Belief in God not an article of Faith

So I am going to try to present something here which may not be terribly enlightening, or it may just be wrong; but today was the first time that the idea struck me.

After Philosophy 101 class today, the professor was talking with the TAs about the day's lecture, which had concerned itself with part of Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion. In contrast to a design argument, as Hume presents it, for God's existence, St. Thomas' Five Ways happened to come up. Now these arguments are somehwat infamous or notorious or something in that, for one thing, their succinctness makes them appear as easy targets for any atheist lighting upon them. But many theists and also some Catholics find that, though they be five, not a single one of them works. I do not include myself in this group of people, and there are many who are not Catholics who do find at least one of them convincing.

Rarely enough, though, do we come across people who say that they began to believe in God on account of the cosmological argument, or an argument from design, or the ontological argument. Leaving that point aside for the moment, one does come across frequently the idea that the proposition, "There is a God", is one which can only be accepted on faith. In principle, they seem to think, faith is the only thing that could make us confident in assenting to the proposition "There is a God."

Of course, when we leave philosophy class at Cornell, and step into Catholic theology class, it would be heresy to say that reason alone (i.e., apart from any revelation) is incapable of knowing that God exists. This was dogmatically established by the First Council of the Vatican. What the Council did not say is that some one argument is sufficient in this regard, e.g. one of Thomas' Five Ways or some other relevant argument.

Here, therefore, is one important thing to note about the Catholic Faith, the recognition which it gives to the power of reason or the human mind to know certain profound truths about the world, apart from the help of divine revelation. I would imagine that most Catholics are not aware of this dogmatic truth and that they, like many of my students, would insist that we can only believe in God by faith.

But if we push the matter a little further, there is something which, it seems to me, we should note about faith. Let's say that to have or exercise faith in some instance means to assent to a proposition on the authority of another. Thus, there is both divine and human faith: the latter when we assent to a proposition on the authority of another man, and divine faith when we assent to a proposition on the authority of God. "I firmly believe . . . all these things because Thou hast revealed them, Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived."

So we accept whatever the Church teaches dogmatically on the basis of divine Faith. But given the definition of faith, it does not seem that we can accept God's existence on the basis of faith. For to accept something on the basis of faith presupposes that we know God exists; His action or revelation is the essential component in grounding the act of faith. This does not apply to knowing such things as that God is a Trinity, but simply to the claim that God Himself exists. (Presumably, there are a number of other qualities about God which come in that mix of things which we cannot accept on faith, but that's a trickier issue.)

If this is true, then it seems that those who go around claiming that they believe in God on the basis of faith are just dead wrong, at least if we are understanding faith in the Catholic, divine sense. In The Belief of Catholics, Knox lists a number of propositions which, he writes, "no Catholic, upon a moment's reflection, could accept on the authority of the Church and on that ground alone":

(i) The existence of God.

(ii) The fact that he has made a revelation to the world in Jesus Christ.

(iii) The Life (in its broad outlines), the Death, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

(iv) The fact that our Lord founded a Church.

(v) The fact that he bequeathed to that Church his own teaching office, with the guarantee (naturally) that it should not err in teaching.

(vi) The consequent intellectual duty of believing what the Church believes.

He concludes this list by saying: "I do not say that these considerations are present to the mind of every Catholic, however ignorant, however stupid. I do say that these are the considerations which any Catholic teacher would put before him, if and in so far as he showed any curiosity about the matter. I would add that a glance at the Penny Catechism will disabuse any unbiased mind of the idea that the Church, even in dealing with simple folk, conceals from them the intellectual basis of their religion."

Okay, so that's a rough sketch of the situation. But how does it work out in more complicated situations? At the very beginning of the Summa, Thomas asks whether it can be demonstrated that God exists? The first objection runs thus: "It seems that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated. For it is an article of faith that God exists. But what is of faith cannot be demonstrated, because a demonstration produces scientific knowledge; whereas faith is of the unseen (Hebrews 11:1). Therefore it cannot be demonstrated that God exists." In response, Thomas argues that God's existence can be demonstrated, and cites St. Paul as follows: "The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Romans 1:20). And in response to the first objection, Thomas writes:

"The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected. Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a man, who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated [Nihil tamen prohibet illud quod secundum se demonstrabile est et scibile, ab aliquo accipi ut credibile, qui demonstrationem non capit]."

Contrary to what I've proposed, Thomas says that one could accept God's existence on faith. I'm curious to know how this would happen. One possibility I see is that one could accept the existence of God on human faith, in the way that I accept Ambrosius' long calculations about strings and stars and such, and conclusions based on certain models as true, being unable intellectually (and unwilling) to do the calculations myself. Such might be an analogous relation between one who understands the cosmological proof, say, and one who cannot see even how the proof hangs together in a coherent fashion.

This solution seems somewhat dissatisfying, though, because it seems to put what is, of its very nature, a fallible instance of human faith before a long chain of propositions to be accepted on the basis of divine faith. I guess this is no more problematic, though, than any other time we have skeptical worries, perhaps about trusting others, but especially about our own ability to know basic, simple things about the world; we are fallible, after all, and we might be deceived about the existence of the chair we're sitting on, for example. So if we bracket skeptical concerns of that type, perhaps it is all right for a simpleton to accept God's existence on human faith, but I do not see how he could accept it on divine faith.

In any case, even if we bracket concerns about simpletons and how they might accept God's existence on faith, those of us who fancy ourselves good with proofs might still be rather anxious after reading Thomas' words quoted above; they make it plain, it seems to me, that Thomas thinks that, for most of us, our knowledge of God's existence is strictly natural. Again, I think that reflecting upon such a claim is great fun because it runs against the grain of our contemporary culture, both in its atheistic tendencies as well as among those who "believe in God", who are "believers", who claim that faith and not reason (or reason combined with sense data) ground their belief in God.

Yet for those of us who are Catholics, who are not simpletons, who can follow a proof, how do we look upon our own intellectual history with regard to this question? I said earlier that it is rare to hear that one became a Catholic after sitting down with the Five Ways or an argument from design or some such thing. Again, it is not uncommon to hear Catholics, even intellectually acute Catholics, such as my friend, Asinorum Doctor, say that they reject all five ways. Yet do these same people have an argument to fill the hole when the Five Ways are removed? More importantly, even of those who accept the Five Ways (or at least one of them), is it true that they believe in God because they followed one of the proofs through and saw that it all worked out? Certainly, in my own case, this is far from being true.

Still, I'm not at all uncomfortable in thinking that my knowledge that God exists is based on reason alone (roughly). I think that St. Paul gets close to what most of us probably feel, writing in the first chaper of his letter to the Romans: "Because that which is known of God is manifest in them. For God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; His eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable."

St. Paul doesn't give a knock down argument here, nothing that looks, on the face of it, like the arguments routinely discussed in the philosophy of religion. St. Paul simply says "the invisible things of him . . . are clearly seen"; that's a bold claim, and there's something more to it than meets the eye, because the sight of which he speaks is not one of the eyes. It sounds to me something like what we often call intuition: we just see something to be true, for example, a simple modus ponens argument:

(i) If A then B
(ii) A
Therefore, B

This is a rational argument, nothing could be simpler (almost) or more obvious, and one reaches an end of rational proof very quickly if one were asked to work back from this argument, starting by proving its validity. Quickly, one reaches the law of non-contradiction A v ~A. One sees it or one doesn't, but there's not much more to be said about it.

Is rational belief in God like that for many of us? We just see it, in some sense, His invisible things, distinguishing between them and the rest of the created world. Or is it the case that most of us, though we haven't been as explicit about it, do have some kind of demonstrative proof of God rattling around in our heads? An argument based on morality, like C.S. Lewis, perhaps? In my own case, though, I couldn't say that there is a single argument which lead me to belief in God, though as I said before, I do think that my belief in God is not based on faith.



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