Hi Fella,
I haven’t given up on reason when it comes to proving God’s existence. Aquinas thought it possible to reason one’s way to the realization of God’s existence. And of course so did Anselm.
As Pope Ben sed in his Regensburg speech, God in his nature is reasonable. I think this must be the predominant Catholic view. Incidentally, there is a very good discussion of this in Chesterton’s Father Brown mystery, The Blue Cross, I think it was called.
By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.
Hebrews 11, 3
I don’t deny that a person can assent to his religious belief by the use of reason. After all, in keeping with the theme of Pope Benedict’s address at the University of Regensburg, that religious faith is reasonable, there can be no contradiction between faith and reason. Faith is not simply superstition nor the abandoment of reason. Nonetheless, reason must take the back seat behind faith. In his idealism Descartes ironically attempted to prove God’s existence by first doubting God exists. If he could have succeeded at proving God’s existence by converting God to a pure and definite object of thought communicated directly to the human mind, as any finite, created phenomenon could be, then we’d no longer be in any need of faith. Tragically Descartes’ bold method spawned a modern universal skepticism in the existence of God in academic circles. Modern man has attempted to disprove God’s existence by the use of reason. Alas, a great multitude of people have been convinced by the arguments of atheistic philosophers by ignoring or rejecting the articles of our faith. Paul wisely teaches us to “understand” by faith. Only through faith can we truly come to know of God’s existence by recognizing him in his creative works.
By saying that “God is reasonable”, Pope Benedict means that God is rational as opposed to irrational. He does not will that any religious faith be propogated in the world by the use of violence and coercion. To lead someone or a group to one’s religious faith, he should use the rational approach which relies on the powers of reason and speech. Faith essentially is a persuasion of a set of religious beliefs.
Aquinas rejected Anselm’s argument, for, not unlike Kant, he didn’t believe that a person can argue directly from the existence of mental concepts in the human mind to the existence of God to which these mental concepts correspond. Aquinas’ “Five Ways” of knowing the existence of God are more indirect attempts at demonstrating the reasonableness of God’s existence by moving from the seen to the unseen, from the visible effects of God’s creation to the Creator. We may infer God’s existence from the conditions of our outward experiences of the physical order of things in this world. Trying to ‘ontologically’ prove the existence of ‘someone’ who exists beyond time and space by directly applying the formal principles of deductive logic with reference to immanent mental concepts is a different story. It amounts to nothing more than proceeding up a blind alley.
God has indirectly revealed himself to us by the effects of his creation, the moral law of human nature directly experienced inwardly through the medium of our conscience, and the human abilty to reason and will - coupled with his direct revelation through the law and the prophets fulfilled in Christ. The Church does not teach that God can be proven to exist as can any natural phenomenon by an empirical deductive approach. But the so-called proofs of our Christian philosophers “can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason” (cf. CCC, # 31-35). Reason must be kept subordinate as an aid to our faith. We must not expect it to be able to eventually supersede faith and thereby nullify it.
In the spirit of Vatican ll, the favour towards the indirect ways we come to know of God’s existence through our spontaneous perception of cosmic order, Pope Benedict has this to say with regard to the theory of evolution:
“Ultimately it comes down to this alternative: What came first? Creative Reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth or Unreason, which, lacking any meaning, strangely enough brings forth a mathematically ordered cosmos, as well as man and his reason. The latter, however, would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, be meaningless…We believe that at the beginning of everything is the eternal Word, with Reason and not Unreason.”
I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. Thus also mankind comes into being.
2 Maccabees 7, 28
PAX :harp:
