RE: I am a Catholic, ask me a question!
August 6, 2009 at 3:33 pm
(This post was last modified: August 6, 2009 at 4:43 pm by Jon Paul.)
(August 6, 2009 at 3:07 pm)chatpilot Wrote: There is no reasoning when it comes to the divine because your whole belief system relies entirely on faith and not reason.Stop defining "my belief system" for me. If you had read the Fides et Ratio by Pope Jon Paul II you would see that this statement of yours is not at all in accord with the Roman Catholic (and indeed orthodox Christian) perspective of the relationship between reason and faith. If you had read Thomas Aquinas, or indeed the much earlier patristics, like Augustine, you would see again and again that science and philosophy is used to explain the doctrines of the Church, and that Christendom has historically been far from anti-rationalistic or anti-logical. It is the religion of the Truth, the Logos who is God, who is the eternal Word and intelligence, begotten of the intellect that is God, and as such faith and reason can never truly be in contradiction or conflict, but only in a union of harmony. Reason and faith can only be distorted into disharmony by our human limitations of knowledge and proper use of reason. For faith is both the intellective willing consent of belief, but it's also the both spiritually and intellecutally enlightening reception of the Spirit of God. The only thing faith and reason can be opposed to is the false wisdom of the teachers of falsehood.
(August 6, 2009 at 3:07 pm)chatpilot Wrote: For a subjective mind trying to reason about the existence of God or trying to relegate everything to divine simplicity he immediately runs straight into a wall.Because your god is beyond natural reasoning and therefore requires a belief in the supernaturalThis is simply idiotic "reasoning". Or it is not reasoning at all. You have provided no reason to suggest that we cannot reason about the existence of God. God is beyond human reason, but he is beyond everything, he is also beyond human faith; it doesn't mean His existence cannot be known.
(August 6, 2009 at 3:07 pm)chatpilot Wrote: or as you like to say objective reasoning which requires a presupposition that God exist as a starting point.But that in no way means we cannot reason about his existence, even though it is also true that denying his existence is self-contradictiory.
(August 6, 2009 at 3:07 pm)chatpilot Wrote: It's good that you separate the two worldviews of objective and subjective minds since as an atheist I can only see things from a subjective point of view.The fact that I am an atheist obliterates any possibility of ever seeing things from your objective point of view.Atheist such as myself demand and require subjective evidence of this god.Subjective evidence? Anything you subjectively accept as evidence is subjective evidence. Therefore I can evidence the existence of pink unicorns subjectively, and subjectively I can prove that I am God, because I am the subjective judge of what is evidence and what is not, and I take my excellence to be evidence that I am God. But that does not mean that I have proven it objectively. I appeal rather to logical argumentation to approach objective truth rather than subjective abstraction.
(August 6, 2009 at 3:07 pm)chatpilot Wrote: just like science and theism [are completely at odds with each other]That is not at all the case. Science, at least taken to mean the scientific method, has little or nothing to say about the theological proposition of monotheism.
(August 6, 2009 at 3:07 pm)chatpilot Wrote: Because god exists on this so called transcendental plain he is beyond the reach of science and therefore at least in my mind his existence is untennable.God is transcendental, but that does not mean we cannot know he exists by reason, like it doesn't mean we cannot know he exists by faith. For he has made us in his image, as a rational creature, and given us the power of intellection of the intelligible reality he created, which reveals the work of the divine hand of it's creator.
The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.
-G. K. Chesterton
-G. K. Chesterton