False Arguments That Faith And Reason Are In Conflict | Fr. James Brent, O.P.

>> Great. I've been asked to speak to you this afternoon about common objections to the rationality of faith or arguments that are typically advanced to show that faith and reason are in conflict with one another. This is a topic or an area I'm familiar with since I studied in graduate school for many, many years with professors who were hardcore atheists and had no difficulty articulating and advancing their arguments we heard them all the time. So what I'd like to do is articulate some of the most common ones that they gave me. I would or gave us, I guess you could say. And I'd like to discuss them amongst us. There's a lot of brain power in this room so if we put our heads together and think about these arguments we can see through them rather quickly and easily and various flaws and problems that they have. But they also have a function of setting before us the magnitude of what we're dealing with when we try to advance the gospel or the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas or the practice of the Catholic faith in the contemporary university context. Also I'd like to get kind of everybody a discussion going about whether these are the actual arguments that are still being used or commonly used. I have a feeling that basically where we're at now culturally is the last one which will come to call the Christianity is evil objection which isn't really based on reason or it is but it's kind of a blend of reason and emotive kind of outbursts or sob stories or various things. So we'll come to that. So let's just put it this way. We'll begin talking as if reason was still in play in the discourse. So to the extent that things are discussed rationally discussed or settled by reason there's there's exchanges of reasons. So we'll discuss some of the most common exchanges of reasons and then at the end we can ask ourselves maybe reason isn't really playing that kind of role in our society anymore and then we can talk about that. All right. So these are very common objections that I've laid out in argumentative form here on the handout. We'll go through them and tomorrow when I give my talk I'll step back and say you see these are actually embedded within a much larger philosophical way. Philosophical program or philosophical picture and we'll try to outline that bigger picture but let's just start with the arguments as they're normally advanced. So number one the wishful thinking objection is very common just I mean just going through it premise by premise Christian belief is wishful thinking and number two wishful thinking is irrational. Why is it wishful thinking you just want there to be a god and a heaven and an afterlife or maybe you just want there to be justice for people you think are doing bad things or whatever the whatever you just want there to be these things it's comforting to you it's a crutch it's something allows you to cope with the difficulties of life. So fill in whatever psychological story you want there about why it's wishful thinking it's not too hard to elaborate such a story wishful thinking is irrational therefore Christian belief is irrational. Now let's just see this how many of you heard this objection from either a professor or fellow students. Okay yeah pretty pretty common objection still okay what do we say in response to this well what's the definition of wishful thinking it's believing something because you want it to be true but without sufficient evidence. Okay so there's two things that need to go on there one is you have to believe something that you want to be true and then there has to be also second a lack of sufficient evidence now the second component leads to our next objection the evidentialist objection which focuses specifically on that issue whether there's a sufficient evidence to confirm the truth of Christian beliefs okay we'll come to that in a minute. But let's just stick with the part about whether it is wishful thinking or not I mean are we just simply believing something that we want to be true. Now you might be tempted to just jump right to the second one say there's sufficient evidence there's sufficient evidence here we go and then you're on to the next one but it's actually good to sit with the first part of it for a moment are we believing things that we want to be true. Okay yes you could say that like if you understand the testimony as a whole but if you've ever struggled with any of the doctrines of the faith you have good reason to give to stay so hold on a second there I believe there's a hell but I don't I don't wish there's one. I wish there weren't but I believe there is so we can't say if we if we take the whole yes it reveals the good the good life for man so we're going towards what we want but if we start to go doctrine by doctrine. There's many difficult teachings that we might not wish were true but we believe them anyway. Okay so you can actually respond to the objection easily enough and say look there's many things I hold that I wish weren't so but I believe them because God has revealed them or whatever the case may be. Okay the other thing is just because someone can make a case or tries to make a case that we believe these things out of for the sake of comforting ourselves or as a crutch or as a coping mechanism or something like that psychobabble kind of stories like that they cut both ways and it's very easy to tell turn around and tell the story the other way there's actually a lot of comforting thoughts in naturalism. Okay if you think of yeah I mean you just deny that there's a God because you don't want to stand before him in judgment someday. You deny that there's an afterlife just because you don't want to be morally accountable for your actions and receive the punishments that are due. So it's actually a form of self comforting to deny the existence of God the judgment tribunal of God or other such things. So on that score it seems like atheism is just as much a matter of self comforting as Christianity would be or it could be I mean you could be very easy to go through various things and say you're just comforting yourself. If you're telling yourself this story and make yourself feel good. Okay especially if you have a lifestyle contrary to the sixth commandment. Okay you just tell yourself there's no God and there's no judgment and I can continue to live this way freely. It's very comfortable. You can do all kinds of things actually that otherwise wouldn't be able to do so you could go there if you wanted to that would just that might be a fight but you could go there. Okay oh by the way just so you so you realize this is something else we could talk about I've lined the objections up so that they're about what they're about Christian beliefs or they're about Christian faith. But when the arguments are articulated in real life they're not about Christian belief or about Christian faith they're about Christians. That means it's about you okay so when you go to respond to the argument you might be tempted to make it about the the other person as well and then you get the judgment and then you get the accusation of being judgey. But it's interesting these are all pretty judgey if you look at it that way so you can you got that you can use as well okay in terms of dealing with these things on the ground. But it seems to me the real answer to the wishful thinking objection even though that what we gave already are some important distinctions and things you could say the real answer is that in fact it's not wishful thinking because there are good reasons to hold Christian beliefs. Now that's where we go to the next objection but before we go to the next objection let's just stop like I said I'd like this to be conversational what do you think about the wishful thinking objection. Any other criticisms or replies that I maybe have overlooked let's put our heads together. Well I think it also kind of relies on deep cynicism and there's kind of I think that like wishful thinking is sort of a pejorative term for hope I think in many cases. People think that we're too hopeful about our future. There's too much good that's possible. Yeah that's right. But a really cynical view nihilistic view of the world. I think the world is too evil for Christianity's future. Yeah I think that's there's something to that we're going to get to it tomorrow and we talk about the wisdom of the world as opposed to the perennial philosophy. And the wisdom of the world radically denies our fundamental intuitions and basically tells you you just have to accept that your deepest most fundamental intuitions about yourself and about reality are just falls. You just got to accept the pain that comes with that. And that's where I think a lot of people have basically cajoled themselves into accepting that contrary to our inclinations in nature. And so there really is a habit of dark view of the world really a habit of despair. And to spare about reason J.P.2 talks about that in Fides of Ratsia. I'm wondering about, I think one big thing I dread because I would never expect this to be Christianity and we're just talking about any sort of deism. I wouldn't care for the wishful thinking of judgment. I guess would inconspicue for example, a non-Christian or like say, a king in an order. Anyone else? I feel like I would almost be inclined to use this wishful thinking. Yeah. believes in the fun of your God. Right. Some sort of like a pagan God that is just a nice way of thinking about it. Why certain. Right. Not what happened. So where is-- I guess like where is the distinction to be in why? Is this unapplied to them, but not us. Right. Yeah. I think that you need both of the things that I'm giving you, which is there's lots of things we believe that we don't wish to be true. I do think that that's an important point to make. Right. So it's not just wishful thinking. Res, with other, depending on what the package is that the person believes in, it could be all comforting all the way through and nothing hard. That's why I think a lot of people are drawn to far Eastern kind of practices, Buddhism, yoga, the new age kind of thing. There's nothing really difficult in it. Yeah. I think for example, like you know, when you ask a religion, or if it's human sacrifice, probably, you know, assuming that it's hard to accept for really something. But-- and I'm sure that they had plenty of reasons why they could show that there is good talent physical evidence for-- Right. We'll get into the question of evidence as we go. A lot of it's going to turn on the question, though. So yeah. I think one objective that I have come a lot of people are thinking about this is that the reason why there's difficult doctrines and Christianity is because they were made by powerful leaders in order to subjectate the lower people. Yeah. We'll come to that later. That's part-- it sounds like the Christianity's evil objection, and a more aversion of it. And the answer to that, I guess, the first thing would be is if it was simply a matter of the powers of the church trying to articulate things, to subjugate people, they would not have articulated things as they did. They would have accepted the heretical options on a lot of doctrinal positions along the way, because those are easier for larger numbers of people to swallow. So if they were just trying to corral the masses, they would have gone with a conceptually easier number of options. But instead, they always went with the really difficult, most mysterious thing, as a matter of course. So it's almost like they were intentionally making it hard to believe. Well, let's give other people a shot in the back. I think you take the visual thinking of just one step further, however, and say that-- I think it depends on the bigger cultural context of the not that the difficult doctrines that we still have to reflect on, to be able to conform to. Yeah. You can say what you do. But you do want to live a very productive, and chase life and all that. Yeah. Otherwise structures you work by, in a sort of interest age, that-- Right. You seek that order and that figure. And so I still wish what I can need if you deny yourself, what it's really about. There's a number of things to say in response to that. I guess it sounds like what you're getting at it saying, you really have underlying, like your outward empirical kind of manifestations deep down behind the masks. You secretly do want these things to be true. That becomes a question of how do you verify someone's actual wishes and desires? And in an age where the hermeneutic of suspicion is at play as a method of rationality, people have a habit of mind of saying what's presented in the empirical given is not the real story. That needs to be unmasked to find a more sinister motive behind it or an underlying kind of mechanism. So you'd say, that is the way you'd have to say, OK, how are we going to verify people's actual beliefs, actual intentions, and actual commitments? And it's not going to be straightforward. You say, look, psychologists have talked about this. And it's hard to find people's actual beliefs and wishes, which actually makes it harder for the wishful thinking objection. And also people can have internal conflicts. They can both want it and not want it at the same time in different respects. So that complicates things, too. And I think in that case, it would be useful to find an example or appropriate personal. Could you speak up a little so everyone can hear? Yes, I think in that case, if you're to hear it, it would be useful. And usually not hard to find some personal example struggling in terms of some kind of interchanging church. Maybe it's not conceptual at the actual. Yeah. Maybe it's just like something that-- I mean, obviously, it's a teaching of church, but wouldn't really have a huge impact on your day and day living. So it's harder to name that. I was going to say, I think it is very important, and it's very rare to ask people what they actually want to be true. And I found that it's really helpful not because you're being incredibly bad at about it, but sometimes they haven't even thought through that really. Like, what are you actually wanting to do? And I think in particular, in sort of the new-- I think this thinking people are often dishonest to say, oh, I love for Christianity to be true. But it's just not. Right. And I think that's sort of a rhetorical change for you because if you poke it a little bit, there's no way that traditions you sit on, but actually want to be true. Or I mean-- Yeah. Which goes back to the point we were made earlier, how do you verify people's actual beliefs? So maybe a good way to approach it is through actual dialogue. What do you want to be true? And instead of saying, here's what you really want. I'll tell you what you really want. That kind of approach. Yeah. So the problem with any objection like this, regardless of where it's coming from, but specifically with this direction, is it's a conversation stopper. If the goal of the conversation is to evaluate the claims of Christianity and respect to their truth values, you're not doing that with this objection. You're doing as you're attempting to psychoanalyze the person. That's right. None of us have the credentials to do that. Even I have some skepticism if you can truly psychoanalyze. That's right. And you can bring out statistics that a large percentage of actual diagnoses done by clinical psychologists in settings with proper testing, a large number of those are false. Yeah. There's a lot of false diagnoses. And so I don't think it's a good idea to ever assume what someone's thinking. It's best just to take them up the word and go from there. Yeah, you can do that. But you raise a really important point. Notice the conclusion, not only of this objection, but the next one, that faith is irrational. And a number of philosophers have pointed out that as soon as you call a position irrational, just that very label has the effect of shutting down discourse because you're basically saying to the other person, you're not suited for rational discourse with me. So it's the kind of objection that I think it does have that effect, because of the very conclusion that we're being argued for against. I mean, imagine if a Christian were to come out and say, this position is irrational. That would be considered very adversarial, confrontational, judgy kind of discourse. But we have it heaped down on us, like on a regular basis. So-- [INAUDIBLE] Well, in the objection of sometimes conflying the idea of the unity and wishful thinking and something beautiful. So the inner and truly is beautiful, which is an almost basic position, because we're not even asking for it. And that seems to be something that if wishful thinking is, I guess I wish something to be true of the report that's what I believe it is. But finding something beautiful is a similar in which-- Right. --well, I am attracted to it. Well, there are certain times of distractions. Yeah. And some objections seem to just collapse and sometimes of attraction seem to wishful thinking. Because, like, more, if I say a nice notion that we want on the side, it's not the time wishing you to get to it with a time of multiplying. That's a good response. In fact, I've never heard that before. So you could ask the interlocutor, how do you distinguish between wishful thinking and beliefs based on beauty? Scientists will often accept the most elegant theory on the basis of its elegance or its beauty. And there's an evidential power that beauty itself is considered to have. So how do you differentiate believing something-- believing something to be true because it's beautiful versus wishful thinking? That'd be a challenging question. That'd be a good response, I think. Following up, I think, to wish for something is a desire. Yep. And we're only really moved to investigating something which is part of the desire of knowledge. And we would never be able to investigate something that we don't want to do because these could be true or quite true. And so sometimes, every serious inquiry is based on the wishful thinking. Yeah, that's a good point. You could end up saying science itself, a scientific enterprise, is based upon the belief that the world is intelligible. And there is a kind of skepticism. It says, well, how do you know that even to begin with? And that's basically just wishful thinking. Now, there's actual metaphysical reasons that can be given for saying that reality is intelligible. But you're right. At the origin of every inquiry is a desire based upon some belief about the way things actually are. Let's move on to the next one. I want to make sure we get through all of them and the time we have the evidentialist objection. This was probably the most common objection we heard. Alvin Planninga, the great epistemologist, philosopher and epistemologist, who was at the University of Notre Dame for many years. He basically built his philosophical career largely around answering this objection and doing all the work that needed to be done to answer this objection. He basically points out that only a few philosophers have articulated it. It's a premise by premise, but if you have, but really it's one of those objections that's nonetheless in the air everywhere you turn. Every seminar you take, every conversation, all the conferences you go to, it's always in the atmosphere, it's the, I guess you could say the underlying objection to the faith. There's two forms of it. One's based on something called the evidentialist principle. It goes like this. Number one, it is irrational to believe something without sufficient evidence. And number two, Christian faith consists of believing many things without sufficient evidence. Therefore, Christian faith is irrational. Now that version of the argument turns on this concept of sufficient evidence. And the first thing you might ask yourself is, well, what counts as sufficient? And we're all familiar with the game. So you've played it, in fact, Jesus seems to have played it with the Pharisees, that they ask for evidence and he gives a sign. And what do they say? It's not enough. We need more. So he gives another sign, or he gives them more premises. It's not enough. Give me more. And you ratchet it up. And you give more signs, more, more premises. I need more. I need more. I need more. And what you're running up against is a kind of insatiable appetite for signs and evidence. So what counts as sufficient? That's very difficult to say, or to answer a priori. Now, the expression sufficient evidence can be taken out and you can use a whole variety of other terms. Proof, grounds, warrant, justification, reasons, good reasons, or any such thing. And when you take that, take out the expression sufficient evidence and use one of those others, what you realize is, whoa, this argument is traveling around and masquerading under many, many different guises. Philosophically, it's substantively the same argument. You just don't have sufficient reasons. Now, Aquinas himself was aware of this argument, of course. And he answered it in many different places throughout the summa. Before I jump to reading some of his texts, I'd like you to jump down to, you see where I have the regardings there? There's different ways you can run this argument. You can run it regarding the existence of God. There's not enough evidence for the existence of God. And there you'd answer the question, you'd answer it one way. You could go to natural theology like we did this morning. When it comes to the mysteries of faith, like the resurrection, you have a very different way of answering it. You don't want to say that we believe in the resurrection based on evidence and historical considerations. There's a number of problems that come with that as we'll get to in a minute. Then you have other issues like the historicity of Scripture and the fact of miracles. You can get the problem of miracles, essentially, this argument applied specifically to miracles. That's basically what Hume's argument regarding miracles is. There's a very general form of the argument that's just about Christian faith generally. Then there are specific versions of the argument regarding God, regarding particular mysteries like the resurrection, regarding miracles, regarding the historicity of the Bible. There's all kinds of things. Let's go to what Hekwina says. In the second part of the second part, question two, article nine, reply to the third objection. Here's a quietness's basic answer to this objection. The believer has a sufficient motive for believing. He uses the word motive. See, there's many different terms that could be used. The believer has sufficient motive for believing. Before he's moved by the authority of divine teaching, God said so basically. He's moved by the authority of divine teaching, confirmed by miracles. That's a very important little clause. Confirmed by miracles. And what is more, by the inward instigation of the divine invitation. So he does not believe lightly. In other words, for a quietness faith has three features. Number one, it's acceptance of testimony as God's own testimony. It's acceptance of testimony as God's own testimony. Number two, there's confirmatory signs. Now here, he says, miracles, but I'll just say more broadly signs. And in other places like Summa Contra Gentile, book one, chapter six, he gives a whole list of signs. Okay? You've got miracles. You've got healings. You've got the fulfillment of prophecies from the Old Testament. You've got the pronouncement of sublime doctrine. You've got the expansion of the church, the miraculous expansion and stability of the church. Through time, you have the experience of peace and joy that's up from another order, a more sublime or supernatural experience of peace and joy, etc. He gives basically a list. And that list is effectively chapter headings for large-scale investigations into the topic of signs. And all down through history, Christians have always stud gathered and studied and reflected upon signs or confirmatory signs. They're going to taxonomy studies, explanatory kind of patterns. There's inductive versions of the argument, deductive versions of the argument, abductive versions of the argument. It's really the science of what's now called fundamental theology. This used to be very, very common for Catholics to be educated in that at some point, either in junior high or in high school. We can find old religion books from the 20s. And they would actually give them the signs that confirm the divine origin of the Christian faith. Unfortunately, in the last 50 or more years, 50 years or so, the study of signs has become kind of, like people, "Oh, don't bother with all that. People don't believe for that reason, etc." And you've got to be careful. Yes, that's not the proper and per se reason for believing. But men, it really does help a lot of people in an auxiliary kind of way, in a secondary way. And it's actually a lot of fun to go through the signs. What are the signs that impress you? And in a room like this, there'd be a lot of signs we could elaborate and articulate. Most importantly, Aquinas says, "We have the third factor, which he calls the inward instigation of the Holy Spirit." We don't want to overlook that by any stretch. Aquinas wants us to realize that the proper reason why a person believes in the existence of God is because he's interiorly moved by, and we could say, an instinct, the instinct of the Holy Spirit, that's his language, an instinct of the Holy Spirit or an instinct of faith, which properly translates. It could really mean like inspiration or inclination or principle of inclination. A person is moved from within to accept the testimony in a basic way. So we hold this as first principles in a manner analogous to the first principles of a science. The articles of the creed are analogous to the first principles of a science, he says, which tells us that they're first principles. So what we have is a body of testimony confirmed by signs, which we do not believe because of the signs, but which we believe because we're moved inwardly to accept the whole in a simple way. Now, there's a lot there that I just laid out to you a quick account of the theological virtue of faith and how the ascent of faith works, and it's a very mysterious matter. It's unlike other acts of belief regarding matters that fall within the range of reason. So we can talk about that at length. But I wanted to at least get across the point that we do not believe in the testimony of the apostle, the prophets, and the apostles. We do not believe in the mysteries of faith because of the signs that confirm the testimony. Why do we not do that? Aquinas says it many times, faith does not believe on account of arguments. That's a quote. Faith does not believe on account of arguments, which is really interesting for a guy who does arguments like all the time, right? That's what he does. He knows how arguments figure into the act of faith, and they're not in the position of being the basis on which we affirm these things. They're in an auxiliary position. They clarify, they explain, they bring out the intelligibility of it, etc. Why does that matter? Let's go to the next version of the evidentialist objection, the proportional form. This you'll find in David Hume and in others who kind of follow him. It's quite common today. Number one, rational beliefs are proportionate to the evidence. Another way to put it would be like this. The degree of confidence with which you hold something ought to be proportionate to the degree of evidence for it. If something has a 75% probability, your degree of confidence in it ought to be about 75%. How do you assess that? There's Game Theory and how much are you willing to bet? And there's different ways that there-- people analyze all of that. But the idea is that the belief should never be more subjectively certain about something than there is evidence for it. So you see, you're supposed to have a proportion between belief and evidence. So the principle goes. But Christian beliefs are not proportionate to the evidence. Like the certitude regarding the existence of God or the mysteries of faith or the resurrection of Jesus or things is like absolute. So like, historical reasoning could get you at best. At the very best, you could get a probabilistic argument that it's-- let's suppose it was 90% probable that Jesus rose from the dead. Based on historical, critical reasoning and abductive inference from the text and the data that's available, 90% chance Jesus rose from the dead. Well, then you should have 90% degree of confidence. But we have more confidence than that. So the beliefs are out of proportion. The answer to that is precisely a coin. He saw this problem. I think he saw it very clearly. And he says, all throughout his writing career from the earliest writings to the latest, faith does not believe on account of arguments. This is why the idea of the basic belief is so important. It's a-- these are first principles, basic beliefs, which we believe because of that inward instigation of the spirit. But it just so happens is also surrounded by lots of confirmatory signs, which allow us to answer objections like this. That's the point-- one of the points of the signs, OK? All right. And we can run the proportioning argument regarding the other things as well, the existence of God, mysteries of faith, history, and the scripture, et cetera. All right. Let's open it up for conversation. What do you think of the epidentialistic jenic? The passage from the supergiver to the point of the argument to-- against it. I wouldn't find that convincing if I were to question. Because it's not true what he's doing is arguing that the basis for the beliefs are the very things that the evidential argument is calling a question in place. I see you see the problem. So he basically says we believe it because God says so. And then the skeptic is always going to come back and say, well, how do you know God says so? But that's why he sees that. That's why the very next clause is confirmed by miracles. So he wants-- The skeptic wouldn't believe in miracles. Oh, well, that's a whole other-- that's another thing. That would be making the evidentialist arguing specifically regarding miracles. OK, further, it's reducing the signs to just miracles alone, which in this passage, he kind of does. But in other places, he's realized there's a much more expansive list. So it's not just miracles. And furthermore, when he has in mind miracles, he doesn't just mean the miracles in the Bible. He means contemporary ones as well. That's part of his argument as well. So the person who's going to be skeptical about miracles that just raises the question, well, how do you deal with the problem of miracles? And one way to go with it is we'll argue about the past miracles last. Let's start with contemporary ones. So let's put you on. You will get out of playing, go to lords, and we can start there. OK? Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say that point that I'm that usually I have a inclination to jump into the use of the procedure of a procedure without miracles. Yeah. The basically reason. There's good reasons. I mean, this scripture tells us that's one of the confirmatories on it. Yeah, it's helpful by actually finding it in kind of winners down in the sense of it. And I'm like, yeah, sure, that was a great summary. And then the result of their heartache, I'm really-- they're not the last three. I find that a conversation is where I'm talking about the other signs that it tends to be more effective than-- Right. --whether I'm eating a tributative, or a personal example, like I was talking recently with someone who's in the news and who's talking to me. He's like, how do you pray? What does that actually mean to you to pray? Yeah. But like having a dialogue with the Lord in this way, and she sort of questioned and pondered and then see this sort of mystical or serious rather like response, as part of the sort of tributative. And found that really interesting. Yeah. Then you only talk about whether it's the grace that you get of something like a confession or something like that. Sure. These are these. Sure. It's interesting that our society-- Yeah. --expressing a degree of sentiment as returns to-- I'm not just strict with logic, but sometimes they want a little bit of personal knowledge and they expect you to go to-- do you know what it is? In 1917, you know? Yeah. I know that happened a few years ago. And probably in recent awhile, they can't come up with the reason why the miracle's wrong. They just don't acknowledge it. Right. You're right. The more you bring it into a temporary and impersonal testimony, it's usually to talk about the inspirational, the spirit of time to find the word for a science in your life. Sure. That's a great point. There's a lot of things to say in response. First, we have to distinguish between evangelization strategies generally speaking and answering objections in particular. So a lot of times, if we're not careful, we can think-- and this is the way the evidentialist objection is set up. It's set up in such a way that there's one interpretation of that, if you refute the objection, then I'll be a Christian. So it's like, but not necessarily. This objection could just be defeated, but the person could have other reasons for not being a Christian. So evangelization strategies are one thing. Answering objections is another. Finding fallacies in an argument is another. So we can find fallacies in the argument. But what the trick is is that the second premise as you believe it without sufficient evidence, the one way to respond to the argument is to go right to the second premise and start supplying evidence. And then you think, oh, well, if I just supply enough evidence in the personal belief-- and this is my evangelization strategy-- and then what you realize is, wait a second. No, there's more to a conversion than simply premise premise conclusion. There's personal factors. There's the will. There's the desire to-- there's a trition. There's studies-- and tummits have done the studies-- of stages of conversion. And arguments are a factor in one of the stages. But they're not by any stretch the whole story of conversion. So you're right to say there's way more to the conversion process than just arguments or reasons are applying to them. That's a moment within the process. And yes, the second point about things being personal, that's an important observation as well. A lot of people fault what they call the old apologetics for appealing to reason alone of all the powers of the soul that speaks to the intellect, but like forgets the other powers of the soul, like forgets the person, doesn't speak to-- it's rhetorically unmoving that way, like a gustant, it's much more rhetorically powerful. But there's nothing to prevent. Tumus from elaborating a very Augustinian line of reason and what you're really looking for is happiness, and here's your inclinations. And here's the answer to your inclinations here in this testimony. Oh, and by the way, this is awesome. You're drawn to it. Oh, by the way, there's also-- also all these confirmatory signs. And that's just a point out of the sign. So you can do that, too. The last thing I'll say is that one of the things that's important for us to realize-- actually, I forgot. Let me just-- I'll hold off on the third thing for now. There was not very much on the treatment of here and this is that secular and not sick babies, but actually don't have knowledge of the only thing that is the words faith, belief, and knowledge is the least harmful. It's not just that it's-- Yeah. I wanted to speak more about how these people grow. Great point. So for a lot of people faith in our society when they hear the word faith, it's practically synonymous with feeling, sentiment, opinion, private point of view, and things like that. It's practically synonymous with that. In the ancient world, though, is clearly understood-- I mean, the very nominal definitions of the word-- meant that faith is accepting something on the word of a witness. So faith is testimonial belief. And once you realize that faith, properly speaking, is testimonial belief, you realize human beings can't live without faith. The gustan has a lot on this, yeah? We can't step outside the matrix of testimony. Everything in our lives is built around testimony from other people. Science itself would grind to a halt if scientists did not take each other at their words when they reported their results. So there's no way to live without faith. That would basically be anti-social personality discomfort if you tried to live without faith, without trusting anyone about anything. So there's lots here you can start to say why faith, generally, speaking, is reasonable. I mean, the gustan's great examples are like, where were you born? I was born in Michigan. Well, why do you believe that? [LAUGHTER] Your mom, my mom and dad told me. And then people will say, oh, no, no. But I have a birth certificate. That's a form of testimony. I don't know what it is. say. Another example is how do you know that the man you think is your dad? Is your dad? There's only one person who knows. Your mom. That's it. But then people say, oh no, I could do a DNA test. I could do a DNA test. Can you read DNA tests? Otherwise, you have to believe the expert who tells you this is the right DNA. So there's really no way out of the testimonial matrix. So I mean, it's-- so the question is, is it reasonable to believe the apostles? Is it reasonable to believe the apostles? When they say they've been divinely inspired and they're telling you God's own word? That's where the argument goes, classically traditional speaking. My response to an alien, when I get one of the proof guys, this is to say proof that he doesn't. And then they roughly will switch to another. They're like, oh, well, you know, why is there people like that? Like, they automatically will switch away from that one. That's right. So the problem of evil is always on the list. We'll get to that later. I would just watch out for burden of proof kind of debates. There's all kinds of considerations. And I never found those very fruitful. Like, who's the burden of proof really on the believer or the person who doesn't believe? I'd just say let everyone bring comfort with their arguments for their position. As far as a proportionate for the believer and the person that for the believer, I had this discussion a couple of times. I found, even an unreliable to be perceptive of his distinction, that evidence can be proportionate to the believer, to the judgment that you ought to be. You can say something you ought to do. Yeah. Then that unique God's help to then say, I do believe it. That's very interesting. That's exactly the theological reasoning. And there's also stories down through history of people who have gone to Lords. They've seen miracle happen right before their very eyes. And they'll say, I want to believe, but, and I see that I should believe, but I just can't. There's been actual people in those circumstances, yeah. I think something that really is this proportionality idea seems to have been involved now is this idea of parsimonious scientific principle. How does it take for the most parsimonious theory to account for what it's seen? Yeah. I think it's important when someone brings us up to say, okay, but we have to remember Christian Moonief is actually a conscience of things that we all agree upon, not the one, like that we observe in the world. And so if you're rejecting Christian Moonief as it is a very grand view, it's in the lab revision, like the human person and the users are well-wanted. If you're objecting on those grounds, you have to then provide me with a less, or like a more parsimonious, less complex accounting for all the things that Christian knew. Yeah, that's a good way to proceed. And you could say there's nothing more, there's nothing simpler than a first, than an account of reality with the first, with one first principle that's absolutely simple and accounts for everything else. What would be simpler than that? Certainly, atomism is not simpler with a few positive, all these atoms. So there's also different kinds of simplicity. There's ontological simplicity, you know, simplicity in terms of laws or axioms, so there's principle simplicity. So that gets tricky in terms of kinds of simplicity. Yeah, that's one thing I'd say. Yeah. [ Inaudible Remark ] I say something like, you know, but if you were 50% or 30% sure that on the other side campus, through $10,000, giveaway, like you walk over there, and heartbeat. You go, like, very likely to end that one in the case, do so because it wouldn't be beneficial to you. And it's that, like, you need to stand to gain a lot. So, then I started saying, are you, depending on who I'm talking to, I don't know, I sometimes say, are you, making an adventurous claim? Is it seep with being kind of disguised, push-up and being claimed in a sense that you don't want this to be true, because you're worried about being pushed that way? You know, to tell you the truth, Aquinas says exactly that about the Pharisees and the commentary on John. He says that a person can request evidence for two different reasons, morally speaking. You can request evidence in order to verify the truth, or you can request evidence in order to avoid it. And he says the Pharisees are requesting evidence precisely in order to avoid the truth. So, what you're getting at is a person, maybe this person isn't asking for reasons precisely in order to avoid it. So, Aquinas has that distinction. I came across that, I was like, wow. It's all, it's there. [laughter] I find, you're talking about the faith as testimony, I don't think I'm really a counter-picking it, as I'm not. What I was thinking for you was very to talk about that is particularly among our generation in the way data is, and like us, for the internet, it's very different than all past communities. And there's so much lack of trust in testimony that you could start making anything about talking about any sort of miracle, and it's all for lying on testimony. Right. I think among our generation there is a huge, a lack of those. That might be the case, but there might be a habit there, or a custom of mind. So, you started talking about what we're talking about. Totally. If you think about it, it's scary. Like, you get on an airplane. Right. And all these people have testified said, you're going to fly like, you know, a mile up in the sky or more, and it's going to be going 600 miles an hour. But everything's okay, trust us. Or brain surgery. What is brain surgery? I'm going to take this, I'm going to cut up with your skull, and I'm going to take this knife and stick it in your brain. You'll be okay. Trust me. Trust me. But people do brain surgery every day. As soon as you get into the like, a miracle or the reliability of the spiritual and stuff, it's just like, oh, no. Right. That's right. So, a lot of people have pointed this out that there's a kind of what happens is they're inadvertently out of their will raising the evidential standard, often without realizing it. So, yeah, how, yeah. That's the best way to kind of combat that just to find out all the other ways that I think the info. I think I don't know about trying to combat it. I think what helped me a lot was realizing there are stages of conversion. And people generally have everyone has like what we might call a fixed kind of paradigm. Like, there's a certain set of a way of understanding reality and a certain set of goals and a set of means are going to use to get to that goal. And as long as the person has their paradigm, other views are like just not live options for them. They're just not a live option to use William James's expression. So, like, I take it that for you becoming like a Buddhist, it's just or a Hindu. It's just not a live option. And if a Hindu were to come up to you and start trying to give you all these arguments to be a Hindu, you just wouldn't even like face you. Generally speaking, people need to be disposed to hear the arguments for it. And so they're often, they'll talk about their needs to be paradigm breakdown first. Our persons receive paradigm first falls apart. Like the prodigal song wakes up in the pigments of this ain't working. And I say, I'm going to go try to find something different. And then, if a person's looking for something different and you come to meet them and say, here's testimony and here's confirmatory signs, they're much more disposed to actually listen. So, when you're meeting a person and where they are in their existential journey, it makes a difference. But if you want to try to come up with, I'm going to find a way to force speed to generally, it doesn't work. It seems that, just like you said, you pull, take things off of faith all the time without really realizing it. It seems to me that it's not so much faith, but more faith in the supernatural. Right. Good distinction. It's interesting because you know, I see that even in some Christian churches, like people will try and come up with naturalistic explanations for miracles and the goals. Yeah, of course. And it's like, well, you know, there was actually because this and this and this happened. And so, how I'll tell you that. So, the very distinction, the very distinction that you're discussing, Augustin and Aquinas are both aware of. And they have a category of human testimony versus divine testimony or what you're calling supernatural testimony. And they realize that what is it that actually overcomes the resistance, if you recall that, to the testimony of God. It has got to be that inward, instigation of the spirit. So Aquinas has in the treatise on faith. faith, the scenario, there's two different people can listen to the same preacher. Juan just said, "That was ridiculous." And another is like, "Whoa, I'm going to become a Christian." So what is it that accounts for that difference? It has to be something subjective, something internal to the subject. So the way to think about evangelization properly speaking, not just apologetics, but like helping people in the conversion process is to think of yourself as collaborating with the spirit that work in the person you're talking to. And that collaboration can be a short-term thing. It can be a very long-term thing. So a Gustin's conversion process, for example, is stretched out over a decade, more than a decade. But different people factored into that in different ways at different times. So it's been said that relationships actually are the best context for these kinds of things. It's when you're with friends, whom you trust, and who trust you, where there's a kind of people's guard is generally down, they're maybe not as defensive. They'll be more predisposed to listen. But you're right, nothing's going to bring a person to believe in absolute truth, the testimony of absolute truth, except a proportionate principle. And that proportionate principle can only be something interior. Yeah, that's right. Please listen to the truth. For me, I'm part of my review with expressions around this. It makes me feel a bit of a good sense. Well, I've tried to believe, done my best, perhaps I've even seen some of the healing users. Right. But I never felt anything about how I try it. Yeah. It must not be true. Yeah, I mean, just to-- yeah, I mean, I don't know what to say about that, except to say that feelings are not truth indicators by themselves. That might be one place to start. Yeah, that might be just one place to start. That's going to require helping a person in a very particular set of circumstances. What was the form of the faith that you were raised with? There's going to be a lot of straw men lurking there. You've got to find out all the straw men, inversions of the doctrine, and do a lot of untangling of a history there. We should move on to the next objection. We're going to have a Q&A panel later. I put the problem of evil on here because you are going to face the problem of evil in terms of people raising it up against you. It's still probably the most common objection or one of the most common objections to the rationality of faith. The coin is himself raises it and is argument in his article on the existence of God and the sumo, the alloje. Aquinas formulates what is today called the deductive version of the argument. If God existed, there would be no evil in the world. But there is evil in the world, therefore God doesn't exist. Now Aquinas has a simple answer to that that he gets from St. Augustine. Sometimes I just call it Augustine's principle, which is God draws good out of every evil. I think you should just take that principle and sit with it. Aquinas realizes if God exists and if evil occurs, it must be that God draws good out of it. Okay? God draws good out of every evil. Now let's stop. We could think about this for a long time. We could have, I had a whole 15 week seminar on the problem of evil. We can go on this forever. But when we say God draws good out of every evil, that's without qualifications. The good that he draws out of it could be visible. It could be invisible. It could be accessible to us or inaccessible to us. It could be in this life. It could be in the next life. It could be any one of those things. Okay? So it's not like if God necessarily draws an empirically verifiable good that we can experience in this life. Not necessarily. It's just that God draws good out of every evil. So somehow in the end, every evil will have this good drawn from it. Okay? And that's what really, that really in a sense sets up for the next one because a lot of people realize, okay, that principle by itself might take out the deductive version. Calvin planning is very famous for having provided what has been a very widely received refutation of the deductive version. You just suppose there's a possible world in which these evils happen, but all kinds of goods come out in such a way that in the end everything is justified. I mean, okay, that's one possible world. Okay? So all it takes is one possible world and the deductive version falls apart. Okay? Again, people will inevitably say, okay, fine. You say if God exists and he draws good out of every evil, it follows that all the evil in the world is justified. It has some good, that's drawn from it or will be drawn from it. That just seems very, very, very unlikely. Therefore, it's very, very, very unlikely that God exists. So is this second argument that inductive version? This was the one that my old professor's favorite the most. If God existed, every evil would be justified. But probably there's at least one evil. That's not just it. Meaning, can't draw sufficient good out of it. And you've got to be very careful in dealing with this because people can drop in your lap and say something like, what about the Holocaust? And you can get yourself into the business. Don't walk into this trap. Just don't walk into the trap, right? There's a major trap there where you walk and you say, all kinds of good things have come. That's a rhetorical loser, okay? So it's better to say, look, human beings are not competent to assess the goods that could potentially be drawn from all the evils in the world. And infinitely wise, God, he alone is competent to assess that. So in other words, you and I are not epistemically qualified to assert premise two of this argument. That's the quick answer to the objection. Given the limits of our reason, the comparative field of data, I mean, it's just, it's crazy to think we're competent enough to assess that, okay? That's the response to the, now I suppose I could open the floor. So, I'm going to go to the problem of evil. But if we go there, it's just going to be a long time. So maybe we should just keep on rolling to the next one. Yeah, because we're going to have a panel later. If people really want to bring it up, we can do that. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Okay, okay, so let's just go through the last ones. They're quicker. So far, the ones I've brought up, really, there's a lot of rational interplay there. So we're going back with giving and receiving reasons and trying to make sense of the world. But sometimes I get the impression that large numbers of people have given up on using reason in that way to try to make sense of the world. And we've just gotten to a point where there's kind of emoting or other such things that leave it all behind. So a lot of people have more dismissive forms of arguments. We can call the progress objection. Once upon a time, people did not understand the universe and they posited gods to explain things. They appealed to their rewards and punishment to control people. But through the advancement of science and understanding, we know better now. In other words, humanity, the myth of progress, we've made all this progress. And now we just know it's like a religious worldview's false and basically, scientism or something like it is true, just through progress. And to me, that's a very large scale kind of wand waving and magic wand. Wave the magic wand of progress or progress in understanding now we just know that. There are much more sophisticated and elaborate forms of the argument. The argument from the success of science can be spelled out, premise, premise, premise. And what you're there, I think, to realize what you're up against. This is not just like a syllogism or an argument. This is the assertion of a whole culture over and against another one. It's like the city of man, like in August, here's this world that we've built. It's a world of science, the world of technology, the world of, and we've kind of advanced this through our efforts over the last several hundred years. It's the most sophisticated explanation of reality ever, ever asserted. And basically, that's where we're going to take our stand over and against your religious kind of thinking. So do you see that this is really like the tip of a massive iceberg where there's like really one city against them like another? That's why we're going to get into that more tomorrow. But we've got to have some kind of quick responses to this. So we'll need to talk about that maybe on the panel. And then lastly, the Christianity is evil objection. And this seems to me, maybe the most common, but you tell me. So look at the first sentence. Christianity is blameworthy for blank insert bad thing here. And by blameworthy, it can be any one of a number of claims. Christianity or the church is responsible for this? Christianity and the church was a major contributing factor for this? Or at the very least Christianity existed at a time when this was going on and did not do anything to oppose it or did not sufficiently oppose it. Therefore, it's blameworthy in this, like maybe looser sense, but still blame. And then you can assert, or insert whatever you want, anti-Semitism. It's been said that Christianity has fermented anti-Semitism. Look at all the programs down through the ages, etc. The condemnation of scientific inquiry with Galileo, my old professors used to really rail about Giordano Bruno. And that was like he was a go-to figure. The inquisition, colonialism, and the oppression of peoples is kind of taken as a given that Christianity was just imposed on the Philippines or on the Central America, South America, etc. Even though the historical facts are otherwise slave trade. Very few people, of course, know about the role that Thomas and Dominicans played in the opposition to the slave trade. Our Tolo Mede las Casas and his work with the Spanish tomas in trying to oppose the slave trade. People don't know about that, but they've gotten in their textbooks growing up that Christianity facilitated and approved the slave trade, etc. AIDS in Africa, that's a big one. The oppression of women and the oppression of LGBTQ, that's just the latest in a long and very ancient argument that goes back at least to the days of, all to the days of the apostles. All right, so those are the common objections to Christian faith. And are we done, we have time for Q&A, or is that it? We're scheduled to start the, why don't we go like three or four minutes five for Q&A to take breaks? I'll come back to the panel and we'll have more Q&A. Okay, let's do it. Could you just talk about how you would respond to something like a thing, a position or, I mean, could you or Sarah come on here that I would know how to respond to this? Yeah, right, these are hard because you actually have to be up on the topics historically. So the truth is that there's been in recent decades a lot of new history and historical studies of the Inquisition. And it turns out that the picture that was painted of the Inquisition throughout the 19th and 20th century, a lot of that stems from Spanish, polemics against, or just anti-Spanish polemics by other people and other, you know, empires and whatnot. Okay, so a lot of historians have done digging and they've gone looking at the Inquisition and they've done a lot of revising the whole thing. And it turns out that the Inquisition did not operate in the ways that it's stereotypically purported. You have operated, there was like rules of evidence, there was defense available to the person. There was all kinds of, it followed procedural principles that were much different than what. The use of torture was not nearly as extensive as was previously thought, the number of executions, was not nearly as extensive as previously thought. In other words, it's been a kind of mythic, it was blown up into mythic proportions and that myth is still in the process of being undone and revised as we get back to actual records and facts. So I would respond to that by saying there's an ongoing project of historical research but the trend of the last three decades has been to see that the Inquisition is not nearly anything at all like what we previously thought it was and we're still learning more about what it actually was. [ Inaudible ] Yeah, these are exactly the kinds of considerations that are being advanced by and the new historical research. [ Inaudible ] Yes. [ Inaudible ] Right. [ Inaudible ] Yeah. [ Inaudible ] Yeah. [ Inaudible ] Yeah. Okay. We'll come back for more. 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