Do we know or believe as Catholics?

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FortressGiant

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Greetings everyone,

This is something I’ve wrestled with and researched without finding a good answer. As Catholics, do we know through faith that God is real, that the Church is the truth, etc. or do we believe these things due to discerning what we know, the promptings of grace, and so on? I used to strongly believe that faith was a channel through which God could reveal to us the absolute truth and not just a belief or trust in God. While I don’t feel the following way anymore, 5-6 years ago when I was experiencing miracles and graces that lead me to join the Church I remember knowing, in a way that I didn’t have with Islam or the things I’ve believed about politics and other issues, that the Church was the true path and that all she taught was true. This knowing was incredible and overwhelming at times, leading to strong episodes of ecstasy. This knowing went away one night, a night I’ll never forget because of that, and ever since I’ve been more and more curious about what the Church teaches, if anything, about knowing vs believing that the Church and her view of God are true.

My initial question leads to this question which has also troubled me: Can we say without a doubt that this life is not a “dream” made to appear a certain way to us? The only way this would not be the case in my view is if we could know in this life through faith that it is not a dream.

I appreciate your (name removed by moderator)ut!

FG
 
The simple answer is we believe. No one has empirically or “scientifically” proved the existence of God on which all the rest hangs. An operative definition of faith is “belief in the things we hope for…” Cut loose your faith and you will drift endlessly in a conflict between the real and the imagined. The words “faith” and “proof” are mutually exclusive.
 
Descartes went down the road of doubting and discovered that you can doubt everything, except your own existence. So reason can only take you so far, then you have to have faith.
 
I don’t think belief and knowledge need to be mutually exclusive. Faith doesn’t have to be blind, subjective or less interested in the truth.
There are many ways of knowing whether or not something is true.
We can know that something is true based on what we see and hear. We can also know something is true using logically reasoning. Knowing by faith to know something on the basis of trust in the one bearing witness to a knowledge claim.
I suggest reading what Peter Kreeft wrote about faith in “What Catholics Believe: Faith”. In it he says “Faith, like science, has data, but they are of a different nature, and cannot be discovered, proved, or comprehended by the scientific method”
 
FortressGiant said:
As Catholics, do we know through faith that God is real, that the Church is the truth, etc. or do we believe these things
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**We believe these things because we were taught them by the good nuns and priests in our Catholic education, They were all reasonable ideas, and no doubt true ideas, because these folks had a direct line to God who would not let them ere in any area of faith and morals. The thought that they could be wrong was an unthinkable proposition. God would not allow that.
**
 
Depends on your definition of ‘know’. It’s one of those words that seems so simple but just isn’t. When does belief becomes knowledge? There’s no real line, and it can be different for different people. Adding to that is English can be a bit sloppy, especially the way we use it in day to day conversations. Consider…

“I know 2+2 equals 4” - You can ‘know’ this because it’s definitional, we didn’t discover 2+2 equal 4, we defined 4 to be, among other things, the sum of 2 and 2.

“I know the Earth revolves around the Sun” - Living in modern times there’s a … get ready for it … astronomical amount of information to demonstrate this, but very few of us have done the experiments ourselves. So there’s an element of faith or belief there, but it’s also verifiable, you COULD do the experiments even if you don’t. It’s not an edict handed down, but a conclusion drawn from evidence that’s available for review.

“I know my wife is faithful to me” - People say this but it starts to get a bit wishy-washy. You presumably aren’t following your wife everywhere she goes, what you’re expressing is a belief in her desire to be faithful combined with confidence in her ability to do so. The evidence isn’t available for review like it is with the above example, you rely more on your faith in the person’s character and hopefully a lack of signs that you might be wrong. In this case saying you ‘know’ is more about saying you have a high degree of confidence.

“I know the surgery is going to go well” - Unless you’ve been granted with the gift of foresight, giving these kinds of reassurances if you or someone is going under the knife seem much more strictly ‘hope’ based. You hope it’s going to go well, and you might even have done what research you can on the surgeon and hospital, but you don’t know the future. In this example saying you ‘know’ seems to be more about saying you have a strong desire or hope that a certain outcome is achieved.

So where do religious claims fall? Probably all over that spectrum, and they’re probably different for each person and even for the same person at different times of their life.

Finally you may want to look into solipsism, it’s the kind of ‘brain in a jar’ scenario. It’s a philosophical study and it’s not actually something proposed to be true, just a tool to think about what we know and what we call knowledge.
 
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I look at the lives of the saints and I see what happens when someone struggles and yet continues to hope and cooperate with the grace of God. Their faith deepens as they read and hear about what the saints went through, and grew in holiness rather than despair.

We are surrounded with so much unbelief in today’s world. Staying with a committed group of people who practice prayer can help us to stay the course.

Our Lord Jesus Christ gave every drop of His Blood for us. I struggle, but I need to pick up my cross and follow Him every day, using all the helps He gave us. How more awesome can the Mass and the sacraments be!
 
FortressGiant said:
This knowing went away one night, a night I’ll never forget because of that
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Without having to go into specifics in this forum if you don’t want to, I was wondering if this was from some kind of traumatic experience like if you felt like church failed you or someone hurt you. If so maybe it would be helpful to dialogue with your priest and with God for healing there. The church is the beautiful bride of Christ, but just like an individual human bride, after the wedding and joy surrounded there, you do realize she is only human and thus sinful and will sometimes let you down or hurt you. But happy marriages can be restored and last a lifetime so there is hope of healing from your experience.
 
CoeurRempli said:
I don’t think belief and knowledge need to be mutually exclusive. Faith doesn’t have to be blind, subjective or less interested in the truth.
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Couldn’t agree more. It is my contention that things like faith, belief, love must initially start in the mind, our empirical observation of a phenomenon. But at a certain point, reason and logic no longer hold any sway.
 
I’ve come to this same conclusion before…everything we encounter could theoretically be an illusion but we know that we exist, whatever our true form is
 
Thank you for your post. I see what you’re saying but is there anything in Church teaching that says faith is so powerful that through it we can obtain a grace by which we completely 100% know that God is real, that the Church is the truth, and that this isn’t a dream state or that a higher power hasn’t set up the things around us in a certain way so they appear to lead to a conclusion that isn’t actually true? Such a grace, if it exists, would bind us to say we know the truth instead of just we believe. I know this might sound crazy but when you start exploring the true nature of things, even with science, things get more confusing and quirky and mysterious. Just because something seems unlikely doesn’t mean it is and how would we know what truly is likely and unlikely when we are not omniscient?

I get your points, there are many ways to “know” in this life (although these often lead to false conclusions so we have to be careful) but is there any way, through faith, to 100% know the truth?

Even in Heaven, would we completely know the truth about God? If yes, then is it possible to get to this same level of absolute knowing in this life? Is this perhaps one of the gifts of the beatific vision?

FG
 
Hi Dan123, this was a very detailed post that broke things up in a way that really brings clarity to the different types of “knowing” we can have. I emailed this to myself to reread it because you make a lot of great points and distinctions here! It’s certainly not an easy matter to define.

FG
 
Without having to go into specifics in this forum if you don’t want to, I was wondering if this was from some kind of traumatic experience like if you felt like church failed you or someone hurt you. If so maybe it would be helpful to dialogue with your priest and with God for healing there. The church is the beautiful bride of Christ, but just like an individual human bride, after the wedding and joy surrounded there, you do realize she is only human and thus sinful and will sometimes let you down or hurt you. But happy marriages can be restored and last a lifetime so there is hope of healing from your experience.
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Hi Whitney,

I’ve gone through many different traumas in my life, including negative spiritual experiences I have felt, and many (if not all) of these experiences happened due to my own sin. It was due to sins I committed that I have lost this “knowing” or whatever it was, as well as other amazing spiritual graces given to me, and because of this I struggle every day to figure out what God actually thinks of me and wants from me.

FG
 
If something is true, then the different ways of knowing would point to the same truth, or at least not contradict. Ultimately I think accepting anything as true is a choice that you make, based on the evidence presented and based on whether it corresponds to all the other truths. This goes not just for religious truths but also scientific, historical etc.

I don’t think we can ever know 100% even in heaven. We are finite beings, and God’s truth is infinite. There is always more to discover but in a way that can be quite a beautiful thing.
 
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