The Dumb Ox

When atheists think the understand religion...

2012-02-19T07:34:00.000-06:00

I occasionally read an article out loud for my wife while she is busy with our daughter. It lets us read together and gives my daughter some time listening to words. I chose 'Religion for Everyone' to read to them, and the result was pure comedy.

I don't want to make fun at this article because I am sure the author was sincere. But it is obvious he has no idea what 'religion' really is. He is a convinced atheist, but he longs for the Old-Time Religion that he supposes brought us together as a community. So his solution is to 'learn from religion' and create secular copies of the pieces that built the communities of the past. In the article, he mostly uses the 'genius' of the Catholic Mass as his starting point. It appears he has only read about the Mass, however, and never really stepped inside a church during the liturgy.

For instance, his understanding of the Eucharist is foreign to any mass-going catholic. He supposes that we come to mass (physically) hungry, making us primed for lessons about life (the homily), so that when we greet our neighbors (Sign of Peace), we do not judge them. We then partake in a meal (the Eucharist) and in our satiated state give our fellow parishioners a pat on the back and grow together. Then drawing on a fairly spurious history of the early mass, he supposes the secular version is an "Agape Restaurant', where a community groups comes together to share a meal without prejudice. This lofty goal is achieved by splitting up families and friends at the tables and asking neighbors questions like, "What are your fears?", which are from a script lying on the table. No, I'm not making this up.

Beyond the question of "who would ever want to do this?", he missing something else completely. He supposes that the success of a religion is built upon liturgies and rituals and not the stuffy doctrines. But it is entirely the opposite. The liturgies only make sense if they are proper reflections of the doctrines. The mass is pointless unless Jesus was the son of God who gave his body and blood in sacrifice. Baptism is pointless unless its action removes the stain of Original Sin and brings us into the community of the church. The evidence for this misunderstanding is clear when the author makes statements like, "Religions know a lot about our loneliness." No, it is God who knows a lot about our loneliness, and when we turn to Him as a community in the liturgy, only then is there a chance that we can properly align ourselves.

I honestly wish the author luck. I hope he has a chance to establish his restaurants and build his temples, because when they are empty, it will hasten the end of this post-modern notion that religion is just a set of empty liturgies.

Ethics and Morality III: The Alternative God of Love

2012-02-12T08:05:00.002-06:00

In “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist” Joel Marks, an ethicist writing in the New York Times, argues that although it may appear to us that they exist, morals are a complete fiction. He motivates his objection to morality with the Euthyphro. As he explains, this Platonic dialogue challenges us with the dilemma, “Do the gods approve of something because it is pious, or is something pious because the gods approve it?”

This question exposes the fabric of morality and ethics. If we suppose that piety is higher than the gods (however many there may be), then we are forced to admit that there is some greater authority than the divine. Hence, the gods themselves would be superfluous to questions of morality. Any divine revelation would be mere divine opinion. On the other hand, if the gods are the sole author of our morals, then morality is a puppet of the gods. Morality itself would be arbitrary and merely compulsory. At the command of Zeus we could be in a world in which murder, abuse, and lying are blessed acts. That is a frightening world. Hence, the Euthyphro dilemma forces us to choose between a morality in which the gods are superfluous or one in which they are our capricious tormentors. We react to the gods with apathy or dread.

Prof. Marks tells us that these innate reactions are important. “We have an intuitive sense of right and wrong that trumps even the commands of God,” he assures us. In other words, we can judge the gods, and in that way Prof. Marks chooses the apathetic view. Yet if gods are not needed for morality, then atheism seems a logical next step. And, as I have previously written, Marks argument is that if there is no divine, then there can be no place for morality to exist either.

Is dread of the gods a better choice? Plato does not think it is logical. In his dialogue Socrates challenges the young Euthyphro, who on his way to condemn his father, with the above dilemma. Out of respect for the gods, Euthyphro chooses the view that piety must be what the gods approve. But Socrates shows that a thing that is pious cannot be pious merely because it is approved by the gods: an approval is passive in nature but piety is an active property of a thing itself, so, Socrates argues, piety cannot be the result of any approval. By the end of the dialogue, Euthyphro is made a fool by Socrates, who shows him that if he cannot point to the true essence of piety, he has no basis for his supposed piousness.

Consider, though, the nature of the gods in Plato’s cosmos. The gods inhabit a divine realm that is little different from the realm of the mortals. They are ‘higher’ than humanity only in the sense that they have complete dominion over the earth. The gods bicker between themselves and disagree violently. Zeus, their leader, is only first among equals. Hence piety cannot have its source in any one god. This is why Euthyphro must suppose pious things are approved by all the gods.

Plato, for all his wisdom, was unaware of Jewish theology, that the divine is one omnipotent, omniscient God who is the source of all things, unique in His supreme unity. God Himself is one, rather than divided among gods. God’s will is perfect rather than fickle. Moreover, this God is not a being; He is being itself. He creates ex nihilo and exists outside time. The God of the Jews shares his godliness with the Greek gods only in the faint sense that He is above humanity.

Returning to the dilemma, we find that in His unity, this Jewish God presents an alternative solution for Euthyphro: God simply is piety. This is to say that God is the complete and total source of piety. God and piety are two words for the same thing under different facets. And if we examine the dilemma more closely, we see that piety is not unique. Socrates could have challenged Euthyphro with similar questions about the source of truth, love, justice, goodness, or morality itself. And in a similar way, we would find that God is truth, that God is love, etc.

Of course this idea is not new; it is orthodox Christianity. In the Gospel of John, we find that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (14:6). John speaks in his first epistle that, “He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (4:8). This language fills the Bible. Yet these concepts are more than just biblical axioms. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his fourth way of rationally knowing God, appeals to the good, true and noble in humanity and shows that they must flow from a source that holds their perfection. And this source can only be what we call God.

Examining again the problem of Euthyphro in the light of the alternative Christian understanding of the divine nature, we see that the perceived dilemma vanishes. We find a problem only when we anthropomorphize God into another being or disconnect morality from its source. Marks’ search for morality is really a search for God. His innate rejection of a capricious God is misplaced, because his intuitive sense of morality can only have its source in God himself.

Moreover, the above solution to Euthyphro’s dilemma has a corollary that confirms our common sense: love is divine; morality, how we love, is divine; justice, the application of love, is divine; piety, the love of God, is divine. In a word, to love is to taste God. Love is, literally, a miracle. This is why we seek to experience true love. If we have considered the full theological implications of God being love, then when we tell someone we love her, we are telling her that we meet God in her presence.

This is the common sense notion that an atheist must deny. Marks denies it by supposing God is another being whom he can judge. Other atheists deny it by supposing that love has a meaning in a purely material universe. This brings us to the irony of atheistic ethics. The atheist denies the existence of God but must appeal to love in order to motivate his ethics. This love can ultimately never inspire us, however, because it lacks the divine substance that makes it real. So an atheistic ethics borrows inspiration from the true sense of love that resides in God, completing the irony.

Of course Marks, and likeminded atheists, are sincere. They see no evidence for God, but wish to establish a reasoning for being good without Him. Yet, returning to St. Thomas, in the exercise of establishing a universal ethics, the atheist finds his evidence for God. The atheist tastes God in his love of the good and just. This is not scientific evidence, but evidence that is even more powerful because it reaches into the heart.

Ethics and Morality

2011-08-27T21:03:00.002-05:00

As a rebuttal to my previous comment, my friend endorsed an atheist response to the Joel Marks's Ex-Moralist article. In his blog Why Evolution is True, the ecologist Jerry Coyle argues that Marks did not truly give up morality. Instead he switched to a utilitarian morality and merely called it something different. I don't agree. In the following reply, I suggest that Marks gave up on morality because his atheist philosophy demanded it.

Sometimes it helps for me to start at the beginning. What is the purpose of defining morality? Why go through the trouble? It seems to me that morality is important because there are times when we simply do not know the right action to take. Sometimes we must rely upon something outside ourselves to tell us what to do. Our internal compass -- our instinct, our heart, or our head -- fails us. Morality tells us what to do at these times. Yet there is also ethics, and both ethics and morality instruct us how to act.

Although both are valuable, I see ethics and morality as distinct. What separates them is that ethics change and are debated while morals are eternal. We cannot deny that each of us has times when we disobey even our own rules. We rationalize them away or we try to forget them. The moral rules are those which we can never deny or rationalize into nonexistence. We must accept them. Morality becomes most needed precisely at the moment one wishes to ignore it. To make this point clear, consider being accused of something "unethical" versus "immoral". The latter has a feeling of inviolable transgression that the former lacks. Or to put it more succinctly: ethics suggests, morality compels.

I make this distinction because I do not think Prof. Coyne or Sam Harris, whom Coyne mentions, is talking about morality. They are talking about ethics. Consider this section from Coyne's post:

"[Prof. Marks] may not call [vegetarianism] the 'right' thing to do, but it’s what he sees as a way to increase well being. And that’s exactly what Sam Harris sees as 'objective' morality."

To be fair, I have not read Harris, and neither Coyne nor Marks wrote in order to define a complete system of ethics, but consider what is here. They propose that we should act in ways that increase well-being. That sounds good, but it is easily rationalized away. If I am selfish and place a higher weight upon my own happiness, then I am justified to act selfishly because my well-being is most important. Yet we also feel that would be wrong. (I can give personal testimony to this sin.) Hence the idea -- that we should act to increase well-being -- is an idea in ethics. To motivate, it requires some external moral standard that tells us we should not value ourselves so highly.

I don't think Coyne would be satisfied with that argument. He would say, I think, that he possess an innate morality which tells him to act humbly. This morality is guided by the "head" and the "heart".

"[Prof. Marks's] 'head' is his secular and rational consideration of what consequences actions can bring. If some consequences are more desirable than others, as in factory farming, that’s not much different from morality.

"His 'heart' is his evolved feelings about the right thing to do. That is the part of our morality instilled in our ancestors by natural selection."

He supposes morality is a combination of choosing what is more desirable rationally and judging his choices based on his internal feelings, which have emerged from evolution through natural selection. So for him, the ultimate external moral standard is based in the natural process of adaptation. It changes and evolves, and hence it is not truly objective. (Notice objective becomes "objective" in the quote above.) Dawkins calls this the "changing moral zeitgeist" in The God Delusion. But there are problems with such a moral standard.

Morality is not an abstract idea that we discuss to make us feel better about our actions. It gives us a basis for truly judging our actions and the actions of others. Ideally, it should give us a standard by which we construct our laws. And in this latter way, morality becomes action. We ruin people's lives by throwing them in jail (or worse) for not conforming to the moral zeitgeist. We feel we are justified in administering this discipline because they have offended a morality that not only applies to us, but to them as well. For example, we would all agree that thieves and murderers are immoral and should be punished.

And so here is the problem: if we suppose that morality evolves, then how can we justify punishment of immoral acts? How do we guarantee these wrong actions are not, in fact, just the next step in the evolving moral zeitgeist? How do we avoid punishing the more evolved actions outside our current morality? Given the unreliability of our individual moral sense, as I mentioned above, we cannot depend on it. Toward an answer Dawkins proposes that "the zeitgeist may […] move in a generally progressive direction, but […] it is a sawtooth not a smooth improvement" (p. 308, The God Delusion). But this is not satisfying: why is the zeitgeist not generally regressive instead?

Fundamental to Dawkins's argument is that today we know and understand more than our ancestors -- we have discovered more truth. Therefore we are more likely to construct a proper understanding of right and wrong. But we cannot know this with certainty. We can only trust that the zeitgeist is guided by an invisible hand. Dawkins, Harris, and Coyne would say, circularly, that this is the hand of evolution. But if evolution is the author of our changing moral sense, we cannot then use our moral sense to judge what truth evolution has given us. Hence an inner, evolved sense of right and wrong can never provide an objective standard of morality.

I think in his "anti-epiphany", Prof. Marks peers behind the curtain of the morality argued by Dawkins and Harris and sees the circularity. The invisible hand disappeared. He sees no basis for compelling anyone to act in a right way, because "right" doesn't have a real meaning. Moreover, he has no alternative. There is no atheistic argument for morality that is not fundamentally circular in the above way. And that is why he no longer believes in morals. He can only suggest an ethics from the basis of his internal compass. (At least, then, he still has a job.)

But there is an alternative solution that embraces the invisible hand, the teleology, of our moral development. This solution acknowledges moral guidance as one of the divine attributes, because only God can satisfy our quest for an objective morality. And it does not require us to redefine words with perfectly good definitions. But that is for another post.

A path toward moral relativism

2011-08-23T21:50:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, just before going to bed, I ran across this essay by ethicist Joel Marks on the New York Times called "Confessions of an Ex-Moralist". I found it to be a refreshing look at the moral implications of atheism, and I commented on Facebook that it was nice to read a "serious" atheist. A friend took exception to my comment and wrote:

What exactly do you find 'serious' about this? If anything, I find it almost exactly not serious. This guy sounds like an atheist who at some level wishes he just could be a believer and make all the tricky stuff go away. I think teh kidz call this a faithiest.

I wrote a reply in which I tried to express the logical reasons of this particular atheist's choice of moral relativism and why it was important to understand it.

I doubt that I am unique here, but it often feels as if morals are real, i.e., that there is an objective right and wrong. When someone has wronged me, it feels as though his action was not just wrong for me but for him as well. And I would like to think that, at times, I am truly justified in my anger toward someone else. So if I feel so strongly about a moral reality, then why?

One answer, I suppose, is that morals do not exist as we would feel they should. Instead of morals, the argument goes, each of us merely has preferences. Morals themselves are an illusion or, at best, are an emergent property formed out of the complex interactions of our subjective preferences. Either way, morals do not have real authority.

Regardless of whether that particular argument is true, Prof. Marks is convinced that his atheism demands that it is true. He explains why here:

"A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset […] But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? […] Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?"

As a humanist, he finds truth in the inward feeling of beauty one sees in a sunset (what his friend calls God). But it is the experience between man and sunset that he finds transcendent, not the sunset itself. As an atheist, he knows this is not really God, but like his friend he did "adamantly affirm the objectivity of right and wrong". Yet at his "anti-epiphany", he realizes that there is a duality between his friend's belief in God and his belief in morals. As man is to sunset, man is also to lie. He supposes that he should be as amoral as he is atheist. And in that case, morals do not exist any more than God does.

What is so "serious" about this atheist is that once he realizes that his philosophy demands that he give up an important aspect of his life -- morality is important to an ethicist -- he does so without question. Moreover, I find it commendable that he focuses on the questions of atheist morality instead of the more worn out question of whether atheists are moral. I find the notion of a relative morality absolutely fascinating because it raises a huge list of questions. Prof. Marks covers some in his essay: Are any acts not permissible? How does one deal with disagreement? How does one escape moral nihilism? What are the societial implications of such a philosophy? How can we rely on an instinctual morality when it is so unreliable? Each of these is a hard question, and hence I don't agree that it as an easy way out.

Whether evolution via natural selection is a counter-example to Thomas's Fifth Way

2011-08-21T20:57:00.000-05:00

Thomas Aquinas famously shows that the existence of God may be shown through five ways. The fifth way is sometimes called the teleological argument or the argument from design.

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

Thomas begins with the rational principle that all things that act toward an end must have been designed to act toward this end. Hence, if we find that there are ends, that agents act "as to obtain the best result", then we must agree that these agents' actions had a designer. Thomas finds such agents in nature, agents that lack intelligence yet act in ways that are obviously "aimed" as, famously, "the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer". Here Thomas is supposing these agents are programmed to act, they do not decide for themselves, e.g., birds fly south due to their DNA, not out of free choice.

Thomas focuses on nature and so his argument has lost some influence among modern man, who would more easily (and scientifically) attribute the ends of nature to natural selection and evolution. To stay with the analogy, even a dumb archer will guide an arrow given enough time and motivation. For example, Richard Dawkins argues that

Thanks to Darwin, it is no longer true to say that nothing we know looks designed unless it is designed. Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance. And among these eminences of pseudo-design are nervous systems which -- among their more modest accomplishments -- manifest goal-seeking behavior that, even in a tiny insect, resembles a sophisticated heat-seeking missile more than a simple arrow on target (p. 103, God Delusion).

Evolution is undoubtedly true, and natural selection is the most likely scientific explanation for the way in which we ended up with complex organs like nervous systems. But I doubt that evolution by natural selection is a valid counter-example to Thomas's fifth way. Such arguments miss the deeper philosophical point contained within Thomas's argument.

Thomas remarks that at least some natural, unintelligent agents act to obtain the best result. They do not end up acting at random (fortuitously), but in a way that best suits them. It is the notion of best that implies a designer, even given evolution as the method of achieving that result. For example, a dumb archer may eventually be trained to aim at a target, but it is a rational impossibility that a dumb archer chooses his target. He shoots where he is told. His notions of best are external, decided by a more able mind. So if we wish to argue against Thomas's divinely driven nature, we cannot point toward evolution because it does not provide a definition of best. It does not aim the arrow of nature, it merely propels it.

To make this point clear, consider what one may say is the best human organ, the brain. In his lecture notes on Aquinas, Peter Kreeft writes

I think Aquinas would say that evolution is an excellent example of cosmic design, evidence for God. He’d say the arrow of evolution flies to the target of human brains only because it’s guided by the intelligence of a divine archer. Aquinas would not be among the anti-Darwinian fundamentalists today. I think if he saw the atheist bumper sticker of the Christian fish with the word Darwin in it, he would not understand the intended irony, he would interpret it as an argument for theism (p. 20, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas).

Using Dawkins's words, that there are bodily "eminences", we actually argue for God's existence. If we suppose that the action of our grey matter is the pinnacle of evolution, then we must concede to Aquinas that there is a designer, aiming the arrow of evolution toward human intelligence. (God is the intelligence designer not the Intelligent Designer.)

A proper counter-example could be formed if it could be proven that there is no notion of best. Instead, there are just flavors and variations, each equally valid. So Thomas's archer may hit the bullseye, or he may avoid it, but we cannot rationally suppose one target is better than another. This is a post-modern critique of Thomas. But such an argument is not only fatal to Thomas's fifth way, but fatal to science as well. Science needs best too, because it tells us truths about the physical world; it needs a best hypothesis. Without best, the flat Earth and the round Earth become equals, and science would become a glorified database of physical occurrences.

This is why science is indebted to Aquinas and his fifth way. He justifies the otherwise arrogant claim of scientific truth by telling us why we have intelligence: because our minds, made in the image of God's omnipotence, are ordered toward reason. And in that humble way, we may find truth.

Skeptics and Believers: Lecture 1 - Religion and Modernity

2011-01-16T22:10:00.000-06:00

The material for this course begins at the enlightenment, or the scientific revolution, and it examines what religious and nonreligious thinkers have thought from then to the present time. The great question that is posed is, "Can religion be modern?" The first lecture gives an overview of Prof. Robert's attempt to answer to that question.

Prof. Roberts defines Modernity in its more philosophical sense. The movement of Modernity is toward a greater substitution of the "authority of reason" for the Medieval "authority of faith". He identifies Modernity with ideas of progress and the universality of reason. Modernity innately supposes that man will be unified under reason and that, somehow, mankind itself is on a slow journey to this unification. At the same time, man does not need God or religion to achieve this final goal, because every step is built with the human intellect ordered by reason. By this definition, Modernity is not so much atheist as it is agnostic. The Modern god is an outside observer.

With that definition of Modernity, it seems impossible that religion can be modern. To be religious supposes that God is both necessary and essential for life. So while various religions may absorb features of Modernity, they can never truly be modern. This is only my prediction of Prof. Robert's conclusion, but I am very interested in what place he finds for religion in a Modern world.

After defining Modernity, Prof. Roberts gives an overview of the course. He has chosen to explore the questions of religion and reason throughout time, focusing on what philosophers have thought. We will hear from Descarte, Hume, Kierkegaard, Kant, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and others. For this lecture, we are only given the standard nuggets of argument for which they are famous. But he ends the lecture on a curious note.

At the end, he wants to describe the importance of philosophy. (Afterall, what use is his lecture if we do not fully appreciate what philosophy is.) He turns to Focault. Philosophy, he says, is a practice of thought. It is a testing of ideas. This exploration of ideas, if it is deep enough, verges on the spiritual. Philosophical inquiry, he says, is important because it allows us to change our ideas. In fact, it impels us to change our ideas.

That definition sounds very appealing. But if I did not know any better before I listened to these lectures, I would have put philosophy aside and forgotten about it. Imagine if we said that the importance of science is that it is possible change our ideas about physical reality? Imagine if we got upset because science dictated to us the nature of the world and felt oppressed by science because we could not form our own understanding of nature. What good would science be? But indeed it is that dictatorship that gives science its usefulness. If science gives us truth, then we can only accept the reality it presents us, we cannot argue. Likewise, philosophy is only useful if it is a real source of truth. It is important to be able to seek new ideas and change our understanding of the world, but only on the journey toward truth. If God exists, then positing his nonexistence is an ultimately useless exercise. Freedom is useful only in the service of truth. It is not an end unto itself.

So instead, if we are to continue further, we must suppose that philosophy is a exploration of the nature of reality every bit as concerned with truth as science. With that, we can see how religion and reason are not so opposed to each other. They are both an exploration and response to what is true and real. Otherwise, they are pointless.

Skeptics and Religion: Beginning thoughts

2010-10-17T14:38:00.000-05:00

I have been hoping to learn more about atheism and religion for a long time. Although any conversion requires an evaluation of the religious landscape, I have never gone through a systematic evaluation. And now I have a great opportunity to do that.

An atheist friend of mine often raises objections to religion and faith on Facebook, and I have certainly linked to several critiques of atheism. Facebook was not built for weighty theological and philosophical discussions, and so often those discussions were not as useful as they could have been. So in a spirit of dialogue, we have decided to seek out a common vocabulary by listening to lectures on skepticism and religion. These lectures (I hope) will offer a survey of religious belief and its criticism. What I hope to gain is perspective. I want to understand why people have had different views from the perspective of those views. In other words, it is usually not enough for me to understand the criticism of a worldview. I also want to hear and understand why it is that a worldview exists.

Our first lecture series is called Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition. These lectures are given by Professor Tyler Roberts, who is himself a skeptic. The second lecture series is called Faith and Reason: The Philosophy of Religion by Professor Peter Kreeft, an outspoken Catholic apologist. I hope that these two sets of lectures will give us both points of view.

To begin the discussion, I have some questions I hope are answered by Prof. Tyler over the course of the lectures:

Will he frame the religious narrative as a search for truth or as the slow triumph of human thought?
What does he believe is the purpose of philosophy?
Can he explain love and the intellect from a skeptical point of view?
Under the skeptical mindset, what stops one from becoming a nihilist?

The final question is the one that I am most interested to learn about. Is nihilism inevitable if there is no God?

My friend's commentary can be found here.

Theology on Tap: "The Siren Song of Science"

2010-06-20T22:20:00.001-05:00

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.

A working definition of Truth

2010-04-21T22:28:00.001-05:00

Scientists discuss their work in elaborate ways. They invest vast amounts of time and intellectual resources toward writing papers and creating presentations. Often the organization of work takes as many hours to produce as the original work itself. There is a reward, however: the more effort put into a paper, the easier it is to understand, the more precise the results, and the more convincing the argument. But their effort would all be pointless if none of them believed their own arguments. Instead, each scientist believes they are uncovering a previously hidden part of reality. Science seeks to discover, not to interpret.

We often take this idea about science for granted, but it is profound. It implies that when a scientist speaks about atoms, he does not mean that, for him, atoms are a good way of understanding physics, but that there are atoms and the universe is made of them. To disagree is to be mistaken.

Consider the alternative. If each of us was allowed to have our own understanding of physics, how could we communicate, how could we make progress? It seems absurd to suggest that there can be no certainty about the physical world. Yet, without Truth, we are forced to embrace this absurdity. Truth is what lets us talk about the real world. It implies there is a right understanding of reality. It implies there is something to discover. But it is uncompromising, because it also implies that we can, at times, be utterly wrong.

This is my working definition of Truth. There is a reality, and we can discover it. There is a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, and these words have a meaning beyond mere feeling or interpretation. It may be difficult to find, but it is there.

Intention

2010-04-19T21:51:00.000-05:00

My intention in becoming an atheist was never to do harm to a certain faith or to rebel against a society which sought my conversion or for any other vindictive reason. It was an effort to rid myself of all superfluous beliefs and their unnecessary baggage. I attempted to reconstruct a tabula rasa, and strongly held to the conviction that I would not believe anything that I could not see with my own eyes or understand with my own mind. This is a task undertaken only by those who feel they have the intellect to withstand a full frontal assault from reality. I felt safe within the intellectual fortifications of the university, which, in its clean room of thought, had already declared war on ignorance and continually won virtually every battle.

Or so I thought.

Go to church

2010-04-19T21:32:00.001-05:00

The earliest memory I have of anything related to church is leaving. Being dragged, in fact, away into the parking lot. I don't remember specifically what happened, but if my mother is to be believed, I had caused some trouble in Sunday school. I do remember Sunday school, specifically coloring pictures of Jesus and his disciples, always with sandaled feet and continually in the presence of sheep. Their faces always seemed serious, and I could never figure out exactly why. These pictures were not like the books I colored in school. Even at this age I was a contrarian, so if there was some hint of seriousness in my activities at Sunday school, I acted out. No doubt, it was for this reason that I was being dragged home.

I do not want to project false, romantic ideas back on my childhood, but I can't help but feel a tinge of what would later lead me toward atheism. In church, I remember feeling stifled. The air was thick with condescending looks. And the word "arbitrary" comes to mind. Why did we go to this big room and sing boring songs and talk about Jesus? Jesus was boring, absolutely boring. There were about a billion better things I could to do than go to church. Even just thinking of those three words, "Go to church," creates ill flashbacks in my mind.

My family moved often when I was growing up, so there was never a chance to settle into one particular church. But even when we become more stable in Cincinnati, we seemed to switched churches often. I remember my parents were fond of a particular church in California, and they wanted to find a replacement. I don't think they ever did. So from an early age, I was made aware of a variety of worshiping styles. Perhaps this led me to think of church as arbitrary. If God is universal, why doesn't everyone do it the same way?

I struggle to remember anything specific. It all seems like a wash now, and it was over quickly. I do not remember when or why, but we stopped going to church, because, as my mother said, "I acted up too much." She was probably right, I did. So from the time I was about six or seven until college, I rarely stepped inside a church. My parents tried, after they rediscovered their faith, but there was no way they were going to get me to go to church.

Evidence II: Russell's Tea Pot

2010-03-31T20:09:00.001-05:00

There is a hope that becoming an atheist solves many philosophical problems and that the solutions proposed by atheism do not create any greater difficulties. A popular atheist argument is 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, because there is no real evidence, just assertion. Notice, however, 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 does not hit at the heart of most atheists, who often believe 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 assertion of Russell's argument is that we can logically deduce reality from evidence, and that this deductive reasoning is true. In a word, he asserts 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.

This argument might be useful to show the nonexistence of God if God were just another material object in the universe. But like intelligence, God is metaphysical, separate from physical reality but nevertheless a real part of it. So if God requires evidence, so does intelligence. Atheism, at least the scientific variety, cannot be comfortable with that.

Reading the Bible the first time

2010-03-20T21:02:00.000-05:00

I picked up a Bible the first time as an atheist. I wish I could say I wanted to be convinced by Christianity. Instead I read it as any other book, except with added significance, because this was the book of my tradition. My father had read it, my grandfather had read it, and his father, etc. It was an attempt to connect to a past I did not know. I felt a comfort in picking up a book my family had always known. Each generation had identified itself by picking up this book, and interpreting it in its own unique way. As part of the latest generation, I had every right to interpret the Bible too.

I saw the Bible as a worn out traveling trunk. It didn't contain anything anymore, but it was wonderful to think of the places it had been and what it had seen. There was no reason to use it as anything other than a way to see into the past and to marvel at how it had shaped history. But it was only a hollowed out book, its cover more meaningful than its contents.

I started at Genesis, as every amateur does, thinking that because it was just any other book, I would read it cover to cover. My goal was to read it without the restraints of taking it literally. With Genesis this is easy to do, because it is mythological. We can view these stories as something like the bedtime tales we learn as children. Except, these are stories about the beginning of the world.

I read Genesis much more quickly than I anticipated I would, but at some point in Exodus I gave up. My mistake was to assume the rest of the Bible was so easily dismissed.

My struggle with atheism

2010-03-13T16:32:00.000-06:00

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, reasons of morality or ideology. One of the most popular types of intellectual atheism is based in scientific reasons. If you think there is a disagreement between religion and science, and you pick science as the winner, then you will be an atheist.

Each of these arguments for atheism requires a different response. Each of type of atheist would have a different conversion story if they chose to become Christian. I am lucky that I have not had great pain in my life, and I never experienced the emotional trauma required to reject God. My personal struggle with atheism came from scientific arguments, and therefore this is the only type of atheism that I can personally comment about. This is not to say that I don't think there are good arguments against each type of atheism, but that, if I speak with any authority at all, it is only against scientific arguments.

Evidence I: An atheistic critique of religion

2010-03-07T22:40:00.004-06:00

There is often a disdain for the supposed dichotomy present in religious scientists, who must wall off their faith from their science when it comes to standards of belief Science, in its truest skeptical form, requires all ideas to be questioned and all answers to be corroborated by good evidence. Faith, on the other hand, is said to be embraced because we are told to by tradition, evidence not factoring into the equation. Theology, or its twin cousin, philosophy, is often criticized because we can believe almost anything. Without evidence, all is up for grabs.

I frequently used this argument to defend atheism. And it is hard to argue against, but it is not bulletproof, because within it, there is an inherent assumption that there is no evidence for any religion. There is, of course, plenty of evidence for religion. It could even be said that there is too much evidence, because each religion has its own. The problem is that all of this evidence cannot be true, because it blatantly disagrees with itself. At first glance, the only way to evenly evaluate all of this contradicting evidence is to declare it all equally invalid.

I was convinced this reasoning was right, and in fact, the only moral reasoning. To pick one religion's evidence to be true seemed arbitrary, and picking Christianity would be giving my culture and personal heritage undue significance.

I reiterate these arguments because they were convincing for me and they shaped my rejection of Christianity. I felt I was safe, because I was being fair. Upon meeting God in heaven, I could pull a Bertrand Russell and say, "Well, God, you should have given me more evidence." It would be God's fault.

An atheistic view of science and religion

2010-03-06T13:25:00.005-06:00

When I was an atheist, a great problem for me was the intersection of religion and science. No where was 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 does one continually affirm a limp and useless source of knowledge?

I could, for convenience, weaken science or Biblical creation only partially. Where they disagree, one would 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.

At the time, I played tuba at a church on Sunday mornings. I enjoyed myself and found the sermons interesting, although I seldom agreed with them. One particular morning, the pastor talked about his understanding of science and religion. Below is an email I wrote shortly after his sermon. It is still very interesting to me now, because it encapsulates my thinking at the time so well. And I would struggle deeply to find the error in my thinking.

I was at church this past Sunday, and I found your sermon to be very thought provoking. The questions which arise when trying to reconcile religion and science are very important to me, and as you pointed out, are taboo to some people. I am very grateful that you, purely as a religious person, are willing to take on such questions.

If I may summarize your sermon, you argued that religion and science answer questions which are fundamentally different. The most fundamental part of science is that it begins with the statement, "I don't know". You then went on to say that such a standpoint in religion would be refreshing. We should not take the Bible as a source to tell us everything, but as a source of faith. Science is the exploration of the world, and religion is the exploration of love and faith.

But I am not so sure science and religion are separable that way. You mentioned that some of the stories in the Bible should not be taken literally (specifically the fall of man). But why shouldn't they be literal? Is it because the story of man, Adam and Eve, is figurative? Therefore all stories which mention them directly are equally figurative? I think you would find it hard to find someone in your congregation who takes the Adam and Eve story literally.

That begs the question, however, why don't people take Adam and Eve literally? There are many reasons, I am sure, but what possibly convinces most people is science. Carbon dating has allowed us to see that humans have been around much longer than the 6000 years the Bible predicts. To believe the Adam and Eve story literally requires us to disbelieve that carbon dating works. And to disbelieve carbon dating, you must call into question an entire body of research. It just seems easier to make Adam and Eve figurative figures, designed to teach us we are all sinners. And we all are sinners, so it has served its purpose.

The ancient Jews knew nothing about carbon dating however. I don't know for sure, but it seems reasonable to believe they took the Adam and Eve story to be literal. They believed the world was created in 7 days. They believed the world was made by the separation of heaven and earth. They believed these things literally. Otherwise, they would have been more careful to let us know which stories are literal and which are figurative. Each story is written in a similar way.

So if the ancient writers of the stories in the Bible took them literally, then why don't we now? To me the answer is science. A study of the figurative nature of the Bible would be a study in the popularization of scientific reasoning. The general trend is to find more of the Bible figurative. As we understand our world better, more passages of the Bible perhaps seem unreasonable.

This is where faith comes in. Faith is an expression of how literal we would like the Bible to be. Faith is the statement, "I believe this to be true" without evidence either way. Science and faith are then a balance between what you know and what you are willing to assume. This balance is at equilibrium in all of us. The scientist in us forces our world to be more rational and material, the theist forces the world to be more supernatural and in God's control. How we choose to be scientific and theistic defines our own faith.

So are we free to choose where we draw the line. Is it up to us to choose what we believe is literal and figurative in the Bible? If it is our choice, then it leads to interesting consequences.

One area that science has been unable to comment is the existence of God. It is impossible to understand God, almost by definition. Science cannot push so far as to deny the existence of God. But I have been surprised to find that science can comment on the methods of God. If you ask a religious scientist about his faith, it is a common answer to hear that the scientist loves to understand how God works. Thinking about how God works is an interesting concept though, because it suggests that if God does control the universe, He tends to do it in a regular way.

The regularity is the surprising thing. It is so regular that we can now predict seemingly unpredictable behavior from models and simulations. The trouble arises when these models start to predict behavior the Bible is explicit about. For instance, the big bang theory has been corroborated in simulations from astrophysics. Scientists can form reasonable conclusions about the state of the universe fractions of a second after the beginning of the universe. From these data they can reason how matter formed, how the solar system formed, and how life formed. This simulation sounds a lot like the beginning of Genesis.

The balance of faith and science can react in several ways to this information. It can disbelieve the science, and in so doing second guess the conclusions of many intelligent astrophysicists, it can believe it is true, invoking the figurative nature of the beginning of Genesis, or it can disregard and ignore it. The last I hope will not happen, but the first two of course is the great contention of evolution and intelligent design.

But it goes further. If we analyze the implications of such a theory and realize that God works consistently in the same way, then it puts a constraint on God himself. It seems the only place for God is at that very moment in the beginning when the universe exploded. That leads back to faith. In order to be religious, you must have faith that God is intervening beyond the initial step, breaking His laws of physics occasionally, and that requires you find the balance between faith and science that satisfies you.

It seems to me that the scientific reasoning is gaining at all times. Every day there is a new discovery of God's universe. In faith, we only have the Bible, which seems to be becoming more figurative. In other words, in the balance, science is gaining more force. So what is keeping us, as rational people, from simply letting science gain the force it inevitably will? Why not just make the whole Bible figurative? What if God Himself is figurative? What if He is a manifestation of the love, compassion, morality and order which has arisen from our evolution as intelligent beings?

These are questions I have been pondering. I thank you for reading all of this, and I would appreciate any comments you may have.

February 11, 2007

In case you are curious, I never heard back from the pastor.

Lay down your shovel

2010-03-05T23:22:00.000-06:00

I can remember one of the first moments when I began to doubt my own atheism, and it was not due to a theological argument, but to great literature. Here it is, from Steinbeck's East of Eden:

Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful.

Samuel wrote to Joe, sayings, "I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you'd take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven't even got a shovel yet."

The unanswered question

2010-03-04T20:10:00.000-06:00

"Pilate said to him, 'What is truth?'" (John 18.38, RSV).

The evangelist is, unfortunately, silent regarding Jesus's reply. The question is left unanswered. In fact, it is startling how quickly the text moves on. Pilate tries to render his innocent verdict, but is persuaded, deliberately, by the crowd instead. The unanswered question is followed by an example of its opposite.

Light

2010-03-04T07:39:00.001-06:00

A favorite metaphor for God during the Middle Ages was light. Many of these metaphors still make sense, but some, like St. Thomas Aquinas' idea of light "illuminating" the air, do not survive our current physics. We now understand that light travels even in a vacuum, not least between our sun and our own planet. But this concept of light tells us a different lesson about God.

It is often difficult to see how God and evil can exist in the world. How can God, who is infinite good, allow evil to remain? If good and evil are two opposing forces, like the two ends of a magnet, then God's goodness would indeed push away all the evil in the world. But evil is not the opposite of good, it is the lack of good. So where pure evil exists, there is a complete vacuum of good.

God's infinite goodness does not attempt to fill the voids on his own. He does not need to, because he can transcend them. He penetrates through the vacuum and shines His goodness upon us, and if we are willing to follow Him, we begin to fill the voids. This is God's grace. God transcends and uses evil in order to teach us, so that we may become saints.

Existence

2010-03-04T07:37:00.002-06:00

Philosophical arguments for God are only useful for understanding the Deist God. The Deist God is the god of philosophy, capable of providing the foundational support for Truth and purpose. Even St. Thomas Aquinas only tries to prove this tiny sliver of God, showing the wealth of what we can reason about God purely from this infinitely small section of knowledge about him.

One of these reasonable assertions is that God is existence. His essence is his existence, as Aquinas says. He is the act of existence, itself. In other words, as we look around and see that anything at all exists, we are seeing God. He is present to all things because he is the present act of them existing. If something exists now, then God is there in that act of existence.

Many philosophers get stuck at this tiny piece of God and see no reason to proceed into the Judeo-Christian understanding of God. Surely there is a need to establish Truth, but how can one make the leap that this God is interacting with the world, that we may pray to him, and that he knows us personally? We need revealed truth.

It is interesting, though, how God identifies himself to Moses. Although the early Jews probably had no concept of the abstract idea of God's essence, God nevertheless identifies himself this way. He says, "I am who I am". His ancient name means, "I am". Here we see how right Aquinas is. "God is" is the most fundamental, yet complete, understanding of God. To create an analogy that God is "love" or "truth", while true, in some way diminishes God. The sentence, "God is" simultaneously tells us something about God and identifies him, because he is simultaneously the cause of everything and the presence of everything. He simply "is" everything, in every possible meaning that we can understand that concept.

What is astounding is that we can know this both by human reason (Aquinas) and revealed scripture (Moses). They both agree. And while that does not prove the God of Abraham is the right conception, it certainly throws out many other Gods, namely those of every ancient, pagan polytheistic religion. Our understanding of the world is only complete in a monotheistic God, who tells us "I am".

Self-contradiction

2010-03-04T07:32:00.001-06:00

Peter Kreeft, in a lecture series about St. Thomas, acknowledges a common philosophical mistake about God:

"Another attack on the meaningfulness of Aquinas’s concept of God is this: Some say that the concept of omnipotence, or infinite power, is self-contradictory, and therefore meaningless. They ask whether God can make a rock bigger than He can lift, and if you say yes, then they say there can be something bigger than even God’s power can lift, so God is not infinitely powerful; but if you say no, then they say there is something God can’t do, so again His power is not infinite.

"But the linguistic confusion is in that question, not in the concept of God that the question questions; for “a rock bigger than infinite power can lift” is a self-contradictory concept, but “infinite power” is not itself a self-contradictory concept. So the simple answer to the question is: No, God can’t make a rock bigger than He can lift any more than He can make anything else that’s self-contradictory and therefore meaningless."

If you don't accept this answer, then you don't have a problem with God, you have a problem with the notion of self-contradiction.

Agreement

2010-03-03T13:31:00.000-06:00

I think that everyone can agree that, if a god exists, they would like to believe in that god, and that, if no gods exist, they 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 are constantly vigilant to align our beliefs with what is immutably real.

Musical absurdities

2010-02-24T18:00:00.001-06:00

In the autumn before we were married, I can remember sitting outside of a restaurant with Heather. I had been a little depressed, and at the time that meant that I had been listening to the music of Morton Feldman. Before I continue, I have to explain his music. You don't so much listen to Feldman's music as you enter his space and take it all in. This is contemplative music. It is music that is quiet and repetitive. It is abstract, often judged as the sonic equivalent of a Rothko painting. It is not something you sit back and enjoy. For me, it was as close to a religious experience as I had ever known, which is why I turned to it at these times, as a man may turn to God for guidance.

I was talking with Heather about Feldman's music and what it meant to me at the time. It was all going to my head. Feldman, the man, had an extraordinary gift for speech. I had read two books of his essays and lectures, in which he explores the fabric of music itself. It is impossible not to feel a little bit of a musical scientist as you read his words, discovering the depths and purity of the musical Art. I ate this stuff up, because I believed, as I do now, that music could communicate more purely than speech. Music, in its best, allows the very essence of people to open and transfer, not in a mystical way, but in a very real way. To explore the fabric of music was, for me, to explore what it is that makes us human. This is why I had become so enamored with Feldman. In his music, he provided me with religion, in his words, he was Christ-like. So I began to talk about music with Heather. I remember discussing an objective musical reality, that there was something out there by which all music was judged.

The absurdity of these ideas didn't phase me at the time, but I could begin to tell, in that instant outside the restaurant, that it was bothering Heather. She understood less about where I was coming from that I did, but she did get a sense that she was losing me. I had the sense that I was losing myself. It was then that she declared that didn't like discussing music with me anymore. This was an incredible blow to me, not only because of the great weight I gave to music, but of its place in our relationship to each other. We became so close, so fast, because we both loved music. But now it was becoming a wall between us, and this scared me. I could have, at that moment, chosen an easy way out and dismissed her. But, and let me pause for a prayer of thanksgiving, I didn't. This singular event launched me on a study of what I really believed. Because its absurdity was finally starting to sink in.

Catholic continuum

2010-02-22T23:03:00.001-06:00

The entire world is, without always knowing completely, Catholic. This must be true if the Catholic claim is true, that the great church is the universal church, meant for everyone on earth. As such, there is no reason to see the world as a fight between various sides on the issue of religion. There are only those who are somewhere along the infinite continuum of alignment with the truth, culminating in the infinitely perfect man, Jesus.

Song of science

2010-02-22T23:02:00.001-06:00

If I could identify a theme to my life and my story, it is a search for truth. Perhaps the most obvious is the fact that I chose to become an engineer. Science is the search for a particular kind of truth, that which we can feel and touch and manipulate. I probably would have become a scientist if there was more money in it. As an engineer, I get to both satiate my desire to understand the world and be financially comfortable. Both professionally and practically, one could easily describe engineering as the combination of science and money. I came to graduate school because I wanted to be a part of discovering real knowledge.

I came to graduate school on an ideology high. All I understood of the world was through science, and I wanted to weave myself into the fabric of this knowledge. The beauty of the university is that you get to learn from incredibly knowledgeable people, the best of which make you feel like you are just as smart as they are. And if you aren't careful, you might even think you're as smart. In this environment, it is easy to be enchanted with the surety of the basics. Newton's laws are so plainly obvious and simple that, given enough time, the rest of science must undoubtedly be within grasp. The siren's song of science.

But as you do science, you realize that it is dirty. Things are never so obvious. The piece of knowledge you carve out for yourself verges of meaninglessness, and, if you are lucky, one other person might be able to understand your ideas. That is, if you are lucky enough to actually have an idea. This is the work of science. Although I was disillusioned, I have never lost my faith that science accomplishes something. Knowledge progresses on, but I must be satisfied with my infinitesimal contribution.

However, as an undergraduate, I was enamored by the human spirit and its search for knowledge. I read the pop literature: Hawkings, Green, and Kaku. A particularly transformative book was Complexity, recommended by a friend who unwittingly changed my life. These books presented a beautiful world. The universe is simple enough to understand, yet complex enough to instill wonder. The laws of nature were obscure to the untrained eye, but could be made obvious if you read the right books. This is the world we lived in, and I knew the secret handshake: science.

It is within this world that I became an atheist. In such a world, what room is there for God?

Introduction

2010-02-22T20:40:00.001-06:00

First, I need to establish my credentials. I am in no way an expert on theology or God, if such a thing exists. I can speak only as a layman, a member of God's Church, who has unexpectedly come to God and barely begun to understand what that means. I have a love for theology, but only as a dilettante. And like all dilettantes, it is too easy for me to mistake facts about God as knowledge of God Himself. Realizing my weaknesses, I am reluctant to talk about these things, because I may betray a level of certainty that is not actually present.

This blog has started in preparation for a talk I will give in the Theology on Tap series for my church. I have debated in my head whether I should actually give this talk, because, again, I know so little about theology. But I was subtly prodded by both my wife and my parish priest to share my story, and I finally convinced myself it would be a good idea after realizing it could be a channel for me, a means to let my thoughts coalesce. Its preparation would also be a Lenten penance and a gift I could give to my parish and my friends, who have been so helpful and patient with me.

What follows will be many unrelated, unorganized posts, only meaningful as the seed of an idea. I apologize if they are completely unreadable.

What is this?

2009-12-14T13:59:00.000-06:00

A blog about things I think about which someone has probably already thought about and said better than I could ever do. Nevertheless, if I don't get these things out of my head, they'll bug me.