Part One: The Profession of Faith
Our thesis statement here is that we are about to characterize Faith and what it means To Believe. Sure. Let’s get into it.
I. The Desire for God
This section boils down approximately to “God is the only way for man to be happy.” If I rephrase this as “humanity tends to seek spiritual fulfillment and a grand sense of meaning, purpose, or belonging,” then I am inclined to agree, and I think if you take that idea and put it in a Catholic shaped box, it comes out like “God made man dependent on him for happiness and that’s why man seeks god.” That’s fine. What we have here is not a bulletproof argument for the case that man by design needs to find god to soothe his restless soul, but I’m not sure that’s what it was meant to be.
Some asides from this section:
- God created man through love, specifically.
- “and through love continues to hold him in existence”
- Suggests the creation is not self-perpetuating, which is interesting. God has to actively allow hold something in existence.
- God “allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him”
- The Catholic church should hesitate to use the word “grope” in their documents
- Besides just giving man a hard-coded existential crisis in our DNA, we’re also strategically placed so that we have to search for God.
- Except for sometimes, when people don’t search for god, I guess.
- The characterization of why people overlook or reject god is a little one-sided, but did we really expect a fair representation of the case for atheism here?
II. Ways of Coming to Know God
Basically, they say there are three of them:
- Look how organized and beautiful the world is (the Design argument)
- There must be a first cause (the Causal argument)
- God revealed himself to man (the Experiential argument)
I mean, all of these have pretty fair objections, although the experiential argument can be hard to get around for individuals for sure. How can I really make the case that someone’s lived experience is wrong and made up and imagined and dismissible? For robust arguments, though, the experiential argument is too inconsistent from person to person, so I think it’s best not to engage it at all. My experiences that led me to atheism are valid, someone else’s experiences that led them to Catholicism are valid, and they don’t agree with each other, and there’s not really anywhere to go if we’re trying to form a philosophical argument.
But we’re not here to talk philosophy—we’re here to talk Catechism. I’m trash at philosophy anyway.
Side note about this quote here: “God willed both to reveal himself to man, and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith.” Listen. That was one action. God revealed himself to man. What is the point of chopping that up into two things here? As if God had to separately will men that capability to notice when he reveals himself? What this kind of points me to is a version of god that is actively pulling every string everywhere all the time. Full Deterministic God. But I don’t need to lock that in as a Trait of Catholic God just from some weird verbiage, but I mean hey we’ll see if more evidence turns up.
III. The Knowledge of God According to the Church
Oh boy, the Church is “our holy mother.” That’s neat. I wonder if that got pulled in from those scriptures where the Church is the Bride of Christ? We also make the Causal Argument more official here—God is the “first principle and last end of all things.” There is a bold claim here that god can be “known with certainty…by the natural light of human reason.” My man, if that were the case, there would be a mathematical proof of god floating around out there somewhere. There is not a mathematical proof of god floating around out there somewhere.
Ok, in verse 37 we get a big qualification to the bold claim. Basically “man is technically capable of certain knowledge of god, buuuuuuuuuuut the truths aren’t consistent with our observations of the world around us, men don’t like it when god asks them to surrender to him, and man’s priorities are all goofed up by original sin.” This can be patched up with a little enlightenment by god’s revelation, with the help of which the truth “can be known by all men with ease…with no admixture of error.”
Right. Ease. No admixture of error. This is Catholicism we are talking about, right?
Fun aside—”natural law written in our hearts by the Creator” definitely has some implications about ethics and morality, but it sort of depends on what exactly is meant by “natural law.” But I think it’s fair to say man has some sense of right and wrong that is independent of god and inherent to man, unless natural law here refers more to the general relationship between man and god.
IV. How Can We Speak about God?
Not a title I was expecting, but the point is that God is unknowable and transcends reality itself, so language will inevitably fall short of accurately describing god. Hilariously, verse 43 describes god as having “infinite simplicity.” What a nothing expression. “It’s not complex, it’s just impossible to understand!” And how can something like simplicity be infinite anyway? Like what does that actually mean?
I’m tempted to praise the admission that knowledge of god is limited, but I think it is too often used as a cop-out to excuse shitty beliefs (why would god make people gay and send them to hell for it? truly god is mysterious) or shitty divine behavior (like sending a bear to maul those kids in 2 Kings).
Anyway, one of the other major points here is that we can describe god if we use the “manifold perfections of his creatures” as the starting point. Sort of a “god is all around us” type thing.
Summary
Eh. Not too much of interest, and a whole lot that I think it a little bit problematic. The basic points are:
- Man gets restless, all looking for truth and shit, until he finds god
- the Design and Causal arguments for the existence of god
- It is technically possible (with a big asterisk) to reach a certain knowledge of god’s existence
- It is technically possible (with a big asterisk) to describe god in a roundabout way.
At least a couple of these are distinctly Catholic to me. In Mormonism, at least, it is taught that perfect knowledge is nearly impossible without like an angelic visitation, and that’s why faith matters. Faith must get a pretty different treatment in Catholicism, because this sort of flies in the face of the Mormon flavor of faith. The preoccupation with using correct language also seems pretty catholic to me, though I guess most other faiths also have their preferred ways of phrasing things.
Here at the end of this section, do I know what it means to Believe in a catholic sense? I was sort of expecting an outline of tenets, or maybe a characterization of what faith should feel like, or how we should conceptualize faith. Instead, I have the above bullet points. Catholicism doesn’t need faith in something unknowable, because according to this it is knowable. I don’t know if I like that more.
Unrelated—I’m going to have to find a way to speed up this process. There is a lot of content in this catechism, and I don’t know if I have the capacity to agonize over every sentence of it like I’ve been doing so far. There are like sixty-some-odd sections here. Anyway. Part one, section one, chapter two coming soon.