{"id":12,"date":"2011-05-09T22:09:52","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T02:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=12"},"modified":"2011-05-09T22:09:52","modified_gmt":"2011-05-10T02:09:52","slug":"the-reasonableness-of-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/the-reasonableness-of-christianity.html","title":{"rendered":"The Reasonableness of Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Contrary to atheistic boilerplate, Christianity is anything but a crutch for the weak minded and timid hearted.\u00a0 Christians have gone to great lengths over the centuries to show that, while reason is no substitute for faith, and while it can never occupy anything other than a subordinate position with respect to the latter, reason can indeed establish at least the probability of God\u2019s existence.\u00a0 Some Christians have gone further than this to argue that God\u2019s existence is rationally demonstrable\u2014<\/em>that is, that it can be established with certainty by reason alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

St. Anselm, the eleventh century bishop of Canterbury, is famous for his \u201contological proof\u201d for God.\u00a0 Anselm tried to show that there was no way that God can\u2019t <\/em>exist.\u00a0 The idea of God, Anselm reasoned, is the idea of a being \u201cthan which none greater can be conceived.\u201d\u00a0 When the atheist and the theist deny and affirm God\u2019s existence respectively, it is this idea that they have in mind.\u00a0 But since it is better for a being to have existence than for it to lack it, and since God is, by definition, the best, <\/em>the conclusion is inescapable: God necessarily <\/em>exists.\u00a0 It is no more possible, logically, to affirm the idea <\/em>of God while simultaneously denying His real existence <\/em>than it is possible to affirm the definition of a \u201cbachelor\u201d while denying that a bachelor is an unmarried man.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ontological proof has had its share of detractors, many of the earliest and most distinguished of which have been Anselm\u2019s fellow Christians.\u00a0 St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, among the greatest thinkers the world over and himself a proponent of arguments for God\u2019s existence, rejected it on the grounds that it illicitly moved from \u201cthe order of ideas\u201d to \u201cthe order of things.\u201d\u00a0 Simply put, the idea of God is one thing; God Himself is something else altogether.\u00a0 \u201cGod exists\u201d is not self-evidently true to us, and so while the denial of this proposition is false, it is not self-contradictory.\u00a0 Thus, Anselm is mistaken: just because one can conceive God, doesn\u2019t mean that one speaks nonsense in simultaneously denying that God exists.<\/p>\n

Aquinas sought to prove God\u2019s existence the only way he thought it was possible to do so\u2014by appealing to experience, not of God, but of the world.\u00a0 From what is seen, Aquinas supposed, we can infer that which can\u2019t be seen. His famous \u201cfive ways\u201d argument reasons from five fundamental features of our world\u2014change or motion, causality, contingency, excellence or value, and harmony or order\u2014to the existence of God. That is, only by way of appeal to God, Aquinas contends, can we explain these phenomena.<\/p>\n

The one theme that connects the five ways is that of contingency.\u00a0 <\/em>To put it another way, the five ways argument is, essentially, an argument from contingency.\u00a0 To say that something is contingent is simply to say that it depends<\/em> upon something else.\u00a0 You and I are contingent, as is this computer on which I type, the chair on which I sit, and everything else of which our world consists.\u00a0 Aquinas\u2019s position is that the phenomena that constitute our world point beyond themselves to a first cause or reason that is not itself contingent, a being that is necessary.\u00a0 <\/em>A necessary being is a being that contains the reason for its existence \u201cwithin itself,\u201d so speak, a being the very nature of which is to exist.\u00a0 And this being, Aquinas declares, is what we call God.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, although Aquinas and other Christians who advanced arguments from contingency accepted the Genesis creation account, they acknowledged the possibility that the world could have existed forever, as Plato, Aristotle, and the pagans believed.\u00a0 As Father Frederick Copleston, a twentieth century Roman Catholic priest and historian of philosophy, once memorably quipped, whether you have one piece of chocolate or 1,000 pieces of chocolate, chocolate is never going to yield anything other than chocolate.\u00a0 Similarly, whether we are dealing with one contingent thing in the universe or the totality of contingent beings that comprise the universe, that which is contingent is by definition contingent upon something that, ultimately, can\u2019t depend upon anything else.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are several other arguments for God\u2019s existence that we simply haven\u2019t the time to consider at present.\u00a0 Whether any of them succeed is debatable and, at any rate, beside the point.\u00a0 That Christians labored tirelessly to establish God\u2019s existence upon rational grounds is a fact of which far too many of our contemporaries, Christian and otherwise, need to be reminded, if not taught.\u00a0 Yet there is something else to be gotten from this little history lesson.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What is remarkable is that in presenting them to their Christian brethren, the proponents of these arguments were under no illusions that they were \u201cpreaching to the choir.\u201d\u00a0 If they were under any such illusions, they couldn\u2019t sustain them for long.\u00a0 Not that anyone would know it from studying philosophy in any of our secular universities, but medieval Christians anticipated by hundreds of years the considerations against the arguments for God\u2019s existence that David Hume\u2014widely held up in philosophy textbooks as their critic par excellence<\/em>\u2014wouldn\u2019t raise until the eighteenth century.\u00a0<\/p>\n

William of Ockam, for instance, like Hume much later, rejected the notion that there is a necessary connection between causes and effects: just because A occurs doesn\u2019t mean that B must necessarily occur.\u00a0 Unlike Hume, however, it was Ockam\u2019s interest in safeguarding God\u2019s sovereignty that informed his conclusion that causality is best understood in terms, not of necessity, but of regularity.\u00a0 <\/em>Creation consists of distinct things that happen <\/em>to be arranged in the order in which God arranged them.\u00a0 But God could have arranged them otherwise. Thus, there is no necessary connection between them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is another reason, though, why Ockam and such medieval thinkers as Nicholas of Autrecourt and John of Mirecourt rejected necessary causality.\u00a0 It is precisely because each thing\u2014each \u201csubstance\u201d\u2014that God creates is unique in being fundamentally irreducible to every other that the existence of one can never be inferred from the existence of the other.\u00a0 Yet what this means is that causal arguments for God\u2019s existence of the sort that Aquinas and many others put forward can never be as strong as they had been thought to be.<\/p>\n

Whatever the atheist or, for that matter, anyone else <\/em>may say of Christianity, no one can truthfully say that it is irrational.<\/p>\n

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contrary to atheistic boilerplate, Christianity is anything but a crutch for the weak minded and timid hearted.\u00a0 Christians have gone to great lengths over the centuries to show that, while reason is no substitute for faith, and while it can never occupy anything other than a subordinate position with respect to the latter, reason can…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Reasonableness of Christianity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, nofollow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Reasonableness of Christianity\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Contrary to atheistic boilerplate, Christianity is anything but a crutch for the weak minded and timid hearted.\u00a0 Christians have gone to great lengths over the centuries to show that, while reason is no substitute for faith, and while it can never occupy anything other than a subordinate position with respect to the latter, reason can…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/the-reasonableness-of-christianity.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-05-10T02:09:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jack Kerwick\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Reasonableness of Christianity","robots":{"index":"noindex","follow":"nofollow"},"og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Reasonableness of Christianity","og_description":"Contrary to atheistic boilerplate, Christianity is anything but a crutch for the weak minded and timid hearted.\u00a0 Christians have gone to great lengths over the centuries to show that, while reason is no substitute for faith, and while it can never occupy anything other than a subordinate position with respect to the latter, reason can…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/the-reasonableness-of-christianity.html","og_site_name":"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture","article_published_time":"2011-05-10T02:09:52+00:00","author":"Jack Kerwick","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/the-reasonableness-of-christianity.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/the-reasonableness-of-christianity.html","name":"The Reasonableness of Christianity","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#website"},"datePublished":"2011-05-10T02:09:52+00:00","dateModified":"2011-05-10T02:09:52+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/6832222998cc14717ded1849531201c5"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/the-reasonableness-of-christianity.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/the-reasonableness-of-christianity.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/05\/the-reasonableness-of-christianity.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The Reasonableness of Christianity"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/","name":"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture","description":"Beliefnet Voices - 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