Theology on Tap: "The Siren Song of Science"

Reflections

I gave the following talk in May.  I was horribly nervous, mostly because as I stood in front of the microphone and looked out into the crowd, I realized it was the first time I had publicly professed my faith.  But it was worth it, if only for the huge swell of calm that poured over me after I finished the talk.  This was a chance for me to form my ideas into something coherent, something understandable.

But it was also a chance for me to find my limitations.  My nervousness was not only a sign of being a novice, but also of being unconfident.  Why the lack of confidence?  Because in some parts I could only form a first-order approximation of what I wished to express, unaware of the secondary or tertiary meanings.  So for instance, when I wanted to talk about the inconsistencies in the Bible, I meant to say that there are passages in the Bible which do not easily agree with one another.  The finding of the empty tomb is the canonical example.  But I did not mean to suggest that the Bible is filled with incompatible passages, unable to be reconciled by anyone but the Catholic hierarchy.  I meant to imply only that finding the real meaning of the Bible is very difficult, so difficult, in fact, that many atheists see this as a sign that Christianity cannot be right, because it cannot put forth a coherent set of Biblical axioms.  But this very real difficulty is not troubling to most Catholics because of sacred Tradition.  I wanted to say this argument in as few words as possible, and so I called this difficulty "inconsistencies".  There is probably a better word.  

What this tells me is that I have to be more Bible literate.  I have to have a better appreciation of where my faith comes from.  So I have started to read Fr. Raymond Brown's Introduction to the New Testament again, beginning with the epistles of St. Paul.  Beginning with St. Paul is important, because, in my haste to reject Protestant Christianity, it is easy to have a distaste for St. Paul.

But what I also came to understand was that I have a fundamental hunger for philosophy, not the fake philosophy of the Internet age, but true metaphysical thought.  I want to know philosophy in the sense that it is the love of wisdom, a love of understanding.  I had begun this journey with St. Thomas Aquinas, who achieved the height of Medieval thought, but who drew upon Aristotle.  That leads me to Plato and Socrates.  In other words, I want a knowledge of classical thought.  So I am beginning to read Plato and Aristotle in that hope that, with this basis, I can feel more comfortable with my own understanding.  Again, I want to know where my faith comes from, and in many ways, it comes from the ancients.  The church often holds up Socrates as a man who, although pre-Christian, is in heaven.  I have a lot I can learn from him.

I. Introduction

Some of you here have a strong relationship with God.  Some of you may have come with no relationship with God or don't believe He exists.  Some of you may have come with ideas different from the Catholic understanding of God.  But there is something that all of us can probably agree on: if there is a god that exists, we would like to believe in that god, and if no gods exist, we would not like to be mistaken and needlessly believe in a false god.  Most of us probably also agree that no one has it all figured out.  Each of us is aligned and unaligned with reality in our own unique way.  Our intelligence is limited, but we cannot live life without claiming that some things are true and others are false, and therefore each of us will inevitably be wrong in our claims in some way.  In other words, our beliefs do not make reality.  Instead, we want to figure out what reality is so that we can align our lives to it.

With that in mind, we can ask a series of questions, 

• "Is there a God?" - If God doesn't exist, then this talk can be a lot shorter.

• "Does this God interact with the world?" - If God does exist, does He just sit up in Heaven and watch from above, or does He play a more active role?
• "What does this God mean for us?" - If God is actually present in the world, what does this mean for you and me?

For some of you, the answer to these questions might seem obvious.  Some people with a special grace (like St. Paul) suddenly feel the presence of God and immediately know Him.  But there are others who struggle to find God, and only by considering these tough questions stumble upon Him.  I am one of the latter type, so these questions are very important to me.

Tonight I want to take you through the journey I had to answer these questions, a journey in which I initially rejected God.  Now, I am in no way an expert on theology or God, if such a thing exists. I can speak only as a layman who has unexpectedly come to God and has barely begun to understand what that means.

---

II. Atheism

The first question I want to talk about is whether God exists.  When I came to Madison, I answered this question with a firm, "No."  And I would follow this up a statement like, "God doesn't exist, just as unicorns don't exist and trolls don't exist, just as there are no pots of gold at the end of rainbows, and just as, I'm sorry to spoil it for you, there is no Santa Claus."  And I would often turn the question around and ask, "What do you get by believing in God?"

    In order for you to understand how I came to this conclusion, I want to tell you some of the ideas I thought were convincing.  Why would a person deny that there is a God?

A.  Scientific arguments for atheism

In general, there are many reasons that a person may become an atheist.  A person may have experienced great suffering in the world.  They may have been personally injured by a parent or someone they associate with God, like a priest or a pastor.  They may have lived through some natural disaster convincing them that there is no room in the world for a loving God.  These are emotional arguments for disbelieving in God.  There are also intellectual or philosophical reasons for becoming an atheist.   One of the most popular types of philosophical atheism is based in scientific reasons.  If there is a disagreement between religion and science, and science is the winner, then atheism is the logical choice.  This was the reason I did not believe in God.

    Science gives us real knowledge about the world.  It is very difficult to deny that.  I wanted to weave myself into the fabric of this knowledge, and that is why I became an engineer and came to Madison for graduate school.  I wanted to be a part of real discovery.  The beauty of the university is that you get to learn from incredibly knowledgeable people, and the best make you feel like you are just as smart as they are.  Newton's laws become so plainly obvious that, given enough time, the rest of scientific knowledge must undoubtedly become just as obvious.  

But can science tell us about God?

i. Science and God

As an undergraduate in Texas, I was getting a chemical engineering degree, so that meant I was learning chemistry, physics, and math.  I started to read the popular books on these subjects.  I loved A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.  Here is a quote from the end of his book:

[I]f we discover a complete theory [of science], it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God. (p.191)

Here Hawking argues that when we finally understand the basis of physics, we force God into a smaller box.  Science, therefore, not only tells us what is true in the material world, but also something about the spiritual.  And as science is perfected, it explains more, and hence there is less room for spiritual explanations.  For example, whereas we used to think disease was caused by some evil force, we now know that it is caused by viruses and bacteria.  And rather than just praying to cure the sick, we can do something about it!

    I also read a book called Complexity, which shows that it is possible to find order in seemingly chaotic processes.  For example, think about a flock of birds, which seem to dart around at random.  You can simulate this behavior by giving the birds three simple rules: 1) don't run into each other, 2) don't get too far apart, and 3) try to match each other's speed.  None of the rules says, "form a flock."  The behavior emerges from the rules, and is therefore known as emergent behavior.  (Movies)  The same analysis can be applied to DNA formation, economics, and sociology.  I was convinced that we could analyze our morals this way too.  Each of us has an idea of what is good and bad, and as each of us interacts with one another, the morals of our society just emerge.  We don't need the Bible or God to give them to us; science is enough.

ii. Contradictions between science and religion

But there are also contradictions between between science and religion.  No where is this intersection so lucid than in the creation stories of the Bible, which clearly contradict what we know by science.  The only way to embrace both Genesis and evolution, then, is to rob one of its explanatory power.  But how can you continually affirm a limp or useless source of knowledge?

    I could, for convenience, weaken science or Biblical creation only partially.  Where they disagree, one could be declared winner.  Yet once I have taken that step, how could I disagree with an alternative theory that draws that line in a different place?  What makes me so special that I could feel comfortable knowing I was right?  For me, this was a direct path to relativism, because to adopt a weakened source of truth is to adopt them all.  The only way to be rational is to throw out one or the other, and I was not about to give up on science.  

So if God is real, shouldn't there be scientific arguments for God?

iii. Creationism and Intelligent Design

After I left for college, my parents began to rediscover their faith.  They are Presbyterian and had always been religious.  But they renewed their Christian identity and became more involved in church and studying the Bible.  They knew I had these questions regarding faith and science, so they sent me a publication called Answers in Genesis.  This publication argues that scientific truths like evolution, geophysics, astrophysics, and just plain physics are wrong.  Why?  Because they do not want to let science put God into that smaller box, a box they see as incompatible with the Bible.  Instead, they seek to find traces of the Biblical creation myth in the physical world.  They want to put science in a box, a box proclaiming that the Earth is 6000 years old and Noah's flood killed the dinosaurs.  This argument is known as creationism.
    I also became aware of the Intelligent Design movement, which is similar but tries to be more scientific.  Intelligent Design argues that there are some organisms or components of organisms too complex to have arisen through evolution or other naturalistic processes.  Therefore they can only be accounted for by a designer who formed them spontaneously.  For Intelligent Design, science is irreconcilably broken.

    I found both of these arguments horribly weak.  To embrace Biblical creationism required me to embrace an extra-scientific assumption: that the Bible was unquestionably literal.  To embrace Intelligent Design required me to suppose science is limited, but that idea is different than what we know by experience.  Everyday there are discoveries we once thought impossible.  Who was I to suppose I knew which things would always remain undiscoverable.  And as before, I didn't need the Bible or God, so what was the point?

B.  Converting to atheism

I saw a balance between science and religion.  Science, in its most skeptical form, requires all ideas to be questioned and all answers to be corroborated by good evidence.  On the religious side, there are ideas about God, spirituality, and morals.  Whatever evidence we have for God comes from an old book, or He is invoked as the creator of the universe.  We are often asked to believe suspicious miracles.  But His miracles do not look so miraculous anymore, because we have science.  Acts of God are just complex acts of physics.  It seems, then, that the balance is constantly tipping toward the science side, so why can't we, as rational human beings, just declare science the inevitable winner?  Why not disregard all of those extra religious arguments and instead use our energy toward understanding the real world?

    It was at this moment that I could no longer find a place for God.  I was helped along by atheists like Richard Dawkins, who try to get atheists to "come out", to realize it is OK to be an atheist and to let go of God.  And so I did.

    My intention in becoming an atheist was never to do harm to a certain faith or to rebel against a society or for any other vindictive reason.  It was an effort to rid myself of all superfluous beliefs and their unnecessary baggage.  I decided to strongly hold to the conviction that I would not believe anything that I could not see with my own eyes or understand with my own mind.  If there was a God, and I met him in heaven, I would merely ask him, "Where was the evidence?"

C. Living as an atheist

Some of you may find it impossible to understand how someone could live as an atheist.  Where is the meaning in the world?  What gets you up in the morning?  For me, the beauty of the world was enough.  The universe is simple enough to understand, yet complex enough to instill wonder.  But I was also infatuated with music, specifically classical music.  You can usually find me either listening to, discussing, or reading about music history and the lives composers.  Composers were like demi-gods to me, able to connect to some locked up part of humanity, not in a mystical way, but a very real way.  I didn't need God or religion to give my life meaning.
    And I held to these convictions firmly.  I had no trouble admitting I was an atheist to anyone, even to the girl I would marry, a Catholic.  We had many discussions, and I constantly challenged her beliefs. "What evidence do you have for God?"  "How can a God with omniscience judge the beings He creates?" "Why can't God be just one big metaphor?"  "And don't you know about all the contradictions and errors in the Bible?"  At one point we came within inches of breaking up over it, but somehow she maintained patience and love for me.  I did not, and still do not, understand this love, but it was in searching for it that I eventually stumbled upon God.

---

III. From Atheism to Deism

If I had never had this love in my life, I probably would have remained an atheist.  In our modern world, the problems with atheism are very difficult to find, but eventually I had to confront them.  So what are these problems?

A. Faith in progress

I believe that science is progressing toward a more complete understanding of the world, which contributes to new and better technologies.  The average life-span is constantly increasing and the average travel time around the world is decreasing.  It is difficult to argue that the human condition is not improving.  And as a reader of science fiction, so I naturally envisioned future civilizations in which the mysteries of death have been revealed and eliminated, war has been abolished, and the human mind has been unlocked.  I knew it was a fantasy, but I innately felt we were headed toward something like it.  This idea is the modern faith in progress.  I had a faith that humanity would eventually save itself from its problems.  There was no need for a savior God; we could do it on our own.

    But to make this argument requires us to forget about all of the terrible technologies that have been developed.  Understanding atomic fission has given us both nuclear power and atomic bombs.  In fact, it is very easy to recognize that our ability to kill others has far outpaced our ability to protect against weapons.  So each scientific discovery has a great potential to make our life better, but also to destroy it.  The discovery itself is neutral.  Faith in progress rests on faith in man.  We must not somehow believe that science itself is what causes progress toward a better world.

    Now this is not so much a problem with science as a problem with a particular interpretation of science, an interpretation to which I ascribed.  And it was the first domino to fall.  I remember the moment precisely.  My wife and I had decided to be married at St. Patrick's, so we started to attend mass there on Sundays.  At mass, Msgr. Holmes gave a homily summarizing Pope Benedict's encyclical, Spe Salvi, or Saved in Hope.  Msgr. seemed to be speaking directly to me.  Instead of placing our faith in man, which we know is fallible, we, as Christians, must place our faith in God.  This defines Christian hope.  I realized my error.  It was foolish to put so much faith in man.  My reaction was immediately, "If I am wrong about this, what else am I wrong about?"

    I felt part of the beauty I had ascribed to science was taken away from me.  There was no guarantee that my work as an engineer would be used for the benefit of mankind.  I realized there is no such thing as an atheist hope.  I began to seriously question what I believed and why.  By accident, I tripped over an argument for God.

B.  Russell's tea pot

As an atheist, I could not suppose that science would save the world, but I could at least find comfort in the fact that I didn't believe in superfluous things, like God.  I required evidence.  This argument is popularly known as Russell's tea pot.  Bertrand Russell argued he could assert that there was a tea pot some place between Mars and Earth so small that no telescope could detect it.  And given this assertion, no one would be required to believe in the tea pot, least of all worship it, because there is no real evidence, just assertion.  And notice that the tea pot cannot be shown not to exist.

    This argument is designed to show that if a thing cannot be proven or disproven to exist, the burden of proof falls upon those who assert its existence.  Hence, because God cannot be proven or disproven, the Christians, who assert his existence, must show that he exists.  But they cannot, so the atheist is acting only sensibly.

    If you say this argument is wrong, then every assertion is true until proven false.  You must believe in unicorns, UFOs, and telekinesis, because we cannot disprove these things.  Or, at least, if you believe in God, you have no recourse to say that such things do not exist, because you believe in an equally unproven thing.

    The weakness of this argument is apparent in its assumptions.  A sensible person, it argues, is one that does not believe anything until evidence is presented.  Yet what could be a more fragile assertion than love?  To be completely sensible, love becomes a contractual agreement, in which true love is measured by how certain requirements are met.  Love is reduced to its components, and if not verifiable, it is delusional.  To embrace Russell's argument is to give up on love itself.  But love did not hit at the heart of my atheism, because I believed that free thinking is the greatest human virtue.  And besides, maybe love is the exception; love without a little delusion is no fun.

    The strongest assumption of Russell's argument is that we can logically deduce reality from evidence, and that this deductive reasoning is true.  In a word, he assumes we have intelligence.  But one may ask the question, what evidence do we have for intelligence?  How do we tell the difference between sanity and insanity?  We can use only our intelligence to explore the question, but this is precisely the problem we wish to explain.  Using intelligence to explain itself at best produces a circular argument.  Therefore, brought to its logical conclusion, Russell's line of reasoning argues against the concept of human intelligence itself.
    Obviously, to be a scientist, you must suppose that you are a rational creature.  But to be an atheist and a scientist requires you to make an a priori assumption, "I have rationality" without evidence.  There must be something out there instilling the scientist with rationality, but what is this thing?  Whatever it is, it must be present to each sane man, and it cannot be physical.  To follow St. Thomas Aquinas, this thing is what everyone calls God.

    At this point there is a temptation to declare, "But of course, we have intelligence!"  Then what is wrong with the declaration, "But of course, there is a God?"  

Armed with this new understanding of who or what God is, I began to see the world in a different way.

C.  Seeing the world anew

If metaphysical concepts such as intelligence exist, then what about things like love?  As an atheist, I understood love as mechanical.  If you could stimulate the right chemical response, then you would fall in love: the checkbox theory of romance.  Needless to say, I was rather unsuccessful with girls.  Yet when I finally found love, I could not make sense of it.  My wife loved me in a way I could not understand, and I did not have to work to get her to love me.  She simply did.  I eventually realized I was faced with a dilemma, either I could try to search for an explanation, or, perhaps, love, of that soul connecting, storybook variety, actually does exist.

    Yet all of these arguments merely point to some metaphysical thing, instilling us with love and intelligence.  This concept is only a deistic god.  How do you get from that to the religious understanding of God, a God we must worship?

---

IV. Deism to Christianity

I now I want to move on to the second question, "Does God interact with the world?"  There is a difference between a God who merely resides in Heaven and one plays an active role in our personal lives.  If God is not actively present in the world, then we can safely disregard Him until we start talking about metaphysics with our friends.  In other words, He is an impractical God.

    But there are religions, particularly Christianity, that claim God is somehow manipulating the world, that he performs miracles and answers prayers.  This is a God who is a very real part of our life, not just some idea.  Is there room in the world for such a God?

A. Miracles

As a scientist, I had a problem with miracles.  Scientists test theories by conducting experiments which must be reproducible.  But if God is performing miracles, then how can we tell the difference between a new scientific discovery and a special act of God?

    As an atheist, it seemed that claims of miracles were, in fact, just bad scientific hypotheses.  If the Christians are right, and Mary had truly become pregnant as a virgin, then a doctor would be able to tell.  Likewise, all miracles could be measured, but we have yet to scientifically verify a single miraculous event.  So how can a scientist believe in miracles?  Isn't there a contradiction between science and the miraculous?

i. Creation - The big miracle

Let us first consider the biggest of all miraculous events, the Christian claim of God's creation of the universe.  And, for a moment, let us step outside of scientific arguments and think about this miracle abstractly.  St. Thomas Aquinas argues that it can be shown that God is the creator of the universe because he is the uncaused cause.  What does that mean?

    The immediate cause of my existence is my parents.  The cause of their existence is their parents.  And so on, until we must arrive at something that requires no cause: this is the uncaused existence.  This is God.

    But why can't causes just go back to infinity?  Consider Peter Kreeft's answer:

Suppose I tell you there is a book that you want, a book that explains everything. You ask me, “Will you give it to me?” I say yes, but I have to borrow it from my friend. You ask, “Does he have it?” and I say no, he has to borrow it from the library. Does the library have it? No, they have to borrow it from someone else. Well, who has it? No one actually has it, everyone borrows it. Well, then, you will never get it. And neither will anyone else.
(Kreeft, pg. 18)

Existence is like that library book.  If nothing has it innately, then nothing has it at all.  But why can't the universe be the cause of itself?  Because we know this isn't true from science.  Each instance of the laws of nature is link in a chain, like a string of dominos.  Yet without anything to push one over, none can fall.  This argument doesn't even imply there was a beginning in time, that there was a time zero.  Even an infinite string of dominos cannot fall by itself.

    So not only is there no contradiction between science and miraculous creation, science relies on this creation.  God breathes life into the laws of nature.

ii. Divine intervention

Yet miracles after creation are a different thing.  Why would God go to the trouble of creating the laws of nature, only to later break them?  Don't miracles contradict the laws of science?  No.  Why?  Because if God created the universe, then he is, at all times, our first cause.  He is everything's first cause.  Miracles are just those times for which God is both the first and immediate cause of an event.  No natural law is not harmed in the making of a miracle.

    So the virgin birth does not contradict the laws of science.  Mary, who was born of human parents, traces her existence through a chain of natural events, back to the beginning of creation, back to God.  Jesus, born of a miracle, traces his birth immediately to God.

B. What if the Bible was true?

Before my conversion, I did not understand these arguments, but had begun to have a sense that God was, indeed, a part of the world.  Almost unintentionally, I picked up a Bible, and turned to the Gospel of Matthew.  I wanted to know what is was like for my wife to read the Bible.  So I decided to pretend, just for curiosity's sake, that these stories were true.

    Surprisingly, the world did not end.  But a switch in my head had been irreversibly flipped.  At that moment I realized that if the miracles of Jesus were true, it did not contradict what we know.  In fact, if Jesus really was God and had come 2000 years ago, then the world we live in seemed to fit.  There would be endless debate about who he was and what his life meant.  Wouldn't people try to deny his existence?  Because 2000 years is long time.

    Put another way, imagine that Jesus had come not in the time of ancient Rome, but to a civilization that possessed the level of science we have today.  Imagine that he performed real miracles for us and that we were able to poke and prod him, videotape him, and take MRI scans as he performed these miracles.  A great multitude of intelligent, logical minds are convinced, "Yes, he is God," and their testimony convinces others.

    Then imagine 2000 years later and the amazing technology they would possess and how archaic our videos and MRI scans would seem, how weak our evidence had become.  Wouldn't it be easy then to toss away the evidence, to label our generation as too naive to know that there could not possibly be a Jesus who was God?

    This is the way I began to see the Bible: not as a perfect history of Jesus, but as a flawed, yet reliable testament of Jesus.  It was then that I began to become a Christian.  But if the Bible is flawed, how do we know what is flawed and what is inspired?

C. The Biblical difference

The Bible is unlike any other holy book, because it is grounded in history.  We know, roughly, when each book of the New Testament was written, and we know, roughly, how each of the books was assembled into the text we have today.  The Bible is about a God who comes into the real world and transforms us forever.  And in the wake of his departure, the Bible is a response to the real man of Jesus.  It contains stories of his time here, for those of us without the grace to be witnesses, and it contains letters to those who had been witnesses, but who had began to stray from Christ's core teachings.  But the truth the Bible contains would still be real, even if it had never been written.

    The Bible is also different because its authors were human.  They were true authors, guided by God.  And because they were true authors, they had the ability to make errors.  They could disagree with one another.  And yet, with the help of the Holy Spirit, they could be more right than other men.  They could give us insights into God they could not have made on their own.  This is how scripture can be both inconsistent in places and inspired.

---

V. Why Catholicism?

So given this holy book, it is our job to understand what it means for us.  This leads us to consider the final question, "What does God mean for us?"  Just as in science, when we seek the one truth of what physical reality is, there must only be one truth about who God is.  

    Therefore, I could not accept that there were many interpretations of the Bible.  If each of us were free to interpret the Bible in our own way, then why can't the whole thing be metaphorical?  Why isn't that the truth of God?

A. Interpreting the Bible

Well, there are many people who believe just that, that the Bible is completely metaphorical.  There are others who have more subtle interpretations.  For example, there is a Lutheran interpretation, a Calvinist interpretation, a Methodist interpretation, a Presbyterian interpretation, an Evangelical interpretation, and a Catholic interpretation.  Each has significant differences in theology.  In America, it is easy to move from church to church until you find a pastor who preaches the Bible in the way that feels right.

    If I began to affirm the Bible as a source of Truth and to interpret it on my own, I would actually be putting my faith in myself.  If I wanted to be more humble and picked a church, I could put my faith in that church's interpretation.  But the Lutherans subscribe to the interpretation of Martin Luther, the Calvinist and Presbyterians interpret from John Calvin, the Methodists follow John Wesley's interpretation, and Evangelicals follow their local pastor.  So to follow these churches meant I would be at risk of making that same mistake again, to put my faith in man, a man who was not God.

How could I be humble, then, when seeking the truth of God?

B. Already Catholic 

As we prepared for marriage, my wife and I visited Msgr. Holmes to discuss our marriage plans.  We had been going to mass at St. Patrick, but I did not participate.  I would not pray and I certainly did not kneel.  But I had all of these new ideas in my head.  And so uncontrollably, involuntarily, I began to spill them out.  I was an atheist, but I had recognized its weaknesses.  I could see how there was room for God, but with so much disagreement, I did not see how we could use the Bible as a source of truth.  I exhausted an hour trying to say everything.

    Msgr. listened intently and let me finish.  Then he pragmatically answered, "It sounds like you're already Catholic."

    At first I was dumbfounded.  Then I had an immediate feeling of homecoming, as if I had truly found were I belonged.  Yet I had been trained to distrust my feelings, to trust only logic.  And so I launched myself on a search for an answer to the question, "Am I Catholic?"

C. The Catholic difference

I think most people can share an appreciation for Catholic art, its icons, cathedrals and music.  But for me there was something more special, because I loved music history, and the history of music is grounded in the Catholic church.  There is Gregorian chant, of course, but I could listen to a Mozart mass, and then attend mass.  I could see for myself the beauty that Mozart had captured.  But it would be foolish to join a church just because you like the music.

    The more I searched, the more I understood the reason I was Catholic, and it was simple:  I believed there was a real objective Truth.  That means that the words "Right" and "Wrong" can have a real meaning.  "Right" doesn't have to mean "this is what I happen to think is right for me", instead it can mean "this is what is right for the world, for everyone."  

    But this is not some peculiar belief.  When scientists talk about physics, they don't think they are forming elaborate interpretations, but are describing reality.  They assume there is a true reality to find.  So how does that make me Catholic?

i. Catholic Truth

For a Catholic, Truth flows through the Church.  There is no danger of error, because it is confirmed by the council of bishops, headed by the Pope.  The bishops receive their authority from the Apostles.  The Pope receives his authority from the first of the Apostles, from St. Peter, who was given a special grace by Jesus to teach without error.  Hence, there is an unbroken line of Truth from God to everyone.  This is a sign that the Catholic understanding of Truth is right, it doesn't prove it.  Yet to suppose a person can find that Truth on their own severs the line between God and man.  And then, "What is Truth?"

    So we are not left on our own to search for the truth of God, we have a living interpreter in the Church.  The same God who instills us with intelligence and who gives meaning to love, guides us to Him through his Church.  He guides us to Truth.

ii. Catholicism vs. science

I had to answer one last question.

    Is there a contradiction between Catholicism and science?  There cannot be.  No Catholic should ever be afraid of any scientific discovery.  Because if science tells us real truth about the physical world, and the Church tells us real truth about God, then they cannot disagree.  There is only one Truth, only one God.

    The trouble arises when we try to use science to show that the Church is in error.  Any argument that uses scientific claims to disprove God is either fundamentally circular or self-contradictory.  Yet it is also unwise to stake our faith in the physical world.  If we seek to find God inside creation, in the world of science, then we set ourselves up for error.  It is the weakest form of theology.  Besides, Catholics do not need science to find God in the real world. He is present, countless times a day, in the eucharist.  You can go visit Him.

D. Converting to Catholicism

So was I Catholic?  

    I was apprehensive to admit it.  I did not want to give anyone a false hope that I had become something I wasn't.  I did not want to lie.

    As my wife and I prepared to be married, we began to understand the Christian teaching of marriage.  Marriage is an unbreakable bond of love, a reflection of the love between God the father and Jesus.  For Catholics, marriage is a sacrament.  It was the true culmination of everything I felt our love had become.  I could no longer deny that this was the truth I had been seeking.

    And so, as I entered St. Patrick's on our wedding day, it was my last act as an atheist.  I professed my love for my new wife "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" and exited a Christian.

---

VI. Conclusion

I found God through answering tough questions, but without the experience of love, I would have been hopelessly lost.  As I searched for answers to questions about God, I had to check myself.  Does the answer make sense in the real world?  I had to think about God carefully.  

    But it is often too easy to mistake thinking about God for God.  These arguments tell us only about a small piece of God.  And so the next part of my journey is to slowly forget these arguments, to stop wondering about God's existence and instead to know Him, to know the real God.  To know God does not require any elaborate theology.  Instead it requires nothing simpler than prayer, participating in the sacraments, and living a life of charity.  This is the life of Truth.

    But this Truth isn't true just for Catholics, it is for everyone.  Everyone is on their own unique search for Truth, a search for God and His Church.  I cannot see the world as a fight between various sides on the issues of religion.  Each of us, as humans, is somewhere along the line of alignment with the Truth.  None of us has it all figured out, we agreed on that, therefore we can all, whether we believe in God or not, Catholic or not, seek out the fullness of Truth in the world, constantly vigilant to align ourselves with what is immutably real.

THANK YOU.