Hello Father, I have a theory that I'd like to see your opinion of. I'm asking you because not only are you a Catholic priest, but from reading your blogs you seem to be a little more open-minded than some that I've encountered over the years, and you obviously take care to look into and understand what people ask you.A very wise teacher of mine once told me that students don't fail school, schools fail students. I looked into this concept more and came to realise that it is true, not necessarily in it's exact wording but in the concept behind it. Everyone can learn anything, it's all merely a matter of finding a way to help them understand and learn. If they aren't interested, some people might call it a lost cause, but a good teacher will find a way to make a topic interesting to a listless student.My theory is that this also applies to religion. I suspect that a huge reason why so many people end up turning away from their faiths and churches is because of the same essential principal.Faith in any religion is based on exactly that, faith. To believe without requiring any form of evidence. To accept what is taught without doubt, without questions, and with blindness. Life itself teaches many people some rather harsh lessons in gullibility. We learn the hard way that taking what someone says on blind faith alone gets us hurt in many ways over and over again. To expect a sentient adult to just accept the existance of God merely because a priest told them he exists is insulting that person's intellect. Of course they're going to think, "Why should I believe you? So you're a priest, but you're still human. Human's aren't perfect, many are wrong about the things they say and believe. Just look at all the alien conspiracies, Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy... and you expect me to believe in God just because you think I should?"Most people that lose faith in God need some sort of evidence, or some sort of extreme event (good or bad) in their life to occur, to bring them back again. I was recently flatly told by a Catholic priest that belief in God should not require any kind of "evidence" and we shouldn't attempt to question that God exists let alone try to prove it. I suspect that this attitude is a case of the teacher failing the student. Humans need to understand in order to believe, and most have learned in life that understanding doesn't come from someone they hardly know simply telling them it is so.That being said, once someone has been given enough evidence that what a person tells them is true, they will become inclined to take the rest of the information given to them on faith, for so long as it all makes sense to them. For example, if someone can be convinced that God does indeed exist, the concept of heaven and life after death will be more likely to be accepted on faith.Now I'm not suggesting that someone should go and construct some huge scientific exploration into proving the existance of God to prove it to all of society. What type of evidence a person needs is going to be the same as what might catch their interest in education: it's different for everyone.Do you think that if the leaders of the Catholic church - or any church for that matter - were more willing to look into an individual's interests and ways of thinking and find something that will appeal to that person as being sufficient evidence of God's existance and the Catholic teachings to be correct, with an open-mind that not everyone is a carbon copy and might not believe in the exact same things in the exact same way (eg: some may think scientifically, others historically, others spiritually) that maybe more people might find (or in many cases re-find) their faith in God and turn (or return) to the church?
Thanks so much for writing all that! It’s a very interesting reflection, and I want to start by agreeing wholeheartedly with what you say in your last paragraph. It’s something that the Church in general is very aware of — that the way faith is discussed and lived has to vary a great deal across different cultures and their subgroups — but that doesn’t always happen well at street level.
For starters, we priests and bishops aren’t always as good at “being all things to all people” as we would like to be. The existence of the Vatican’s new YouCat, the World Youth Days, and youth ministry in general is a good move in the right direction, though. Definitely the language of, say, the Catechism of the Council of Trent (copyright 1566) isn’t quite as legit as it used to be… and the YouCat (copyright 2011) discusses the really important issues in a way that is a whole lot more understandable to us 21st-century types.
Now to dig in to the meat of your question. Quite obviously, there are 3 totally different answers that 3 totally different types of people would give you. If you’re (1) an atheist, faith is definitely meaningless and (if you’re a Hitchens devotee) even destructive. If you’re (2) a deist, God does exist but he isn’t going to give you any help in figuring that out. I mention those two to bring out a key (and sometimes unnoticed) difference with (3) most believers in monotheist religions: We believe that not only does God exist, but that he has revealed his existence to us along with something about what he would like our relationship with him to be.
Why is that relevant? Because it totally changes the ballgame. Faith will no longer be mere “blind acceptance.” If it is, then religious people certainly are the most gullible people around and we certainly are insulting everybody’s intellect. Faith isn’t about what we see, but it is about what we hear: faith on our part is a response to something God says. So in one sense it’s blind but in another very important sense it isn’t at all.
God speaks. So sure, we need evidence, but the evidence we’re looking for isn’t of the same type as, say, evidence that a molecule of water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. The Resurrection is quite literally evidence for us, as well as the fact of its announcement having been handed down from generation to generation down to us. But true faith in the Resurrection is ultimately God’s gift and the Holy Spirit’s inspiration.
But the Church — and in this there seems to have been some sort of misunderstanding in what the priest told you — does in fact say that we can have “evidence” about God’s existence that is a prelude and a preamble to faith. (It’s in Vatican I’s Dei Filius 4 and in St. Paul’s Romans 1.) In other words, that God’s existence can be demonstrated with an argument from reason. But to figure out that God is a Trinity… well, that’s beyond human knowledge and God had to tell us himself.
Our reason is very important. Very important. But it’s not the be-all and end-all. For my teaching, I spend a lot of time reading science and philosophy, and if there’s anything that scientists and philosophers will agree on — and they don’t usually agree on much ;-) — it’s that even though human knowledge has progressed so much, the realm of what we don’t yet know and in fact might never be able to know is simply immense.
So if that’s the case, I simply can’t count on my reason — besides the fact that I’m not even remotely the smartest person on Earth — to definitively figure out questions that are so crucial.
And yes, the way of getting to those answers is going to be different for everyone.
Just one more point: You can be a car thief and a philanderer and still make great scientific discoveries; your moral life doesn’t affect your scientific prowess. But moral life does affect our ability to discover God. Some folks don’t realize how much their own moral preferences underlie their rejection of God, and others don’t realize that they’ll continue to be blind to God’s continuous presence and love until they make the moral decisions that they need in order to be freed from the things that blind them. It sounds weird, but it’s true.
If you click here, you’ll get some sample pages from the YouCat. Scroll down to what’s page 7 in the PDF document (pages 14/15 in the book) and you’ll see that some of your questions are addressed there. Fwiw. Hope it helps!
God bless you, and let’s say a little prayer for each other!
