Answers For an Atheist (Part VI)

Hey everyone, sorry it's been so long. My hope is that I'll be able to get into better regular blogging habits and have more regular updates here. Anyway, I continue answering Hemant "The Friendly Atheist"  Mehta's "78 Questions for Christians." The original post in my series can be found here and my most recent post here. I should add that a lot of the questions I'll be addressing in this post deal with the same basic issues as questions I've already addressed, so my answers will be reasonably short and accompanied with links to previous posts.

#18 What matters to God more: The quantity of people praying or the quality of their prayers?

The love and sincerity with which they pray; I assume that's what you mean by 'quality'.

#19 If quantity matters, shouldn't the most popular team always win the Super Bowl?

This question is not applicable, given my answer to the last question.

#20 If quality matters, why do people you love sometimes die no matter what you do?

I don't know. I really wish I did, but I don't. I go into this in more detail here. This raises the question of why bother praying if it all comes down to God's will, which I discuss here.

#21 Is it possible that your prayers have no supernatural effect and only serve to make you feel better?

I believe God has promised to hear and respond to our prayers and I believe He keeps His promises. However, even without that promise, I believe prayer would still be worth while, see the last link I gave for my reasons.

#22 Would you ever admit it if that were true?

If I was presented with good reasons.

#23 Is there anything in your life that makes you doubt God's existence?

Nothing that causes rational doubts.

#24 How would your life change if you had serious doubts about God's existence?

Since my religion is the essential guiding principle of my life, it would change in more ways than I could count.

#25 Was Jesus white?

No, and I really have no idea what the point of this question is.

#26 Why does God seem more likely to answer the prayers of a talented athlete than a starving child overseas?

I don't believe He does, although if you are asking why He allows the prayers of a starving child for food to go unanswered, see above.

#27 Why does God seem to hate Africa?

He doesn't, although if you are asking why He allows evils like extreme poverty to be so much more prevalent in Africa than Western Europe of North America, again, I don't know, but see my previously linked to comments on why I don't think I need to know.

#28 If a group of people came from (say) Africa to your community with the intent to convert you to their tribal faith, would you listen to them and take them seriously, or would you just dismiss them because they don't believe what you already believe?

If it was my practice to simply dismiss anyone who doesn't believe what I already believe then I never would have become Catholic. I shifted from atheism to a sort of liberal Protestantism and from there to Catholicism in response to dialoguing and listening to other people's beliefs and reasons for believing.

Ok, so that's a lot of questions covered in one post but as I said, a lot of it was repetitive. His next group of questions deal with some different issues so, Deo volente, the next post will be more detailed.

 

Of Binding and Loosing

Does Matthew 18:18 contradict the Catholic interpretation of Matthew 16:18-19? That may be an obscure question, so let me explain. Anyone at all familiar with Catholic belief or interdenominational apologetics knows that Matthew 16:18-19 describes Christ making some specific promises to St. Peter. Of special relevance is Christ's promise that "I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you lose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (16:19 ESV). Catholics see this gift as giving special power to St. Peter for the governance of the Church.

One response from our separated brethren is to point to Matthew 18:18. Here, Christ is talking to a large group of His disciples and says "Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." This, it is argued, proves that St. Peter was nothing special, all believers receive the same powers to bind and loose that he received.

To answer the objection, and to understand what exactly these powers of binding and loosing are, we need to look at context. The immediate context of Matthew 18:18 is a discussion, by Christ, of how to deal with unrepentant sinners within the body of believers. The final remedy is that the sins of the unrepentant person be told to the church "And if he refuses to listen to the Church, let him be as a gentile or tax collector."

Two brief asides: first, I've heard a lot of people insist that because Jesus was so loving, He's never support anything like excommunication. Yes He would, and did; right here. Second, given that both of my parents were career employees of the Australian Taxation Office, the New Testament usage of "tax collectors" as a synonym for "worst sinners ever" always makes me smile.

 To return to my main point, however. First, it should be obvious from this context that the power to bind and loose refers to the power to discipline errant members of the church. I've heard protestants cite these verses as evidence that every believer has the power to 'bind' evil spirits. The truth, I'm afraid, is that it refers to a rather more prosaic matter, the power of the church to discipline its members. Second, given that verse 17 is talks about the authority of the church it makes no sense for the 'you' in verse 18 to be interpreted as "you - every individual" rather it should be seen as "you - the collective body of the church."

We are left then with Christ promising to His church collectively what He had previously promised individually to St. Peter. Does this contradict Catholic teaching? Not in the slightest. The Church does not see the Pope as some spiritual lone ranger exercising his powers out of the context of the wider body. Indeed, the fact that the same power should be given corporately to the church and individually to the church's head beautifully underlies what Vatican II called the collegiality of the Church. The fact still remains, that the power which Jesus collectively granted the Church He gave individually to St. Peter. That is the Petrine Primacy.

 

Answers For an Atheist (Part V)

Before I took my rather long break from blogging I had started on a series of posts responding to Hemant "The Friendly Atheist" Mehta's video "78 Questions For Christians." This is a (long overdue) continuation of said series. You can find the original post of the series here  and the most recent post here. This post will seek to build on previous posts in the series.

So, some more of Mr. Mehta's questions:

#13 Let's say you have an amputated limb, would prayer ever bring it back?
#14 If you've heard stories of amputated limbs ever growing back, how come there's never a camera around when that happens?
#15 How come no cameras are around when any miracle happens?
#16 If you had an exam coming up, which do you think would help more, prayer or studying for the test?
#17 If you prayed for me over YouTube right now, do you think I would know it somehow.

#16 is essentially the same issue as #9 and #12, my answer to those in my last post is my answer again here. As I said, I don't believe it's quantifiable.

My short answers to #13 and #17 are "Probably not, but it's possible" and my short answers to #14 and #15 are, "I don't know." Obviously, however, these demand longer answers.

This is, of course, all tied in with the problem of evil. If God loves us, why does He not automatically heal all illness and injury? If God wants all of us to know Him why does He not give us all the same undeniable experience He gave St. Paul on the road to Damascus or at least perform a few miraculous re-growths of amputated limbs on camera?

I hasten to add, I certainly believe in a God who has the power to regrow limbs in answer to prayer or to make Mr. Mehta (or anyone else) mystically aware that he is being prayed for, but, generally speaking, God does not do these things, why not?

As I said, I don't know, but how significant is my lack of knowledge?

In his Summa Theologica St. Thomas answers the question of how a perfectly good God can be reconciled with a universe in which evil exists by (quoting St. Augustine) arguing that God allows evil only in the knowledge that this will produce a greater good. (S.T. I Q 2. Art 3 rep. obj. 2). What good does God create that is great enough all these evils? What good does He create by allowing Mr. Mehta to not believe in Him when he could appear to him like He did to St. Paul?

As I said, I don't know, but I don't see that I should know. One of the obvious things about God is that, if He exists, He knows things I don't and is a lot smarter than me. Therefore, the fact that I don't understand some things He has or hasn't done is absolutely no reason to assume He has not good reason.

I understand why, on an emotional level, so many people find this unsatisfying, I do too. When I look at the world and see all the good people whose sincere prayers for life, health, an end to persecution go unanswered, I can't help crying out "God, WTF is going on!" I don't see anything wrong with this, indeed, the book of psalms as a number of what are called "problem psalms" whose main point is to demand an answer from God for why He allows such injustice.

While I understand, however, why the response is emotionally unsatisfying, I can't really see why it would be intellectually unsatisfying. If God exists He must be able to see factors, results, consequences of doing one thing and not another that are not obvious to us. There is surely, therefore, no reason not to believe that such a God could have perfectly good reasons for doing, not doing something, that are not at all obvious to us.
 

How Not to Read a Catholic Masterpiece

Every year a large number of people read J.R.R. Tolkien's great novel "The Fellowship of the Ring." but they read it in a rather odd way. They pay little, if any, attention to the character development, to the grand flow of the narrative or to the great themes of the work. They instead focus on certain specific episodes: Bilbo's party for example or the first meeting with Strider, and they treat these episodes almost as if they were short stories in their own right, giving little thought to how they fit into the novel as a whole. Having finished the book they consider that to be the end of the matter; some of them are aware that he wrote further books, but they've generally been assured that these are not worth reading. So, having finished 'Fellowship' they considered themselves to have read Tolkien, at least in any worthwhile sense.

Ok, confession time, the above is all false. To the best of my knowledge nobody has actually read Tolkien in this way. It is, however, a popular way of reading a Catholic writer comparable to Tolkien, namely Dante Alihegri. As I assume most readers realise, Dante wrote a great trilogy of narrative poems: The Inferno, The Purgatorio and The Paradisio, collectively known as The Divine Comedy (comedy here being used in a rather different sense than the modern one.) These days, however, Dante is normally thought of as the author of the Inferno, the number of people who have read or want to read the Inferno is far greater than those with any interest in the other two works. I've even heard well instructed Catholics argue that the Inferno is the part worth reading. This, to my mind, is a travesty. The comedy as a whole is not only a literary masterpiece but has a number of profound things to say about morality, free will, happiness, sin, redemption and a wide range of other topics and the Inferno is actually the least rich part of  the whole. As Dorothy Sayers notes, the Inferno necessarily has the least to say about these topics since the people whom Dante meets in hell have lost the good of the intellect.

It is also worth noting as Sayers does, that this preference of readers for the inferno is a product of modernity. There is no evidence of any general preference for the Inferno prior to the nineteenth century. Admittedly, the fact that a view is new does not prove it false, in this case, however, I think it highlights an important point; the preference for the Inferno is a symptom of a cultural inability to appreciate long narrative poems. Our general experience these days is with short poms, by short I don't necessarily mean haikus, for purposes of this discussion, a poem of a few pages length can still be considered short, but we generally do not read or write the epics, the grand narrative poems of lengths equal to a modern novel.

As C.S. Lewis notes in his Preface to Paradise Lost, a great many modern people now attempt to read great narrative poems as if they were short works. This, I think, is what a lot of us try to do with Dante, trying to read each episode as though it were it's own short poem. The Inferno can, in a sense, be read this way, the Paulo and Francesca part or the descriptions of various torturers being visited on various popes can be treated like a story in their own right. Even with the Inferno, however, a lot of what Dante is trying to say will be lost. You cannot, however, read the latter two works like this; the only way to enjoy the Purgatorio, or, still more, the Paradisio is with a focus on the themes of he work as a whole.

This is a pity because the Comedy, the whole thing, is a great work both of Catholic literature and of Catholic theology and philosophy, entirely worthy of comparison with Tolkien and I think a greater familiarity with the work would be an important part of a restored Catholic Culture.

This raises the question of how to get over our culture's bias against long poems. Here's my advice, first, if you are Catholic, read the Comedy, the whole thing. Second, read it in a version with a good commentary, I recommend the Sayers version, which should be available through Penguin. Third, on your first reading, almost try to forget that you are reading a poem, think of it as a novel which just happens to be written in rhyme. Obviously, the Comedy is not a work of prose and reading it as if it were will lose something, but I think a first reading will be more fruitful if done this way.

Dr. Kreeft's Bad Case for God (Part I)

Hey, I know it's been a while. You can blame my lack of posting mostly on my health which has been up and down a lot (please pray.) I was inspired to jump back into blogging today when someone posted a video by prominent atheist 'AronRa' responding to this video by prominent Catholic philosopher and apologist Peter Kreeft. Now, I have to say, I wasn't impressed by AronRa's efforts and plan (Deo volente) to do a post explaining why, but I wasn't impressed by Dr. Kreeft either. Dr. Kreeft is, as I said, a fairly prominent Catholic figure and lectures in philosophy at a Catholic University, you'd therefore expect him to have a reasonable grasp of the positions of the Church's most famous philosopher, St. Thomas Aquians. Regrettably, he actually helps perpetuate a number of misconceptions about St. Thomas' position, misconceptions that other Thomists like Edward Feser have been working hard to dispel.

After some brief preliminaries, Kreeft tells us that "...a good place to start [in rationally proving God's existence] is with an argument by Thomas Aquinas..." Actually, as St. Thomas would be quick to point out, this argument actually comes from Aristotle, but that's a minor point. More seriously, Kreeft tells us that that the argument begins with the observation that things move (they do) and that motion must have a cause (it must). So far so good but Kreeft then goes on to speak of the need for a first mover being like a first domino, causing the other dominoes in a line to fall. When attempting to give an explanation of why this cannot go back indefinitely Kreeft gives the an arument that the material universe has been demonstrated by science to have a beginning.

That is not St. Thomas' argument. When St. Thomas speaks of God as "First Mover" or "First Cause" he is not speaking about being first in a temporal but in a hierarchical series of causes. To explain the difference, consider a series of dominos. The first domino knocks the second one over which knocks the third over and so on. If the line of dominoes is long enough, then further dominos could be knocking each other over long after the first domino has stopped doing anything. In fact, with a line sufficiently long, you could wait for the first domino to knock over the second, pick that first domino up and throw it in the fireplace to be burned, and the rest of the dominos in the sequence would keep on falling. This is an example of what Thomists call a "temporally ordered" or "accidentally ordered" sequence.

In contrast, imagine a book, laying on top of a table, which is laying on top of a second story floor. The table is holding up the book, the floor is folding up the table, the first story walls are holding up that floor and the building's foundation is holding up the whole thing. In this circumstance the foundation is the first cause of everything being held in place in a very different way to that first domino, if the basement were to be removed from its place, the whole edifice would collapse. This is what Thomists call a "hierarchically ordered" or "essentially ordered" sequence of causes.

For Aquinas, God is the first mover in the same way that the foundation of that hypothetical building is the first cause of everything in the building being where it is. Dr. Kreeft makes very clear that he is not using St. Thomas' argument when he rhetorically asks (a little bit after the two minute mark in his video) "But what if the universe was infinitely old?" St. Thomas' answer is that it makes no difference; even if the universe were infinitely old, at any given moment God would need to exist to underlie whatever motion  is happening in that moment. In the same way, even if, hypothetically, we imagine an infinitely old building, the foundation would still need to exist, moment to moment, to hold the whole thing up.

This is not, however, the answer Dr. Kreeft gives. He attempts to give a scientific argument for the impossibility of an infinitely old universe. I will (deo volente) explain in a future post why I find his argument unconvincing, but for now I will just note that, whether good or bad, his argument is not the argument of St. Thomas.

As a brief aside, at about the one minute, thirty second mark, Dr. Kreeft declares that "Science will never find the first cause, that's no knock on science it simply means that a first cause lies outside the realm of science." I happen to agree with this statement but my reason for thinking this lies in a fairly lengthy bit of reasoning which considers what qualities can be shown to be necessary for a first cause to have. Absent any explanation of this, Dr. Kreeft's claim sounds like a dogmatic assertion. I can well imagine an intelligent listener, unfamiliar with the theistic philosophical tradition hearing this and thinking something like "Why, when science has identified so many other causes, would we imagine that it can't find the first? This is simply God of the gaps reasoning."