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!

How do we know?

"How do we know?" This simple question might be the most ignored question in all of today's intellectual discussions. I'm not talking only of the question of how do we know God exists, for that cannot be answered in one simple blog post. What I mean is, how do we know anything? How can we be certain of our own knowledge and of our own reasoning ability?

From the atheist worldview, the whole universe is an orgy of randomness. The cosmos has no "design" to it at all. It just is. Everything, absolutely everything, from the Big Bang to the creation of life itself and our own species, says the atheist, is the result of an essentially chaotic and random universe. Most "hard atheists", as opposed to agnostics, will readily admit this. "Nature," they say, "is the whole show. And everything in it is the result of the same 'mindless' chaos of randomness." One of their favorite topics in religious discussion, biological evolution, is the perfect case in point. The atheist says that the neutral pressure of natural selection creates every single trait in every single biological species on earth. They are essentially saying that random chaos creates pressures which "select" those fit to survive under the current conditions. Thus, everything from mankind's arms and legs to reason capability is the result of this process. Do you see the problem here? This worldview thinks that the human mind was born out of randomness. That logic and reason are simply the by-products of a blind evolutionary process. Under this philosophy, there is no reason to believe that "logic" and "reason" yield truth. All it tells us is that these things have somehow helped us to survive.

I personally think my own realization of this problem was huge in accepting God. Blaise Pascal had a very similar point in one of his Pensees (too lazy to go find out which one). In other words, unless we believe in a supernatural source (God) for our own mind, we have no reason to trust it.

If my own explanation is confusing, I suggest reading Pascal. I believe C.S. Lewis also made the same point. Either way, their abilities far exceed my own and I wholeheartedly suggest them.

First Steps

This is my first blog and I'm not really sure where to start, so I thought I'd share the beginnings of my own conversion story. Of course it is incomplete and shortened for the sake of brevity.

The first step was simply questioning my own beliefs. I had been raised without religion of any kind, and in fact, was taught that those who had any kind of supernatural faith were either dumb, insane, disingenuous, or too intellectually apathetic to question their own dogmatic beliefs. Suffice it to say that for most of my life I thought religion was totally foolish.

During my teenage years I began to wonder about this. Freud is famous for believing that religious faith is a form of insanity. . . and if God does not exist then of course he is right! After all, believing in a supernatural entity that has supreme control over the universe, created mankind in his image, and is responsible for all beauty and goodness manifested by everything and everyone is behavior which would be sheer madness if it were not true. Adults get placed into psychiatric wards for having imaginary friends. If God is not real, then believing in him is infinitely more insane than having imaginary friends, because God is infinitely more important and influential than imaginary friends. Yet, I had definitely met orthodox men and women who seemed quite intelligent, not to mention lucid. My grandparents were ardent believers; were they insane? My own personal interests were laden with Christians. I loved the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's universe. Was he too insane? What about the 95% of the earth's population who believed in in some sort of supernatural entity? Insane? That is the thing about atheism: it requires an astonishing amount of arrogance and snobbery. It has to. How else do you tell the vast majority of people on earth that what they believe to be the most important thing in life is absurd and probably even insane?