What's the Point?

“How many ways are there to God?”—“As many as there are people.” —Joseph Ratzinger Salt of the Earth

I've been struggling with how to describe what I'm trying to do with How Can You Still Be Catholic? I'm coming to the conclusion that it's half-right to call it a book of apologetics and evangelization. Certainly I would be glad if people found it a really effective defense of the faith, and certainly I'd be glad if people converted as a result of reading it.

But the more I look it over in each round of proofing, corrections, and editing, the more I'm coming to the conclusion that what I'm really after is simply strengthening the faith of Catholics and making the faith a little more comprehensible to non-Catholics. After all, a great many people have no idea what Catholicism really is, or what the history of the Church truly has been. So in many ways, the book is simply an invitation to understanding, offering the curious and the open-minded a way to see their questions answered, to discover the reasons why some decently intelligent people remain Catholic in an age in which that seems like such a strange and unlikely choice.

After all, don't we know better? Aren't all the historians clear that the Catholic Church has always been a force for oppression and a menace to the common good? And aren't all the scientists in agreement that the Catholic faith has been disproven conclusively by research and experimentation?

Isn't it all over?

Well, the answer is emphatically no, not yet, not even close. Indeed, we're still getting converts from a variety of backgrounds: female converts, Jewish converts, former atheists, many Protestants, and more. Why are they converting? What could possibly compel them? The answers are as varied as the individuals.

And yet so often the debates and the public commentary seem to assume that there's no reason to still be Catholic, that no one of any intelligence would be Catholic, that the world has moved on in all ways and the Church must eventually depart the stage, disgraced and discredited, that there's not even a fig leaf left here, if only her followers would open their eyes and see ...

We must surely be disgraced, yes, for the Bride cannot expect to be spared the fate of her Bridegroom. But to be disgraced, disreputable, ridiculous in the eyes of the world is a far cry from actually losing grace, from actually being deprived of the divine life in the soul, of the death of the Church and the promises of Christ. The covenants endure, and will do so till the end of the world, and the relationships they've fostered will endure right outside of time. The Holy Spirit abides, and will abide, to the end of the world and into eternity in the heart of the Church, in the hearts of the faithful, the righteous, and the penitent.

Spoiler alert: This universe has a twist in its ending, everyone. Even though we've been told it's coming, we're still going to be surprised.

The God Who Wasn't There...Until He Was

So I've been asked to watch the following films and comment.  Having intermittent internet access, I'm going to post them here to keep track of them:

And then:

So comments to follow.  Feel free to respond to them in the comments below. 

It's worth noting that one of the people involved in it later came to a rather different place. Completely opposite, in fact. Excerpts:

...Despite this evidence I maintained a lingering intellectual attachment to atheism. In late 2004 I organized a blog interview with the bestselling atheist author Sam Harris (The End of Faith). Assisting in the questioning was filmmaker Brian Flemming. This association led both me and Harris to appear the next year in Flemming's anti-Christian documentary, The God Who Wasn't There.

I attended the documentary's New York premiere. At the end of a subsequent summertime showing in the city, however, I found my atheistic enthusiasm waning. The appearance of my pseudonym in the credits inspired less pride than I had expected. As the lights turned on, I felt alienated from the audience and its contemptuous, antireligious laughter.

I briefly considered joining a small group that had formed to discuss the film over dinner. In fact I followed them for several blocks while debating whether to invite myself. But halfway across a darkened midtown street, I walked away...

In time I found it impossible to believe that the universe was created out of nothing. There was order, direction, and love. Those things all pointed to some larger, unfathomable consciousness. I realized I could not believe that human hearts and minds came into being randomly.

My eyes were also opened to the core truth of Christianity. Whereas I had formerly concurred with Nietzsche's appraisal of the faith as a "slave's philosophy," a cruel celebration of senseless suffering, I saw that his experiences had brought even him to appreciate the nobility of sacrifices made for the sake of life...

It's worth noting that the man isn't precise in his writing--he says, "In time I found it impossible to believe that the universe was created out of nothing." Yet that's the Christian belief. I think what he meant was "In time I found it impossible to believe that the universe came into being out of nothing without some creating agent, some independent being--without God."

For more on the evidence for the existence of Jesus and of God:

• Why Believe God Exists? Why Believe Jesus Exists?
• Discrepancies in the Gospels
• Further Evidence for God the Father
• God, Miracles, and Belief
• John Wright's Conversion: The First Post 
• "...making sacred wounds blossom..."
• A Good God is Everywhere — And Provides for Everything with Love
• The Dangers of Giving the Catholic Church a Fair Hearing
  

The Dangers of Giving the Catholic Church a Fair Hearing

A former atheist, now a Catholic, bears witness. Excerpts:

...As a teenager, I realised that I needed to read beyond my staple polemicists, as well as start researching the ideas of the most egregious enemies of reason, such as Catholics, to properly defend my world view. It was here, ironically, that the problems began.

I started by reading Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address, aware that it had generated controversy at the time and was some sort of attempt –futile, of course – to reconcile faith and reason. I also read the shortest book of his I could find, On Conscience. I expected – and wanted – to find bigotry and illogicality that would vindicate my atheism. Instead, I was presented with a God who was the Logos: not a supernatural dictator crushing human reason, but the self-expressing standard of goodness and objective truth towards which our reason is oriented, and in which it is fulfilled, an entity that does not robotically control our morality, but is rather the source of our capacity for moral perception, a perception that requires development and formation through the conscientious exercise of free will.

It was a far more subtle, humane and, yes, credible perception of faith than I had expected. It didn’t lead to any dramatic spiritual epiphany, but did spur me to look further into Catholicism, and to re-examine some of the problems I had with atheism with a more critical eye.

First, morality. Non-theistic morality, to my mind, tended towards two equally problematic camps: either it was subjective to the point of meaninglessness or, when followed logically, entailed intuitively repulsive outcomes, such as Sam Harris’s stance on torture. But the most appealing theories which could circumvent these problems, like virtue ethics, often did so by presupposing the existence of God. Before, with my caricatured understanding of theism, I’d considered that nonsensical. Now, with the more detailed understanding I was starting to develop, I wasn’t so sure.

Next, metaphysics. I soon realised that relying on the New Atheists for my counter-arguments to the existence of God had been a mistake: Dawkins, for instance, gives a disingenuously cursory treatment of St Thomas Aquinas in The God Delusion, engaging only with the summary of Aquinas’s proofs in the Five Ways – and misunderstanding those summarised proofs to boot. Acquainting myself fully with Thomistic-Aristotelian ideas, I found them to be a valid explanation of the natural world, and one on which atheist philosophers had failed to make a coherent assault.

What I still did not understand was how a theology that operated in harmony with human reason could simultaneously be, in Benedict XVI’s words, “a theology grounded in biblical faith”. I’d always assumed that sola scriptura (“scripture alone”), with its evident shortcomings and fallacies, was how all consistent, believing Christians read the Bible. So I was surprised to discover that this view could be refuted just as robustly from a Catholic standpoint – reading the Bible through the Church and its history, in light of Tradition – as from an atheist one.

I looked for absurdities and inconsistencies in the Catholic faith that would derail my thoughts from the unnerving conclusion I was heading towards, but the infuriating thing about Catholicism is its coherency: once you accept the basic conceptual structure, things fall into place with terrifying speed. “The Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole,” wrote Edith Stein in The Science of the Cross: “If we become immersed in one, we are led to all the others.” The beauty and authenticity of even the most ostensibly difficult parts of Catholicism, such as the sexual ethics, became clear once they were viewed not as a decontextualised list of prohibitions, but as essential components in the intricate body of the Church’s teaching...

Why, yes, the Body of Christ is clothed in a seamless garment, and not one of his bones will be broken.

 It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment a man ceases to pull against it he feels a tug towards it. The moment he ceases to shout it down he begins to listen to it with pleasure. The moment he tries to be fair to it he begins to be fond of it.--G. K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion

Pope Francis, Atheists, and Redemption

So here's the Huffington Post headline for a piece on the Pope: Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics

Huffington Post's headline is incredibly misleading. Here's what the Pope said:

...Wednesday’s Gospel speaks to us about the disciples who prevented a person from outside their group from doing good. “They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do good.” And Jesus corrects them: “Do not hinder him, he says, let him do good.” The disciples, Pope Francis explains, “were a little intolerant,” closed off by the idea of ​​possessing the truth, convinced that “those who do not have the truth, cannot do good.” “This was wrong . . . Jesus broadens the horizon.” Pope Francis said, “The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation”:

"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. Instead, this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

“Instead,” the Pope continued, “the Lord has created us in His image and likeness, and has given us this commandment in the depths of our heart: do good and do not do evil”:

"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

“Doing good” the Pope explained, is not a matter of faith: “It is a duty, it is an identity card that our Father has given to all of us, because He has made us in His image and likeness. And He does good, always...”

Read the whole thing. Essentially--God's law is written on all of our hearts because we are all made in the image and likeness of God. We are all capable, then, of knowing and doing the good. Christ comes to redeem all of humanity. Though right now some humans believe and others do not, we can love each other as brothers and sisters by all trying to do good and come to encounter each other in our common humanity. This is the first step towards reunion and peace.

Or look at C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength for an example of an atheist doing good (MacPhee) and so being on the side of the angels.

For more, see:

• Yes, Pope Francis said: All are ‘redeemed!’ Is that news?
• Friends Don’t Let HuffPo Writers Do Theology

God, Miracles, and Belief

The logical positivists show up in Mark Shea's comboxes:

...You cannot prove or demonstrate the existence of a thing by slipping it in through a philosophical back-door, because philosophy is only a self-referential logic game. You need observation...

Plenty of other commentators respond with philosophical reason, but we can answer the second part of the challenge as well as refuting the premises of the first.  You want observation? We've had observation. Will it prove anything to you? Not necessarily. Why? Because they are not your personal observations; because it is possible to doubt anything one is presented with, even an appearance of God himself right in front of you; because the inquiry must be an honest one, made with an open mind, before one can permit oneself to see what's right in front of them. But if you truly want to know when God or his supernatural agents have been observed, here--I give you a small smackeral:

John Wright's Conversion
The Apparitions at Fatima
The Apparitions at Kibeho
Conversion of Roy Schoeman
Conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne
Apparitions to St. Faustina
The Christian mystical tradition
Lourdes

And there's lots more where that came from. But again, as C. S. Lewis portrayed with the dwarves of the Last Battle in Narnia, people could be in paradise and refuse to accept the evidence of the world around them, of God at their back and imperishable heaven at their feet.  John Wright summed it up best:

...You might wonder why, if God can convince atheists to worship Him merely by dropping by for a visit, He does not do it more often. The reason is that it does not help, not at all, not a bit. When I suffer doubts, when my faith gets weak, my faith in my memory gets weak too. Faith and faithlessness have NOTHING TO DO with evidence presented to reason or senses. It has to do with a humble will and an upright heart. If God presented evidence to skeptics, all that would happen is that skeptics would doubt their evidence. If God gave a logical argument to prove His own existence, all that would happen is that skeptics would doubt the power of logic to prove anything.

Skepticism pretends it is all about open-mindedness and evidence. Not so. Skepticism is about suspicion and pride and self-will. It is about pretending you are smarter than people who, if you only knew, are actually wiser than you and your sneering questions and foolish word-tricks. The only place we ever see a humble skeptic is in the physical sciences, because scientists are willing to let their conclusions be ruled on by nature...

And finally, there's the argument laid out throughout Scripture (alongside, of course, all those accounts of people observing God):

For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them.  Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse...--Romans 1:19-20

The world exists--blessed be the One at the back of all things! For more, see New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution and a Rational Faith.

"A Darwinian Society Would be a Fascist State"

Interesting admission. Excerpts:

In an interview with an Austrian daily paper, Richard Dawkins said, "No decent person wants to live in a society which works according to Darwinian laws...a Darwinian society would be a fascist state...." (Die Presse, July 30, 2005, p. viii.)

The Viennese economist Ewald Walterskirchen points out the close relationship between neo-Darwinism and economic neo-liberalism:

Both theories start from the belief that only random changes or adaptations determine the process of development, by way of selection, that is, of competition. The United States economist Paul Krugman is quite right when he writes that a textbook on neo-classical micro-economics reads like an introduction to microbiology.

in economics, the close relationship to biology is seen especially in the writings of Hayek, who is reckoned to be one of the fathers of neo-liberalism. Friedrich von Hayek, a member of a family of biologists, talks explicitly about a "sifting" by the market. Hayek holds that a high rate of unemployment--like an excess population in the animal world--is economically desirable, so that natural selection can have something to work on. In turn the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), the seat of neo-liberalism, interprets the economic crisis in Europe simply as a lack of ability to adapt to shocks--just as neo-Darwinians interpret the dying out of animal species.

The conclusions drawn from these reflections in terms of economic policy are quite clear: economic policy only needs to create the right overall framework and conditions for the selective mechanisms of the market to operate effectively. Decoded, this amounts to saying that we have to get rid of the European social model.(Der Standard, July 16/17, 2005)

..--Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Chance or Purpose?: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007), 170-171

Schoenborn's whole book is fascinating, well worth a read. He cuts between the poles of neo-Darwinian atheism and creationism/Intelligent Design theory to lay out a higher synthesis of evolution and creation, drawing especially from Thomism and the notion of continuing creation in ways I'm just beginning to comprehend. Very well done.

Penn Jillette, Defender of the Faith

Wow.

On When You're Actually, You Know, Suffering

Jennifer Fulwiler offers hope to modern mothers (and the rest of us.)  Excerpts:

...December was a hard month. I couldn’t seem to stay on top of anything, and my inability to deal with life seemed to get worse by the week. Three days before Christmas I cleared off an entire evening to wrap presents, and quickly became so angry and overwhelmed that I went to bed in disgust instead. I felt like I barely survived the chaos of Christmas day, and in the week before New Year’s Eve I hardly lifted a finger around the house. I was unmotivated to do anything. I began backing out of social events, and felt exhausted by even the simplest tasks around the house.

I was aware of my abysmal state, and knew what the problem was: I’m lazy. And kind of a whiner. Not to mention not being fully dedicated to my vocation, and unwilling to carry my (small) crosses. Christ asks a few simple things of me, and even gives me this lavish, first-world life surrounded by luxuries, and I let a little pregnancy fatigue keep me from getting the job done! If only I were more open to God’s grace, I’d be able to unload the dishwasher without feeling like it was such a big deal.

I’m ungrateful.

I’m spoiled.

I’m lazy.

These are the thoughts that were going through my head for the better part of a month. And so when the doctor at the Emergency Room sat me down and told me that my lungs were full of blood clots, some of them large, and that he was astounded that I’d been able to function at all, I almost cried with relief. To be completely honest, I was more relieved than I was scared. I know the facts about pulmonary embolisms and know how dangerous they are. Later, I did experience worry and fear. But first, relief.

There is truth to the accusations that I’m ungrateful, spoiled, and lazy. No false humility here — I really do posses all those attributes to some degree or another. But it was simply not true to say that those faults alone were the cause of my suffering. I was struggling against a terribly difficult physical condition, and my body was running in the red zone for all of my waking hours. In those weeks when I was unaware of the reality of my situation, I worked under the incorrect assumption that my circumstances were normal, and that therefore the problems must come down to spiritual and mental character defects on my part. Not surprisingly, this caused me to be in a state of constant inner turmoil. In fact, it was reminiscent of the buried angst that simmered silently within me when I was an atheist: whenever you live under false assumptions about reality, you will live in anguish. It may be buried and only pop up occasionally, or it may burst to the surface in explosions of acute despair, but whenever you try to jam a square peg of your perception of reality into the round hole of actual reality, there will always be friction.

And you know why I bring this up? Because I think I’m not the only one who could benefit from an outlook-shattering diagnosis.

Once I felt like I had permission to admit that one area of my life was legitimately hard, I began to look at other areas as well. And in the process I’ve been reminded of something I’d known for a while, but had slowly forgotten: that 21st-century motherhood is really hard, whether or not you have clots in your lungs...

Lawrence O'Donnell, Scriptural Illiteracy, and Hubris

Lawrence O'Donnell is not an impressive Biblical exegete. At. All.  Excerpts:

...The Presidential Inaugural Committee said that “whoever delivers the benediction rejects the same parts of the Bible that President Obama rejects, and most Democrats reject, even though every word of the Bible is the word of God.”

All presidents who undergo their inaugurations should, in theory, “accept all of the teachings of the Bible” as they place their hand on the book. But O’Donnell said that because “there are no literal followers of the world of God as presented in the Bible left on Earth,” reciting the oath of office upon the placement of their right hand on the book makes the pledge “one of our most absurdist traditions in the government that invented the separation of church and state.”...

When will atheists and the swath of absolute literalists begin to actually get that the Bible, in some places, offers an authoritative interpretation of itself? See, for example, Acts 15 and Ezekiel 20:11-26. Further, when will they get that the Bible must be read both as a unitary book (the Word of God) and as a library of books by different human authors in different genres with different intended audiences using different standards for what to include? Of course a parable isn't going to make sense if held to the standards of a front page news clipping. Proverbs isn't the same thing as Chronicles isn't the same thing as Psalms isn't the same thing as Genesis isn't the same thing as Isaiah isn't the same thing as the Gospels. Folks! Use your heads!

“...This time, as it was last time for the first time in history, the book will be held by a First Lady who is a descendent of slaves. But the holy book she will be holding does not contain one word of God condemning slavery. Not one word. But that same book, which spends hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages condemning all sorts of things and couldn’t find one sentence to condemn slavery, does indeed find the space to repeatedly condemn gay people, as the now banished Louie Giglio said it does. And as the First Lady is holding that book for the President, sitting someone near them will be a pastor who the Inauguration Committee will make sure is much more adept at hiding what that book actually says than Louie Giglio was...”

Not one word? Anywhere? Tell that to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the many Christian abolitionists. Tell that to William Wilberforce and John Newton. Tell that to the Christians leading the modern anti-slavery movement.  I think you'll surprise them greatly.  Ironically enough, the event featured in that CNN article was crafted in part by Louie Giglio, whom O'Donnell is laying into.

But let's see if there's anything, anywhere in those hundreds of pages of the Bible, that we might consider a slavery-condemning verse.

For through faith you are all children of God in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendant, heirs according to the promise.--Galatians 3:26-29

And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’--Matthew 25:40

Just for starters.  For more, see The Popes and Slavery, I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, Special 75th Anniversary Edition (Martin Luther King, Jr., born January 15, 1929), and For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery.

Why Believe God Exists? Why Believe Jesus Exists?

"Step into my classroom," said the (Fr.) Spitzer to the skeptic.  Seriously--the wiki takes a bit of work to navigate, but having studied under Spitzer...guaranteed awesomeness and extensive intellectual depth.  To read some responses to his thoughts, see this.

Thoughts on Conversion

from Mark Shea on the occasion of the baptism of Leah Libresco.  Excerpts:

...It’s all still true. All still beautiful. All still absurdly undeserved. All still an amazing bolt from the blue that I was born for, made for, looking for all my life–and never saw coming till he stood there in front of me and said, “How about it, pal. I’m your heart’s desire. You want to come with me?” The strangest thing in the world is the sensation of being absolutely free as you choose to do something that feels like everything in your life–everything in history, everything in Creation–has been leading up to. Theologians puzzle out free will vs. predestination. I puzzle it sometimes. But the one moment I really came closest to feeling like the veil was removed and I was staring predestination in the face was the one moment I also felt like I was making the freest choice I ever made. Who would say no to Him? Who would find the love of his life, whom he lost in childhood and thought never to see again, suddenly appearing at his door–and then send her away because a job, or a video game, or a meal, or popularity with the local barflies mattered more? Pearl of great price indeed...

Materialism Disproved

Because it cannot handle the existence of meaning. Excerpts:

...Greene writes that "a staunch reductionist would claim that...in principle absolutely everything, from the big bang to daydreams, can be described in terms of underlying microscopic physical processes involving the fundamental constituents of matter." Good stuff. I'm with him so far. But here's where he loses me: "If you understand everything about the ingredients, the reductionist argues, you understand everything."

If you understand the ingredients, you understand everything. I think this is a perfect summary of where modern atheism goes off the rails. A computer program could read and analyze the words of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, and even answer questions about its content. It could "understand" all the ingredients perfectly. But does that mean that it has grasped the essence of Sonnet 18? Scientists could attach a neuroimaging device to the head of a man who is reunited with the woman he loves after a long absence. The scientists could describe in great detail every part of his brain that was in use when she first walked in the room, and explain precisely how all the neurons were firing as he gazed at her. Would that data alone fully capture the moment?...

Materialism is Wrong

because meaning really exists.

New Atheist Appropriations of Religion

Interesting.  I agree with the article's criticism of the attempt.  Excerpts:

Celebrated philosopher and author Alain de Botton expects to upset a great number of religious people and atheists alike with his proposal that: “it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless to find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling...”