There's no need to apologize, Peace. I'm serious. If I'm honest, I have not been offended at any point in this conversation, but there may be a reason for that which will be important to talk about. But to begin, and forgetting the nature of our current debate topic, I owe you a great deal of credit. Truly, I owe it to you that I have found my way back to Christianity, and this is not merely lip service. I was there while you took on both myself and ARM for a couple of months, and then as I backed off, you continued to field him as he dug in. I've been debating issues of philosophy and religion with people online for years. I've never seen a Christian remain as committed, patient, and unwavering as you did for the better part of a year, let alone against one of the sharper and more highly educated atheists either of us has ever met.
Most Christians who would be willing to commit the time lack the knowledge and acumen. Those who have the latter typically wouldn't put in the time. So yours was an example that had a major impact on me. No matter how 'heated' any of our discussions has been - or could still be - that fact doesn't change. Concerning this debate over Catholicism, there's no doubt it is important, nor is it to be dismissed as a prissy debate over abstract theological particulars. Yet at the end of the day, even if it were the case that I never hanged my hat in the Catholic Church, I know you'd be just fine as a Catholic.
I recall one of the exits on the highway of our debate with ARM had to do with the nature of faith, and how ultimately all belief (and therefore all knowledge, by extension) rests on faith. It occurred to me earlier today, as I was hammering on your recursion to belief in Rome's authority, to question what the alternative could be? Is there any belief system that doesn't ultimately come to rest there? Don't they all become circular at some point? One of the things I strive to do, as a basic philosophical method, is to always ask whether whatever 'test' I'm applying to one person's belief/argument/claim could also apply to my own. It's an interesting thing to consider. If I had been really hammering on one of King's theological stipulations, could I eventually force him into that same loop back to "I have faith in this, and that's all I can say."
But this leads me into another point I want to make about my particular situation in this debate. I grew up in a mostly secular environment. I discovered Christianity early in high school, within a Protestant context. It was a Church of God, and back then the concept of theology never really registered to me. I mostly went because of a girl. Later, I fell away from the church and actually found myself first fascinated with pagan tradition and later the occult. By the time I began my talks with yourself and ARM, I'd actually become authentically atheist. I stress that I was a legitimate atheist, because I don't truly think most atheists know what it is like to actually be atheist. They think they do, but they don't. Frankly, I'm not even convinced ARM is legitimately atheistic, as in believes in nothing. When you look for the devil, find it, and come out the other side still not believing anything, you've got nothing to look for anymore. Real atheism isn't this cocky thing we find so many times online, people with an inclination to argue. It's nothing. It's despondent and hopeless. It's powerless.
I'm saying this because it situates me uniquely in this debate, in a way that isn't shared by yourself and King, and this is important. Your faiths are both stronger. You have invested faith in and committed yourselves to an actual communion within the world. I haven't done that.
You asked in your comment if I am willing to be charitable, and all I can say is I am the most charitable person you'll ever find. The rub is: it's because I'm never afraid to treat what I think as wrong, truly because I've never been afraid to give up on anything I believe. We've discussed things related to this before, and the frustrations my Christian friend has had with me. I can bounce back and forth between being these different things, and holding these different beliefs, because in some sense I have this weakness of being a chameleon.
It has its tradeoffs. On the one hand, it can be useful when we are reasoning about things. It can give me some flexibility in debates. On the other hand, what am I risking? I've got no skin in the game. Nothing to lose if I treat every belief like it's cheap to exchange. So I've been in a different predicament than either of you, and I must acknowledge that my desire to know truth combined with what I've said above can cause me to be like 'water on rock', since I am so fluid and unattached to anything, I can seep in as I look for cracks. Again, I acknowledge this can be useful, but is ultimately a piss poor place to be.
Of course this has all begun to change, but some of those tendencies are still there with me. At the moment, I find myself on a bit of an island. Don't make the mistake of thinking I'm arguing for a protestant view here, not at all. In truth, I don't know where I should be, and I'm wondering if I'm not just another Kierkegaard. What a bunch of existentialist tripe!
Do know that if I am critical, it is because I care. I want to find a place to be. If I express a concern, it's not about arguing for the sake of arguing. If I offer an argument that seems a little pointed, or sarcastic, or whatever, it's probably because my frustration is authentic, and not directed at you personally, but at God and the world because I just wish it could be easier to know the Truth.
Sorry for the diary entry.
Thanks for sharing.
because I just wish it could be easier to know the Truth.
In a sense I say Amen. In another sense, I feel if it were easy to have this knowledge by human power, it wouldn't be worth knowing, or at least nowhere as worth knowing.
This harkens back to the very first part of the Summa I quoted from earlier. In that article, Thomas shows that not just philosophy is sufficient, snd for a number of reasons. First, because there are Divinr things that reason alone can never discover - like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the natures of the angels, etc. - and do we require Divine revelation to know these things, by faith. And, of course like we've been saying, faith can grant one knowledge, gnosis - as long as it is faith in something true. Which, if it comes from God, it is.
But there are others reasons for having theology / for God revealing things to us, with respect to those things that can be known by human reason. Like that God exists, for instance. But only those with rigorous intellectual dispositions will come to know and understand something like the cosmological arguments; and furthermore, even intelligent people who become familiar with them will simply dismiss them if they haven't been trained in logic and epistemology or first principles; it is usually ignorance of one of these sciences that leads internet atheists to shrug off the cosmological arguments. So the point is that it takes a lot of time and commitment to come to this knowledge, and this is a path that most, due to lack of ability or opportunity or interest, will never tread. So to have this same truth about God's existence revealed, and to and people in its acceptance by grace, is a tremendous act of mercy. And so on. Just some thoughts.
I guess my point is that there is a way that Truth can be known easily - but it has to be by grace, not reason (alone). That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about these things - we should! - but unless we also surrender to God's grace, we're gonna have a bad time.
I was inspired by the appeal to charity, in part because the paradigm of that method in discourse is truly the Socratic one. I thought, let's attempt this as it concerns the crux of the issue - Popery - and see if it can't cut like a knife to the epistemic heart of the debate. This must begin with laying out an assumption.
Now, I won't literally ask questions, ala Socrates. Not only do I think it is patronizing (once we're dealing with conversation partners who are aware of themselves), but it's tremendously difficult to do in the context of an online message board. So I might phrase statements as questions to imply the method, but I'm interested truly in walking out the logic and getting your feedback.
PRESUPPOSITIONS
(a) Truth exists. God exists. To know Truth is to know God.
(b) Following from (a), God compels man to know the Truth, i.e. there are many things which man may (or may not) know which he is not compelled toward: but what constitutes Truth is that which God compels us to know, and is by definition salvific. Stated another way, the definition of Truth is that which we must believe, such that we can be delivered. Therefore Truth, at minimum, is the least set of beliefs necessary to salvation.
(c) The Roman Catholic Communion (RCC) says that the statement, "Christ commissioned the holy office of Pope unto Peter and his successors as the ordained vicar of Him on earth until the end of days", is Truth.
(d) To fail to know the Truth is to fail to know God, and therefore to not be saved. Someone who is not saved spends eternity in Hell.
COROLLARIES
"One must, at the time of death, hold the belief that the material office of Pope is holy and supreme on earth, in order to enter Heaven."
"To fail to know this fact (of the Pope), which is True, is to fail to know God."
From the above, the following must be true:
A teenage girl living in the undeveloped world, and coming from a primitive pagan background, has no knowledge of any other traditions, let alone much of her own. She knows nothing of monotheism, of sin and repentance, or salvation.
One day, a Methodist mission group comes to her village and introduces her group to Christianity. These missionaries successfully transmit what they consider to be the fundamental core of Christian doctrine, consisting in knowledge of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the fallen nature of mankind, the requirement of repentance, faith, and prayer, the nature of virtue and vice, goodness and evil, and finally that unerring faith in the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary combined with authentic humility before Him will ensure that a person defeats death.
The little girl is reluctant at first, but on the third day she falls to her knees and confesses faith in Christ, crying tears of joy at having realized the magnitude of God's sacrifices through his Son. She asks for her sins to be forgiven and for Christ to enter her heart and soul that she might be saved from her sinful nature. She is baptized in water on this day, and we think that she commits to a life of prayer and imitation of the Christ nature.
Suppose that a week from the mission group's arrival, a cluster of savages attacks the village and the little girl is killed.
For not having implicitly or explicitly held the beliefs of RCC, the little girl has gone to Hell and is punished eternally in the pit.
If this is not the case, then one or more of the presuppositions stated above cannot be true.
Further, if it is not the case, then what follows is that belief in the papal axiom of the RCC is not compelled for us to know, and by necessity must then constitute an uncompelled belief, i.e. one which is not necessary to be held in order to be saved, for we have said that what God compels man to know is strictly Truth as the minimum set of beliefs necessary for soul salvation.
I think it would be best for me to begin by citing what the Church teaches on this point of there being no salvation outside of the Catholic Church:
"Outside the Church there is no salvation"
846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers?335 Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:
Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.336
847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:
Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.337
848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men."338
- from the
Further, the Church does not deny the goodness and holiness in non-Catholic churches, but merely affirms that the fullness of Truth, and salvation itself, is to be found and worked through the Catholic Church:
Wounds to unity
817 In fact, "in this one and only Church of God from its very beginnings there arose certain rifts, which the Apostle strongly censures as damnable. But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions appeared and large communities became separated from full communion with the Catholic Church - for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame."269 The ruptures that wound the unity of Christ's Body - here we must distinguish heresy, apostasy, and schism270 - do not occur without human sin:
Where there are sins, there are also divisions, schisms, heresies, and disputes. Where there is virtue, however, there also are harmony and unity, from which arise the one heart and one soul of all believers.271
818 "However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers . . . . All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church."272
819 "Furthermore, many elements of sanctification and of truth"273 are found outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church: "the written Word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope, and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, as well as visible elements."274 Christ's Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him,275 and are in themselves calls to "Catholic unity."276
So I think the premise above that neither I nor the Church would affirm is premise (b); it simply is not the case that there are facts that absolutely and without exception must be explicitly affirmed by the intellect in order to be saved. But if salvation is achieved by such a one who is ignorant of such facts, it is achieved through the Catholic Church, which is the Body of Christ.
Allow me to put it this way. The salvation of man is worked by Christ. The essence of Christ is the Truth of Christ, since He is Truth (John 14:6). The Truth of Christ is just those facts that are true of Him and His will for mankind. Thus, the fullness of faith is intellectual assent, without doubt, to the full range of those facts; and furthermore, anyone who is saved is saved by the power of Christ and the act of the intellect and will that unites a soul to Him and the facts pertaining to Him and His will for mankind.
This does not mean that unless a soul be keenly and explicitly aware of every fact, and assent to it, that they cannot be saved. It means that a soul has to acknowledge that there is Truth, that there does exist a full range of such facts, and that soul must assent to that full range, whatever they may be. Thus the girl in your example can be saved, and it is by virtue of Christ (including His Body, which just is the full range of those facts) that she is saved, even if she does not know all the facts - it is simply necessary that she have the humility to submit to them - to the fullness of Christ - whatever they may be.
Thus part of what I quoted points out that those who are just born into Protestant or Orthodox traditions bear no sin at all. It is those who are introduced to these facts, and reject them, that are put in danger.
Now, this does not mean that we should not evangelize, that we should not teach people these facts. Remember, what we've said is not that the girl in your example will be saved, but that she can be. The best way to ensure a person is saved is to teach them the fullness of the faith, so that they can benefit by 1) assenting to it, and 2) from the sacraments that it offers, which exist for the purpose of providing people with the graces they most need to be saved.
I think this serves as a sufficient response to this particular argument you have laid out. Of course, the Catholic Church believes that belief in the full nature of the Church's hierarchy is necessary for one's salvation insofar as it is a part of this range of facts, and it is only by virtue of this range of facts (Christ's Body) that one is saved. But there is nonetheless the possibility of those without knowledge of these facts being saved.
And finally, in the case of those who live pious lives, and assent to all the facts but one (let's say, the full nature of the Church's hierarchy), and in fact, actively reject this last fact - well, it is a precarious position, but even then we are not compelled to say they will surely be damned, for we can imagine (and pray) that the graces they have received in life, as well as the merits and intercession prayers of the saints in heaven, might manage to convert them away from error and towards Truth on their deathbed, such that salvation can still be attained.
This argument, I think, stands in theory as a response to what you've laid out, even if the fact of the matter of the Roman Catholic claim is not itself Truth (which I of course believe unwaveringly that it is).
EDIT: It looks like you added premise (d) after I began typing my reply, but I think my reply addresses that premise directly.
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