Show)

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.
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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.
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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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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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On Easter 2008, the renowned sci-fi writer John C. Wright entered the Catholic Church after a lifetime of atheism. This is his conversion story:
 
My conversion was in two parts: a natural part and a supernatural part.

Here is the natural part: first, over a period of two years my hatred toward Christianity eroded due to my philosophical inquiries.

Rest assured, I take the logical process of philosophy very seriously, and I am impatient with anyone who is not a rigorous and trained thinker. Reason is the tool men use to determine if their statements about reality are valid: there is no other. Those who do not or cannot reason are little better than slaves, because their lives are controlled by the ideas of other men, ideas they have not examined.

To my surprise and alarm, I found that, step by step, logic drove me to conclusions no modern philosophy shared, but only this ancient and (as I saw it then) corrupt and superstitious foolery called the Church. Each time I followed the argument fearlessly where it lead, it kept leading me, one remorseless rational step at a time, to a position the Church had been maintaining for more than a thousand years. That haunted me.

Second, I began to notice how shallow, either simply optimistic or simply pessimistic, other philosophies and views of life were.

The public conduct of my fellow atheists was so lacking in sobriety and gravity that I began to wonder why, if we atheists had a hammerlock on truth, so much of what we said was pointless or naive. I remember listening to a fellow atheist telling me how wonderful the world would be once religion was swept into the dustbin of history, and I realized the chap knew nothing about history. If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.

I would listen to my fellow atheists, and they would sound as innocent of any notion of what real human life was like as the Man from Mars who has never met human beings or even heard clear rumors of them. Then I would read something written by Christian men of letters, Tolkien, Lewis, or G.K. Chesterton, and see a solid understanding of the joys and woes of human life. They were mature men.

I would look at the rigorous logic of St. Thomas Aquinas, the complexity and thoroughness of his reasoning, and compare that to the scattered and mentally incoherent sentimentality of some poseur like Nietzsche or Sartre. I can tell the difference between a rigorous argument and shrill psychological flatulence. I can see the difference between a dwarf and a giant.

My wife is a Christian and is extraordinary patient, logical, and philosophical. For years I would challenge and condemn her beliefs, battering the structure of her conclusions with every argument, analogy, and evidence I could bring to bear. I am a very argumentative man, and I am as fell and subtle as a serpent in debate. All my arts failed against her. At last I was forced to conclude that, like non-Euclidian geometry, her world-view logically followed from its axioms (although the axioms were radically mystical, and I rejected them with contempt). Her persistence compared favorably to the behavior of my fellow atheists, most of whom cannot utter any argument more mentally alert than a silly ad Hominem attack. Once again, I saw that I was confronting a mature and serious world-view, not merely a tissue of fables and superstitions.

Third, a friend of mine asked me what evidence, if any, would be sufficient to convince me that the supernatural existed. This question stumped me. My philosophy at the time excluded the contemplation of the supernatural axiomatically: by definition (my definition) even the word "super-natural" was a contradiction in terms. Logic then said that, if my conclusions were definitional, they were circular. I was assuming the conclusion of the subject matter in dispute.

Now, my philosophy at the time was as rigorous and exact as 35 years of study could make it (I started philosophy when I was seven). This meant there was no point for reasonable doubt in the foundational structure of my axioms, definitions, and common notions. This meant that, logically, even if God existed, and manifested Himself to me, my philosophy would force me to reject the evidence of my senses, and dismiss any manifestations as a coincidence, hallucination, or dream. Under this hypothetical, my philosophy would force me to an exactly wrong conclusion due to structural errors of assumption.

A philosopher (and I mean a serious and manly philosopher, not a sophomoric boy) does not use philosophy to flinch away from truth or hide from it. A philosophy composed of structural false-to-facts assumptions is insupportable.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads, and has no patience with mere emotion.

But it was impossible, logically impossible, that I should ever believe in such nonsense as to believe in the supernatural. It would be a miracle to get me to believe in miracles.

So I prayed. "Dear God, I know (because I can prove it with the certainty that a geometer can prove opposite angles are equal) that you do not exist. Nonetheless, as a scholar, I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken. So just in case I am mistaken, please reveal yourself to me in some fashion that will prove your case. If you do not answer, I can safely assume that either you do not care whether I believe in you, or that you have no power to produce evidence to persuade me. The former argues you not beneficent, the latter not omnipotent: in either case unworthy of worship. If you do not exist, this prayer is merely words in the air, and I lose nothing but a bit of my dignity. Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation in this matter, John Wright."

I had a heart attack two days later. God obviously has a sense of humor as well as a sense of timing.

Now for the supernatural part.

My wife called someone from her Church, which is a denomination that practices healing through prayer. My wife read a passage from their writings, and the pain vanished. If this was a coincidence, then, by God, I could use more coincidences like that in my life.

Feeling fit, I nonetheless went to the hospital, so find out what had happened to me. The diagnosis was grave, and a quintuple bypass heart surgery was ordered. So I was in the hospital for a few days.

Those were the happiest days of my life. A sense of peace and confidence, a peace that passes all understanding, like a field of energy entered my body. I grew aware of a spiritual dimension of reality of which I had hitherto been unaware. It was like a man born blind suddenly receiving sight.

The Truth to which my lifetime as a philosopher had been devoted turned out to be a living thing. It turned and looked at me. Something from beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality, reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me. This was not a case of defense and prosecution laying out evidence for my reason to pick through: I was altered down to the root of my being.

It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast.

Naturally, I was overjoyed. First, I discovered that the death sentence under which all life suffers no longer applied to me. The governor, so to speak, had phoned. Second, imagine how puffed up with pride you'd be to find out you were the son of Caesar, and all the empire would be yours. How much more, then, to find out you were the child of God?

I was also able to perform, for the first time in my life, the act which I had studied philosophy all my life to perform, which is, to put aside all fear of death. The Roman Stoics, whom I so admire, speak volumes about this philosophical fortitude. But their lessons could not teach me this virtue. The blessing of the Holy Spirit could and did impart it to me, as a gift. So the thing I've been seeking my whole life was now mine.

Then, just to make sure I was flooded with evidence, I received three visions like Scrooge being visited by three ghosts. I was not drugged or semiconscious, I was perfectly alert and in my right wits.

It was not a dream. I have had dreams every night of my life. I know what a dream is. It was not a hallucination. I know someone who suffers from hallucinations, and I know the signs. Those signs were not present here.

Then, just to make even more sure that I was flooded with overwhelming evidence, I had a religious experience. This is separate from the visions, and took place several days after my release from the hospital, when my health was moderately well. I was not taking any pain-killers, by the way, because I found that prayer could banish pain in moments.

During this experience, I became aware of the origin of all thought, the underlying oneness of the universe, the nature of time: the paradox of determinism and free will was resolved for me. I saw and experienced part of the workings of a mind infinitely superior to mine, a mind able to count every atom in the universe, filled with paternal love and jovial good humor. The cosmos created by the thought of this mind was as intricate as a symphony, with themes and reflections repeating themselves forward and backward through time: prophecy is the awareness that a current theme is the foreshadowing of the same theme destined to emerge with greater clarity later. A prophet is one who is in tune, so to speak, with the music of the cosmos.

The illusionary nature of pain, and the logical impossibility of death, were part of the things I was shown.

Now, as far as these experiences go, they are not unique. They are not even unusual. More people have had religious experiences than have seen the far side of the moon. Dogmas disagree, but mystics are strangely (I am tempted to say mystically) in agreement.

The things I was shown have echoes both in pagan and Christian tradition, both Eastern and Western (although, with apologies to my pagan friends, I see that Christianity is the clearest expression of these themes, and also has a logical and ethical character other religions expressions lack).

Further, the world view implied by taking this vision seriously (1) gives supernatural sanction to conclusions only painfully reached by logic (2) supports and justifies a mature rather than simplistic world-view (3) fits in with the majority traditions not merely of the West, but also, in a limited way, with the East.

As a side issue, the solution of various philosophical conundrums, like the problem of the one and the many, mind-body duality, determinism and indeterminism, and so on, is an added benefit. If you are familiar with such things, I follow the panentheist idealism of Bishop Berkeley; and, no, Mr. Johnson does not refute him merely by kicking a stone.

From that time to this, I have had prayers answered and seen miracles: each individually could be explained away as a coincidence by a skeptic, but not taken as a whole. From that time to this, I continue to be aware of the Holy Spirit within me, like feeling a heartbeat. It is a primary impression coming not through the medium of the senses: an intuitive axiom, like the knowledge of one's own self-being.

This, then, is the final answer to your question: it would not be rational for me to doubt something of which I am aware on a primary and fundamental level.

Occam's razor cuts out hallucination or dream as a likely explanation for my experiences. In order to fit these experiences into an atheist framework, I would have to resort to endless ad hoc explanations: this lacks the elegance of geometers and parsimony of philosophers.

I would also have to assume all the great thinkers of history were fools. While I was perfectly content to support this belief back in my atheist days, this is a flattering conceit difficult to maintain seriously.

On a pragmatic level, I am somewhat more useful to my fellow man than before, and certainly more charitable. If it is a daydream, why wake me up? My neighbors will not thank you if I stop believing in the mystical brotherhood of man.

Besides, the atheist non-god is not going to send me to non-hell for my lapse of non-faith if it should turn out that I am mistaken.
 
 
Originally posted at FreeRepublic.com. Used with author's permission.