I have a couple of family members through marriage that grew up Catholic and attended Catholic schools. Personally I think Catholic schools are wonderful, but it is well known within the Catholic church that a high percentage of children who go to Catholic schools fall away from the Christian faith in adulthood. In fact, I heard a question regarding this problem addressed by Father John Riccardo on a Catholic radio channel recently that I listen to when I’m at my current customer site in Des Moines, Iowa. Father Riccardo’s primary explanation was that Catholic parents are not effectively modeling committed Christian lives. This may be the case, but I would also argue this has been an issue going back generations due to the way the gospel is being preached, which is supported from some of my readings of the brilliant Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft. Father Riccardo is an incredibly gifted catechetical priest who teaches consistently that Christianity is based on both faith and intellect. So I would expect that adults who gravitate to his parish are more serious about their faith and are cognizant they need to model their Christian faith to their children as well as teach them why there are compelling reasons to believe in Christianity (viz., through historical testimony, archaeological evidence, and cosmology).
This post is not in any way meant to be a knock on doctrinal distinctions of Catholic teaching or the manner in which Catholicism is taught, but what is interesting to me are the parallels in the thinking of my two Catholic relatives regarding God, and religion in general. Basically, the conclusion both have come to is that the Catholic church is corrupt, and terribly harsh in it’s teachings, thus there is necessarily little to no truth content in the Catholic message. Where these two differ is that one believes in God, but believes strongly faith is 100% blind, while the other claims to be an agnostic leaning atheist. Unfortunately, both have fallen into moral relativism because they now don’t believe there is such thing as objective truth or objective moral values or duties. I see very little logic in their implied view that the Catholic church should be perfect, when standard Christian teaching makes clear that all of humanity is fallen. The church teaches that we should be not be looking to men, but should instead be looking to Christ, so my two relatives are completely missing (or perhaps avoiding) what Christianity plainly teaches.
Now my “blind faith” relative, due to his Catholic upbringing, has a strong sense of what he calls the “common good” even though he cannot, or won’t, articulate any objective definition for it. This, however, is only a vestige of his Catholic faith, as Catholicism is decidedly Thomistic, and one key tenet of St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching centers around the common good within the context of natural law. Yet I don’t see how my “blind faith” relative can adopt a concept of the common good while at the same time declaring that all truth content of the Christian faith is false. This is logically inconsistent, in my view. He seems to have distilled the entire gospel down to being “good,” as if there is nothing more that is required. If that is all that is required, then obviously there is no need to spread the gospel, and there was no reason for Christ to die on a cross for our sins. Now this is not to say that my blind faith relative is immoral in anyway, as he is an upstanding and productive citizen in a position of authority. It’s just that his worldview is only consistent with a Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest ethic, since God has no causal role in an infinite, physical world as he construes it. He has an excellent sense of right and wrong, as well as the moral “oughts” that flow from his concept of the common good, yet it is hard to imagine how he can consistently use the word “ought” if there is no objective standard on which to base the “ought.”
As to my agnostic relative, he is currently reading Stephen Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design. In this book, Hawking declares that since universes can be created out of nothing, and since physics is “complete” (i.e., physics explains all phenomena), then “God is not necessary.” Yet can Hawking make this claim? Well my agnostic relative appeals to the brilliance of Hawking in physics, yet ignores that while Hawking may indeed be a brilliant physicist, this does not automatically bestow the title of philosopher as well. Specifically, when Hawking proclaims that universes are popping into existence all the time, he has not a single empirical example to demonstrate his assertion, which is a purely mathematical construct. Further, even if universes were to pop into existence, then how can he say that God had no role in creating the physical laws that would allow such phenomenon? Let’s say that BMW created a 5-series that could reconstruct itself every three years, providing me with the latest model (for a fee, of course). Could I argue with BMW that they are no longer necessary since the car can regenerate itself every three years with no involvement on their part? Hardly. On another note, if I were to ask Stephen Hawking if the writing of his book was purely based on physical laws, and not original thought, he would be forced to answer “Yes.” Sadly, this would mean that the book was written as the result of a causal chain leading back to the beginning of the universe 13.7 billion years ago, and that Stephen’s work is solely the product of a blind process.
I think the key problem for my kinfolk, as I see it, is since they don’t believe we can get to truth, they don’t see truth as something to be pursued. I believe that truth should be pursued, and see no particular reason to believe it cannot be accessed. In fact, my relatives are actually presuming the very thing that they deny. They both fly often, and I don’t guess either has shown up for a flight thinking it wasn’t true the flight was scheduled at the time they were told. Now they might argue there is truth only in “concrete” cases such as this, but I think they are mistaken to assert that there is truth in airplane departure times but there can be no truth in religious claims. A correct view, I think, would be that there can be truth or falsity in any propositional claim. Just as one can be wrong about the time a flight departs, one can be wrong about a religious claim, and the converse holds as well. Now it is true that some religious claims may be abstract, but in these cases we’re making epistemological claims based on our best evidences and logic, so they shouldn’t be dismissed any quicker than we might dismiss Hawking’s claims that there can be an infinite number of universes based purely on mathematical models.
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