In this blog post, I prove that God exists and defend my acceptance of Catholicism. The accepted proof-of-God is ontological, while the case for Catholicism stands only on faith. My argument bridges metaontology, the analytic necessity of theism, and the rational permissibility of revealed religion.
I begin with a tripartite taxonomy of metaontological approaches: keeping natural language to account for ordinary discourse, adding to it to explain cognitive limits, and subtracting from it to isolate fundamental scientific realities. Aligning specifically with a deflationary, non-subtractive stance, I argue that taking established linguistic practices and historical traditions at face value logically necessitates the analytic truth of theism; I assert that competent, historically informed definitions of God and existence make the statement “God exists” inherently true, thereby characterizing atheism as a failure of linguistic competence.
Building upon this theistic foundation, I subsequently defend my personal adherence to Roman Catholicism by strictly delineating faith—defined as trust in a living, external authority—from natural reason and empirical history. Ultimately, by framing Catholic dogmas and miracles as theological assertions about the past rather than empirically verifiable historical events subject to modern secular historiography, I construct a worldview where institutional religious truths remain logically insulated from, and thus never in direct contradiction with, the discoveries of natural science.
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| Illustration for this blog post, drawn by Nano Banana. |
This section reviews approaches to metaontology, as background and preamble for the next section, where I explain my oapproach.
Ontology is often introduced as a debate about what there is. But that framing can hide a prior question: what are we doing when we use existential language at all?
If ontology is “the inventory,” metaontology is the method (and sometimes the therapy) that tells us how to read the inventory: whether to take ordinary talk at face value, to revise it, to supplement it, or to treat it as a mere starting point for something else.
Once the metaontological question is put that way, three broad approaches stand out—approaches that differ not primarily in which entities they list, but in how they treat the authority of natural language and its role in inquiry.
1.1. Keeping natural language as it is
The first approach takes ordinary discourse as basically in good standing and aims to account for it, not to correct it. The animating picture is that the job of philosophy is not to redesign the language we already competently use, but to explain how that language works—its logic, its pragmatics, its embedding in life.
A canonical slogan for this attitude is Wittgenstein’s: “All propositions of our everyday language are in fact, just as they are, in perfect logical order.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.5563) Read metaontologically, the thought is that, even if many natural-language sentences cannot be easily regimented into a perspicuous language such as first-order logic, still, the competence underlying everyday talk is not an ontological mess in need of rescue. If we seem to speak easily and systematically about tables, numbers, properties, holes, shadows, reasons, possibly even “sakes” and “behalves” and “dints”, then a metaontological approach of this first kind tries to explain that systematic ease rather than treat it as an embarrassment.
Logical behaviorism, as I understand it, fits here because it interprets the meaning of our discourse in terms of the life-situations in which it is used: linguistic behavior is part of a broader pattern of action, expectation, and social practice. If a natural-language ontological commitment fits into sentences that are interpreted as true within a human form of life, then there is nothing more that could be wanted from an existence claim, and no metaphysician is needed to separate out the truly existent things from the merely linguistic commitments. Minds, emotions, and perceptions exist, but there is nothing more to the words than their role in the sentences in which they are used in actual practice.
Amie Thomasson’s “easy ontology” is an explicit case of the “keep-language” approach. The central idea is deflationary: if a fragment of ordinary language is consistently and intelligibly used, and its existential claims can be settled by uncontroversial conceptual or analytic standards, then we are entitled—in that deflated sense—to say that the relevant entities exist. Numbers, properties, holes, etc., count as existing because they are the values of variables in well-behaved, established linguistic practices. (In a footnote to page 265 of Ontology Made Easy, Thomasson says she isn’t sure “sakes” are used consistently enough in our language, but she admits their existence conditional on that.)
The payoff of this approach is continuity: ontology becomes, to a significant extent, an account of our conceptual scheme and its place in human life. For critics, an approach admitting everything from average persons to fictional detectives to moral properties seems somehow too permissive, as though anything goes; “keep-language” theorists reply, however, that it only seems that way if you are importing a thick metaphysical standard into a domain where the practice itself already determines the relevant standards of application.
1.2. Adding to natural language to explain cognition
A second metaontological approach begins by granting that natural language is an instrument designed primarily for communication, coordination, and action—not necessarily for revealing the full structure of thought or reality. On this picture, ordinary talk may be too thin, too contingent, or too parochial to capture what cognition can represent. The metaontological move is therefore expansionary: we add to natural language (or systematically extend it) to account not merely for what we do say, but for what we can think, conceive, or entertain as possible.
Here the treatment of universals is telling. Ordinary language contains common nouns and predicates, but it may not explicitly mark every conceivable universal. An expansionary approach takes the fact that something can be conceived of as “predicable of many” as itself a reason to treat it as a candidate universal, even if no community in fact speaks as though it exists. The goal is to go beyond existing linguistic habits toward a more powerful representational scheme.
Meinongianism exemplifies this strategy by allowing nonexistent objects to serve as the intentional correlates of thought: we can think about the golden mountain or the round square, so our cognitive architecture seems to range beyond what exists in the ordinary, extensional way. Meinongians treat ontology as including not just what we ordinarily talk about, but anything we can intend or represent.
Platonism is a more familiar, and related, expansionary program. (Ed Zalta, for instance, started out as a Meinongian and became a platonist, all the while keeping more or less the same views on abstract objects.) It suggests that mathematics, modality, or properties are not just useful linguistic posits but reflect a domain of abstracta that can be grasped by reason. Where the “keep-language” approach often treats talk of numbers or properties as a harmless, practice-governed manner of speaking, the “add-language” approach treats such talk as a clue to deeper cognitive and metaphysical structure. Ordinary language may underdescribe that structure, so we extend it with a theoretically motivated ontology.
The attraction here is explanatory ambition: cognition appears to outstrip ordinary description, so we enrich the ontological story accordingly. Expansionists believe other accounts of ontological commitment cannot account for the expressive power of human representations without smuggling the expansionary machinery back in; rival theorists, of course, see this as too permissive or extravagant.
1.3. Removing from natural language to reach what “really” exists
Instead of treating ordinary language as basically in order or as merely incomplete, this third approach treats ordinary language as ontologically indiscriminate. Everyday discourse is full of conveniences, idealizations, and surface grammar that may mislead us about what is fundamental. So we subtract from natural language: we revise, regiment, or replace ordinary existential talk in order to track a thicker, restricted sense of what exists—what is genuinely “in the world” rather than merely in discourse.
Neo-Quinean metaontology is the most popular version of this. On that view, existence questions are to be answered by looking to our best overall scientific theories: to exist is (roughly) to be a value of a bound variable in the regimentation of the theory we have most reason to accept. Ordinary language is not the tribunal; theory choice is. (Famously, for Quine, mathematical objects exist because they are indispensable to the formulation of our best physical theories.) The neo-Quinean can be relaxed about folk ontology yet strict about scientific ontology: everyday talk is a starting point, but ontological commitment is ultimately a matter of what our best theories must quantify over.
Neopositivist, empiricist approaches are subtractive in a different way; instead of caring so much about what our theories quantify over, the neopositivist leans on observation (and verification, or something like it): what exists is whatever is licensed by experience, measurement, or observational warrant. Here too, ordinary language is trimmed back. We may speak about abstract objects, possibilities, or unobservables, but the thick “exists” is reserved for what can be tied to observational justification. (My favorite revival of logical positivism is Minimal Verificationism by Gordian Haas, although it does not address ontological commitment.)
“Hard-road” nominalism, like Hartry Field’s project of rewriting science without abstract objects, is perhaps the most dramatic instance of subtraction. Field aimed to show that abstracta are dispensable, by rewriting the relevant scientific theories so that they no longer quantify over numbers or sets.
Defenders of this approach see it as treating deep questions of existence with a desired level of seriousness that the earlier approaches lack, by no longer letting them be settled by the surface grammar of ordinary language. There is a risk, however, of revisionary overreach: we may end up with an ontology so austere that it fails to respect the success of ordinary and scientific practices. The approach may seem unmotivated, since given that it is clearly not the ordinary sense of existence, it is unclear why restrictionists decide to speak about existence in this way, and what they think they gain by it.
1.4. Apparent exceptions and why they still fit
Two families of views can look like they do not fit this threefold taxonomy, but they can be integrated once we focus more closely on the metaontological stance rather than the ontology.
1.4.1. Neither particulars nor universals are fundamental
States-of-affairs ontologies (as in Armstrong) and trope theories (such as John Bacon’s) appear to reject the basic natural-language division between proper names (particulars) and common names (universals). They instead treat something else—states of affairs, or tropes—as metaphysically basic, and treat particulars and universals as derivative or constructed.
But this does not constitute a fourth metaontological approach; it is a choice of primitives that can be pursued in any of the three stances.
- A stick-to-language version will say: ordinary language talks as if there are particulars and universals, and our job is to interpret that talk in terms of tropes or states of affairs without declaring ordinary discourse mistaken.
- An add-to-language version will argue: ordinary talk is not enough to reveal what cognition or metaphysics demands; we must introduce tropes/states-of-affairs as theoretical posits that better capture what can be thought or conceived.
- A subtract-from-language version will say: the ordinary distinction misleads; once we regiment our best theory properly, we should replace talk of particulars/universals with the more fundamental categories.
The crucial point is that trope theory and states-of-affairs theory do not by themselves answer how ordinary language relates to ontology; they propose a metaphysical base. Their metaontological orientation depends on whether they treat ordinary discourse as authoritative, incomplete, or misleading.
1.4.2. Ted Sider’s structural realism
Ted Sider’s emphasis on “joint-carving” structure and naturalness can also look like a distinct metaontological position. But I believe that it is better understood as not offering a metaontology at all, at least not in the sense of a systematic account of how existential discourse should be interpreted.
The reason is that “joint-carvingness” functions as a label for the desired outcome—carve nature at the joints—without giving a general method for reading, revising, or extending our existential language. If one says, “include all-and-only the joint-carving categories,” then the pressing question is: by what procedure do we determine which categories are joint-carving? If the answer is not given in a principled way—by appeal to linguistic practice, cognitive explanation, theory choice, or observation—then “naturalness” risks becoming an honorific attached to whichever categories one already favors.
If one were to operationalize the notion of “joint-carving”, it could in principle be implemented in any of the three ways (keep, add, subtract). But as a standalone slogan, (which is how it is presented by Ted Sider,) the notion can only function as an ad hoc filter: we decide case by case what is “natural,” and call the sum of our ad-hoc judgments the criterion. Nature may in some sense have “joints” or important fundamental structure, but without a disciplined account of how we are entitled to assert naturalness claims, structural realism is more of a posture than a method.
1.5. Recap
In metaontology, the central divide is not between realists and anti-realists, or between nominalists and Platonists, but between three stances toward natural language and its authority:
- Keep ordinary discourse and explain it.
- Add to ordinary discourse to capture cognition or metaphysical possibility.
- Subtract from ordinary discourse to isolate a thicker sense of what really exists.
Even if your theory’s primitives are such as tropes and states-of-affairs, which have no straightforward connection to natural language, still you must choose how much of natural language and cognition you want to account for in terms of your primitives; and positions that rely on evaluative vocabulary like “joint-carving” without supplying a principled account of how such evaluations are warranted risk failing to be metaontologies at all, functioning instead as an undeclared case-by-case selection procedure.
Fundamentally, a metaontology is an explicit strategy connecting language, thought, theory, and world. Without choosing and defending such a strategy, your ontology is little more than a list backed by taste.
2. Ontology and theism
This section explains my approach to metaontology and ontology. I believe that accepting the existence of God follows from my choice of metaontology, and hence this section is an “ontological argument” for the existence of God, though not in the usual way. I defend why choosing a metaontological approach that accepts theism as a matter of course is the most reasonable thing to do.
I will state my metaontological beliefs and briefly explain why I hold each one; I do not address counterarguments because I do not know of any, and I believe there are none.
Metaontologically, I adopt a non-subtractive approach. This is to say that I reject the approach reviewed in §1.3. I believe that the philosopher has no authority to tell the layman that he is using language wrong. When Democritus allowed that “by convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space”, he distinguished ‘conventional existence’ from ‘real existence’, but he did not attempt the contemporary imposture which amounts to denying the success of ordinary linguistic practice. When your theorizing is over and you have finished writing your list of what things exist, it had better contain every noun in the dictionary, at minimum.
I also adopt an anti-structuralist approach. In the present sense of that term, this means, for one thing, that I reject Ted Sider’s emphasis on structure and naturalness, which I had already criticized in §1.4.2 as not constituting a metaontology at all. More precisely, not only do I reject Sider’s approach to naturalness as ad hoc, but I also do not believe in David Lewis’s or any other approach to naturalness, since I believe all of them are devices for adhockery in ontology. Since I do not believe in joint-carvingness or naturalness, I see no reason to privilege any particular way to use the word “exists” over any other way as long as both ways are defined explicitly and used consistently. Since the approaches reviewed in §1.1 and §1.2 are all careful about this, I am neutral between them.
Hence, I adopt a deflationary approach, which means that there is nothing more to the word “existence” than whatever meaning in which you explicitly define it and use it. Existence does not mean, for instance, anything about being an object of physical theory, or perceivable, or having causal power, or anything like that. You may grant such thick extended meanings to adjectival phrases such as “physical existence”, but not to existence simpliciter.
2.2. Theism should be easy
“God” can be defined in different ways.
Usually, atheist polemicists define it in whatever way is easiest to attack; for instance, the first chapter of Dawkins’s The God Delusion brackets out “Einsteinian religion” and clarifies that he will spend the rest of the book refuting “the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language.” This is because atheist polemicists are not only dishonest, but philistines, caring nothing for the great philosophers of the Western tradition that led up to the world they live in. As Edward Feser said in The Last Superstition:
The irony is that to anyone who actually knows something about the history and theology of the Western religious tradition for which Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens show so much contempt, their books stand out for their manifest ignorance of that tradition and for the breathtaking shallowness of their philosophical analysis of religious matters. Indeed, as we will see, these authors do not even so much as understand what the word “faith” itself has actually meant, historically, within the mainstream of that tradition. One gets the impression that the bulk of their education in Christian theology consisted of reading Elmer Gantry while in college, supplemented with a viewing of Inherit the Wind and a Sunday morning spent channel-surfing televangelists. Nor do they evince the slightest awareness of the historical centrality of ideas deriving from classical philosophy – the tradition of thought deriving from Plato and Aristotle and whose greatest representatives within Christianity are Augustine and Thomas Aquinas – to the content and self-understanding of the mainstream Western religious tradition. This is perhaps not surprising in the case of either Dawkins – a writer of pop science books who evidently wouldn’t know metaphysics from Metamucil – or Vanity Fair boy Hitchens, who probably thinks metaphysics is the sort of thing people like Shirley MacLaine start babbling about when they’ve lost their box office cachet. But such ignorance is simply disgraceful in the case of Dennett and Harris, who are trained philosophers. One would never guess from reading any of the “New Atheists” (not to mention the works of countless other secularist intellectuals) that the vast majority of the greatest philosophers and scientists in the history of Western civilization – not only the thinkers just mentioned but also many modern thinkers outside the classical tradition, including Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Boyle, Newton, and on and on – have firmly believed in the existence of God, and on the basis of entirely rational arguments. And, needless to say, they offer their readers no account of the grave philosophical challenges to which the naturalism they are committed to – the view that the natural, material world is all that exists and that empirical science is the only rational source of knowledge – has consistently been subjected throughout the history of philosophy, and which many influential and sophisticated contemporary philosophers continue to press upon it. Yet the fact is that, contrary to the standard caricature of philosophers as inveterate skeptics who have no truck with religion, among philosophers the view that the existence of God can be rationally demonstrated “enjoyed wide currency, if not hegemony . . . from classical antiquity until well after the dawn of modernity” (to quote the philosopher David Conway, writing in a book that had a major influence on Flew’s conversion to philosophical theism)9; and the suggestion that human reason can be accounted for in purely materialistic terms has, historically speaking, been regarded by most philosophers as a logical absurdity, a demonstrable falsehood. Within the classical Western philosophical tradition, belief in the existence of God and the falsity of materialism has generally been thought to rest firmly and squarely on reason, not “faith.”
I will also quote Feser’s footnote 9, which clarifies the quotation he used:
Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, p. 79. The rational demonstrability of theism is in Conway’s view the core of what he calls the “classical conception” of philosophy, a conception he attributes to Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plotinus and the other Neo-Platonists, Augustine, Boethius, Maimonides, Aquinas, Renaissance thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Erasmus, and even (despite their rejection of certain key ancient and medieval philosophical ideas) modern thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Benjamin Whichcote and other Cambridge Platonists, Newton, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. To this list of philosophical theists could be added, of course, Anselm, Duns Scotus, and many other medieval Scholastic writers; Islamic philosophers like Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and Averroes; modern philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Samuel Clarke, and William Paley; Suarez and other Late Scholastic philosophers; Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Gilson, and other Neo-Scholastics and Neo-Thomists of the 19th and 20th centuries; A.E. Taylor, F.R. Tennant, and other 20th-century Anglican philosophers; and, among contemporary analytic philosophers, David Braine, William Lane Craig, Brian Davies, John Haldane, Robert Koons, Barry Miller, David Oderberg, Alvin Plantinga, Alexander Pruss, James Ross, Richard Swinburne, Charles Taliaferro, and William Vallicella – to name just a few.
Look at all those names. Those were smart people. They are better than you and me. Indeed, if a reader is about to comment on this post, I am absolutely certain with no doubt in my mind that I consider that reader, holistically considered as a human being, a worse person than each and every one of these philosophers, taken individually; they were simply better at thinking, which is the central component of the value of a person. (And hence it does not matter if they supported slavery, or whatever.) We must consider, as Felipe Miguel’s thesis warned, “The Epistemic Significance of Agreement with Exceptional Theistic Philosophers”.
I claim that, in order to honor the great thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition, we should define “God” and “exists” in whatever sense makes it plausible to say that it is true that “God exists”. It is insensitive, and culture-hating, to define it any other way, in light of the above. There are many such plausible senses available, such as the property of “Platonic Being” of Ed Zalta’s Abstract Objects, p. 43; I am not particular about it. Due to my anti-structuralism on metaontology, I believe many different definitions of “God” and “exists” can be acceptable; and due to my deflationist, anti-subtractive view on metaontology, I believe most of the acceptable definitions will turn out to make the sentence “God exists” come out true.
To be clear: I am saying that you have to contort the definitions until you’re willing to say the words “God exists”, no matter what you mean by them, and if you’re unwilling to do so then you’re insensitive and you hate culture. Some readers may be concerned whether a plausible definition may not turn out to be deistic rather than theistic. Such readers are trying to draw a sharp line between deism and theism, which cannot be done historically; see Atheism and Deism Revalued on the issue. From a historically informed perspective, the definition of “deism” is as indeterminate as the definition of “God”.
2.3. Analyticity of theism
If the components of the proposition “God exists” are defined in some way that makes the proposition true, then it is an analytically true proposition. This seems to have two consequences:
- It seems to put me on one historical camp, which favored a priori or ontological proofs-of-God, against a different historical camp, which favored a posteriori or empirical proofs-of-God.
- It seems to commit me to the claim that atheists are not competent language users, since they use the word “God” without attributing existence to him.
Regarding the first, I will clarify that actually, both camps gave a priori arguments; regarding the second, I will accept the consequence and explain how it might be true.
2.3.1. Historical arguments were not truly a posteriori
There are two senses in which an argument can be a posteriori, or empirical:
- An argument is a posteriori in a thorough sense when it is possible for a competent language user to deny the putatively observational premise, if he lacks some relevant nonlinguistic knowledge.
- An argument is a posteriori in a limited sense when it is conceivable for a human being to deny the putatively observational premise, although such a human being would not be a competent language user.
While many historical arguments for the existence of God have been described as “a posteriori”, I claim that they were only a posteriori in a limited sense, but not in a thorough sense. In the modern, broad sense of analyticity, it is analytic, hence a priori, to say “some things move” (argument from motion) or “some things have the appearance of design” (argument from design), in the relevant technical senses of “motion” and “appearance of design”; if someone denied that any things move, he would not be a competent language user regarding the verb “to move” and the noun “motion”. Due to the difficulty in giving up competent language use regarding these words, even atheists do not generally respond to these arguments by denying their putatively observational premise, and instead they respond by denying the consequence.
2.3.2. Atheists are not competent language users
If the components of the proposition “God exists” are defined in some way that makes the proposition true, then it is an analytically true proposition, which means atheists are not competent language users with respect to these words. I claim that this is the case; for instance, atheism often falls out of a restrictive metaontology which, as noted before, leads systematically to incompetent language use.
Since we can find studies saying autistic people are more likely to be atheists, and also have difficulties with figurative language, I have been tempted to speculate that atheism is connected to difficulties with polysemous language, finding it hard to say something “exists” if it’s not connected to sense-perception (as most things that exist are). However, a study comparing religion and verbal ability does not support this view.
Aside from ordinary confusion owing to poor education, we cannot rule out dishonesty; after all, one purpose of identification as an atheist is to signal your membership in atheist culture, and hence the fact that you consider the bulk of humanity to be your outgroup, i.e., that you hate most humans. This motivation is clearly not tied to truth-value. Such, then, are the mechanisms for incompetent language use by atheists.
3. Religion
“Natural religion” is when you try to honor God based on what you know about him from nature, without claiming that any particular event constitutes a divine revelation. If you somehow felt inspired by the divine being whose existence was proved above, you could attempt to honor him based only on your natural knowledge; I do not care much about attempts to do this, although it is theologically important that this is possible.
“Revealed religion” is when you accept some particular event as a divine revelation, such as the miracle at Mount Sinai, or the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection, or some other miracle. This also often involves a holy book, and so on.
Either one may be simply called “religion”, depending on context.
I am a Roman Catholic. This section of this blog post will clarify my views on revealed religion, but only in order to avoid confusion with my belief in theism, which was explained above.
3.1. Motivation of revealed religion, generally: matters of faith
My approach to revealed religion is defined by the following conceptions.
- If something can be found outside revealed religion, then it is not a correct motivation for revealed religion. Hence, the following are not correct motivations for revealed religion: aesthetic appeal, a sense of belonging to a community, moral values. (Although impious philosophers such as Spinoza and Kant have believed that revealed religion is for the sake of moral values, I side with Christian philosophers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in believing that revealed religion has nothing to do with moral values, since moral values can be demonstrated with absolute clarity beyond a shadow of a doubt by the unaided power of human natural reason, and hence do not require revealed religion.)
- Revealed religion is believed on faith, and it is characteristic of faith that one cannot be irrational for failing to have it. Hence, I reject views where religious belief is to be supported by reason, such as evidentialist approaches where the resurrection of Jesus is argued to have happened historically; and I reject views where reason is to be supported by religious belief, such as in presuppositionalist apologetics.
- Faith is trust in an external authority. Hence, religious belief is not properly basic as Alvin Plantinga says, nor does it require any special faculty besides our senses, our will, and our reason; in particular, it does not require a faculty of intellectual intuition, or “sensus divinitatis”, or any belief-producing “inner witness of the Holy Ghost” except insofar as it may be said that the Holy Ghost works on humans by means of their ordinary faculties.
In my opinion, revealed religion is when you trust an external authority about “matters of faith” related to honoring God, such as what names he should be called, what rituals may be rightly performed in his honor, afterlife-related beliefs, etc. In my opinion, these are questions on which nature does not determine an answer, and hence unaided human natural reason will not arrive at an answer. But you may still want an answer, since it is common to want to have rituals performed surrounding your birth, death, marriage, etc. But then again, you are not rationally required to want these answers, and you may be perfectly rational if you decide to have no answers to these questions which are matters of faith.
3.2. Motivation for Catholicism: one, holy, catholic, apostolic
The Catholic Church has traditionally claimed that its “motives of credibility” are its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. There are many documents in which it claims this, and the most prominent one nowadays is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 811–870. The catechism also cites other sources in its footnotes for your perusal.
Notice how this works perfectly with my conception of faith: you certainly are not irrational if you fail to believe in Catholicism due to these motivations, hence faith is kept distinct and separate from reason, such that they cannot be confused. However, these are pretty appealing motivations anyway, and not in a merely aesthetic sense:
- Unity is pretty cool if you care about saying “I believe in this religion” in a way that has any truth-conditions at all. I have shown that it is impossible for Protestantism to have any fixed meaning, and similarly with Judaism and other religions, because there is no central living authority. Catholicism, on the other hand, is whatever the Pope says it is, hence it means something.
- Holiness can refer to whatever senses of holiness you may think of. Certainly the doctrines of Catholicism contain no error, as will be explained in the next section.
- Catholicity, or worldwideness, is nice if you care about being part of something which is spread across the whole world, and hence serves as a symbol of cosmopolitan aspirations.
- Apostolicity might not seem obviously cool by itself – after all, if you already love the apostles, you’re already interested in Christianity. But actually, it has a similar relationship to time as catholicity has to space. Christianity claims continuity with ancient Judaism, which is one of the world’s oldest religions, all the way in the bronze age. And in particular, Catholicism claims a continuity of institutional hierarchy: the first Pope picked up where the last Jewish High Priest had left off. Even if Hinduism is older than ancient Judaism by some measures, certainly it cannot claim this kind of institutional continuity. Given the previous remarks on unity, this means Hinduism cannot claim to really be the same religion that it was in antiquity, unlike Catholicism.
3.3. Faith vs. reason
The burden of this section is to show that Catholicism does not contradict reason, which is easy to do.
3.3.1. History vs the past
I believe various claims about the past made by Catholicism, such as that Jesus rose from the dead, performed miracles, etc etc. I do so without any irrationality, for you may notice that I did not call these historical claims.
Although many official Church documents may call these historical claims, they are not historical claims in the sense I mean it: in this sense, something is part of history if-and-only-if we can determine that it is part of the past from current evidence, by current methods. Since current university-accepted historiographical methods do not permit accepting that miracles happened, no miracles are part of history in this sense.
The Catholic Church does not claim that miracles are part of history in this sense, either: the Church instead asserts that these events happened in the past, and does not furthermore make the claim that there is evidence, acceptable by current methods, to show that they happened. Hence, in the sense at hand, the Catholic Church makes claims about the past, not about history.
The Church’s claims about the past are to be accepted on faith, entirely unrelated to any claims about history. The historian is free to determine the content of history without any worries that he may be debunking some claim made by the Catholic Church.
3.3.2. Other propositions
Maybe you think the Catholic Church makes some claim which is not about the past, but which is nevertheless erroneous. You shouldn’t think so, since the following is a dogma proclaimed by the First Vatican Council:
Even though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.
God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth. The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the Church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.
Therefore we define that every assertion contrary to the truth of enlightened faith is totally false.
Furthermore the Church which, together with its apostolic office of teaching, has received the charge of preserving the deposit of faith, has by divine appointment the right and duty of condemning what wrongly passes for knowledge, lest anyone be led astray by philosophy and empty deceit.
Hence all faithful Christians are forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, particularly if they have been condemned by the Church; and furthermore they are absolutely bound to hold them to be errors which wear the deceptive appearance of truth.
This dogma is very important, since you may use it to assure yourself that any supposed falsehood proclaimed by the Catholic Church is only your misunderstanding. After all, suppose you know by your own reason that some proposition P is true. Then if the Catholic Church seems to proclaim that not-P is true, there is a contradiction between faith and reason, which contradicts the Vatican I dogma. Hence, charitably interpreted, the Catholic Church does not proclaim that not-P is true, no matter how it may appear to the contrary.
This may seem weird if you’ve never thought about it. But Catholicism is not like Protestantism, where it is your job to figure out how to interpret the revealed words defensibly. This is very much not your job. If the proposition P seems to you, by the power of your natural human reason, to be a legitimate conclusion of science, then all you have to do is to simply teach it as such, as you normally would; and if the Catholic Church disagrees, then you will be notified of your excommunication by your bishop, or by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, or by the Pope himself, as the case may be. This actual enforcement by a living authority is what determines that, after all, you had in that case turned out to really have been “forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science” the proposition P. Of course, if it really is proven that the proposition P is true without doubt, such that it is irrational to deny it, then in such a circumstance Catholicism would have falsified itself. This hasn’t happened, and by God’s protection, it won’t.
