Purify Your Bride

Greg K makes a good postabout arguments for God. At least I think it is good because it is similar to thoughts I have had recently. The basic idea is that there are many pieces of evidence that point to the truth of the Catholic faith. Not one of them is airtight. It is always possible for a rational person to find it unconvincing. But what happens when you take them together? There are quite a few of them. Could they not when taken together be considered convincing? It’s like a circumstantial criminal case:

1. The defndant had an argument with the victim around the time of the murder
2. The defendant was seen with a .38 caliber pistol the day before the murder. The victim was killed with such a weapon.
3. A blue van was seen leaving the murder scene right after the murder. The defendant owns a blue van.
4. The defendant had no good alibi for the time of the murder

None of these things by themselves would convince a jury somebody committed murder. Still when they are all taken together it can be quite convincing. If you don’t find it convincing you can add a few more to the list. You can see that in principle there is a point where it becomes unreasonable to believe that he is innocent when so many things point to his guilt.

 The same approach can be taken to convince people that the Catholic faith is true. I have often been struck by how many pieces of empirical evidence fit in so nicely with the Catholic faith. Many of them would not be at all expected if the faith were not true. Just off the top of my head:

1. Theology of Beauty. Humans have an ability to appreciate beautiful things. No other species does this. You have music. You have colors. You have the majesty of a water fall. There is no practical material benefit to this. Why do we care? Catholics claim humans were made in the image of God. That easily explains why we want to admire and create beautiful things. But how would it come about if we are just a evolution of lower life forms? I would not expect it.
2. Theology of the Body. People are endowed with a strong sense of sexual ethics. They see sex as something intimate. Something personal. Something that forever changes a relationship. Why is that? Animals don’t have any of that. Would it really evolve? I can’t see it. If it was about effective reproduction humans would never learn to wear clothes or have faithful marriages. The idea that God endowed man with a spirit and connected that spirit to His body and especially to his sexuality explains much better the innate feeling people have about sex.
3. Ancient intuition about God. Ancient pagan cultures all followed the same pattern. They all started out as monotheists. They believed in one god as a creator, a law giver, and a judge for the afterlife. All their gods had different names but they all had similar rules about morality. When cultures interacted it was common to simply accept the gods of the other culture and so paganism grew to have many gods. This would be expected if they were all imperfectly discerning some spiritual truths. You would expect them to get some things right rather than everyone being in the same totally wrong place. 
4. Uniqueness of Isreal. Catholics claim that the nation of Isreal was the people of God and has a fuller revelation of God than any other nation. What we see is the Isrealites being different in that they refused to accept polytheism. They did for some periods but kept returning to monotheistic beliefs even facing persecution. They also had much less change in theology over the centuries. They stuck to the same ideas that came from Abraham and Moses.  This is what you would expect from God’s holy nation. A very different religious story than other nations and one that stuck to the same teachings even though their understanding could deepen.
5. Messianic prophecies of Judaism. This is a many-fold argument in it’s own right but many prophesies of the old testament were fulfilled by Jesus. Some of them are very specific. You have Danil’s prophesy of the 7’s. You have Micah naming Bethlehem as Jesus’ birthplace. You have Isaiah predicting He will be born or a virgin. You have Zechariah saying he will make an entrance on a donkey. The Psalms give a much more detailed description of a crucifixion than the new testament does. It goes on and on.
6. The miracles of Jesus.  - This includes not only the evidence about the facts of Jesus’ miracles but also the quick development of a high Christology. That is to say that many people very early in Christianity saw Christ as God or very nearly God. Pope Benedict quotes Phillipians 2 written around the year 55, “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place  and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” How can the church arrive at such an idea about Jesus? The explanation they give involves the miracles especially the resurection. Many of the key players claimed to be eye witnesses of many miracles.
7. The growth of the early church.
8. The unbroken line of popes and bishops.
9. The doctrinal integrity
10. The preservation of the nation of Israel
11. The church surviving the reformation, the fall of the Roman empire, etc.