Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brandon Vogt
Read between
October 11 - October 18, 2017
It’s been eight years since I chose to become Catholic. Interestingly, I’ve noted how different the reaction I usually get compares to the reactions that converts to other religions often receive. Admit you’re exploring Buddhism and you’re greeted with wonder and encouragement. Reveal that you’ve become Jewish or Muslim and you’re treated with hushed reverence. Say you’re dedicated to meditation or the power of positive thinking and the “Good for you” comments will stream out as if you lost sixty pounds. Heck, share that you’ve just been baptized at a local nondenominational church and people
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I’ll admit it’s a weird decision. It goes against the grain. It’s radical. It is, in a word, rebellious. But that’s precisely what makes it worth considering (and, dare I say, exciting). It’s easy to swim downstream, to accept the status quo. What’s hard is to be a rebel, to look with fresh eyes on something most people reject and say, “What if they’re mistaken? What if ‘anything but Catholic’ should perhaps be ‘what else but Catholic’?”
Of course, there are other good reasons to believe something. If a belief is true, it’s almost always good and beautiful too. There’s a harmony among these three qualities, what philosophers call the transcendentals.
Truth, goodness, and beauty are like three notes of a chord, and when they’re played together we know we are hearing something coherent and fulfilling. Or to switch metaphors, they’re like the three codes to a lock. When you turn the dial back and forth, hitting all three codes, the lock clicks, it opens, and you’re welcomed in.
Catholicism offers that. In fact, it’s the only true rebellion left. It’s not rebellious to get drunk, criticize institutions, pursue sex and money, or come out as an atheist. Everyone’s doing that. Those are all mainstream. They’re easy and expected. They may sometimes require a slight bit of courage, but really, everyone is following those paths, swimming along with the current.
Maybe in a strange and confused world, the Catholic Church looks so backward because everyone else is facing the wrong direction.
What do you mean when you say you want evidence?
However, it’s easy to forget that sensory evidence isn’t the only type of evidence in our world. This is a crucially important fact. Sensory evidence is irrelevant, for example, when we consider questions of morality, meaning, or existence.
It’s not just that we haven’t yet found such evidence, though it may exist. It’s that such evidence is impossible, even in principle. Does that mean it’s impossible to show God exists? Not necessarily. It simply means that science isn’t the right tool, nor is scientific evidence the right sort of evidence, to settle the God question.
If terms such as arguments or evidence rub you the wrong way, it may be helpful to instead consider these as clues.
(Road signs don’t prove the destination exists but show clear the way.) That’s exactly what these arguments and evidence are: signposts to God. So let’s look at each of them.
Let’s take a look at one popular formulation, known as the Kalam argument. Its name comes from the medieval Islamic theologian who first formulated it.
It means that nothing just springs into existence randomly and without cause. For if that were the case, then our world would be a wild spree of things popping into existence like magic—only it would be worse than magic, since with magic you at least have a magician who pulls rabbits out of hats!4 But in a world that violated this first premise, you’d get rabbits popping in and out of being without even magicians or hats. Very few sane people believe the world works this way, and so pretty much all of us agree with this first premise.
The scientific consensus today is that the universe had a beginning, and it occurred roughly 13.7 billion years ago.
This means the cause must be something beyond the universe, beyond all matter, energy, space, and time. In other words, it must be transcendent (beyond the universe), immaterial (beyond matter and space), and eternal (beyond time), and to create something so massively complex as the universe, it must have been tremendously powerful and intelligent.
There are only a few possibilities. Perhaps the cause was something abstract, such as the laws of physics, numbers, or mathematical functions. But those won’t work since, to use a bit of technical language, they’re causally inert. They either describe reality or represent abstract concepts, but they don’t cause things to happen.
But when we consider morality as a clue pointing toward God, we’re not so much interested in which moral framework is correct but in the simple fact that almost all people agree there exists some moral standard that we’re obliged to follow.
Yet that’s not all. We also experience moral duties. It’s not just that we see certain actions as right or wrong; it’s that we feel compelled to do the right actions and avoid the wrong ones. Many people call this our conscience.
Most of us agree with these two facts, that we experience moral values and moral duties. We have years of experience, years of evidence to back them up. But there’s one more interesting facet about these values and duties: they often seem objective. They originate in something beyond human feeling and opinion.
This doesn’t mean a few people, or even a few cultures, won’t be mistaken about that fact. But in those cases, we don’t just say they have a different preference, as if the child torturers just prefer chocolate instead of vanilla. No, we say they are wrong, emphatically wrong, and morally insane.
But if all of that is true, we must ask ourselves: Where do these objective moral facts come from? What grounds them? If there’s a moral law that binds us, what or who gives it that authority? Where’s the lawgiver behind the law?
Either these moral values and duties come from nature, from us humans, or they have a transcendent source. They couldn’t have come from nature, since as the famous atheist David Hume noted, nature only shows us what is; it doesn’t tell us how something ought to behave (this is the famous “is-ought” problem in philosophy).
The only way to get from the is of that fact to the ought is by smuggling in a hidden premise, namely, that I ought to do what makes my wife happy, a fact I certainly agree with but can’t derive from nature alone. Nature, by itself, can never tell us what we ought to do.
We’re under no obligation to behave in ways that lead to survival, unless we happen to choose that for our goal, a goal that others are under no obligation to share. Again, even atheists such as David Hume widely recognize this, that objective moral duties can’t be grounded in nature.
If morality just depended on the common consensus, then we would have no basis on which to denounce misguided moralities of the past, such as Nazi views on Jews or early American views on slavery, both of which were held by consensus. We need some objective ground beyond human opinion.
So it seems our moral intuition provides another strong clue to God. It shows that some perfect, transcendent standard of goodness exists beyond our universe, grounding our moral values and duties.
The first argument focuses on the intelligibility of our world. That’s a fancy way of saying that our universe is structured in a way that we can actually understand and model it. Consider the elegant mathematical framework undergirding our universe: this framework is not just beautiful and well ordered; it’s actually understandable—it’s coherent. We’re able to wrap our minds around significant parts of it.
Considering all the possible ways our universe could have existed, an intelligible universe is extremely unlikely. Far more probable would be a disorderly chaos. And yet, here we are. Why is our world so orderly and intelligible? Perhaps it’s just due to chance. Maybe we just won the cosmic jackpot against almost incomprehensible odds. But that seems wildly unlikely. It seems instead that the deck was stacked, that our world happens to be intelligible against all odds because it was intended to be that way.
The fact that we can understand and make sense of the universe is a clue that someone planned it to be that way.
Suppose, as many people believe today, that God doesn’t exist and the world just blindly evolved over millions of years, beginning with simple biological organisms and building to our complex human brains, all without supernatural aid. That narrative is extremely common; it’s the prevailing view in our schools and popular culture. But if that account is true, what justification do we have for trusting our brains?
Why believe they are aimed at finding truth rather than mere survival (these are two different things)? The truth is we don’t have good justification. In fact, if atheistic evolution were true, it would be far more likely that our brains would evolve into blobs of randomly firing neurons rather than coherent thinking devices.
We’ll have to stop with these three clues—the universe, morality, and reason—but there are several other signposts to God. For example, many people have recognized God’s existence after a powerful experience in nature or during prayer. Still others have found him in community, by reading the Bible, or through the impressive witness of other people. But I chose these three because they have the advantage of being objective clues to God. They’re admittedly a bit heady, but they are clues that anyone can examine and consider, regardless of background or religious experience.
Religion simply means a set of beliefs and practices that connect one to a transcendent realm.
Why is it better to embrace religion rather than nothing? Well, one reason, as people have intuited up and down the ages, is that it ensures we worship the right God or gods in the right way, offering a proven way to connect with a world beyond this one. From this perspective, religion serves as a stabilizing force in the quest for God, making sure we stay on the best path.
This is why most people throughout history have seen religion as helpful, not oppressive. They understood that religion is a desperately needed guide, an admission that our collective spiritual experiences, across space and time, are more reliable than one’s own solitary pursuits.
But the problem is that when we cast off religion, we refuse a major source of help in exploring this spiritual world. We might read spiritual books or seek out gurus, but ultimately our exploration is still self-determined and thus self-restraining.
Consider, for example, someone who claims to be “scientific but not into scientific laws and rules.”
Embracing religion means listening to what G. K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead,” the shared consensus among our ancestors that says religion is a helpful thing.
If God really wanted us to know the truth, why would he force each of us to figure out these religious questions on our own?
The Church doesn’t encourage people to give up meat so that Catholics can pig out on lobster or fried fish instead. The aim is to open up space for God, fulfilling our earthly hunger with spiritual sustenance (which explains the Friday timing: Friday coincides with the day of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the Cross).
John Henry Newman, a famous nineteenth-century English clergyman, came to the same conclusion. He compared religious teachings to the sturdy banks of a river. Suppose you have a river with hard, sharp banks on either side. The sturdy banks will cause the river to move forward with great power and verve. But if you soften up the banks, the water will slow down. Remove the banks altogether and the raging river will devolve into a large, lazy lake.
Liturgy, rules, doctrines, and creeds aren’t meant to slow down religious progress. They’re the very conditions that allow it to surge.
People often die for beliefs they think are true but are really false, such as terrorists who fly planes into buildings because they think it will earn them seventy-two virgins in heaven. But people don’t die for a belief they know is false, which would have to be the case with Jesus’ apostles.
Assuming the consensus view that Jesus died around AD 33, that means within a handful of years (not decades or centuries), large numbers of people were already convinced Jesus had risen from the dead. Again, if this were a myth or legend, it would be nearly impossible for it to develop that quickly, especially when numerous eyewitnesses were still around.
Jesus unveiled his divine identity slowly over time and typically only to his close followers. He seems to have done it this way because he knew that overtly claiming to be God would make him a threat to Roman leaders. Their reaction would be swift and lethal. So Jesus instead used coded language that Jews of his day would have picked up on but the Roman authorities would have missed.
Buddha, Confucius, or Socrates might say, “You must love this teaching more than even your own family,” but they would never say, “You must love me above all else.” Why? That would make them the greatest possible good—a description reserved only for God. Yet once again, we see Jesus claiming that role for himself.
What you and I want is objective evidence of Jesus’ resurrection. We want evidence that is independent of personal feelings or experience. Fortunately, Christianity, unlike many other religions, is rooted in history and thus can be investigated historically.
First, Jesus died by crucifixion. Second, Jesus was given an honorable burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Third, Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty on the third day after his death. Fourth, several people from different backgrounds, including friends and enemies, claimed to have seen and interacted with Jesus after his death. Fifth, after these encounters, Jesus’ disciples experienced a sudden and remarkable transformation—they went from being afraid and defeated to boldly proclaiming that Jesus was alive. Again, these five facts are widely accepted by serious New Testament scholars,
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But even that doesn’t take us all the way to Catholicism. It gets us to Christianity, however. If Jesus really is God, then religions that claim Jesus is not God are, at least on this crucial point, deeply mistaken. They may be right about lots of other things. They may indeed contain much truth. But they’re off base on this fundamental issue: Who is God, and is Jesus really God? Christianity is alone in getting the answer right.
As I thought more about his reaction, though, I realized that the same criticism could be leveled against any decision. When we settle on any truth or choice, we’re implicitly rejecting many others. This isn’t a bad thing; it just seems that way in our hyper-tolerant culture that has lifted open-mindedness to the level of virtue. Yet as G. K. Chesterton observed, “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”17
