Pure Reason, Vatican I, and St. Augustine

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balto said:
What changed your mind?

I had been getting really into the rational defense of Catholicism over the past year, but actually I think you brought up quite a number of good points in your OP. Recently I finished up reading one of Peter Kreeft’s books on Pascal’s Pensees and Pascal was very much an Augustinian thinker. At first I thought he was kind of cowering away by not grabbing the rational, Thomistic proofs head on, but what he was arguing for actually made a lot of sense. All the rational justifications of Catholicism are sound, yes, but they are not going to convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced. You can argue with the secularist all day long and win every debate, but if she doesn’t want theism to be true, then theism is not going to be true to her. The question we should be asking is does it even make sense to want Christianity to be true? That’s what Pascal’s Wager seems to have been all about, not necessarily the fear of going to hell if you guessed wrong about whether God exists, which is the usual, naive presentation of the wager. Even Aquinas discusses this I believe, when he argues that the intellect is the formal cause of the will but the will is the efficient cause of the intellect. The book is called Christianity for Modern Pagans if you are interested (the title is just one of Kreeft’s usual witty things :cool:).

I was rereading G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and he talks a lot about all of this as well, at least in the first few chapters.
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Remember, whatever you read, has been written by another human with no more insight into anything supernatural than you or me.
 
balto said:
What changed your mind?

I had been getting really into the rational defense of Catholicism over the past year, but actually I think you brought up quite a number of good points in your OP.
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My problem was that I made it seem as though the rationale for being Catholic was determined and conditioned by faith, as if reason without faith doesn’t show the divine origin of the Catholic Church but that faith somehow is what makes it credible. In a sense that’s right because the faith of believers has outward effects that demonstrate its truthfulness but it’s not as if faith per se is what makes one determine the Truth.

We can come to the edge of the natural and say, “This is the end: what lays behind this is true.” (And of course without faith what lies behind is unseeable.) But we can’t make the leap into the supernatural and accept it for ourselves–that takes faith. It’s a seemingly subtle distinction but still important lest we become fideists.
 
oldcelt said:
In other words, I believe it just because I believe it. Yep, that’s what it’s all based on, and I am just as guilty.
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One can only be guilty for believing, if he knows he is believing in the wrong things. Others believe because they are convinced that what they believe is the truth. Then again one can believe what he wants to believe for his own reasons. One’s belief can be objective, or subjective, according to reality, or according to his own mind. Personally I wouldn’t trust my judgement alone, I would have to put it up against what I hear from others, and what I experience. I would also pray for guidance. Seek and ye shall find.
 
CrossofChrist said:
So, by chance you have actually read all of this, I now ask whether or not we can truly come to a knowledge of God by the light of natural reason apart from faith. IOW, can we actually come to knowledge of God from pure reason, from reason alone?
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Yes.

St. Paul says that “all men are without excuse” for denying God because nature proves his existence.
 
We must make a clarification: Not just reason alone, but reason that is based on objective reality, this is the outside world, God’s creation.
 
oldcelt said:
In other words, I believe it just because I believe it. Yep, that’s what it’s all based on, and I am just as guilty.
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We believe because of the authority of God who reveals. And from God’s external signs “which are sufficient to prove with certitude by the natural light of reason alone the divine origin of the Christian religion” we can have confidence in our religion (Humani Generis 4). But ultimately it’s faith that gives us true confidence in God and allows us to accept for ourselves the truths of Revelation inaccessible to natural reason alone. Faith helps us experience God in a profoundly new way.

Yes, there are some things we use as a foundation for our thinking and at some point you have to say that it’s true because it is. IOW because it’s self-evident. I guess that takes a form of natural faith in reason. 🤷 We can’t deduce everything about reality from everything else in an endless cycle of proofs, but it’s rational to believe (some things) because, well, it just is right.
 
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