apologetics Archives - Spes in Domino

March 16, 2022 iacobusm Faith and Culture, The Liturgical Year

The Lorica of St. Patrick Is As Timely As Ever

The Lorica of St. Patrick

St. Patrick Window — *Window in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh*

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

As Timely As Ever:

Pious Tradition v. The “Experts”

Pious tradition attributes authorship of the prayer above, known as “The Lorica (or “Breastplate”) of St. Patrick”, to the Apostle of Ireland himself. As is the case with the beloved “Prayer of St. Francis”, experts tell us the eponymous Saint is most likely not the real author. I myself trust Pious Tradition more than The Experts any day, but for our purposes here we’ll just say that it could have been written by St. Patrick. In any case, while the prayer as you see it above is the most well-known version, it is really only a part of a much longer composition (I’ve put the full text at the bottom of this post). At one time this magnificent prayer, in its complete form, was a part of my morning devotions every day.
“The Breastplate of St. Patrick” is, in fact, written as a morning prayer, and more: it is a statement of faith, a brief but comprehensive catechesis, and a call for Divine help against the dangers that beset us from both earthly and spiritual sources. Those things are as necessary today as they were in 5th century Ireland, and St. Patrick’s prayer is a powerful and inspiring way to start our daily journey.

“I Arise Today . . .”

The complete “Breastplate” opens with “I arise today/Through a mighty strength, the invocation of Trinity . . .” St. Patrick is famous for his emphasis on the Trinity, reportedly using the tree-leafed shamrock to illustrate the doctrine (as memorialized in the present-day stained glass window from the cathedral in Armagh, his primatial see). Here, he also emphasizes “the Oneness of the Creator of creation.” In converting a pagan people, Patrick needed to impress upon them that there was indeed only one God, as distinct from their pagan pantheon, although expressed in three Persons. The Triune God is also unlike their familiar gods in that He alone is the universal Creator, as opposed to pagan deities who were more powerful than mortal men, but still finite and fallible beings. In our own day we also need to be reminded that God is Love (1 John 4:8), and Love reaches its perfection in a union of persons, but also that God the Creator is master of all the blind forces of nature with which we wrestle.

**St. Patrick Lighting the Paschal Fire on the Hill of Slane, 433,** *by Vincenzo Waldre, 1792*

     The next “I arise today . . .” is followed by a brief Christology: incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection and descent to the Dead. We, no less than our newly-christened forefathers did, need to understand exactly Who and What is the God that we follow.
     A third “I arise today . . . .” is followed by a litany of various Angels, Patriarchs, Prophets, and Saints, which re-establishes for us that our devotion to the Person of Jesus Christ also connects us to all the lesser persons, living and dead, in the Communion of Saints.
     Next, “I arise today/Through strength of heaven,/the light of the sun . . .” and so on, through a list of natural forces which, St. Patrick here reminds us, come below us in the order of creation, and are so much the more under God’s power (how often we moderns forget both of these truths!).

God’s Providential Care

     After a fifth “I arise today . . .” we see a litany of the various manifestations of God’s Providential care:

     God’s strength to pilot me,
     God’s might to uphold me,
     God’s wisdom to guide me . . .

And so on. At the end of this section we shift our focus to the various evils that beset us:

     God’s host to save me
     From snares of devils,
     From temptation of vices,
     From everyone who shall wish me ill,
     Afar and near.

    In the next section we call for God’s help against these evils, which are laid out in more detail:

     I summon today
     All these powers between me and those evils,
     Against every cruel and merciless power
     That may oppose my body and soul,
     Against incantations of false prophets,
     Against black laws of pagandom,
     Against false laws of heretics,
     Against craft of idolatry,
     Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
     Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.
     Christ shield me today
     Against poison, against burning,
     Against drowning, against wounding,
     So that there may come to me
     an abundance of reward.

Notice the priority given to spiritual evils, which Christians have traditionally understood to be far more serious dangers than the physical hazards at the end of the passage. Today we often ignore or even deride these deadly perils (as I discuss in my post “For Such a Time as This: Powers, Principalities & The Culture Wars“).

The Lorica

     At this point we come to the famous passage quoted at the top of this post (Christ with me,Christ before me, Christ behind me . . .), from which the prayer takes its name. Here we call upon Christ to surround us, to “armor” us, with his protection.
     Finally, the prayer ends by repeating the invocation with which it starts:

     I arise today,
     Through a mighty strength,
     The invocation of the Trinity,
     Through belief in the Threeness,
     Through confession of the Oneness
     Of the Creator of creation.

     As I read through this prayer, which was composed for ancient pagans who knew nothing of Christianity, I am struck by how well it is suited to our current post-Christian, neo-pagan culture. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Even with all the amazing gadgetry that we’ve concocted for ourselves over the centuries, we’re still subject to the same basic temptations and hazards that have always haunted humanity. We still could use the breastplate of Christ.

(See also “St. Patrick, Julius Caesar, and Slavery to Sin“)

Here’s a beautiful setting for St. Patrick’s prayer by contemporary composer Ola Gjeilo:

The Breastplate of St. Patrick:

I arise today

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In the obedience of angels, In the service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In the predictions of prophets,
In the preaching of apostles, In the faith of confessors,
In the innocence of holy virgins,
In the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.

I arise today through
God’s strength to pilot me,
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
afar and near.

God’s Providence

I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.

The Lorica

Christ shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me
an abundance of reward.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

March 9, 2022 iacobusm Faith and Culture, Pro-Life

Random Selection Favors Religion, or, What Would Darwin Do?

I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19)

Spes in Domino — **The Marriage***, by Pietro Longhi, c. 1755*

An Angry God

Random selection appears to have doomed its most enthusiastic promoters to extinction.

I want to be clear that I am not taking issue in this post with the theory of evolution per se, or even with Darwin’s specific take on it in particular. Just as there is a “Spirit of Vatican II” that doesn’t concern itself overmuch with what the Second Vatican Council actually decreed, there is a Spirit of Darwinian Evolution that invokes evolutionary theory as a sort of charm that wards off the need for a Creator, but doesn’t feel the need to explain how. It’s that totemic use of evolution, with a quasi-mythical Darwin as its high priest, that I’m referring to here. My whole point, in fact, is that if materialist atheists were actually to apply evolutionary theory to themselves, they would have to admit that unbelieving humanity is doomed.

*Charles Darwin: Prophet of an angry god*

Let’s start with atheism itself. Atheism and the related materialist philosophy are often described as religions, or as quasi-religions. There’s something to that. For unbelievers, a dogmatic adherence to the tenets of their ideology often seems to play the role that religion and devotion to God fulfills in other people’s lives. It certainly is the case that many of those who reject religious belief treat Darwinian evolutionary theory with almost religious awe, and have turned the man himself into something of a god (Darwin Fish, anyone?), or at least a prophet. If he is a prophet, however, he’s a prophet in the mold of the mythological Greek prophetess Cassandra, whose prophecies were never believed. The evidence is pretty clear: random selection likes religion, but is not a fan of atheism.
Before I look into the matter more directly, I should provide a little context. In my years teaching in Catholic schools I often engaged in dialogue with young unbelievers who were enamored of proselytizing atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (if a messenger of good news is an evangelist, what’s the messenger of bad news? A cacangelist? Just a thought.). In the course of these discussions, I came to an interesting realization: in Darwinian terms, atheism is a negative trait. In strictly materialist terms, that is, based on the clear, straightforward evidence, if we all became atheists, humanity would cease to exist in short order.

Believe the Science

I soon discovered that I was not at all the first person to come to this conclusion: I found a report on a site called Scilogs* about the work of German researcher Michael Blume, who says that

It is a great irony but evolution appears to discriminate against atheists and favor those with religious beliefs . . . Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century.

Blume’s research shows that not just atheist societies, but unbelieving individuals consistently undermine their own posterity:

Blume took data from 82 countries measuring frequency of worship against the number of children. He found that those who worship more than once a week average 2.5 children [2.1 children per woman is the “replacement rate”, the minimum necessary to maintain a population at its current level] while those who never worship only 1.7 – again below replacement rate. There was also considerable variation in religious groups . . . Those without a religion, however, consistently averaged less than two per woman below the replacement , whereas those with the strongest and most fundamental religious beliefs had the most children.

Other researchers come to similar conclusions, and not only on the replacement of populations. On the most basic level, their own individual existence, unbelievers fall short of believers: statistically, those who are actively religious live four years longer.

Viruses of the Mind

What would Charles Darwin say? It would appear that Evolution is an angry and capricious god indeed, as it has clearly selected its most ardent adherents for extinction.

The curious hostility of the process of evolution to the materialist worldview casts a bright light on a contradiction that lies at the heart of the project of atheist proselytization: even if you believe it, why would you want to convince other people? The Dawkinses of the world will reply, as the Blume post says, “that religions are like viruses of the mind which infect people and impose great costs in terms of money, time and health risks.” This, it seems to me, actually defies reason: as I ask my unbelieving interlocutors, is it logical to conclude that a world populated by those who think we are nothing but matter created by meaningless, random natural forces will be a better, kinder place than a world that is the home of people who believe we have been created intentionally by a loving God? Can we reasonably expect that those who believe that we are answerable to nobody and morality is just a social construct will be more loving and generous than men and women who are convinced that we have been commanded by a benevolent Creator to love one another? It just doesn’t make sense.

God is Love (1 John 4:8)

And not surprisingly, the empirical evidence agrees. In addition to the demographic data above, anyone who has studied the history of Rome before and after the Christianization of the Empire, can attest to the humanizing effect of Christianity, and that it was that same Christian Church that civilized the barbarians who eventually overwhelmed the Roman state. Modern day sociological evidence shows the same thing: religious believers (especially Christians) report higher levels of personal happiness (see here, for instance), are more likely to join community and voluntary associations (even non-religious ones), and are more likely to vote. As is the case with the data cited by Blume, the more devout the believer, the stronger the effect. Arthur C. Brooks copiously documents the same results with a wealth of statistical evidence in his book Who Really Cares: believing Christians are much more involved in donating their time and talents for building up their societies, and are much more willing to spare their personal wealth to help others. The Catholic Church alone has founded and runs thousands of hospitals, schools, and countless other charitable projects around the world. Is there any organization founded or run by atheists that even comes close? I submit that the reasonable view is the one that fits the evidence, not the one that contradicts both the empirical data and common sense.

A final point involves getting beyond narrow materialist ideas of what constitutes reason and taking a more expansive (and more traditional) view. Is The Truth about humanity more likely to be something that diminishes humanity, that tears down our societies, makes our lives meaner, and maybe even leads to our annihilation? Or does it lift us up, does it promote flourishing societies and happy productive people? Jesus Christ says “I am The Way, The Truth, and The Life” (John 14:6): doesn’t the evidence bear him out?

*The article to which I refer has since been removed. You can find the same information, and more, on Blume’s own website: http://www.blume-religionswissenschaft.de/english/index_english.html

March 4, 2022 iacobusm Uncategorized

Evangelism, Free Will, and the Spiritual Works of Mercy

**St. Paul in the Areopagus** *by Mariano Fortuny (1855-1856)*

We live in strange times. Never in human history has it been possible for so many people to live lives so disconnected from reality. Former Nuncio to the United States Archbishop Carlo Vigano has just released a remarkable meditation for Lent which touches on that issue. He starts with a prayer from the Ambrosian Missal, which says in part:

Venite flentes, fundamus lacrymas ad Deum:
quia nos negleximus, et propter nos terra patitur:
nos iniquitatem fecimus,
et propter nos fundamenta commota sunt.
Festinemus anteire ante iram Dei . . .

Come weeping, let us shed tears to God: because we have transgressed, and because of us the earth suffers: we have committed iniquity and because of us its foundations have been shaken. Let us hasten to prevent God’s wrath . . .

*Archbishop Vigano (ncronline.com photo)*

“It is difficult for a man of today,” Archbishop Vigano remarks, “to understand these words of the Ambrosian Missal.” The idea that we owe any obedience to anything outside of our own will and desires has become foreign to us. The understanding that justice demands that we submit ourselves to God’s judgment is particularly difficult:

The de-Christianized world and the secularized mentality that has infected even Catholics does not accept the idea of a God offended by the sins of men, and Who punishes them with scourges so that they repent and ask for forgiveness.

We can see the mentality that Archbishop Vigano is describing everywhere today, even, as he says, in the Church. Not only is it a problem everywhere, it is a problem that undermines everything. When we reject the truth of our relationship with God, we undermine the very concept of truth itself. As St. Paul tells the Ephesians:

Now this I affirm and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds; they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart; they have become callous and have given themselves up to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of uncleanness. (Ephesians 4:17-29)

This “darkening of the understanding” makes it very difficult to carry on any sort of reasoned discussion on matters of importance. When all that matters are feelings and desires, when disgreement (at least, disagreement with favored positions or practices) is ipso facto “hate,” real dialogue is impossible.

This curious state of affairs complicates the efforts at evangelization in various ways. For instance, a few years ago when I was the moderator of an online community a young non-Catholic Christian suggested that sharing the Gospel with other people and praying for them was impeding their free will. Now, it would never have occurred to me that informing or attempting to persuade somebody, much less praying for them, somehow interfered with their ability to make free choices; on the contrary, without free will, such efforts are pointless. Nonetheless, I had heard similar questions from other young people as well. Most young people today (and many older ones as well) have been formed in a popular culture that teaches that simply disagreeing with somebody can be a “microaggression”, particularly if the alleged microaggressor holds more traditional views, and most especially if those views can be traced back to orthodox Christian morality. How should we respond to this situation?

The first thing, I think, is to stress that evangelization and prayers for conversion are an act of mercy. How? Since we are all ultimately held accountable for the things that we do with our free will, we try to save others from the consequences of bad decisions, which is to say, sin. It is, of course, merciful to save another person from sin (and, potentially, from eternal damnation). More specifically, I think we can profitably look at this question in terms of several of the traditional Spiritual Works of Mercy.

Let’s start with free will itself. Even though our will is free, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t influenced by many things. Not only that, we can’t make good choices if we’re missing essential information. Let us suppose, for instance, that a friend is about to dive into a lake that has just been declared unsafe due to high levels of harmful bacteria. Informing him of the danger doesn’t violate his free will; in fact, it allows him to make a truly free choice, because it’s based on the truth, and not on a false belief that the water is safe. If it’s merciful to protect a friend from getting sick in this way, how much more so if we can give him information that can save his soul for eternity? This is the 2nd Spiritual Work of Mercy, “Instructing the Ignorant” (“ignorant” isn’t meant as an insult; it simply means someone who doesn’t know).

*7th Spiritual Work of Mercy: Praying for the Living and the Dead (CNS photo/Jim West)*

We sometimes have the right information, but we may also have disordered desires (that is, attraction to sin) that lead us to do things that we know are wrong. Disordered desires such as greed, lust, envy, etc., pull our will away from what we know is right. Consequently, it often happens that a Christian who knows full well that a particular act, adultery for instance, is seriously wrong, follows his or her desires instead. The consequences can be disastrous for such a person and for others involved in his sin. It is merciful to point out these abuses of our will to each other, because in doing so we can sometimes bring a sinner back to right conduct. As an added bonus, we help ourselves as well, as Holy Scripture tells us:

My brethren, if any one among you wanders from the truth and some one brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. (James 5:19-20)

This is the 3rd Spiritual Work of Mercy, “Admonishing Sinners” (and we are all sinners who sometimes require admonition).

In the end, of course, none of us exercises our free will perfectly, and none of us can save ourselves: that’s why we needed Christ to die on the Cross for us. For that reason we “Pray for the Living and the Dead” (the 7th Spiritual Work of Mercy). When we pray for the living, we are asking God not to override their free will, but to give them the Grace (His help and support) to freely use their will in accord with His Will, and not according to their disordered desires. We also pray for the dead in Purgatory who are being cleansed of the consequences of the misuse of their free will, that God’s mercy might ease their passage into His Presence.

We hear a lot less about the Spiritual Works of Mercy these days than we do about the Corporal Works of Mercy (a reflection of materialist tendencies affecting even the Church). That’s a shame, because in the midst of the greatest material prosperity that this world has ever seen we have a vast sea of spiritual suffering. The world is full of people, including me and you, whose choices are hampered by ignorance, whose desires are disordered, and who are desperately in need of prayers. Answering their needs isn’t an imposition: it’s an act of mercy.

February 23, 2022 iacobusm Faith and Culture

One H*ll of an After School Activity: Meet the Satan Club

Eminent Scientist — *Satan in Dante’s Inferno, by Gustave Dore, 1861*

An Angel of Light . . . Not

Ah, I see the Satan Club is in the news again. This time spreading light. . . . well, not light, exactly . . . but speading something in the Milwaukee area. Don’t be alarmed, though, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel assures us that, despite their evocative name, the group “does not believe in a supernatural figure equal or similar to Christian definitions of Satan – rather, according to the Washington Post, the Satanic Temple [sponsor of the Satan Club] “rejects all forms of supernaturalism” and instead promotes “scientific rationality.” Right. Which is why they call themselves after that eminent scientist, Satan.

I first heard about the Satan Club several years ago, when they were bringing their special kind of joy to Portland, Oregon. They’re still up to their old tricks, posing as an angel of light when, in truth, they are something very different. In honor of Satan Clubs everywhere I’m republishing my original post, called “One H*ll of an After School Club.”

There’s A New Club In Town

Here’s some happy news: the Nehalem Elementary School in Portland, Oregon, has approved a “Satan Club” for its young (i.e., pre-teen) students. The club is sponsored by a group going by the felicitous name of The Satanic Temple. Does that, or does it not, sound uplifting?

I don’t doubt that there are some people who do consider it good news that there will be a club upholding the Prince of Darkness as a role model for youngsters. In particular, some of a more secular bent may appreciate that this puts those of us in with, shall we say, more traditional religious views, in something of a bind. After all, aren’t we always carping about religious freedom, and complaining about efforts to exclude religious belief from the public square? Don’t we claim that government has no business deciding what is legitimate religion and what is not? Are we not, in fact, hypocrites if we try to prevent the satanists from sharing their enthusiasm for Lucifer with the boys and girls at Nehalem Elementary School?

Keeping The Satan In Satanism?

The answer is, I think, simpler than it might at first appear. We absolutely ought to oppose as strenuously as we can anything as poisonous as a “Satan Club” in schools, especially for pre-teen children, and no, there is nothing whatsoever hypocritical about it. Consider the following:

Charming Devil — *Charming illustration from “Educatin With Satan” website*

The satanists themselves make it clear that they are not really a religion. For instance, The Satanic Temple is also trying to install an after school club in the Seattle, Washington area. The Seattle Times (story here) quotes Tarkus Claypool, campaign manager (um, “campaign manager”? Since when does a religion have a campaign manager?) for the group in that area, as saying: “We don’t worship a deity . . . We only see Satan as a metaphor for fighting religious tyranny and oppression.” This is a fairly common trope among Satanists, one you might have heard before. There was a similar quote in the original Fox News article about the Oregon Satan Club. That quote has since been removed, perhaps because the spokesperson in Portland also added that most satanists are really atheists, which tends to undercut even further their claim to religious status.

So, if the satanists don’t really believe in Satan, what is the purpose of their club? “Our curriculum is about teaching them logic, self-empowerment and reasoning”, according to Claypool, “The most Satanic thing about it is in the healthy snack — we have an apple.” Finn Rezz, speaking on behalf of the newly-approved Nehalem group in Oregon, adds that, in addition to “science and rational thinking”, the club will promote “benevolence and empathy for everybody.”

If only that were true. After all, if all they want to do is to promote rational thinking, why not a “Reason Club”? Why not a “Science and Empathy Club”? Those are perfectly legitimate viewpoints. Why not even an “Atheists Club”? However much we believers might dislike it, the same laws that allow Christian clubs on school grounds also protect the nonbelievers. The Satanic Temple has chosen a different route, however, and their choice of the Prince of Lies as their public persona tells us what they’re really about; it has nothing to do with reason or benevolence.

The Devil Is In The Details

To begin with, let’s talk about Satan. He has a track record: he’s been a public figure, so to speak, for millennia. If you were to go out on the street and ask people at random what the Devil represents, what responses will you get? Most people will, of course, answer “evil”, “sin”, “death”, “corruption”, etc. How many do you think will say “a metaphor for fighting religious oppression”? There may be a few, perhaps, but a very few indeed. No, Lucifer’s image has remained true what it is in Scripture, the source that introduced him to us. There we read:

He who commits sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. (1 John 3:8)

He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (John 8:44)

Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. (2 Corinthians 11:14)

Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. (1 Peter 5:8)

*Image from the “Educatin With Satan” website*

How rational is it to hold up as a paragon of “reason” a figure who is the enemy of truth, a born liar who hides his true nature? How appropriate a personification of “empathy and benevolence” is someone known as a murderer who seeks to “devour” the unwary? My purpose here is not to make a Biblical argument against the Satan Club, I’m simply pointing out who and what its patron has always been known to be, and what he actually represents. One doesn’t need to believe in the truth of the Bible to recognize that Satan represents the exact opposite of what the Satan Club claims to promote.

“By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them”

In fact, their choice of the universally acknowledged personification of every evil as their public face brings to mind another applicable scripture passage: “You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit.” (Matthew 7:16-17). Again, that’s just common sense, isn’t it? And what are the “fruits” the Satan club displays? Do the satanists act like people committed to reason, love, and kindness, and do their own self-explanations emphasize any positive message of their own . . . or are their fruits of a different kind? Let us look again at what they say about themselves. Seattle satanist Tarkus Claypool says of the Satan club, “It’s designed to be a counterpoint to the Good News program.” Portland Oregon’s Finn Rezz says that their Satan club “will be held on Wednesdays once a month at the same time as the Good News Club.” In fact, if we look at the FAQ page from the satanists’ “Educatin With Satan” website, we find that they really have more to say about this “Good News Club” than they do about their nominal patron demon, and certainly more than they do about reason, science, benevolence, and empathy put together. In several places they cite the Good News Club as their reason for being, and they even advise those who might wish to establish a Satan club (my bold):

Please keep in mind that The Satanic Temple is not interested in operating After School Satan Clubs in school districts that are not already hosting the Good News Club. However, The Satanic Temple ultimately intends to have After School Satan Clubs operating in every school district where the Good News Club is represented.

Good News: What’s Not To Like?

What are these Good News Clubs that so exercise the good people at the Satanic Temple? The Good News Clubs are a ministry of the Child Evangelism Fellowship. From CEF’s website they appear to adhere to a fairly traditional Evangelical Protestant understanding of Christianity. They describe the purpose of their Good News Clubs as follows:

CEF Website — *Photo from the CEF website*

Our ministry teaches morals and respect for others, helps build character, strengthens families, assists schools and encourages children. We frequently receive comments of support from school officials, bus drivers and parents which complement the positive change in the behavior of the boys and girls who attend Good News Clubs. Our mission is to serve the children, their parents, the school and the community.

They also give a succinct explanation of their methodology:

. . . trained teachers meet with groups of children in schools, homes, community centers, churches, apartment complexes, just about anywhere the children can easily and safely meet with their parent’s permission. Each week the teacher presents an exciting Bible lesson using colorful materials from CEF Press. This action-packed time also includes songs, Scripture memory, a missions story and review games or other activities focused on the lesson’s theme.

As with all CEF ministries, the purpose of Good News Club is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living.

Here and in numerous other places they emphasize that they only meet children with their parents’ permission, and do not seek to supplant their family’s church. Also, while they are straightforward in proposing sin as something that infects everyone, at the same time they emphasize Christ’s saving love and forgiveness: “Now, because of what Jesus has done for you, you can have your sins forgiven. Read on to see how!”

J’Accuse!

Most fair-minded people, even if they take issue with the Child Evangelism Fellowship on some points of theology and ecclesiology, would have a hard time objecting to this program. Perhaps you won’t be surprised that the Satanic Temple doesn’t take a positive view. On their FAQ page they say:

[T]he twisted Evangelical teachings of The Good News Clubs “robs [sic] children of the innocence and enjoyment of childhood, replacing them with a negative self image, preoccupation with sin, fear of Hell, and aversion to critical thinking . . . ”

Forgive me for observing that this angry, accusatory smear seems neither rational nor objective, nor terribly benevolent or empathetic. In fact, it reminds me of nobody so much as the Satan Club’s standard bearer, of whom I observed in an earlier post (“‘Choice’ and The Father of Lies“):

For this reason he is called “the Devil”, from the Greek διάβολος (diabolos), which means “slanderer, perjurer, false accuser, and can also mean “deceiver, one who misleads”. It derives from the verb διαβάλλω (diaballo), whose original meaning is “drive through”, or destroy. Satan seeks to destroy us, eternally, by using falsehood and deception to separate us from God.

*Rational thought and benevolence: Seattle area Satanic Temple members (Seattle Times photo)*

Isn’t that just what the Satan club is about? They pose as “angels of light” with their talk of empathy and science, but it’s clear by their own words and deeds that their true agenda is to disparage and harass a particular Christian group, and separate Christian children from the religious beliefs of their families; the only plausible reason to choose as their public face Satan, the personification of mindless hatred, untruth, and evil from the Christian Scriptures, is to taunt and insult Christians; their stated policy is to form their clubs only where they can target the Evangelical Christian “Good News” clubs. Clearly, their purpose is not to promote a religion in which they assure us they don’t believe, and they manifestly don’t model the virtues they claim to advocate. They are in reality a hate group dedicated to denying Christian students the right to exercise their own right of free expression in their own clubs. Far from being hypocrites, we have solid legal and moral reasons to work to deny them access to public facilities.

February 17, 2022 iacobusm Uncategorized

Our Eternal Destiny: Armed Robbery, or A Warm Place By The Fire?

Litlle Caesar 1931 — *From the film* **Little Caesar,** *1931*

“It’s like comparing cats and dogs.” Ever heard that expression before? Ever used it? I did, several years ago. I was teaching a 9th grade theology class in a (more or less) Catholic school, and same sex marriage (a hot topic at the time) came up for discussion. I wanted to emphasize that the marital relationship between a man and a woman is fundamentally different from a relationship between two men or two women. In my naivete I thought it would be helpful to explain that the relationships were as different as cats and dogs. Which is why I found myself in the assistant principal’s office the next day responding to student complaints that I had called people in same sex couples animals. “They tell me you said they were cats and dogs!”

This is a true story. I understood perfectly shortly afterwards when I heard Catholic scholar and apologist Peter Kreeft say that analogical thinking is a dying art. Our addiction to communications technology, it appears, is killing our powers of imagination. Kreeft pointed out that brains which spend a lot of time interacting with video games and various other electronic devices simply don’t develop in the same way as those formed by extensive reading. Among the those things that are undernourished are linear and analogical thinking. Professor Kreeft has found that this makes it difficult to teach a subject like Theology that requires dealing with a lot of difficult and abstract ideas.

The “cats and dogs” example above is just one of many I’ve experienced in thirty-plus years of teaching and, yes, such examples have become more frequent over the years. Fortunately, we still have a long way to go: while many people, especially young people, may not be as quick to grasp them as they might have been several decades ago, analogies are still the most effective way to communicate many ideas. Analogies have always been a preferred way of explaining Christian doctrine: think of the parables of Jesus, or St. Paul’s comparison (1st Corinthians) of the Church to a body, with all the members working together at their own assigned tasks. Not only that, one of the four traditional Levels of Meaning in scripture, the Allegorical, relies very heavily on analogical thinking. Analogy is often the only reliable way for us who are composed of both spirit and matter to understand spiritual realities.

Not surprisingly, analogies are also an essential tool in any dialogue with those who don’t share our faith. I don’t mean only those analogies we ourselves offer to explain our ideas. There are times when critiquing poorly conceived analogies offered up by those with whom we are, as they say, in dialogue, can sometimes help clarify the muddy thinking behind them. I once had an enthusiastically atheist student, for example, who proposed the following analogy as a critique of the Christian conception of God: Our Lord, as we Christians envision Him, is like an armed robber with a gun to our heads. He is offering us a choice between giving him all our money (i.e., living according to the Gospel and spending eternity in Heaven), or having our brains blown out (which is spending eternity in Hell).

Now, clearly, there are some very obvious problems with this analogy. The vast majority of people, even many non-Christians, will have a hard time seeing going to Heaven as equivalent to getting mugged, even if we accept the premise that living a Christian life “robs” us of pleasures we might otherwise enjoy. Heaven promises something infinitely better than anything available here, whereas an armed robber does not even pretend to make our life better than it was before we met him. And of course there is quite a lot of secular, sociological evidence that following God’s law actually makes us happier in the here-and-now. Also, the robber analogy depicts Hell as something that God imposes on us, in which we take no initiative at all, when in fact the Catholic conception of Hell is that it is something that we choose for ourselves by our rejection of his freely offered love, contrary to God’s desire that “all men be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (1 Timothy 2:4)

The example above, by the way, also shows how analogies can be used not only to enlighten, but to deceive. A vivid image can capture the imagination and appear to be making a good argument, when in fact it is distorting the underlying ideas. A rational rebuttal can help to undermine a bad analogy, but logic doesn’t have the emotional impact of the tangible picture an analogy can create. Sometimes, in addition to reasoned argument, a good counter-analogy helps.

**The Return of the Prodigal Son***, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, c. 1670*

In this case, what analogy more truthfully communicates the eternal choice which God presents to us? Try this: imagine that we are standing outdoors on a cold, rainy night. Somebody (God) opens a door and invites us to come inside with him, where it is warm and dry (although, of course, we need to take off our wet muddy boots and our wet, dripping coats: those represent our attachment to sin). That’s God’s offer of eternal salvation. We can say yes, although we are equally free to say no. In fact, we are free to say “No, you can’t tell me what to do! Besides, can you prove it’s really warm and dry in there?” And we can remain out in the cold, wet darkness. That’s Hell, the product of nothing but our own pride and stubbornness.

The second analogy presents a much more accurate image of the Christian view of our eternal destiny. Notice also that these two analogies do more than simply offer different interpretations of the Christian view of our relationship with our Creator. Each also provides a telling view of the perspective of those who are offering the analogy. We can clearly see that the atheist’s philosophical stance is concerned with power, force, and will, a zero sum game in which one party must be the winner, and the other the loser. The truly Christian perspective envisions a reality in which love can triumph, and everyone can win.

So, yes, analogies can get us into trouble, both because in our increasingly literal-minded age our listeners might not understand, but also because the images we choose may reveal more of ourselves than we intend. Nonetheless, we follow a Lord who compares faith to a mustard seed, and to a treasure buried in a field. Not only that, he describes our omnipotent Creator as a loving, forgiving Father who waits for each one of us anxiously from afar, desiring us to return to him so that he can say of each of us, “this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” (Luke 15:24) Let’s not stay outside in the rain.

February 8, 2022 iacobusm Uncategorized

Looking for God in All the Wrong Places

There’s an old joke about a police officer who was walking his beat one night when he came upon a man, apparently drunk, crawling around on his hands and knees on the pavement under a streetlamp.

“What are you doing?” asked the officer.

“Looking for my keys,” came the reply.

“Where’d you lose them?” returned the constable.

“Over there” answered the other, gesturing toward a shadowy area outside the halo of the streetlamp.

“Then why are you looking here?” demanded the bemused policeman.

“Well,” said the man, looking up at the officer, “the light’s better here.”

I am sometimes reminded of the unfortunate man under the streetlight when I am engaged in discussion with atheists. It’s not that they are intoxicated, but that they insist on conducting the search for God where He cannot possibly be found, using a method that is guaranteed not to find Him.

Most atheists I talk to are materialists, who insist that we can’t reasonably argue for the existence of God unless we can detect his presence using the tools of science. This is, of course, a very narrow and limited understanding of “reason” (and one for which they have a hard time coming up with a reasonable defense). They either can’t or won’t accept that the Creator of the universe must logically be outside his creation (just as an artist cannot be inside his own painting). Science can only detect things that are part of the natural universe. If God is truly God, then finding Him through scientific inquiry is as useless as looking for lost keys thirty feet away from where you know you dropped them.

Unless, of course, you don’t want to find anything . . .

June 24, 2021 iacobusm Uncategorized

Practical Apologetics: The Geometry of Faith

Once upon a time I was a teacher in a (more or less) Catholic school, where I was occasionally called upon to teach an introductory theology course to the bright-eyed young men & women of the ninth grade. Of the roughly 16 students per class there would usually be 2-3 Catholic students whose families attended Mass at least weekly, and a like number of non-Catholic Christians who were regular church goers. The rest were raised in a secular environment, ranging from occasionally religious to explicitly atheist.

I soon found that most of these young people, even many of the regular church attendees, had been so indoctrinated into a materialist way of thinking by teachers, mass media, and society in general that I found it difficult to explain even basic religious ideas. It was almost like speaking a foreign tongue. Some of these students were fans of the then-popular “new atheists” (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.), and most had been affected to some degree by “scientistic” thinking, that it, the idea that scientific explanations were the only serious or valid explanations. I found that I had to get them outside of these narrow ways of understanding reality before they could even begin to understand the purpose of or the need for religious faith.

Many of my blog posts grew out of discussions with these students, including some republished here (“Has Pascal’s Wager Really Been ‘Debunked’?“, “God’s Existence Isn’t A Dark Matter“). The post below is another of these, in which I try to get my students to look at the world from a different – ahem – angle:

What is both seen and unseen?

“The Catholic Church,” according to G.K. Chesterton, “is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.” Those of us who have been out and now are in (back in, for some of us) know how true it is. And it stands to reason: as both a worldly and a spiritual entity, the Church cannot be contained within purely physical bounds.

“The Catholic Church is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.” -G.K. Chesterton

This sounds like sheer nonsense, of course, to those who are formed in a materialist worldview, because they reject a priori the existence of a non-physical reality. It may be a decided minority who consciously embrace such a worldview, but many, many more unthinkingly see the world in the same way. Explaining Catholicism and the Catholic Church under these circumstances (except, maybe, in the most zealously orthodox Catholic schools) sometimes feels like trying to converse with someone who speaks a completely different language.

Instructing the unknowing, however, is one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy, so we must always search for new ways to communicate the experience of faith. In the “Dark Matter’ post, for instance, I use the cosmological theories of “dark matter” and “dark energy” as an analogy to answer the common idea that, because we can’t detect God directly using scientific instruments, it’s unreasonable to believe in him. I point out that scientists believe that 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is completely undetectable, but they are convinced it is there because of its observed effects on things we can detect; likewise, we can be sure of the existence of God, even though he is beyond this world, because of his effect on things (and people) that we are able to see.

The Faith Postulate

In a similar way, there are things we can know only by experiencing them: the love of God as we experience it in His Church is a prime example. The outsider will often dismiss this sort of knowledge as requiring an irrational, unsupported belief, since the proof comes after our initial commitment. We might ask such skeptics to consider geometry as an analogy. Euclidean Geometry, for instance, starts with the parallel postulate, which requires that parallel lines never meet. It’s not proven, you simply have to take it as a given. Once you do, of course, you find that the entire system is consistent, which validates your starting assumptions. More importantly, you find that when you apply it to the real world, for measuring property lines, for instance, it is absolutely reliable.

Likewise the Catholic Faith: once you “step inside” and see the results, the most “reasonable” response is belief (this is Blaise Pascal’s proscription for those who remain unconvinced by the logic of his famous wager). We can see it in our own lives, where despair and dysfunction give way to joy and productivity; we can see it in large and loving families of believers. We can even see it in the fact that, as measured by consistently higher birthrates, religious societies show greater confidence in the future. Faith works.

All analogies are imperfect, of course, and a skeptic might point out that, while the Catholic Church claims to hold immutable truths, we can change the parallel postulate and still come up with other internally consistent systems of geometry, systems which may not work on a plane, but work perfectly well in other contexts. In spherical geometry, for instance, parallel lines (which are actually lines of longitude) meet exactly twice, at the poles. This system is much more accurate than Euclidean geometry for measuring on a globe. Spherical geometry shows us, for example, that what looks like shortest distance from, say, Seattle to London (a straight line from west to east) on a flat map is actually much longer than a route which loops north (or appears to “loop” north) over Greenland.

The “great circle” route looks longer on a “flat” mercator projection . . .

. . . but on the gnomonic map, which measures global distances more accurately, we can see that it’s really more direct*

The Fullness of Truth

The fact that there are different geometries, however, doesn’t weaken the analogy at all: if anything, it develops it further. Like Euclidean geometry, which only works on a two-dimensional plane, the scientific worldview is an accurate and quite useful tool for interpreting reality . . . within a certain narrow focus. It enables us to learn about and work with things that are physical and measurable, but it cannot tell us about things like love, justice, or any other reality that might exist outside of the purely physical realm. Just as a bathroom scale can tell us how much we weigh but can’t tell us our age, scientific knowledge cannot alone tell us anything about things outside of its set boundaries. The Christian Revelation, on the other hand, reaches beyond the material world and gives us access to a much fuller reality, and once we accept its premises, we can see both its internal consistency and its Truth when applied to our experience.

“Archimedes Moves the World”, the title page of *The Mechanic’s Magazine* London, 1824

Maybe when we look at it in this way, it can help us explain what St. Paul means when he says: “Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19). He is not rejecting reason, but saying that, to someone who thinks in only two dimensions, three-dimensional reasoning is incomprehensible. Likewise with Chesterton: those on the outside of the Catholic Church often think they are looking at a plane, while from the inside we can see it in all its three-dimensional fullness.

Finally, one last quote, from one of the greatest of geometricians, Archimedes: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world!” Everything depends on that “place to stand”, and there’s no firmer ground than the Church founded by Jesus Christ.

*images from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/15424/what-is-the-minimum-knowledge-to-navigate-with-only-a-compass

May 12, 2021 iacobusm Uncategorized

Has Pascal’s Wager Really Been “Debunked”?

Who Will Debunk the Debunkers?

The totalitarian subjugation, debasement, and enslavement of language foreseen by prophets of dystopia such as George Orwell is in full flower. I need not point out recent examples like “peaceful protest”, “court-packing”, and the like to show how many previously clear and serviceable expressions have been made to mean something other than what they purport to mean, sometimes even their exact opposite.

One such term with a long history of abuse is “debunk”. This word originally meant to disprove, to show that a particular statement or argument was “bunk”, i.e., nonsense. For some time now, however, I’ve seen certain people employ the term when they have made no serious effort to refute something, but have simply stated their disagreement. They often seem to think that if they simply invoke the word without actually making an argument, debunk will, through some numinous power of its own, refute an unwelcome assertion.

Debunk has become something of a red flag for me because of this history of abuse. It’s what caught my attention a few years back when I saw a reference to an article claiming to debunk Pascal’s Wager. When I looked at the article in question I found that, to their credit, the authors did in fact make the effort to present arguments in support of their positions; the problem was, their arguments were themselves largely bunk. But don’t take my word for it: I make my case below in an article I first published six years ago this month, “Has Pascal’s Wager Really Been ‘Debunked’?”.

The Wager

Is it true that Pascal’s Wager has been “debunked”? Most informed Catholics will be familiar with Pascal’s Wager, which is an argument 17^th century Catholic philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal developed in his Pensees. Pascal says that whether to believe in God or not is a choice we all need to make. There are four possible outcomes to our choice: if we choose to believe and we are right, we experience endless bliss after death, but if we are wrong we experience nothing at all, we simply cease to exist. If we choose disbelief and we are right, we likewise experience nothing after this world, but if we are wrong we suffer eternal damnation. Belief is clearly the best bet, because we risk nothing and stand to gain infinite joy, whereas disbelief gains us nothing even if we’re right, and costs us absolutely everything if we’re wrong.

Where’s the Bunk?

It’s a simple and straightforward argument, and it seems pretty obvious. You wouldn’t think that there was room for much “bunk” in it. And yet the New Atheism’s evangelists of nothingness claim to have shown it to be an empty shell. You can find websites created by self-proclaimed debunkers which present the main anti-Wager arguments (along with a fair amount of neo-atheist snark). One such site, for instance, takes three main lines of attack:

1) “It assumes that there is only one religion”, thus we are presented, not with two clear choices, but with a myriad of choices. This objection, which has been around since Pascal’s time, is traditionally known as the argument from inconsistent revelations.

2) The second, as we shall see, is not so much an argument as an unsupported opinion: ‘Also, the second problem is that it assumes that the possibility that the Christian doctrine that “everyone is going to hell unless they become a Christian and accept Jesus as their Savior” is a realistic and significant possibility. Perhaps they think it is even as probable as the possibility that there is no God. However, based on the arguments in this book and in others linked, it should be clear that that probability is pretty much zero by now.’

3) ‘Finally, few, if any, disbelievers disbelieve out of choice . . . Most disbelievers disbelieve simply because they know of no compelling evidence or reasons to believe . . .’ and ‘Even if you said all the right prayers and attended church regularly, that would still not be the same thing as believing from the heart, and any real God would obviously see straight through that.’

The Straw Man Cometh

Let’s get the second out of the way first because, as I observed above, it is not a serious argument. Our unbelieving friends make a sweeping assertion and offer no proof other than inviting us to read their book. Sorry guys, your opinion isn’t proof of anything. And if the quality of their argument here is any indication, I doubt that I’ll find the rest of their book any more persuasive (and I’m willing to bet I’ve heard all those “arguments” before, too). This is no more than an attempt to dismiss the case before it can be litigated.

Number one at least has the virtue of being an actual argument, one that was first raised, in fact, in Pascal’s lifetime (just as an aside, if Pascal’s Wager is “old and outdated”, as the debunkers assert, doesn’t the same criticism apply to their equally antique counter-argument?). Pascal himself dismissed it as an attempt to derail the argument, a straw man, rather than an attempt to get at the truth, adding “But if you desire with all your heart to know it, it is not enough; look at it in detail.” What he says next points up the main weakness with of this objection: “That would be sufficient in philosophy; but not here, where everything is at stake.” His wager is not an exercise in formal logic, nor is it a metaphysical proof, nor is it an attempt to offer a comprehensive answer to all the possible possibilities raised by religious belief. Most of all, it is not a hypothetical question for the amusement of bored minds: it deals with a real life and death choice, an eternal life and death choice, that we all must make. He is offering his wager as a guide to making a real decision of which path to set out on, confident that a seeker who is sincerely looking for the truth will, ultimately, find it.

The following analogy might help clarify what Pascal is getting at. Suppose you’re driving down the road and you come to a T intersection. A sign pointing to the right says “Jerusalem”, the sign pointing to the left says “Danger: Bridge Out.” If you take the left road, you might find yourself driving into a river, or maybe the bridge will have been repaired, or there could be ferry service, who knows? If you take the right, there might be an unexpected landslide, or you might miss another turn and get lost, or you might get eaten by a lion; there are an endless variety of things that might happen. You can’t know any of those things at the intersection, but you can be reasonably sure that if you want to get to Jerusalem, the right hand turn is your best bet, while the left will, at best, take you somewhere else, or at worst get you killed. That’s what Pascal’s Wager is about, it’s about that initial decision to commit yourself to finding God, or to turn away. If you choose God, you will still have an endless series of further choices and decisions ahead of you, even if you are sure that the Catholic Church is the True Church. And remember, Pascal’s Wager doesn’t promise that you will find salvation if you choose God, only that you might, whereas if you choose to reject the possibility of God you definitely won’t. The argument from inconsistent revelations does nothing to change that.

Belief is Belief . . . or is it?

The third argument is a variant of the argument from inauthentic belief (briefly, that Pascal’s Wager is arguing for the outward appearance of belief, as opposed to actual belief). Like the first, it misrepresents what the Wager is really saying, and misstates what Catholics have traditionally understood by “belief”. It starts out, as does the debunkers’ second argument, with an unsupported assertion: “few, if any, disbelievers disbelieve out of choice”, followed by another, “Most disbelievers disbelieve simply because they know of no compelling evidence or reasons to believe.”

Not only do they fail to provide any evidence for either statement, the two are, in fact, contradictory: if nobody chooses to disbelieve, then what does evidence have to do with it? In any case, they don’t say reasons and evidence don’t exist, but “they know of no compelling evidence or reasons to believe”. The word “compelling” means persuasive, and implies that they do have a choice either to accept or reject the evidence on offer. And as it happens, according to polling data, 8 out of every 10 Americans do find the same evidence “compelling” enough to believe, so it would seem that whether or not it is “compelling” is in the eye of the beholder: we all do have a choice. Or maybe believers don’t really choose either, in which case, why try to “debunk” anything, since none of us, apparently, have any control over our beliefs? I have no choice but to believe this argument is simply incoherent.

That leaves us with the argument that following the outward form of religious observance without “believing from the heart” would not count as real belief, and “any real God would obviously see straight through” it. Like many fallacies, this point contains enough truth to make it appear plausible at first glance, because insincere belief is, of course, false belief.

And Jesus said to him, “Go your way; your faith has made you well.” (Mark 10:52)

“Christ Heals The Blind Man” by Eustache Le Sueur, 1600’s

Part of the problem here is that this objection misrepresents what a Christian means by belief, in the same way that the secular world misunderstands what is meant by “love”. The modern secularist sees love as primarily an emotional effect, or even as pure emotion, and therefore something that happens to you, not something you do. In the Christian view, Love is a decision of the will, informed by the intellect, and ideally supported by the emotions, but the emotional part is the least essential. It is therefore possible to love, truly love, someone whom you heartily dislike if you sincerely desire what is best for them, without regard for your own self-interest. Genuine belief is likewise a conscious choice and a movement of the will.

Emotions are a very unreliable guide to actions, but can serve to support and reinforce the will. Very often we find that contrary emotions change (sometimes slowly) following a firm decision on our part, especially if we change our habits or practices to go along with it. Countless people have experienced such emotional changes after switching political parties, for instance, or changing some other allegiance. In fact, it is very often the emotional attachments that keep people from switching long after they see solid reasons to do so, and it’s only after they decide to act that the emotions follow.

Pascal believed (as Catholics and many other people traditionally have) that reason, not emotion, should govern the will, but that emotions were the main obstacle for most people, certainly for those who claimed that they wanted to believe but could not. In a case such as this, the challenge is to get our emotions in line with our reasoned decisions. Accordingly, this is his advice to such people:

Learn from those who were bound like you . . . Follow the way by which they began: that is by doing everything as if they believed, by taking holy water, by having masses said, etc. Naturally, even this will make you believe and will dull you. -’But this is what I am afraid of.’ – And why? What have you to lose?

Of course, Pascal was depending not only on the natural tendency of emotions to follow (at least eventually) a firm will, but also the working of God’s grace on those who are sincerely seeking Him, even if they are not yet sure that they have found him.

Now, our atheist friends might point out that they don’t believe in God’s Grace, and our emotions don’t always do what we want them to do. True enough. But it also doesn’t matter. Notice that Pascal isn’t offering a counter argument, but advice to those who might be hesitating, because the argument from inauthentic belief isn’t really an objection to Pascal’s Wager at all. As I indicate in the“T intersection” analogy above, the Wager is solely concerned with whether it is wiser to choose a road that leads toward God, or one that leads away. The choice itself is just a beginning, and is the same whether or not there might be difficulties or further choices along the way (as, in fact, we should expect there will be).

Is it really that complicated?

The simplicity of the choice is what gives Pascal’s Wager its persuasive power. You can find critics who present much more formal and complicated discussions than the self-proclaimed debunkers cited above, but they are all variations of the same old arguments presented here, all of which have been around since Pascal’s day, and all of which rely on making his Wager something it is not. They all have to do with raising questions about the certainty of Eternal Salvation, but that is, of course, why it is a wager in the first place, because there is no certainty in this world. I have yet to see an argument that overcomes this stark, simple choice: what’s the worst that can happen if you gamble on God? What’s the worst if you take the other path? Is it really that complicated?

April 14, 2021 iacobusm The Church

Aborigines, Atheists, and the Authenticity of the Gospels

A few years ago I ran across an amazing story (“Ancient Sea Rise Tale Told Accurately For 10,000 Years“) from Scientific American, detailing how aboriginal Australians have preserved, via oral tradition, accurate information about geographical features that have been underwater since the end of the last Ice Age, circa 10,000 years ago. The article is fascinating for its own sake, but it also shows some of the limitations of the modern skeptical, ostensibly scientific (but more accurately “scientistic”) worldview. Not only that, it has some relevance to our Faith, and particularly to the question of the veracity of Scripture. In the post below I discuss how the amazing memories of Australia’s oldest inhabitants inform our defense of the authenticity of the Gospels.

Port Philip Bay today (photo from https://melbournedaily.blogspot.com/)

Let’s start with the scriptural question. A common line of attack by well-trained atheist enthusiasts is that the books of the New Testament weren’t even written down until 30-60 years after the death of Jesus: how can we expect them to be reliable? There are a number of good answers to this. I used to point out to my skeptical students, for instance, that I had been married for about 30 years, and I still remembered the events of my wedding day quite well, and also events of my childhood and adolescence even further back. My parents still remembered things that had happened 70 years prior, or more. While the average life span was far lower two thousand years ago than it is today (as best we can determine), there were still plenty of people who lived into their 70’s and 80’s – so the events recounted in the Gospels were still within living memory when they were written down.

It’s also a fact that people in ancient societies had much better powers of memory (as people in less literate societies do today), because they needed to rely on memory much more than we do. It should be no surprise, then, that in the 19th century Heinrich Schliemann disproved the rationalist scholars who insisted that the Iliad and Odyssey could not possibly have any real historical background when he excavated the sites of Troy and Mycenae, right where Homer’s epics said they would be (both poems existed for centuries before they were written down).

“A Reading From Homer” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1885

Likewise, in the early 20th century Milman Parry refuted the scholarly assertion that it was impossible for ancient rhapsodes to memorize with accuracy long epic poems such as Homer’s works when he located and recorded Croatian bards who accomplished similar feats of memory. And now we see Aborigines who have transmitted information accurately over not merely decades, but millennia:

Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names.

That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories—many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar—that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.

There’s more to these examples, however, than simple powers of memorization. I found this passage from the Scientific American article about the Aborigines very intriguing:

“There are aspects of storytelling in Australia that involved kin-based responsibilities to tell the stories accurately,” Reid said. That rigor provided “cross-generational scaffolding” that “can keep a story true.”

How much more important to “tell the stories accurately” if they are about God-become-Man, and to forget means eternal oblivion?

“The Four Evangelists”, Frans Floris I, mid-1500s

In other words, older people who know the story will correct the story-teller who messes it up, and it’s a “kin-based responsibility” because these stories are a crucial part of the group identity: they tell people who they are. To forget is to become nobody. How much more important to “tell the stories accurately” if they are about God-become-Man, and to forget means eternal oblivion? And when the elders checking the story-tellers’ accuracy were eye witnesses . . . or when the story-tellers themselves were witnesses or participants in what they are describing?

Believing Catholics, of course, trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit in preserving the truth, but that won’t help to convince those who don’t share our Faith. Natural reason, however, and the available evidence, show that the earliest Christians were not only quite capable of preserving the story of Jesus accurately, but also were extremely unlikely to do otherwise. That, at least, is the rational conclusion: what evidence can the doubters offer to the contrary?

(I published an earlier version of this Throwback Thursday post 12 February 2015)

Feature image above: photo by Lefteris Pitarakis, from website https://www.ancient-code.com/

April 8, 2021 iacobusm Uncategorized

God’s Existence isn’t a Dark Matter

Once upon a time I taught in a (more or less) Catholic high school. Occasionally I was called upon to teach religion to the bright-eyed young men and women of the 9th grade. At the time the so-called “New Atheists” (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, etc.) were in vogue, and so class usually contained two or three students eager to try out the latest anti-Christian tropes that they had picked up online or wherever it is that aspiring atheist proselytizers hang out. Needless to say, we had many a lively discussion. A number of these discussions became blog posts.

In the course of these conversations I became aware just how much our educational system and our cultural institutions have become imbued with an unspoken materialist orientation. Virtually all my students, even professed Christians, seemed to take it for granted that a transcendent God who cannot be measured or detected with scientific instruments could not be shown to exist.

I realized that I would need to help them expand their understanding of how we acquire reliable knowledge beyond the things that science can measure. My first step, however, was to demonstrate that even science has much more subtle ways of understanding reality than they had been led to believe. In the post below I enlist NASA and modern cosmology to show that belief in God is at least as reasonable as many “scientific” concepts that are accepted almost without question.

We begin with the proposition that cosmological science offers a good illustration of some ways in which we apply reason to our world and experience. You may occasionally hear in the news, for instance, reports of planets discovered in other solar systems. We do not now have any instruments capable of “seeing” the planet itself; instead, we detect it by observing its effects on other things, such as the miniscule wobble its gravitational pull causes in the star it orbits, or the very slight changes in the light we observe from the star as the planet passes in front of it (read more here).

Nasa graphic of the Big Bang theory from “Dark Energy, Dark Matter”

On an even grander scale, consider the question of “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy.” Over the past century, scientists have formulated what is known as the Big Bang Theory to account for the fact that the entire universe appears to be expanding at a consistent rate. At the same time, they have calculated that in order for the universe to do what it seems to be doing, it needs to contain much more matter and energy than we can detect – many times more. As the NASA publication “Dark Energy, Dark Matter” explains (my italics):

More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the Universe’s expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest – everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter – adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t be called “normal” matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe. (full publication here)

Notice that physicists say that more than 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is completely undetectable, and we may never be able to detect it. There is no direct evidence of the existence of Dark Energy and Dark Matter, and yet they are sure it is there, only because of the effects we observe on other things.
Much of the evidence for God’s involvement in our world is of a similar sort, at least for those who have not themselves had a direct experience of God. Like Dark Energy, God cannot be measured with scientific instruments, but his effects are very clear. Consider the case of Bernard Nathanson, an atheist doctor from a Jewish family who was one of the founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Nathanson himself performed or presided over tens of thousands of abortions until he was convinced by ultrasound images of the humanity of the unborn.

Deeply disturbed by his involvement in the taking of so many innocent lives, Nathanson, still an atheist, became active in pro-life activities, where he encountered many committed Christians. He noticed something different about his religious friends, which he eventually recognized as what St. Paul called “The Gifts of the Holy Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). It was clear to him that the difference he saw was due to the religious dimension of their lives, the visible effects of their relationship with God. He eventually converted from atheism to Catholicism.

Merging Galaxy Cluster Abell 520 from “Dark Energy, Dark Matter“

Literally millions of people have come to Faith in the same way over the last two thousand years. Like Nathanson, they were first attracted by the effects they saw in others, and after embracing Christ, found the same changes in their own lives. They very reasonably based their faith on the real results they saw in others, and that they experienced themselves.

That, by the way, is a significant way in which belief in God is different from a belief in Dark Energy or Dark Matter. Nobody has ever had a personal encounter with Dark Energy, or seen a miracle performed by Dark Matter; countless people throughout the ages have had direct experiences of God, or witnessed His miracles, which continue up to the present day. One might say that, when we examine the evidence of the world around us, belief in God is actually quite reasonable.

(Feature image above: “Ancient of Days” by William Blake, from Europe a Prophecy, 1794)