The Catholic Vision

Title: 'The Catholic Vision

Author Edward D. O'connor, C.S.C

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Content

Part 2: The sources of religious knowledge

The sources from which religious knowledge can be sought... nature and revelation

Nature has often been preceived as a manifstation of God, and most of the classical arguments for the existence of God start from nature. We call this natural knowledge of God by reason.

Tradition of Judeo-Christian is characterized by the claim of having received revalation from God himseld. This might be referred to as a superatural revalation as opposed to a natural revalation. We call this Divine revalation.

The church maintains that the human reason is inded capable by itself of attaining the knowledge God: but that the revelation given to through Jesus Christ and the phrophets is nevertheless very useful. The First Vatican Council (1870) declared:

God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certitude from created things by the natural light of human reason... But God, in His infinite wisdom and goodness, has seen fit to reveal himself and the eternal decrees of his will to the human race in another way - one that is supernatural...

it does not say that the existance of God can be demonstrated.

Revelation enables us to know them easily, whereas without it the knowledge of God is quite difficult.

Divine revelation is absolutly indispensable in that God has by free "decree," call nam to "participate in the divine goods, which utterly transcend human understanding." That is to say, mankind has a vocation that is supernatural, beyond the reach of mere natural human powers.

Without revelation, we would not know that this has been offered to us; hence weather could we orient our efforts toward such a goal.

Plato conceived of "the good", Aristotle argued for the existence of an "unmoved mover" which he said must be conceived as "thought thinking itself"

St. Thomas Aquinas formulated the most stringent arguments of the existence of God. His Suma Theologia gives five ways, each starts from a different observation of the natural world.

4. Nature Speaks of God

In their vital, experimental interactions with the world around them, and in their simple, untrained musings, people have instinctivly sensed that there must be some kind of Supreme Being.

All of the considerations fall into the perspective of St. Thomas's fifth way, often called the argument from design. In this perspective, the question of God (or divinity) reduces to the question, whether the actual world is simply the result of the chance interaction of all of the factors involved in it, or whether some kind of intelligence is at work in it.

If there are things that cannot be the result of mere chance but must have come about by design, dome sort of intelligence must have produced them.

Chance presupposes multiple lines of causality, each operating according to its own inner necessity. It is when two or more such lines intersect, without this intersection being intentionally planned, that we speak of a chance event.

Can our world have come about simply by the chance interplay of the elements that make it up; or must there not lie an intelligent design behind it?

There is not therefore some evident master plan of the universe that argues for the existence of God. Instead, what we are asking here is whether, in a world that is largely the domain of contingency, there are not marks of intelligent design indicating amid all of this randomness, the work of a purposeful agent.

Implicit Attitudes

• The Meaning of Life - Underlying all of these attitudes is the conviction that wife does have, can have, or ought to have, a meaning. The existentialism of Sartre.
• Confronting the world with confidence - Most people, however, go on living, and do so with a hope, security, and expectation which implicitly acknowledge that the world is not just chaos. They live in the belief that something can be accomplished, that life can indeed be worth the effort. In people who consciously believe in God and his promise of a future reward, this behavior is understandable.

Some common ways to God

• Beauty Three aspects of the world

God and the world of Science

Did not finish this chapter because it is a little off topic of research here. Need to back an finish from page 93

5. God has spoken to us

Because nature's witness to the Creator is so difficult to interpret and so limited in scope, God has spoken to us about himself.

Christianity is founded on the belief that the Sovereign Lord of the universe has communicated to the world something of his inmost thoughts and intentions.

...the summits attained by the human mind trying to scale the steep cliff of the meaning of the world are far inferior to what has been given by the hand of God reaching down to us.

• Revelation real or mythical? The fundamental structures of revelation, namely, prophecy and faith. It is by prophecy that revelations is presented to us, and by faith that we receive it.

Prophecy

The prophet is enlightened so as to perceive the truth directly; others are enlightened so as to acknowledge what is uttered by the prophet. the prophet has the role of articulating in human language the divine mysteries which other accept or reject as formulated by the prophet.

But if we look attentively at their prophecies, we find them mostly concerned with the present, not the future, declaring God's judgment upon the people. And Jesus, although he came as the Messiah foretold in the old testament, was himself the greatest of all the prophets because he, more than any others, declared the divine mystery in the language of men.

What makes a person a prophet is not the content of his message - it is the fact that it originates not from him but fro God. The prophet is sent by God to speak in God's name.

Belief in Revelation

If revelation is the act by which God communicates to us the inner secret of his divinity, faith is the response by which we accept what he reveals. The terms of faith and belief designate the fact that in this act, one gives assent to doctrines, the truth of which omen is not able to see for oneself or to demonstrate.

• The term faith -

• The motives of faith -
  • What leads a person to make such an act of faith? .. two important factors: signs presented to the rational mind to convince it, and grace by which God touches us in the hidden depths of our being.

• • It is normal for the prophet to offer sings as a guarantee that he has been sent by God. ...God gave him miraculous signs to work.
  • Another sign used by the prophets consists of foretelling future events which could not have been foreseen naturally.
  • Such signs confirm the prophet's claim to speak in the name of God.. ... God to whom past, present, and future are all equally present, is vindicating the word of the prophet. They make faith reasonable, even when it assents to doctrines beyond the reach of reason. If a man claims to speak in the name of God, and produces signs that can come only from the power of God, it is reasonable to believe in him.

• Miracles today - But with great difficulty with some of this evidence it is remoteness from us. We today are not able to see the miracles or hear the predictions...
  • The fact is that miracles have not ceased: it could indeed be argued that they are ore abundant and more spectacular in the twentieth century than ever before. Lourds for example, is the site of numerous miraculous healings ...
  • No saint is canonized without several miracles having been worked through his intersession.
  • The tilma of Guadalupe, bearing a miraculous image of the Blessed Virgin
• The church as a sign - The church appears as so extraordinary a phenomenon that one must ask whether recourse to some superhuman power is not necessary to explain it. ... human flaws make the miracle all the more evident. Do we not find the the more we are in the church, the closer we are to God and the truer we are to our own identity; whereas insofar as we withdraw from the Church, we loose contact with God, our fellowman and with our own true self?
• Scripture as a sign - Finally, Scripture is a sign of immense value for faith. Scripture is its own best witness.
  • ...on reading the New Testament, many people find in it a goodness, wisdom, and holiness that convince them of its profound truth and divine origin. Anyone who gives serious consideration to the Faith must examine its main piece of evidence.
• How to seek faith - It is not necessary to find a single, absolutely convincing sign that suffices all by itself; the whole complex of signs occurring in an individual's life go together to give him the "evidence" he needs of divine

The Grace of Faith

Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me (John 6:44f) This hidden witness of the Father is the decisive element in Christian faith, giving an absolute conviction, far beyond what we could get from an miracles or other sings taken by themselves.

• The Father's witness - ... in St. Peter's famous profession of faith. When Jesus asked, "Who do you say that I am?" Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah!" replied Jesus, "For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 16:15-17). He was in light of an interior grace. Peter was able to perceive the true sense, and recognize Jesus as the Christ.
  • Faith is essentially a living, personal response to God. If someone does not have faith you cannot prove to him that God is speaking to him. Each one has to "hear the voice of the heavenly father in his own heart for himself.
• Human witnessing - In matters of faith, although we may be able to show the reasonableness of what we believe, we can never properly proof it. Faith is not a function of our learning or intelligence; the uneducated and dull-witted have just much access to faith as brilliant geniuses. On the other hand, neither is faith an irrational, emotional act; it is a judgement of the mind, and requires that we use our minds, considering the signs and evidence, resolving problems, etc.
• The sin of unbelief - ...the sin of unbelief is not just ignorance or mistaken judgement; it is a closing of one's mind to the light, that is, to the Father's witness.
• Freedom of faith - Most people find faith within themselves or fail to find it. The decision has taken place in their subconscious, and has resulted from many little decisions to do the right or the wrong: to love the good or abandon it. ...falling away from the faith is seldom due to the reasons or problems we consciously declare; it is usually the result of living in discord with the faith we profess.
• The claims of other religions - ...if Christianity is authentic, Islam cannot be, for it contradicts the other. Islam denies that Jesus is the Son of God, reducing him to the status of a prophet.