Pints With Aquinas - Is It Rational to Believe in God? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

Father talks about how we know things and ways we come to beliefs. He does this to show that Faith is rational and reasonable. 🟣 Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Fr. Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar in the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomasic Institute and this is Pines for the Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about how it is rational to believe in God or how it's reasonable to live the life of faith. So many of our secular contemporaries think that belief is irrational. That just as soon as one starts believing, one stops thinking. As if belief were a kind of phidiastic choice to live a sub-human life. A kind of regressive barbaric move, as it were.

But this is not in fact what transpires. And Christians can marshal reasons for their belief, and they can deploy reason even in the setting of their belief. So I want to talk about that with you and walk through some of the steps whereby we can argue for it. So here we go. Okay, so I have been thinking about this recently because I was out on the west coast giving some talks for TI campus chapters. I spoke at Cal and then at Stanford and then at UW and then at U of O and while at UW this was the theme and I thought that I'd kind of like propose it as an honest or humane

or reasonable approach to reality because many of our secular contemporaries would characterize belief as dishonest before reality, so highlight a lot of the things about our experience which are absurd or which are incoherent, and say that it's our responsibility to kind of come before those experiences and to remain resolute as if belief were a kind of escape hatch, as if it were a way in which we kind of compromise on the integrity of our experience and then just choose something easier, or at the very least kind of like noetically more straightforward. So yeah, you have examples of this in absurdist literature. You can think of Albert Camus with like the stranger or the plague, or the protagonist, you know, he's like at a distance from his experience because he sees the kind of terror of his experience. And then when people reach across that apparent chasm and invite him into a relationship of

faith, it's like for him a matter of scorn or mockery because it just doesn't correspond. But our experience as Christians confirms that faith is in fact reasonable. So let's just talk a little bit about natural faith and then a little bit about supernatural faith along these lines. So when we come against or when we kind of discover faith in the natural setting, it's upholder to compare it to other knowledge claims or other kind of thought claims. So you've got doubt whereby the mind is suspended between two positions. You have suspicion and opinion whereby the mind inclines to one of two contrary positions but kind of has fear as it

were or certain uneasiness about the other. And then you have knowledge which is a certain kind of sight as it were. So you see the conclusion through the premises. And then you've got got faith and faith is a kind of access to the reality a kind of noetic access by testimony But it affords you a kind of certainty a certainty proper to faith which we would call like moral certainty So faith is just then knowledge through testimony and yet we would say that it's not unreasonable But reasonable because this is how we come to experience and have knowledge about many things. So a very small percentage of our knowledge is verifiable directly and immediately because like some things are really far away or because some things are really small or really big or because we don't have access to the instruments whereby to measure or gauge certain things or because we don't have the competence or the expertise to inquire into certain things.

There's just going to be a bunch of stuff that we in effect take on faith. Now we can reproduce that knowledge or we can verify that knowledge if we care to, but it's, you know, it's eminently sane. It's eminently reasonable for us to think like, yeah, Moscow is where people say it is on the map. Um, and you know, the elements which we encounter in this world or which we kind of manufacture or generate in a lab are as they are described on the periodic table and the Krebs cycle functions basically like how I learned it functions in ninth grade biology and stuff like that. Right?

So it's, it's eminently saying to trust or sane to believe because of a kind of guild mentality whereby we entrust expertise and competence to those fit for it. Because if this were false, it stands to reason that somebody would have figured it out. And because it's the type of thing which is publicly verifiable. Now are we going to be misled in certain things? Oh yeah, possibly. And I think this is part of the reason for which the kind of crisis of media, whether slanted this way or that, is so acute because people used to believe it and now they no longer believe it, but then there are people kind of caught in the middle. So that's exciting.

All right, so I would submit even further, beyond it being reasonable to believe, it's actually part of human flourishing to believe. Because if you were to try to verify everything under the sun, it would actually trip you up and slow you down in a way that would impede your progress. So like I need to travel, let's say, to Columbus, Ohio for a one-day God's planning event that will take place on April 6th at St. Patrick's Church there on North Grant. This is all true. Check it out at God'sPlanting.org.

There's a sweet advertisement for it. So I have to travel there, and I believe that when Southwest Airlines says that the flight that goes from DCA to Columbus Airport is going to fly when it flies and then return when it returns, that that's good. That's fine. I don't think I need to call up air traffic controllers or head honchos of whatever air travel organizations in order to get their testimony to that fact.

I think that if they ran a bad business model, their company would fail. And so it's probably fine just to trust that what they say when I search on flights.google.com is in fact going to be the case, even if it admits of slight alterations. Or like even more like basic thing is I trust I believe that my parents are my parents. I haven't asked it, wow I'm speaking in Shakespearean English so as to accommodate my strange meter. Yeah, I haven't verified that my parents are my parents by genetic testing. I think we would all agree that that is in many instances kind of weird. In certain instances, called for, depending on those aforementioned circumstances. But yeah, okay, so

schematizing then our experience, we can say when we believe or trust in the natural setting, we are gaining access to certain things like that to which we do not have empirical access by our present means sorry that you always hear sirens whenever I record videos I just live on a busy highway and it's just super loud and that we gain access to these things by human testimony whether somebody who's closer or somebody who's competent or you get it and we we get that because we hold the person to be trustworthy or true. And yet, reason is still at work in faith because we're judging the witness, we're judging

his testimony, we're supplying our assent, and we are verifying by confirming signs. Okay, so there's still an exercise of reason in this natural faith and so yeah it's a reasonable move. Alright, then taking that as our backdrop let's talk a little bit about supernatural faith and this is the heart of the matter and this is where I'll conclude. So faith in the supernatural setting, we have various definitions whereby to gain access to this. So the letter to the Hebrews refers to faith as the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen, or the evidence

of things unseen. St. Augustine speaks of the act of belief as thinking with ascent, so cogitare cum ascensione. And St. Thomas says, faith is a habit of mind whereby eternal life is begun in us, making the intellect ascent to what is non-apparent. So, supernatural faith is a noetic access to things invisible, things revealed on the basis of divine testimony. We believe it because God says so, and we have access to it because God makes it such. So then, this too, we would claim, is reasonable. The stakes are high, right? They are eternal salvation, so we have some encouragement to at least give it a hearing because it seems that our souls hang in the balance. But also it corresponds with certain facets or certain aspects of our human experience.

So on account of the fact that we have certain powers of the soul which transcend the corporeal organs of the human body, it stands to reason that these powers of the soul which transcend the corporeal organs of the human body. It stands to reason that these powers of the soul, as giving rise to immaterial acts, are themselves immaterial and therefore immortal. So there's a kind of hereafter for intellect and will, which gives rise to a kind of infinite inquiry and an infinite desire. And we don't have, it seems to me, any adequate response to said infinite inquiry and infinite desire here on the surface of the earth. And so then when we come across the Christian claim that the only begotten son of God took human flesh, was born under the law to deliver from the law those who were subject to it, it seems to have some correspondence with our human experience in its kind of broken openness.

So then, let's go ahead and schematize our experience as we kind of broken openness. So then let's go ahead and schematize our experience as we did with natural faith. So like what feature of reality is being described and how does faith approach it? So in supernatural faith we're actually gaining access to that which we couldn't otherwise, right? That which we cannot have empirical access by our present means. Okay so like God himself and then all things in light of God as mediated by propositions like the articles of faith. And we have access to it because God speaks.

So when St. Thomas talks about like, okay, so what is it that like faith in the supernatural sense zeros in on? He says, well, it zeros in on first truth speaking. Prima Veritas Loquens. So God who is true, all is true and trustworthy, who does not deceive and cannot himself be deceived, reveals his interior life and the life of all things which issue from his interior life, in light of said interior life. So we believe by the divine testimony, by the divine truth as a testing, as revealed by God, as supremely trustworthy and true,

okay, so as voracious. So one author says, God, truthful and faithful, speaking and guaranteeing, gives us his word, which all at once is true in what it reveals to us both of him, excuse me, and in what it reveals to us of him is both stable and assured and that which it announces and promises." Okay, so this is just a real quick version, kind of fly-by-night version of faith, but

we can see on this basis that there is still room for reason in the sense that reason is still operative even in the setting of supernatural faith, as evaluating the witness, as weighing the testimony, as supplying assent, and as verifying by confirming signs. So we have to, you know, like render a kind of judgment on the witness. C.S. Lewis famously says that he's either liar, lunatic, or Lord. You can't be neutral, right? You can't just think he's a swell fella.

You have to judge the claims in light of, you know, our Christian experience, but in light of the revelation itself. So there's like, okay, serious claims here to divinity, serious claims to rewrite the law, serious claims to perform miracles and exercise demons. What's going on here? This is unlike any other claim, even of a religious sort, unlike anything you've seen in Buddhism or Hinduism or Taoism or Shintoism, unlike anything you've seen in Judaism or Islam, etc.

So you have to render a judgment on the basis of the witness, and that judgment is rendered in a personalistic context. So St. Thomas writes in the Adorote Dei Vote, truth himself speaks truly, else there's nothing true. There's a sense in which this is the most fundamental, this is the most basic. So there's a setting here of friendship and of relationship. Okay, so then in addition, we weigh the testimony.

So you can exercise reason in making judgments upon the interior coherence of the revelation that we receive as Christians. So like St. Thomas Aquinas, in his theorizing about the Trinity, he's not proving the Trinity because you can't prove the Trinity, but he does say, all right, let's use some philosophical terminology and some philosophical argumentation with revealed principles and let's try to make some sense of what this is. I mean, in effect, let's try to kind of shine the light on

what is in itself already superluminous so that our minds can gain some appreciation for what it is that's going on here. And so like he'll use the Aristotelian doctrine of the accident of relation as a way by which in part to account for the distinction of persons while in no wise compromising the integrity of the unity of the essence. In addition, we can also show how faith illumines the human condition. So for instance, original sin is a revealed doctrine of faith, and in light of that revealed doctrine, we gain purchase on our human experience.

We're like, wow, no wonder things are as complicated as they are. No wonder things are as bungled as they are. So Revelation helps us to make sense of our human experience, and we can judge things in light of those doctrines. All right, so judgment of the witness, weighing of the testimony, and then supplying assent. So when we believe, you know, we cited that definition of St. Augustine, it's to think with assent. So we have to choose to believe. You don't fall in and out of like faith in the way that you fall in and out of love.

So how then do we choose? Well, St. Thomas will say that in belief you believe God, right? You believe Him as a witness and then you believe in God in the sense that like you believe that to which He testifies, you believe the doctrines, but then you believe unto God, all right? So you believe in a way that like gives your heart to it in a way that renders your will unto Him whom you have discovered to be trustworthy and true. So Saint Augustine schematizes this by saying that there's a three-fold act of Cratere Deo, Cratere Deum, and Cratere Indeum.

So Cratere Deo, I believe in God, Cratere Deum, I believe God, and then Cratere Indeum, I believe unto God. So there's this sense of, in addition to the intellectual beholding, even if not at close quarters or even if not directly, there's a kind of volitional embracing. So we still have to supply a sense. There's a sense in which we have to choose, and that's important. And then last, verifying by confirming signs. So St. Thomas will say, in addition to judging the interior coherence and in addition to

seeing how it illumines the human condition, we can also exercise reason in, one, proving certain things. Right? So we refer to these as preambles of the faith. So God and His loving kindness reveals more than He absolutely has to. And so on account of the fact that there are certain things that we could prove by reason, but it would take us a long time, there'd be a lot of errors mixed in, and only really wise people would ever get there, God says, listen, I'll just reveal it all.

So he reveals the existence of God and his simplicity and his perfection and his goodness and his infinity and his timelessness, his eternity and his omnipresence. You know, like all these things are revealed when there are other types of things which we could prove if given time and sufficient resources, okay? So the preambles of the faith are another confirming sign insofar as they kind of cover, doubly, as it were, by Venn diagram, the things that we ourselves are given in Revelation. And then lastly, you have what are referred to as signs of credibility,

which would be like, yeah, what things? Like the confluence of prophecy in our Lord Jesus Christ, or the manifest testimony of miracles, or the long-standing and irreformable teaching of the Church, or the lives of the saints. There are certain things which point to, you know, there's something supernatural that's going on here. There's something wild, and they're not proofs of the faith in There are certain things which point to, you know, there's something supernatural that's going on here. There's something wild. And they're not proofs of the faith in the strict sense, but they do capture our attention and make it yet more incumbent upon us as reasoners to try to make sense of what's going on here.

So what we come to discover is that, yes, it is rational to believe and that belief itself is rational and that even within faith, the supernatural sense, many of which doctrines we cannot prove, yet we can still exercise reason to good effect in a way that helps us as philosophers and theologians, as thinkers, as reasoners, to find greater correspondence I suppose between what we believe and then the understanding which awaits us at the end of the age. So that is what I wanted to say. And yes, this is Pines with Aquinas.

If you hadn't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell, and get sweet Amal updates when other things come out. Also I contribute to this podcast called God's Planning. And I made mention of the fact that we have an event coming up in Columbus, Ohio on Saturday, April 6th. It'll be Father Bonaventure and myself. The theme will be the Eucharist signed in sacrament. It's going to be a jammer. It's free. You just have to register online at godsblending.org. And it will be great. So

I look forward to seeing you there and meeting you there. And that's all I got squad. Alright, thanks so much. Know my prayers for you. Please pray for me and I look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas. Peace.