Answers for an Atheist (Part VII)

I'm continuing my series of posts responding to Hemant "The Friendly Atheist" Mehta. You can find his original video here, the most recent post in my series here and my first post here.

#29 Does God speak to you?

Good question and a tough one to answer. I believe He has spoken to me directly at least once although I admit I can't be sure.

Most protestants, from what I can see, fall into two camps on the "God speaking to people" question. On the one hand, there are those who believe that God stopped directly speaking to people when the last apostle died or when the last book of the New Testament was written. My problem with this view is that I see no real evidence for this position in the Bible.

On the other hand, there are those who seem to believe that a Christian should expect God to be constantly speaking and giving personal revelation to them. The objection to this is pretty obvious, God can't really be behind all the many contradictory messages that people think they are receiving from Him. I once had a conversation with a woman, a member of such a group, who told me that her boy friend had recently broken up with her because (he believed) that God had told him to that he wasn't ready to be in a relationship and wouldn't be for some time. Less then a fortnight later "God told" the same young man to start a relationship with another girl and, in less than a month "God told" him to propose to her. Now, I hope it's reasonably obvious that, unless we assume that God was either mistaken or deliberately giving bad advice, then God could not actually have been giving all of these messages.

Catholics take something of a middle ground here. We accept that God can and does continue to speak to His people, but we tend to be wary of the claims that expect such revelations to be constant. Fortunately for us, we believe that God has given us a reliable guide in the form of the Church hierarchy which Christ has established. Therefore a Catholic who believes that God is speaking to him or her is best advised to approach a reliable priest and ask his opinion.

Our example here should be St. Theresa of Avila. St. Theresa is one of the great mystics in history and believed herself to have been directly spoken to by God many times throughout her life. It is significant, however, that St. Theresa never directly acted on these messages without first consulting with her confessor/spiritual director.

I want to close by stressing what I am and am not saying here. Obviously I don't imagine any atheist, on reading this, is going to be convinced of the truth of Catholicism. I what I do hope I can show, however, is that a belief in a Church hierarchy, established by God and empowered to teach for Him, at least gives those who believe God has directly spoken to them a meaningful structure to evaluate whether it really comes from God.

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.

 

A (Hopefully) Final Comment on the Tuam Matter

 Yesterday this article was drawn to my attention. The article makes a number of good points placing the tragedy in its proper context and pointing out that there is still much that we don't know. Another good article on the matter can be found here.

As the friend who pointed these articles out to me rightly noted, there has been a rush to judgement on this issue and, as I confessed last week, I too was guilty of that. It's also helpful to note that problems of this kind were by no means peculiar to Catholicism and I think that the author of the Telegraph article makes a good point about the way certain people react to such acts by Catholics versus those committed by Muslims.

Having said all that, there are still hard truths in this matter for Catholics to face up to. There may yet be much that don't know but we know enough to know that a culture existed which allowed serious injustices to happen against unwed mothers and their children.

We can point out that protestants and other institutions were as bad as Catholic ones. We can point to the surrounding culture; that's all useful as context, but, as a defence of the Church it will only go so far. We Catholics claim to have the fullness of the Gospel, we have the guidance of what we believe to be an infallible magisterium and we have grace of the sacraments. We should be doing better than everyone else. If the best we can say is that we were no worse than others, then we need to remember Christ's words that "to whom much is given, from him much will be expected." (Luke 24:18).

 Blaming the surrounding culture will also only go so far. This is 1950s Ireland we're talking about. The Church was very influential in that culture. If aspects of that culture were unjust, what was the Church doing to confront and change the culture? Where were the letters from the Bishops warning that, while fornication is a sin, the culture that treated being an unwed mother as the worst possible sin was closer to the spirit of the Pharisees than to Christ? Where were the priests warning from the pulpit that those who treated illegitimate children as though they were somehow guilty of their parent's sins was to oppress orphans, one of the four sins that cries to Heaven for vengeance?

Further Reflections

This morning, I wrote this post responding to news reports of a horrible discovery in Ireland. I was pleased to read this, by Caroline Farrow which makes the strong case that the picture is nowhere near as bad as first reports might have indicated. For this I am thankful to God and if I, myself, was too quick to believe the worst, I must ask God and my fellow Catholics' pardon for that.

The fact remains, however, as Farrow herself acknowledges, there was a culture, a culture to some degree fostered by the Church, in which real injustice to women who fell pregnant out of wedlock and, even worse, to their children was not merely done but was made to seem virtuous.

In his excellent book, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote about the way in which individual Christian virtues, stripped of their proper place within the over-all moral life, can become monstrous. As I said a few weeks back the essence of the virtues is that they are those habits which help us to live our life to its fullest. For this to happen, however, each virtue needs to fit within the overall context of a virtuous life, taken outside  of this context, it is easy for a single virtue to become demonic. As the old scholastic maxim put it "corruptio optimi pessima est" - the corruption of the best is the worst.

Catholic blogger, Mark Shea gives, what seems to me to be an excellent discussion of a culture where chastity, which, let me be clear, is a real virtue, was elevated above virtues like justice and charity.

Faced with this, other words of Chesterton seem highly apropos:

O God of earth and altar,
bow down and hear our cry,
our earthly rulers falter,
our people drift and die;
the walls of gold entomb us,
the swords of scorn divide,
take not thy thunder from us,
but take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
of honor, and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether
the prince and priest and thrall,
bind all our lives together,
smite us and save us all;
in ire and exultation
aflame with faith, and free,
lift up a living nation,
a single sword to thee.

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

I was hoping to write something more on apologetics stuff today, then I read this story. (Trigger Warning: The article discusses some pretty disturbing stuff) I don't particularly want to comment on it, but I feel like I have to.

I'm (obviously) Catholic. I also belong to the school of thought within the Church that could broadly be described as traditionalist. I prefer, when possible, to worship according to the pre-Vatican II liturgical forms, I try to observe other, traditional forms of discipline like meatless Fridays, and I regard the way in which most of the old orders of nuns abandoned the habit is one of the great cultural tragedies of human history.

We traditionalists have a tendency to get awfully nostalgic about "the good old days" before the council when the mass was in Latin, nuns wore habits and everyone knew what a good Catholic was supposed to believe and do. I can even remember one well-meaning friend of mine posting on FaceBook a comment to the effect that all the Church's problems started with the new mass and, if we had only stuck with the mass in Latin, all would be well in the Catholic World.

Except, as this story makes clear, the good old days were not really all that good. Now, don't get me wrong, I would not wish to replace one caricature of a Catholic golden age with an equally false caricature of some terrible dark age. I'm sure that the first six decades of the last century were, like every era of human history, an era of saints and sinners, an era when many people tried their best  to do the right thing, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

But we need to be honest. A Church in which injustices of this kind could happen is a Church in which something was horribly wrong. In his classic novel "A Tale of Two Cities", Charles Dickens, while certainly no fan of the French Revolution, warned against the tendency to speak of the Revolution as if it had somehow come out of nowhere, as if the indifference of the nobility to the sufferings had done nothing to create circumstances ripe for such a revolt.

In a similar way, we Catholics, when we complain about the state of the world and the Church, when we decry increasing numbers of ordinary Catholics not listening to what the Church says, when we find ourselves in a situation where the culture around us is increasingly hostile to the Church and our message, we need honesty about the ways in which the Church we love has brought this judgement upon herself.

In some ways, the revelations in this story are nothing new. We already knew that the Catholic culture of the time, in Ireland at least, was one in becoming an unwed mother was treated as an unforgivable crime. We knew the way that, in addition to visiting these gross punishments upon women, the Church added stigma to the innocent children of such women.

Now, we discover that, in addition to stigmatising such innocents, it seems that children were malnourished to the point of death and then, there dead bodies were treated in a way that showed a horrific lack of respect for human dignity.

I have to pause and wonder about the "good Catholic folk" who created and sustained such a culture. I'm sure these people, at least some of them, read the Gospels, they surely all heard the Gospels preached to them at mass. They must surely have heard Christ's warning "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others." (Matt 23:23). Did none of them pause to reflect on the way in which the culture they were reinforcing perfectly fitted Christ's description?

Catholics, but especially traditional ones, need to accept the sobering reality of the past and the sins of the Church. And we need to call upon Our Lord for His mercy.
 

Of Infalability and Green Cheese

Brendan Burnett, a friend of mine, an Evangelical Protestant and a fellow blogger, has an argument which, he believes, disproves the authority claims of both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. The argument can be found here.

Brendan attempts to refute the claims of those Churches which claim infallible authority to interpret the Scriptures with a Reductio ad Absurdum. For those unfamiliar, this is a form of logical argument, sometimes called a "proof by contradiction". The essence of the argument consists in assuming, for argument's sake, that a given proposition is true, demonstrating that said assumption leads to a contradiction and, thereby showing that the initial assumption was false.

Brendan does a small thought experiment and asks us to imagine a possible scenario:

Imagine, then, that the Church says that John 3:16 means: “The moon is made of green cheese.” Imagine that all the respected, godly, knowledgeable church fathers and leaders forever since the first, second and third etc. centuries AD have always believed and interpreted John 3:16 as meaning “The moon is made of green cheese.” Church today holds it. Holy Tradition has always held it.

In such a circumstance, Brendan, argues, either Roman Catholic or Orthodox claims about the authority of the Church to interpret Scripture would lead to the conclusion that John 3:16 does teach that the moon is made out of green cheese. However, as Brendan quite correctly argues, John 3:16 is very clearly not saying anything about the composition of the moon but is, rather, a statement about God's love for humanity and His salvific purpose. From this, Brendan draws the conclusion that, Catholic and Orthodox beliefs about the infallibility of the Church logically lead to absurdity and are, therefore, proven false.

To clarify what he is and isn't arguing, Brendan writes:

Now for this argument to work, I don’t have to show that there is some real instance of it in the world. All I need to illustrate is that there exists some possible, logically consistent situation, which implies some absurd counterfactual (counter-to-fact proposition) from the premise, “Whatever the Church teaches about Scripture is true.” This proposition would be true if the facts turned out a certain way, This turns out quite easy to do.

The reason this argument may seem logical is because of an ambiguity in the term "possible" in the second sentence. Possible can mean a few different things in different contexts.

Some metaphysicians and logicians use possible simply to mean that given proposition has nothing that makes it logically absurd, it is true in some possible worlds. In this sense, it is possible that Julius Caesar died of old age and Brutus remained his faithful friend until death, since there is nothing about the essential nature of Caesar that logically required him to die of assassination at his former friend's hand.

On the other hand, the word "possible" may refer to real, concrete possibilities in the actual existing world. In this sense it is not possible that Julius Caesar died by any means other than assassination since, all the evidence clearly shows that that's the way he died.

Now, if, in the argument above, Brendan means "possible" in the first sense, true in some possible world, then I'll grant that his fathers and councils teaching John:316 is about moon cheese scenario is possible. I deny, however, that this proves what he thinks it does. To the best of my knowledge, no Catholic or Orthodox theologian has ever claimed that an infallible Church must exist in all possible worlds, as if God was somehow logically bound to operate in this way. If somebody ever did make such a claim, Brendan's argument might (I say might, I'd still have some issues) help to refute them. This, however, tells us nothing about what is and isn't the case in the world as it actually is.

On the other hand, if by, "possible" Brendan is talking about concrete possibilities in the actual world, then I'll agree, if you could prove the possibility of the Church teaching that John 3:16 is about moon cheese, then you would have disproven the Church's claims to authority. The problem here is that, a thought experiment is not, by any stretch of the imagination, enough to demonstrate such a real possibility.

Brendan then attempts to write his argument out formally. For those of you not familiar with philosophy and/or formal logic, what follows may be a little technical and difficult to follow. I'll simply say that I've already made clear my principle objections to his argument, what follows need only interest those concerned with the technicalities.

He writes:

P: Whatever the Church says about Scripture is true.
Q: The Church says that John 3:16 means ‘The moon is made of green cheese.’
R: John 3:16 means ‘The moon is made of green cheese.’

(1) If whatever the Church teaches about Scripture is true, then if the Church were to say that John 3:16 means ‘The moon is made of green cheese’, then John 3:16 really would mean ‘The moon is made of green cheese.’
(2) But the text of John 3:16 cannot possibly mean ‘The moon is made of green cheese.’
(3) Therefore, John 3:16 would not mean ‘The moon is made of green cheese’ even if the Church said that it did.
(4) Therefore, the proposition ‘Whatever the Church teaches about Scripture is true’ is false.

I assume (1) and (2) are premises, and I accept them both. (3) follows necessarily from (2). (4) However, does not directly follow from any combination of (1) (2) and/or (3). The only way it would do so is with the mediation of some premise along the lines of "There exists a real possibility that the Church would say the John 3:16 is about green moon cheese"

Finally, Brendan tries to write it out symbolically.

(1) If P, then if Q then R.
(2) Not-R.
(3) Therefore, not-Q. (Therefore not-’if Q then R’)
(4) Therefore, not-P.
QED. Modus tollens.

And at this point he's pretty much lost me. (1) and (2) obviously correspond to their counterparts in his non-symbolic argument. However, at (3) he gives two statements "Therefore, not-Q" and then, in brackets, "Therefore not -'If Q thenR'". These statements are not equivalent to one another, neither is equivalent to (3) in his non-symbolic argument and I don't see how either is derived from his premises. (4) Does follow as a Modus Tollens from (1) and from the brackets part of (3), but that only helps him if he can explain how he derives (3) from his premises.

In short, this argument will not work.

P.S. I don't believe it's possible to derive the conclusion "Not P" from Brendan's premises. It is, however, quite easily to derive the conclusion "If Q then not P". Absent, however, some proof of at least the real possibility of Q this doesn't help his case.

For anyone who cares, the relevant proof is as follows:

1. P > (Q > R)       (Premise)
2.  - R                    (Premise)
3.  Q                      (Assumption)
4.  P                       (Assumption)
5.  Q > R                (> E; 1,4)
6.  -Q                      (M.T.; 2,5)
7. Q & -Q               (&I; 3,6)
8. - P                       (-I; 4- 7)
9. Q > -P                 (> I; 3-8) Q.E.D.