Nature points to what?

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HumbleIOughtToBe

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“Let us pray that, with St. Augustine, atheists and theists alike return to the mysterious depths of their own souls and discover the material world as a vast collection of signs that point us to another realm. Through this same soul, we can reach out to the God who is the source of it all.”
Atheism's Tragic Choice | Catholic Answers
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Destroy every science textbook and a few thousand years later every textbook comes back since nature can be directly observed.

Destroy every religious book, and no world religion get rewritten. The whole reason we have to evangelize in the 13th century is that the beauty of nature does not result in the belief of Our God, much less a God.
 
Atheists have no reason to not believe in God. They are merely suppressing the knowledge that God has given them, as it says in Romans 1:18-20. As far as they are consciously aware, they do not believe in a God, but in their subconscious, they know that this world could not have happened by chance. They try to suppress their conscience by attacking God or God’s people.

That’s why atheists are angry all the time. They’re just trying to quiet what’s left of their conscience.
 
OP,

The study of nature led this former atheist to seek the First Cause of nature since science can’t explain why life began.

Many of the leading scientists of the Scientific Revolution, like Sir Isaac Newton; were deeply religious men.
 
HumbleIOughtToBe said:
Destroy every religious book, and no world religion get rewritten. The whole reason we have to evangelize in the 13th century is that the beauty of nature does not result in the belief of Our God, much less a God.
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Destroy the religious texts of the pagans and they will never be reproduced (barring the intervention of demons), that much is correct. You seem to be under the impression that the True Faith can be destroyed, and that is simply impossible. Christianity should have been destroyed soon after the time recorded in the gospels, but it wasn’t, and Jesus Himself promised that it will never be. And so, you cannot consider Christianity alongside those other religions which certainly could be erased from history.
 
drac16 said:
but in their subconscious
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If the subconscious where a reliable source of God’s existence we should expect to see documentation in the field of psychology about God being confirmed in the mind of man. We do not.
 
This is a hypothetical thought experiment, not on our capacity to destroy Christianity. I say that if all Biblical texts and all minds where erased, we would not see Christianity spring up out of humanities understanding of the beauty of nature.
 
But then you’d have that pesky Our Lady of Guadalupe show up with a miracle that catches the interest of everybody and before you know it, people are being healed and requesting baptism.

Or perhaps Our Lady of Fatima tells the little kids to come back on a certain day at a certain time and a great miracle occurs with 70, 000 people present to witness the miracle told before hand. Then people come away wanting to go to confession and come back to the sacraments.

There is more going on behind the lines than you can expect or predict.
 
You demonstrating that establishing belief in Catholicism requires a miracle to occur. They don’t believe in Catholicism just by asserting [Nature is Beautiful] AND [something in my heart] thus God as opposed to
drac16 said:
They are merely suppressing the knowledge that God has given them, as it says in Romans 1:18-20.
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I saw Ricky Gervais say something like this on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Ricky also used the old “I believe in one less god than you” canard. Applause. The problem with both these statements is that they forget about natural theology and what the Greeks called the God of the Philosophers. Nature does point to the existence of God.

The fact that we cannot reason from nature to historical events — such as the resurrection of Christ (or any historical event) — does not mean that event did not happen. Erase all our history books and we could not re-write history from natural science. What does that prove? These are just really bad sophistic arguments that unfortunately have become widespread popular memes for atheists who don’t think as critically about their worldview as they should.
 
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It’s not negated, but clarified. St. Thomas Aquinas would agree with Kant that we can not acquire knowledge of God’s essence directly, or empirically, but we can demonstrate God’s existence from empirical premises.
 
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HumbleIOughtToBe said:
Philosophical Critique of Natural Theology - Oxford Handbooks

Chapter II: Kant’s Critique of Natural Theology - The Primacy of Faith

Debate over Natural Theology

Natural theology - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

It is thus negated.
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The article is self-refuting. It is little more than a demonstration of the prejudice and willful ignorance endemic to a type of analysis which defaults to, and has unbelief as its basis. Specialists in unbelief are not credible when addressing belief.

Is there something better to support your viewpoint?
 
HumbleIOughtToBe said:
Destroy every religious book, and no world religion get rewritten. The whole reason we have to evangelize in the 13th century is that the beauty of nature does not result in the belief of Our God, much less a God.
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You are assuming that it is all a matter of observation of nature and human reason. From such an assumption, your conclusion seems plausible in a limited way: no world religion would be reconstructed verbatim, although I would expect that religions would emerge, and the better ones would have the same basic principles as Christianity: that one God exists, loves, creates, and saves.

Your assumption however has a major weakness. It does not allow for divine revelation. Without that, you have deism at best, and materialism at worst.
 
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HumbleIOughtToBe said:
This is a hypothetical thought experiment, not on our capacity to destroy Christianity. I say that if all Biblical texts and all minds where erased, we would not see Christianity spring up out of humanities understanding of the beauty of nature.
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Christianity – as such – doesn’t spring from the evidence of nature; belief in God does.

Our ability to understand what the concept of “God” means, proceeds directly from His self-revelation to humanity.
HumbleIOughtToBe said:
Destroy every science textbook and a few thousand years later every textbook comes back since nature can be directly observed.
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Funny, that. I don’t recall seeing scientific textbooks from the ancient cultures, detailing even a fraction of the things that my science textbooks assert. Are you sure about your claim, or is it just one that you’d like to believe…? 🤔
 
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