Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

Truth, beauty, and goodness are probably the three best descriptive words I could use to describe God. I mention this because during the Christmas season I feel filled to the brim with all three.

What does this have to do with my conversion from atheism to Catholicism? Well, because I believed in all three when I was an atheist, but realized that atheism gives no reason for believing any one of them to be real. My previous post, "How do we know?" treats the question of knowing truth, but even if we assume that truth, beauty, and goodness really exist, atheism certainly gives no reason for preferring them. Why not be bad instead of good? Why not prefer ugliness instead of beauty? Why not prefer lies to the truth? Atheism simply gives no solid answer to anyone of these hypothetical questions.

Of course, on one level, these are silly questions. Everyone who is honest with themselves seeks truth, goodness (even if their idea of it is skewed), and beauty. It is simply part of being human. Everyone knows this; it is fundamental to being human. The problem is that nature by herself gives us no reason for seeking these things or caring about them. We have to go above nature to God to get this validation. It's ultimately a problem of authority. Think about it. If someone asked you, "What logical basis do you have for seeking truth?" I don't think you could come up with a satisfactory answer UNLESS you bring up God. You could do this with many philosophical questions. For example, the atheist believes that people just live briefly, then die, and cease to exist. Well then, what's the point of doing anything? The whole concept of "getting something done" becomes meaningless if you and every other person on earth (and earth itself) is doomed to destruction. Even living solely for pleasure becomes meaningless. The reality is that only God gives us Authority for anything in our lives.

To sum up: every human being who is honest with himself seeks truth, beauty, and goodness. No on prefers lies to truth, ugliness to beauty, or evil to goodness. It just doesn't make sense. Even people who do evil think they are doing good. Secondly, only God can give us any reason, or Authority, to seek these things.

So far my posts mainly deal with how I realized atheism is foolish, rather than how I actually came to be Catholic. One thing I will point out here, though, is that ultimately I became Catholic because the Church does Truth, Beauty, and Goodness better than anyone. If Christ is the source of these three things, then of course his Church is the way to experience them.

Finally, it's Christmas time! Go out and find some Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Experiencing it will do you a lot more good than just reading blog post!