From Atheism to Catholicism W/ Pat Flynn

pat fl oh pat flynn welcome to plans with aquinas how are you going it's great to be here matt you drove down from wisconsin that's right with your wife and four children that's that's absolutely right yeah why because you invited me and we wanted to get up wisconsin what's your wife doing right now she and i she's in the hotel room which is uh you know the kids love the hotel room but hotel prints are just not very kid-friendly they're certainly not toddler friendly so it's it's a little stressful no it's brutal i remember see my kids are a little older right now so that my youngest is bribable he's six but you all have some young kids yeah yeah yeah but thanks for thanks for being here we had you on the show about i don't know now is it a year ago i think that's right we talked about atheism we talked a bit about your conversion yeah stuff like that we're going to talk about it today yeah just a repeat someone just said in the chat like wait didn't we didn't they just do this so props to the guy who follows me we'll tr we'll try to do some new stuff yeah we'll see what did you identify as an atheist i forget from my life yeah how old were you well that's a good question um i think i think something that gets overlooked in some of these conversion stories is how gradual the process is yeah both both in and out yeah so for me uh i can trace back i think some significant events in my life that cause some original doubt right um one was was in the fifth or sixth grade sixth grade because the year 911 happened right that's i kind of link these two things together because you saw the so all the towers fall and like my world view started collapsing at the same time so um yeah yeah it was just the teacher and the science teacher uh just sort of um outlining the the basic um you know origins of the universe story and me thinking well this isn't what i was taught in my first grade sunday school class and there was just that [Music] first internal tension this is uh yeah around the sixth grade so so yeah you can probably figure out my age from there yeah it's it's amazing to me that so many people uh like at that time i'm 31 by the way at that time when you're in sixth grade i was 17 and much smarter than you yes now i'm older still obviously exactly the same amount and you're much smarter than me so i don't know how this happens with all these sixth graders you have a much better beard but uh yeah okay yeah no i know what you mean it is cool how how kids do kind of absorb those things and they don't even know how to process them right then and there it's not like you would have raised your hand and expressed that tension that you were feeling right but it something began to unravel yeah it was very uncomfortable uh uncomfortable enough that it stuck with me and it's not like immediately i'm an atheist like i wouldn't even know what that meant at the time it was just like here's i was told one story which was just kindergarten theology and nobody ever really brought me forward from that and then i hear another story and there's at least a superficial tension um or at least that's how i how i see it now it didn't seem superficial back then that was something that was it was it was undermining in a way and then um there were various other influences in my life so i never grew up in like a very religious household by any means like we would go to church um when the grandparents were in town yeah christmas easter that sort of thing so religion was never something that was really talked about in my family it was it was it was outsourced right like okay sunday school maybe for a year and that was about it so i never had any uh good formation no proper catechesis or anything like that so it didn't take much to undermine it right yeah i'm always really impressed when people legitimately read their way into the faith or make a decision despite it going against their self-interest so i was just on the phone with a pastor in north carolina who will have on the show soon and he was the head of this um united methodist church and a huge congregation and he's just made the decision to become catholic and he preached his last sermon on sunday and he's got uh so i won't say his name because he's got uh sabbatical for a little bit but then he said like matt i don't have health insurance i don't know but he said he's like i'd love to say i'm courageous but i've been thinking about this for years but still i'm always very impressed because i think for most of us it has to do with what we desire right and wanting to be accepted by our peers like i i don't mean to crap on mormonism because obviously many great mormons and even very intelligent moments but you know i think they do a really good job of like coming around people and inviting them into their community and i imagine that's really effective maybe more effective than just sort of here's a book and here's the five reasons you should become a mormon oh yeah yeah certainly um you know thinking back for me it was a very um it was a very lonely journey in some respects i didn't have a community in fact my community was all it was all secular is i lost a lot of friends when i became catholic okay um how old were you when you became a catholic uh it was four years ago now so wow were you baptized four years i was no i was i was confirmed my wife however is a convert and she was baptized and confirmed within the last four years wow so she she grew up in a completely irreligious agnostic household yeah so um so i mean we can get into some of that if you want but for me i mean so many of my friendships everything i did everyone everyone i hung out with the sorts of things that we did uh once i started taking seriously that uh yeah maybe catholicism is it maybe i'll become catholic there's a lot of tension there yeah um and it wasn't it wasn't attention that i i realized actually could be reconciled so a lot of the friendships not like they were like nasty or anything like that but it was just we just yeah parted ways right and a lot of things had to change for those watching right now i have uh because someone's already saying something in the live chat i have uh allergies pretty bad someone suggested it's because i smoked too many cigars that might also be the case i don't smoke too many cigars but that's where this voice thing's coming from it's not the covered [Music] okay so sixth grade you had that tension and you said when did you identify as an atheist all right so there was also other things i was into right and um both going um away from faith and then into faith it's not for me it was it was never purely into intellectual either way right i think that um there were intellectual components but i certainly don't want to think like it was just like mr spock yeah yeah um so yeah growing up i was really into music uh still play guitar um and cheryl of metallica don't we yeah we talk about metallica and mega death and i have i have theories um yeah i have theory who's the best league guitarist yeah well it's marty friedman it's okay it's definitely marty um that there's you know there's some beliefs that are that you just won't give up yeah and i'll just admit it straight like that's that's one of them that's that's not going anywhere i don't care what objections you throw at it right yeah um so yeah so i'm into all these other things right um things that uh and i have all these other um people that i look up to in life musicians writers none of them seem religious they all seem kind of cool kind of want to be like them uh in the music world you know like metallica like mega death this we definitely talked about this last time so i won't spend much time on it but it's actually very funny because like dave mustaine and all these kind of heavy metal guys like i thought like yeah they're too cool for religion so uh probably yeah i actually make that association right there's one thing to imbibe it without thinking it consciously but did you actually think they're not interested it's a lot of the lyrics right yeah like a lot and like mustaine now even admits like there's some songs he won't even play live because now he's a christian right and like alice cooper is his godfather which is hilarious like why didn't you tell me this stuff when i was trying to go directly into this yeah yeah sorry um so it's just you know things like that it's like the lyrics the presentation so yeah it didn't have to be explicit right um but then there was there were writers i was always really into writing and uh i found kind of twain at a relatively young age in high school and he's always taking shots at religion right sure funny funny stuff so the cool clever people are against right right and then there was another writer that i was and i'm still into he's actually one of my favorite atheists uh h.l mencken okay i don't know if you've heard a lot of people don't know he's kind of he's kind of like an old school christopher hitchens like if you if you know christopher hitchens you can you can tell like he definitely read mankind like he borrows a lot of mankind's style hilarious um and menken was you know he was he was a journalist he wasn't a philosopher but he was engaged in some of the serious questions i remember going back recently and reading some of his essays and he's he's like critiquing molinism i'm like that's kind of serious for you know so he was he was somebody like he's in the weeds he's he's there and he missed he didn't mention anything like tomism or anything like that but i'm like he knows some stuff so he wasn't completely superficial is what i'm saying yeah he uh was influenced heavily by nietzsche so you can like people pass you off right so okay he keeps referencing this nietzsche guy i'm gonna check him out and so that introduces me to like that that's what gets me into philosophy how old are you when you're reading this would be like early mid-high school okay wow ish and that's pretty that's pretty rare for someone in early high school to be reading like me by like 10th grade something like that because i was really into uh politics at the time too always like very uh engaged in that um we can get into that later if we want but uh so i i had just a lot of interest i've always been just very intellectually curious a number of things but i love these writers and there's something about nietzsche too and like he's kind of edgy so like there's there's a reason i think that young men are you know that he appeals to them yeah um [Music] so that yeah that introduces me to to just philosophy in general and the sort of atheist existentialists and stuff like that so by the time i'm in college right that would be if you were to say are you religious i said no no i'm an atheist was this around the time of dawkins and the new atheists so yeah because that was about 2008. yeah they were on the scene right um i was never heavily engaged or even read all that much by them and when i did i was never i like some of their stuff so i know a lot of people will just um and look the criticisms are merited like some of their stuff is truly bad um but i remember reading some of harris's stuff like uh he had he had a book called on on meditation uh spirituality without religion or something i remember kind of liking that one um and i i did like i did like hitchens he was he was funny yeah um but they were never big influences on me i actually kind of like came back to them later like if that makes sense to become catholic because everyone else seemed so interested in them but they were never um people that i was reading were you reading atheism and college no no no no i um i was vocal about political positions sure but i was not vocal about and this is what i've realized like since converting and talking with other atheists it's just there's just many flavors of atheism like there's many flavors of theism right and my atheism was not militant i would say the snide remark every now and then um which i've tried to to temper significantly right right because it's just generally unhelpful but i i never had um growing up like i never had a bad experience with christianity um you know the christians i knew were met they're all they're all good people for the most part at least as good as anybody else so i never had like any animus i think i would have probably promoted a number of uh cliches that you or myself might challenge now that religion is responsible for this terrible thing or that terrible thing but um certainly i would not have been of the mind to reduce everything wrong with the world to religion which hitchens kind of does have a sounding way right yeah so i would have parted ways with him from there um so so yeah and then you know so my atheism wasn't ever militant so in that sense i think i was it was probably easier to convert me for that reason because i didn't have so many barriers in place were you interested in the big questions what happens when i die what's the point of it all and i guess if you're reading nature you are yeah and nietzsche terrifies you in many respects um with like um psychological egoism the selfishness of it all and these were questions that um or or positions that i was always deeply uncomfortable with right so i was i was never comfortable with atheism ever that's why i say like it wasn't purely intellectual like i'm happy to admit like i was never comfortable with the conclusions that i seem to be reaching as you know as kind of pushing through the naturalistic project if you will you know things that you typically hear that it seems like okay well i i i believe that some actions are really right and wrong but on this worldview how do i how do i make sense of that how do i ground that that was a big thing for me um the psychological egoism thing right that everything we do is inherently selfish i was reading like iran and stuff too she was uh that was that was distressing for me because it seemed like it seemed like that the good life is human interactions or a transaction of sorts huh yeah yeah you know everything is just is so fundamentally selfish that any action that you analyze it's gonna come down to just just being perfectly self-interested aristotelianism has a good answer to that right well we're inclined to happiness by nature right but how we go about that and what we do can be better or worse and i wasn't exposed to that at the time so i was like kind of like stuck in this like nihilistic incessantly selfish you know um everything is fundamental particles world i was never comfortable with that like i wanted to get rid of it i did yeah um it didn't it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me but i didn't really see what the alternatives were either did you have anyone in college trying to evangelize you were you aware of christian or other faith groups on campus no no i can i can firmly say that that never happened to me and i was talking with a friend the other day of how different our um upbringings seem to be even my wife like my wife and she grew up in the south right um part of the reason she was so against christianity for so long is she had so many bad experiences of people trying to evangelize her she would tell stories of how you could be driving down the street or driving um home from school and people would throw like bibles in your window or something like that never and anything like that i i don't i don't remember if it may have happened but i do not have a single memory of anybody ever trying to evangelize me um aside from maybe going to like a concert venue with people with like signs and bibles or pamphlets that they hand out i went for what it's worth i went to uh just as for undergrad of state university and pennsylvania secular university looking back though are you disappointed that no one ever tried with you know you know it's uh now i see it as god's providence in a way right um because everything that i had to go through the questions that i had to wrestle with and the positions that i've come to i think are more mature than they would have been otherwise i think me kind of losing my faith in a sense obviously it's all part of god's providence in in the grand scheme um but i can see the good that came out of that um whereas maybe if i had converted sooner and hadn't gone through as much struggle as much questioning it wouldn't be as deep and don't get me wrong it's not like i have every question answered there's questions and puzzles i'm working with all the time but i really wrestled for a while because the stakes were were so high for me because i knew everything that i would have to change in all that i might lose and and look i'm being a baby about it because compared to what other people have given up it's nothing for me but it was enough to make me be resistant and slow what what did you have to give up or what did you think you had to give up when i tension bring out the scroll of my past sins yeah no i mean so that's one of them um so um so the all the personal sense right um just just yeah sex sexual sins pornography right i mean all of that stuff um so you talked about in sixth grade there was a tension that was kind of inserted into your brain that led you maybe on this path towards atheism or at least it was part of that before we get to deciding you had to give up things what was the tension placed in atheism for you other than you didn't really want it to be true right yeah yeah it was not i think it was a nihilistic tendency right um given the sort of general and again there's different flavors of atheism right but i was kind of in this sort of reductionist naturalist physicalist camp we were talking about dostoevsky before the show you really have to read crime and punishment yeah and i haven't read them everybody keeps talking about it i just i just need to make the time to read them authors like that myself and um you know just just kind of starting from a certain premise and trying to be consistent to the conclusions and seeing that it seems to entail some things that i just cannot possibly accept right that there is i mean everything from uh moral nihilism but but even weirder than that in certain respects like how do you make sense of consciousness self and you know some atheists or some but not all are willing to just bite the bullet and you know go for the nuclear option as we say and they're just eliminativist they'll say there is no consciousness there is no there is no cell he would be an eliminativist alex rosenberg would be another one um and you know to me thinker like rosenberg is very interesting because i think that he i think he is you know he's not yeah he's not a dummy either he was like the you know head of uh or chair of the philosophy department duke or something like that yeah i've seen red and motives to his atheism but he seems like a dude who's been hurt yeah i i have no idea but i could see how you could you could read that um but he seems to me like somebody who's trying to be consistent with a starting point and rosenberg in particular wants to say it it's all fermions and bosons right it's just those those the fundamental particles uh so he denies uh consciousness he denies uh enduring selves he denies truth he denies meaning he denies what else does he do doing denies he does denies morality he's a nihilist right i think he has a term like happy niles i recommend people check out his debate with uh dr william lane craig yeah yeah yeah that was a good one that was a good one i think one of the things craig said was if you believe that you are the same person that walked in here tonight then you should reject rosenberg's atheism right right because you're a different swirl of particles right yeah um so you know i wasn't completely in the same line of thought as like a rosenberg but there was enough things for me that i i think troubled you yeah that that i would have to deny or or significantly modify that just seemed false to me free will was another one actually free will is uh uh it's just um we can get into that more later but that was one was just like yeah dang it like it seems like this world view would uh lead me uh to determinism now let's stop stop there for a second because there are atheists who would say you can be an atheist and either be some sort of have some sort of free will whether that be compatible free will but some would hold to free will why did you think that was impossible well i'm an incompatibilist i don't i don't think it makes any sense to say that we're determined and we still have free tell us tell us yeah tell us tell us why uh well i just i just don't think that that makes any sense right to say that there's some factor that's prior to and logically sufficient for an effect and yet that those factors could hold but the effect not hold like that that makes no sense to me right so to affirm a libertarian freedom we're going to need a different we're going to need a different metaphysics where we're going to be able to be real agents right without some factor in the in the general ontological scenery if you will that isn't both prior to and logically sufficient for our action and i think you think we can do that actually with divine simplicity and there's some some good work on that maybe we'll get there maybe we won't right but if you're a libertarian and like you have deep libertarian uh intuitions with free will which i did just just kind of like break this down for us a little bit more for those who are watching and they're like wait all that just went past me a little too quickly it sounds like you're saying if you're an atheist if you're a materialist at least right you ha you have to deny free will just kind of lay that argument out yeah so i mean the idea is that uh if we're reducing things uh to the mere physical order then say you have you know the laws of nature and then some just event a plus b plus c and then eventually you come along right well the idea is that you and everything about you is somehow inextricably linked to those yes prior factors which are also logically sufficient for you your beliefs your actions whatsoever um so if you're gonna if that is if that's your metaphysics i don't see how you're really getting around determinism which is why many atheists not not all but many embrace determinism right they accept the term in fact we brought up sam harris he's a yeah pretty staunch on on determinism um okay yeah no i don't know if that makes sense no it does make sense absolutely i just think it's helpful for people like one of the things again back to dr glenn lang craig in his uh interview with alex o'connor i'm not sure if you watched that episode i had alex debate trent on the channel about a year a year and a half ago yeah what's that i only watch your podcast i appreciate that but you should watch this one because uh you know alex o'connor's he studies at oxford he's a very bright young man and uh cosmic skeptic is the name of his channel yes and he's got like three four five hundred thousand youtube followers and he had dr craig on and he's very he's a very open-minded guy and craig did incredibly well like just helped him understand a lot of things craig's unreal yeah but one of the things craig said was um you know part of his tactic as a theist apologist theistic apologist is to give the atheist a price tag for his atheism that's going to cost more than he's willing to pay right and that's sort of what you were talking about i think that's exactly what happened to me right there were certain things where as i was going deeper into this particular world view there were costs associated with them and at some point the cost became too much to bear and i didn't immediately have to becoming a catholic by any means but i it caused me to want to look at alternatives more seriously okay see that's a good way to think of it because if you have stopped there it would have just been okay well these things make you uncomfortable therefore they're false that doesn't follow yeah no i you know and i remember like there was a point i remember quite vividly i was sitting in my attic where i was just like i had a book in my hand i forget what it was um but i just reached a point in just my atheistic thinking where i'm like i don't know what's true i don't know if this is true i don't think it's true but i'm gonna keep searching until i figure something out right or throw myself off of a bridge this okay yeah this is similar to my experience like my point it wasn't that because i i saw a pretty grim universe and reality ahead of me and around me should atheism be true that's not a good argument for theism being true but it did make me want to question as you just put it well maybe i should look into these alternatives a little more seriously to see if there's any if they have any uh gas heft yeah that's kind of what you were doing okay right so what did you look to first the classics go back to plato aristotle oh no okay philosophy okay phil i didn't know if you kind of jumped into different world no i mean religion man religion was not on the table for me at all okay like i was i would say i would probably be open to the the idea of like a god in the most general sense right a deism or pantheism uh so i really kind of ran the gamut right so as i moved away from atheism and kind of like closer to catholicism i i went through the whole spiritual but not religious phase right so i was reading thinkers like aldous huxley right and the perennial philosophy and religious pluralists really right um and that that seemed that seemed plausible to me um at first as i dove deeper into it i realized that it wasn't going to it wasn't going to work um especially not like what we call like a naive religious plurals and say like religions are all just saying the same thing they definitely aren't right they say quite radically different things or you could take a more sophisticated view uh which says something like okay religions are definitely saying different things yeah and they're all wrong but they're also kind of right so yeah they're all kind of groping at the same ultimate reality that was that was attractive to me it was attractive to me um and that that opened me up um and i just i just parked there for a while honestly and i was just reading a lot of philosophy and different thinkers of that sort that's cool that you read plato right i mean if i were an atheist i i don't know i think i'd make a religion out of plato i just love socrates you could just be a platonist right yeah yeah well i mean it's interesting because i had you know i had your introduction to these thinkers at other times um you know your basic intro to philosophy courses and stuff like that but i just never spent a lot of time with them so i decided i want to go back but what i was referring to though was uh socrates in prison where his friends try to rescue him and he says look what's the problem you know if if he doesn't say this exactly but if the afterlife exists then it sounds rather pleasant and if it doesn't then i suppose it'll be like going into a dreamless sleep and who doesn't want that it's funny my my philosophy professor brought that up one time and i i challenged her on i'm like is that is that really the only alternatives there like what if there's a hell whatever what if you get reincarnated right it seems like you might be leaving some options right uh-huh that are worth considering yeah so um with all respect to plato of course um but no so i mean you just go and you start you start reading different perspectives and i was doing that from many different angles somehow eventually i forget how i stumbled upon the tumistic tradition um prior to being a christian pride yeah i was at home as far as a catholic yeah and a christian yes yeah yes yeah uh-huh um and not just aquinas himself but like many of the sort of contemporary uh domestic thinkers were very impressive to me father norris clark yes for example he was a big influence the existential thomas this is this was the school that i was i was very much drawn to bernard lonergan yep um when i hit those guys there was just a ring of beauty and truth to the way that they were describing the world and it it checked it checked boxes for me did you encounter any of their sort of existentialist arguments for god's existence from the sort of thomas lens right yeah you know what i mean like the mind is made for truth and if truth doesn't exist then individual truths don't satisfy right yeah so in clark that's his inner path right clark's kind of got the inner path you know the mind is kind of hunting for truth it reaches a set of limits it enjoys it whatever those limits are for a little bit and then and then it rebounds right it rebounds and either it's going to be infinite frustration or we're going to come to rest in the unlimited the absolute right and i think if i remember rightly clark says like yeah this isn't a deductive proof but it's it's suggestive it's definitely suggestive and then he's got his argument if i remember right um it's a two-step right that there has to be at least one necessary reality something that's uncaused in the totality of reality right because there's no cause that can exist outside of it right so in the collection of all that is real there has to be at least one yeah i like the term unconditioned reality because if everything's conditioned then it stands in a dependency relation things outside itself and if that's the case for everything whether it's finite or infinite it can't be turtles all the way down it uh yeah those the fulfillment of those conditions can never be achieved in principle so it'd be nothing it'd be nothing so that's that's like his first step and then his second step is to argue whatever else that fundamental uncaused reality is it has to be a pure act of existing existing through itself and and why is that he thinks he thinks it has to be well it has to be actual right because if it's not then would have to be caused and it's conditioned that's a contradiction because we said it has to be uncaused and if it exists in virtue of something else same thing caused condition that's a contradiction so it has to be has to be pure has to be a pure act of existing existing through itself so there can be no part or feature or dimension to it that was different from it otherwise you have a caused uncaused reality which makes no sense so that gives you divine simplicity right there right it's just pure fully actual reality with no limits no boundaries so you were reading clark and other thomas for their metaphysics right not caring whether or not they were christian at this point uh i was good at ignoring christianity for a while i i remember admitting that to another friend that uh and it was funny because it wasn't like i was even deliberately trying to ignore it like i just glossed over it like even with with thomas like i was just easily able to just just be interested in the philosophy yeah yeah not like not like this they're dumb or anything like that it was just very easy for me to just i just want the philosophy it was very easy for me to think i just want the philosophy and i can just you know it's interesting when i was coming to faith i was about 15 16 years old and i was just open right really open and searching for something beyond me beyond the physical and so i just started like looking into meditation books and new age things but whenever they would use christian terminology it immediately turned me off you know like open your mind and open your heart to if i use the word heaven i was totally turned off i don't know why that was maybe i uh familiarity breeds contempt sort of thing my grandma's a christian my mum's a christian this is all just whatever trivial anyway yeah i'm trying to think if there was any aversion i mean there's definitely some aversions that i had right of different strands of protestantism for various reasons um i was a protestant for i was catholic i i shouldn't actually say that i wasn't really protestant right i explored protestantism okay before i became catholic and part of it was was my wife actually so we're kind of like traveling along this is fascinating both toward the church but on separate paths right so she was brought up in an agnostic household she then became very like new agey spiritual but not religious when she was with you no before me when she met with me i brought her in i made her an atheist okay right um and then she actually was quite upset with me when i thought that maybe we should start considering christianity and so you okay are you married at this point we're married right so we had a kid and then we got married in a secular way and then uh yeah it was a mess trying to come into the church with with that but it worked out thanks be to god um so yeah she had she had a strong aversion to christianity and um i remember knowing that i remember knowing like okay if i'm gonna bring this up to my wife i gotta be i'd be delicate about that right i'm gonna be delicate about it um and we actually got to a point where through numerous conversations her resistance started to break down and i you know i gave her the reasons like hey here's why i think this is credible here's why we should at least think about it and like we got kids now right and this is this is another part of the story it's like how are we going to raise raise these kids and she had the same feeling right she's like i don't know how to teach my kids i don't know what to anchor it in so she wasn't ready to hop to christianity but she was struggling with so do you remember what it was that got you uh thinking about christianity then it was definitely the philosophers that impressed me that that opened me you began to realize this guy's a christian and i i was surprised i was surprised when i discovered i forget where i discovered it from bill craig was definitely helpful at some point i don't know if he was the first one that there was actually a credible historical case to me for christian like that was not something i just assumed was yeah never a thing right that um i wouldn't have been like jesus is is definitely a myth type of proponent but i probably believed that i probably believe that he was some type of mythological or or the spiritual guru type of thing because i just never thought very deeply about it right that he was just kind of a buddha type figure um i did read mere christianity at one point yeah that you know you get the trilemma there um which gets you thinking right it doesn't doesn't the moral argument even you've already yeah i've already been working through that but it was just interesting to see that that's how he opens mere christianity and i think that those are those are good because the truth is is like if you ask me my favorite arguments for god i'm probably going to talk like like norris clark stuff right that but the moral it's true that the moral stuff gets you right in the gut like it did for me um so so yeah so there's that um so i'm kind of coming in uh and i'm kind of converging on catholicism at this point i'm thinking wow there's a lot of there's a lot of things that seem right about this um like it seems to explain a lot of stuff okay this is this is i mean you've got to help us understand how you went from considering christianity reading cs lewis i mean catholicism it feels like there's so many more hurdles to jump for many people this is so much more to accept you know yeah not the least so yeah there were there were issues that i had in a sense that the the question of authority was an interesting one for me and part of the reason is politically i was once very liberal then i became a hardcore libertarian yeah you know how libertarians feel about authority yep not very friendly right and now there's something i'm considering that it's kind of big on the authority question right um and that's very interesting to me i mean part of it was just kind of knocking out options too right so solo scripture always seemed like a non-starter and what's interesting to me too is you didn't have the sort of protestant background that would lead you to immediately dismiss out of prejudice prayers to the same priest like this right like the merry stuff yeah issue for me yep never an issue um the pope never an issue for me it was just does it make sense is there historical credibility it was there was never and i and that's something i really appreciate um or try to appreciate is that we all have our paradigms right we all have that kind of lens that we see things through um and outstanding mcintyre a great catholic convert himself he talks about trying to engage in paradigmatic thinking where it's to really understand a position don't just look at it like stuff don't just analyze the propositions right but like try to step into it try and see through that lens and i obviously haven't lived in every paradigm but i try i try to do that like why would now i try to do it anyways i didn't always try to do it like why would uh you know a protestant feel this way about mary or or the pope and i think i understand that i think i think i really do understand that but i didn't have that issue so that wasn't for me you know the idea of a hierarchical structure makes sense it seems befitting of human nature uh we're social animals uh tradition fits well with that um soul scriptura just it just seems like a non-starter right you don't have an inspired table of contents no book can compile itself no book can interpret itself and we have huge disagreements about all the stuff that's in scripture so it seems like we need another mechanism of some sort right so these things were all sense making to me that seemed to seem to fit there's typology we were talking about that a little bit before the show typology wasn't something that like totally it was again it was cumulative right yep so it was it was just like here's a weight in the scale there's another weight there's another weight uh and maybe there's a weight in the scale for catholicisms it's actually just that i don't think something else works yeah um so and then yeah and then and then just reading the earliest christians right when you read um that you know clement ignatius irenaeus and it's in uh not just looking for the papacy which is quite distinctive but you would read things uh that really seemed like uh a commitment to the real presence you'd hear about the talking about talking about altars like what that yeah what is an altar for well it's for a sacrifice right right right and these were these were things that seemed very much in line with the catholic church but not in line with uh we were going both to a non-denominational and lutheran oh interesting right so we're kind of like camping out at different different places um and part of that was because when i was first talking to my wife about this um she finally got to point she's like okay i'll i'll consider becoming christian but no way in hell am i ever becoming catholic what was her biggest roadblock um her family actually is is um largely ex-catholic so there's um something there right that that is that just got handed down about the negativity of the catholic faith in her family yeah um and then she just uh growing up in the south as a not christian um that's funny though because i would have thought that if she had turned on christianity or the christianity of her youth that maybe now she'd be open to something just not that southern style christianity yeah i guess i guess it was like it was a version from two different angles right she had the southern style christianity which which was off-putting to her should let her speak for herself at some point um but then also her family having left the faith and having just largely it seemed like negative things to say about it as she was growing up yeah gave her a foul impression yeah that's fair uh-huh so i was i was kind of you know intellectually i was i was kind of you know veering catholic pretty strongly at this point what uh catholic books or apologetics were you consuming if any at the time um the one thing that really got my wife was bishop barron's catholicism series oh it's excellent um before what was i doing at that point well you know i was reading these philosophers that i mentioned right um and um once i was seriously starting to consider catholicism i read a lot on the historical credibility for the resurrection because that's obviously a linchpin so that's you know bill craig's got a book called the sunrises which is good nt wright's got a book brent petrie's got a book so tried to see is there a credible basis there i didn't need it i didn't need it proved like mathematically i just need to see is is it is it plausible because once you kind of get to theism yeah right your prior world view uh causes you to interpret things differently right so like given that i had already come to belief in god and that he's good and it seems like something went seriously wrong in the world the i something like the incarnation and atonement just kind of it's a smaller jump it kind of just makes sense right so the fact that there's like a basis there historically for it right it's fitting it's fitting yeah uh it's it's it's it it's um it presents itself as a very plausible and rational option uh so yeah if you press me on all the historical stuff i'm not i'm not an apologist well the fact that i mean uh catholic apologetics has largely been concerned with protestant objections at least up until the recent past with the sort of atheist new atheist movement that's not so new anymore right and so given the fact that you didn't have a lot of questions about indulgences or authority or mary that would probably explain why perhaps you never turn to many modern catholic apologists yeah and you know the authority is a big one so i think if you can if you can get so for for catholics i kind of see it the apologetic project is broken up into three things right you have this god exist and there you're speaking to atheists and agnostics skeptics in the you know the general sense then um is jesus god that's the middle pillar right right and there you're talking to people who might be spiritual but not religious or different religions and then you've got uh did christ give us the catholic church right is that is that church really um is it an authoritative thing in a sense and i think once you can answer the question of authority if you if you can answer it and i think you can um you don't have to work through everything else right i didn't need to work through the indulgence yeah yeah cause like whatever the case is there and now like it doesn't mean you get lazy and ignorant but like look the history of the catholic church is huge no way am i going to be able to parse through every single detail of this right i'm just not going to do it um can i get enough reasons considerations evidence that that will cause me to ascend and say yes this is true that i can then trust that god is really guiding his church and that if difficulties arrive if they're serious enough then i'll eventually go look into it this is a this is a really interesting point and i'd love you to talk about this a little bit more for those who are watching who are on the sort of precipice of accepting catholicism or something else this idea that we just we're so kind of anxious about the fact that we may throw our lives into something that ends up being false right and what you just said there is i can't possibly go through the whole history of catholicism i have to know enough so that i can then trust right talk about that a bit yeah i would love to i think that this i think this plays not just in the catholicism but christianity as well i think there's kind of like the general big ticket questions right the hinge points like these are the things you really got to figure out and there's a parallel here to the resurrection right like if christ really did walk out of his tomb that's pretty whatever other issues you have with christianity probably you can walk work through those right so like let's keep the main things the main thing right if christ really did found the catholic church and this is god's church and god is protecting his church um you know i've heard people you know say i'm in various like philosophical groups i try not to spend too much time on social media but some people are resistant to becoming catholic because of they have issues with divine simplicity say or something like that right that's that's one of cameron batuzi's arguments oh cameron's a good guy um he's okay i had him on my show a long time ago like when i was yeah anyway hello to cammon cameron yeah and what i want to what i want to say to that is that's a that's a difficult thing to think about first off right um but it's not a unique difficulty and can we spend a few minutes on this because i think divine simplicity well the general point and then we can talk about divine simplicity right um because you might be talking to a muslim and they might have issues with the trinity and they say i would become christian but i can't get the trinity doesn't make any sense to me probably a protestant would say well let's focus on the resurrection yeah i like that analogy right and and and here's the thing like because if christ really walked out of his tomb um i out and you could even concede like look i don't really get the training either it's difficult yes but i can maybe at least show you it's not incoherent yes and then let's focus on this thing and that should be the deciding factor i would say the same thing with catholicism like um divine supposition is difficult i don't think it's incoherent i think we can defend it maybe i can't work out every little nook and cranny but if we can you know give good arguments that christ really did give us a church hierarchical unified right um then we should we should we should join it right and then we can doesn't mean we we can't still look into divine simplicity but some things are clearer than others kind of present themselves as a little bit more important than other things yes and that's the way i would i would approach that i think yeah i think that's a really good way of thinking of it right now he thinks the two it's actually a incoherent belief divine simplicity but i see your point right that it's like for the muslim if you accept christ's resurrection then you can go down the road of the trinity likewise if you accept papal infallibility right then we can work on divine simplicity next but that's going to be the you know right yeah and talking with many protestants with divine simplicity and first of all it's not just a catholic thing like many protestants affirm divine simplicity um i was i had i had two very long conversations on this both on my show recently with dr gavin kerr and on another good show uh the classical theism podcast with john derosa if people want to go on the weeds in that i'd say check those out um but there's there's different starting points and i think that this is important to understand right so when i was kind of coming as a skeptic metaphysics really appealed to me because i was kind of looking for the like what's the ultimate explanation of things right right and i think a lot of people who come from scripture start not by looking for an ultimate explanation but looking for an ultimate person and so they take the idea of of god as a person well we're persons let's start stripping away limits right well god doesn't have a body and let's fill out god's knowledge with only all true propositions and so you kind of like get some some big mighty thing yeah but that big mighty thing doesn't seem to me like the ultimate metaphysical explanation of things right but if you're starting metaphysically and you're kind of carving reality at its joints fascinating and you're like okay how do we make sense of the problem of change or the problem with the one and the many and then you start discovering these distinctions between act potency or later essence and existence and then you start to hunt down the intelligent the path of intelligibility well then it seems to me like it's divine simplicity or bust right because we have these categories of things that stand in need of an explanation right we have composites for example of essence and existence and composite things require a cause beyond themselves we have um we have contingent things with a real distinction we have things which move from potentiality to actuality right so in order to make sense of these certain categories of things to make sense of why there's any potentiality at all we're going to have to get to pure actuality to make sense of why there's any compositeness at all we're gonna have to get the absolutely simple being so we have to transcend these categories for ultimate explanations right and when we do that we're going to get something that is categorically different right that is purely actual kind of as we sketch out with the clark argument before that is utterly simple non-composite right uh and whose essence just is existence that god is to be to be now when you do that you get to something that might at first seem spooky and aloof right but we have other moves to show that no this this being actually has intellect has will is personal right is the reason that any of us exist at all but we don't start by looking for the ultimate person we start by looking for the ultimate explanation and you also have to understand the tools the metaphysician is using such as proceeding apathetically and analogically so you know sometimes people are worried and it's a legitimate concern of of with simplicity and then uh you know making certain predications of god if god is all-knowing and all-powerful well aren't these distinct things but yeah in god you're saying the same the same thing right this is the kind of multiple properties objection that just seems like annoying nonsense right yes um and this is where we have that's a great way to put it we have to and like again i try to appreciate that like i can see like why would somebody think that and it makes sense given that there's different starting points and approaches but if you're moving along like thomas does and you're moving apathetically you're striking away the things god is not not material not composed blah blah blah right but then also when we make positive attributions of god because we're moving from effect to ultimate cause and whatever is in the effect must in some way be in the cause right in some way then when we say that there's power knowledge in god we mean that analogically right there's something like power in god there's something like knowledge in god and that god's power and god's knowledge those things are the same but we can still affirm that knowledge and power in us are distinct now all that is you know a huge can of worms that we may or may not want to open but it's just in order to i think fairly evaluate divine simplicity it's very important you don't just start at the conclusion what is the process that leads up to it and same thing like there's different models of divine simplicity too so you might find one utterly implausible there's certainly ones that i reject but then there might be other ones that you find attractive yeah okay hey you said something which i want you to defend i know aquinas does the idea that if something's composite it requires a prior cause to bring it together why think that's true right so if if something if there's an object that's composed it presupposes its parts in existence at the very least right presupposes right right principles is what it's parts sure right so take a simple example like a chair or something like that or even me i have parts yeah it's almost synonymous to be composed is to have parts yeah so um right and and it's not just that it's not just the existence of the parts it's important but um it's the arrangement and function of the parts as well yeah right um i can't be the cause of what i'm presupposing right but my parts also you know they constitute me right so we'd have an explanatory vicious circle if we didn't get outside of the of the composed object and say that again it went too fast we would have an explanatory vicious circle but how would we try if we tried to explain the hole in terms of the parts but the parts in terms of the hole because the parts are also part of the hole think of like a chair right right um how would a chair come together well this is a pretty easy one somebody put it together right but it only stays together because certain other things are operative right at the same time temperature friction forces electromagnetism right you start so it's not just that somebody put it together there's things that hold it together right now expand that out you can go metaphysically so you can go matter and form yeah i think the easier one to think with is essence and existence right with aquinas right so um any finite qualitatively finite thing exists only in so insofar as existence is imparted to it right yes so if there's a real distinction like i don't i don't own existence right it's given to me it's donated to that's what aquinas means by that's hopeful a real distinction well we need something that i don't want to say mush them together right but yeah trying to keep the language simple um otherwise you have the explanation you have something like imparting existence to itself and in which sense it would have to pre-exist itself in which case why would it need to impart existence to itself so you to avoid these type of explanatory vicious circles um depending how any way you want to look at it right physically metaphysically you're going to have to you're going to have to get beyond those categories altogether you recently had josh rasmussen on if i can give him a shout out he's got a really cool argument called the argument from limits yes so he and i think it's it's very close to the real distinction just coming at it from a different way right where he says that you look at a limited thing right this this iphone has a particular shape right yeah why does it have that shape right right yeah why does it have those limits instead of any other limits and he's actually very similar to clark too right we reach these limits and what do limits do limits point out to an external explanation right always beyond themselves well can we keep pointing out yeah can we keep pointing out keep pointing out keep pointing out or do we have to explode all the limits at some point yes do we have to get beyond all restrictions all boundaries right so if we if we do that and we get to the unbounded the unrestricted the qualitatively infinite you know pure actuality right we have moved beyond we're at something categorically different and at that sense in that sense it's so different it doesn't mean we can't say anything about it but i don't think we should be surprised if it's a little bit spooky you know what i mean given that it transcends all the categories we interact with yeah so that was another thing that was never really an issue for me is um sometimes people object to the way aquinas thinks about god or the catholic faith is it's just it's too strange yeah that wasn't an issue for me but i can appreciate why i love what you said earlier that most of us as as the christian who now wants to find arguments for god's existence they basically think of a person and then they add to it those they take away the the finite properties and right that's really interesting to me but as you say for you i hope i'm not caricaturing the other side but that seems no but i can see how that would be the case for some people right right i mean for you you began on the opposite end right and then once you've accepted that uncaused cause then you can look at the arguments that give it knowledge power right seen through different languages so it's it's funny when you come from different perspectives right it's because divine species actually made a lot of sense for me and the catholic church so boldly affirms it yeah that was actually a credibility thing for the catholic faith rather than again so it goes to show like depending on where you're coming from like yeah you know kind of a you know um double-edged sword right like a moment ago you talked about different types of simplicity and i know the church says we must believe god's simple but you talked about there are different versions of divine simplicity you reject right would you tell us um what's the bare minimum we have to accept to your knowledge if you can't do that i would have to in terms of for the church i would have to punt i don't know okay that's fine i don't know if i've heard a good answer of that then then what is the versions of simplicity you reject i'll tell you the one that i like the most okay and it would be um great thinker uh i think somebody i wish would be uh more well-known um w matthews grant dr w matthews grant he's got a book it's an excellent book called um human freedom and god's universal causality or something like that um and he's trying to reconcile those two things right that's his main project is how do we reconcile libertarian freedom and divine universal causality because there seems like a superficial tension there but then he puts out a model called the extrinsic model of divine simplicity in that book and he's building off of the scholastic project of mixed relations what aquinas holds that god has a rational relation to us we have a real relation to god [Music] given that and divine universal causality comes up what's called the um the extrinsic model of the vine simplicity so if people are interested in the model that i like the best it would be that one and we could talk details if we want there's also another book that kind of surveys models by a philosopher named jay richards i think it's called the untamed god if i remember rightly and that was a that's a good book because he kind of goes through i think he's if i remember rightly he goes through like four to six maybe different models of divine simplicity okay he takes issue with the number it's a great name and then yeah he's a good he's a he's a good he's a good thinker i like jay a lot i think i probably diverge with him on the model he settles on okay um but presumably they're both acceptable and within the circles of catholic orthodoxy before we get to questions here and for those who are watching right now in the live chat we are going to start taking questions so have them ready but at least kind of let's i don't mean to rush you but wrap up the story as to how you became catholic and what that was like um so so yeah i was actually kind of like sneaking off sneaking off the catholic mass before my wife was uh i love it i would go to a coffee shop in the morning and kind of do my work because i just i just work for my computer and um there was a catholic mass right down the street and i would go and uh it was a beautiful thing and and in fact actually it was christmas eve one night i'll tell this story very quickly just because again just to show it's not um all or even mostly intellectual i just had this this deep pull uh to go to mass yep and this was before i was sneaking to it so i started sneaking to mass after this this first experience and it was snowing outside and it was horrendous weather and um i told my wife i'm like i think i have to go to that that catholic church down the street i think i i just have to go and she just gave me this look whatever you need to do right yeah uh and i go and it was the most um it was the most beautiful thing right it was like i'm not a feelings person like i never have like spiritual experiences i'm like just very dry okay but that was the closest i've ever came right specifically um if you were to look when the police held up the eucharist matt it was like when i when something hit me no i knew then i knew then at that moment that this is where i need to be if you were to look back now would you say that that was a beautiful liturgy or was it just a rocket it was a beautiful liturgy and it was um i was very fortunate because that parish was a very very old gothic looking thing it was in westchester pennsylvania it was a game of shadow it was saint agnes parish and it's just a beautiful old it was built in the 1700s maybe it's like one of the oldest in that area just beautiful and just exceedingly dark isn't like not a lot of light but the stained glass and the candles beautiful and the beauty was a huge element but the reverence the reverence at the eucharist the homily was incredible um i don't i don't even remember it i remember just i almost shed a tear which for me is right yeah um so yes it was exceedingly beautiful i don't know what would have happened if i would have went into some like tinny drum kit yeah type of mass yeah um but that isn't where god let me go so yeah so then um okay then how did you get you know rcia presumably or that's exactly it um uh so fast forward a little bit get the wife on board and like i said she worked her own way through um and we're both did she did she have an objection to any of the catholic moral teachings say the contraception or something like that um [Music] and did you yes well again natural here is another marker for catholicism is natural law seemed like the best ethical theory in the market as far as i could tell and seeing that the catholic church could upheld that now look that doesn't mean i was following it um so intellectually i was there but i was living a life quite contrary to that right and and so was my wife and we both were and uh i didn't resolve all that stuff before i became catholic but by god's grace um he helped me you know like you know obviously we still have our shortcomings in many respects right but he helped me get rid of a lot of that stuff a lot of the most significant stuff and almost like like that right and um wow yeah yeah especially the sexual stuff right um so we go to rcaa um the church tries to figure out our situation with like you know being married outside of the church and kids and and and and it was all figured out and uh i was confirmed and then christine was uh baptized and confirmed at a beautiful easter vigil and we got all the kids baptized so we got the whole glory we had three at that time how did your parents and her parents if you don't mind me asking that might be too personal i'm not sure but how did they take it uh yeah um i think her family was more surprised than than mine mine uh seemed good um more my friends were like what are you doing man yeah what's going on here um her family she was very very nervous to tell her family because there was a strong anti-religious attitude but it's been good yeah it's been good um they're not they're not catholic but uh yeah it's been it's been good i can't really say too many it wasn't as bumpy as we were expecting i'll say that okay well we might get into some of this in in the questions i'm sure people have questions about your particular conversion things like that but before we do that um and if you're watching right now do us a favor hit that like button if you're enjoying this interview do us a favor and share it because that helps youtube evangelize and it's always good to help google evangelize but before we do that i want to say thank you to our sponsor catholic chemistry i used to work at catholic answers and one of my co-workers was a bloke by the name of chuck gallucci and uh the two of us would talk about our plans for the future and he said he wanted to create the best catholic dating site and just a couple of years ago he launched it and it's really fantastic and so i would highly recommend that you check that out if you go into the description below and click that link for catholic chemistry and sign up today it's the fastest growing catholic dating site on the web they have inbuilt video chats you don't have to give out your number or anything like that people are very serious who come on i think they even have to say kind of what their preference is as far as liturgy and things like this so if you are single and you're open to marriage and you've been maybe wanting to date but haven't been having any luck in this covert period click that link below and sign up today catholicchemistry.com catholicchemistry.com all right this is fantastic okay uh are you aware of the folks at real a theology uh yeah i think i i have to do a podcast yeah we had one of those blokes on to debate gregory pine right at one point yeah very respectful guys very intelligent guys anyway they said awesome to see pat on this podcast well thanks guys his podcast is great too we would love to hear from pat who feels are the who he feels are the best defenders of philosophical atheism and the best books defending atheism from his perspective yeah that's a really good question so um let me first say that i don't actually get a chance to listen to a lot of podcasts so because i'm i'm recording um so let me can i answer this in two ways i'll answer some who are my favorite and who i think are the best um i kind of answered my favorite i'll never get tired of rita nietzsche ever um i don't think he's the most rigorous right like if you're looking for a good analytic philosophy or something like that uh he's just i just always enjoy reading him um and i think he's prophetic and important in many ways even if i if i don't go with him like his genealogy of morals or something like that um i wrote a post not too long ago um which somebody commented on recently very kindly um and i think that they themselves are not religious um called the case for religion and especially catholicism it's a it's a sloppy blog post but it's on my website if you want to check it out and in there i named the three atheists that i think are probably the most formidable um uh jl mackey um john howard sobel and um graham oppe and um i don't know if you're going to get much more rigorous than that and i'd be curious that those guys agree uh to that uh so yeah miracle theism logic and theism and arguing gods would be three books to start now look if you're not training this stuff and like you're a believer like you don't go into those books coming right you're not coming out of those books unless you're seriously engaged in like i just got off his little book on like in like the philosophy of religion right so that's something you got to be like battle ready to go but you know what i i i said this on a podcast with john the other day as we were working through some more of the uh you know um i guess more technical objections to simplicity and stuff like that and um [Music] the way i've seen it and the way i saw it back when i was an atheist and the way i try to see it now now we have to you know faith is also a gift so that's there and we can't put that aside but we sh objections are a good thing right difficulties are a good thing because they can help us reach to a deeper understanding which is the mind once and they can cause us to abandon superficial views and you know in a way i think that that's what the new atheism has done for many christians today right i mean the the sort of rise of william lane craig was in response to people like richard dawkins who are essentially asking things like well who created god which may have been a question that would have stumped the majority of thinking christians 20 years ago but today we we've thought about these things even if it's just a matter of having watched a doctor william and craig debate yeah you know and that's and that's interesting because that i obviously think it's a very bad objection um but it does it has force and as much as i constantly see it repeated even on on my videos and stuff like that and um so yeah i mean like well what can that do what can that do who caused god what i mean just give an example right who caused god what can that objection do if it rattles you well it can cause you to wonder if any argument rides on the premise that everything has a cause to begin with right and that's a good thing to consider does everything have a cause yeah well according to norris clark no he starts from the opposite he says that not everything can have a cause otherwise we wind up in absurdity and that's that's a wonderful insight right that's a wonderful thing to gain clarity on not not just that the objection is is misguided but it gets you to think more deeply about the structure of reality and how things are so even a simple objection like that that sometimes we might just not take seriously um it could be fruitful another question here from cobba thank you for your super chat he says this and let's see if we can understand this because it looks like a little complicated when assessing theory x if theory x implies y which is false then theory x is probably false maybe definitely false if catholicism implies that old church teachings are true and i'm skeptical of any detail of teachings how can i come to believe yeah that's a really great question right so you got a model right and say the model predicts something right say it predicts uh say predicts x but you think not x right well then it would seem like not x counts as evidence against your model right that sounds like it's kind of what he's saying right um [Music] maybe we could use an example here with the problem of evil right um because sometimes it's thought that if god exists that that would predict that there wouldn't be evil right uh but we think that but there's evil in the world yeah um so does that count against the hypothesis that god exists that's kind of like a a softened version right we're not saying that there's maybe a logical contradiction between god and evil but like if god exists and then maybe more probably than not we would predict uh more of a perfect world or a perfect world is such a thing like that right and um so let me let's think through this and then we can go back and and answer his question because i think it's going to come down to weights in a scale at the end of the day right um it's going to come down to more than just one consideration as it did for me because there were some things with the church that i wasn't sure on yeah but there was enough of the other stuff that depressed the scales that caused me to want to go re-evaluate as oh is my commitment to this actually right that would be my short answer to him but even for evil um bring up joshua again he's got a nice little paper on this where he says i hope i don't do injustice to his project but he'll say something like this what what world view better predicts evil would you really take the time to think about it would be a physicalism well it's hard to make sense of that because in order to make sense of evil we need some type of moral standard and then we need moral communities conscious moral beings that can reflect on the moral standard and engage in reasoning and this or that it's hard to see how you're going to get any of that from just shapes and motion right uh some some people might even think it's just impossible to get something like that like to traverse those those categories would just be impossible right but but certainly it doesn't seem very probable now what if what if you have a perfect foundation supreme being itself right and especially as classical theists hold that goodness and being are convertible right well now we've got a perfect foundation so it seems like we've got a standard in place might god have good reasons to create rational agents seems seems very plausible right so now now the things that evil is contingent upon right so evil itself is contingent upon a moral standard be moral communities these actually are better explained by theism yeah and very difficult to explain on on certain uh brands of naturalism if not atheism outright so in that sense evil upon a deeper consideration seems actually point more in the direction of theism than just using the framework that he is he's bringing up here than atheism so and this was kind of a theme that i found actually is that superficial tensions i had with catholicism and superficial doesn't mean like they're weak arguments it's just it's just there's an initial tension the longer i thought about him usually led to deeper concord deeper harmony so to go back to his very good question i would say um for me there was enough winds in the catholic box already that the places where i was um intentional about and i don't remember off the top of my head i do remember there were certain places um the church already had been right so many more times than me i'm like okay maybe i'm wrong yeah maybe i'm wrong on this so let me go re-evaluate you mentioned those three polls earlier god's existence christianity catholicism i wrote a paper a while back about so the apologetics mansion i called it you have these three levels right that's good i like that yeah so you wanna the evangelist the apologist wants to bring you to the summit or to the peak of the mansion and it's true that god can reveal himself to you in a way that you come to believe catholicism to be true in a moment but if you were to think about it sequentially um and you suppose you were thinking of this mansion and then perhaps there are people sitting around the grass by the mansion these might be atheists well to shout out from the third story window that would be catholicism is true about transubstantiation to someone sitting on the grass that would be like trying to explain algebra to somebody who denies basic arithmetic um so my only point here is he says you know when assessing theory x if x implies y and you've got good reason to think y is false but that you don't have to kind of buy the whole thing at once you as you did you can come to believe in an uncaused cause without thinking it's personal right away you can come to believe in a personal uncaused cause that christianity might not be true this is sort of like when people have terrible you know these big objections to the bible and you think okay well maybe the bible's false or just you know a human artifact and nothing more but it wouldn't prove that god doesn't exist you know that can be a helpful yeah i think that's an excellent i like the the point with transubstantiation i mean i could oh my gosh i hope i would never start a conversation with that right well that's right almost everybody's probably going to think that that's false right but it is true though that some atheists will begin with that like they'll say how do you how look you believe in transition yeah yeah i get that it's weird especially if you don't hold the god exist if you know how god exists of course it seems ridiculous if you don't hold like a general like scholastic metaphysics as well right there's just a lot that kind of like leads up to that that you would want to have in place before you even start to bring a subject like that up ash awesome probably not his real name says to either of you see the youth of this age 18 or younger becoming more god-centric or atheist-centric in matters such as purpose of life and morals do you want me to go first on this well just i mean the first thing that comes to my mind is just how incredibly enthusiastic the quote unquote social justice crowd are like it would seem uh obviously true that at least if you look at the media that racism is at least something that's evil right you know that people are pretty moralistic about how we should be living and who should be banned and why right uh and so in that sense anyway yeah it's it's interesting because our our culture is superficially relativist but but not really right right and i think that's what you're saying right is is we have these sort of um i guess these narratives about you know we shouldn't we shouldn't judge and then people make judgments about people judging and this is this kind of um ironic stuff right but um in terms of what i've seen um it actually i'd be curious your experience matt because you're much more engaged i guess in the in the kind of catholic conversation online but like my instagram inbox is like filled uh with like stuff from like young men like young college aged men who are very interested very engaged some some of them skeptical um so there's which which kind of surprised me because i didn't i honestly didn't know what to expect because like i said my journey to catholicism was was kind of like it's kind of solo right i didn't like have a community that was that was moving with and in fact when i got into the into the church like i'd go to like a men's group and it was like everybody there was like twice my age and that was um but i've grown more optimistic from what i've seen online the youth yeah and the and and there's i guess a benefit there because if you're going to be young and and going and and really being catholic you're going to be challenged from so many different angles you're probably going to have to really investigate the faith right if you're serious about it at this point it's not it's it's not such a cultural force anymore that you can kind of just be a nominal catholic you know what i mean yeah i think in a way jordan peterson before his illness sort of took the baton from the new atheists who are now the old atheists i suppose um and they may have sort of overshot um and he was able to kind of come in and kind of talk about the scriptures even from an evolutionary standpoint a psychological standpoint that really appealed to people and at least helped them see the value of religion and seeing uh order in the world and the the beauty and helpfulness of stories in their own life and that at least sort of maybe dulled the kind of hard-edged atheism that the quote-unquote new atheists brought about right you know i found that interesting i think you're exactly right i think jordan peterson in god's providence was that necessary mediating factor for a lot of people right if you imagine like sam harris sitting down say with um a catholic bishop right probably most of people following sam harris would just want nothing to do with the with the religious side of the argument but peterson coming from a secular perspective but giving a a perspective on the bible that wasn't completely hostile seemed to soften a lot of people to okay maybe there's more here than i initially thought and i know because i've had people who've messaged me and emailed me say it was peterson who opened me up to this stuff so he really is a bridge for a lot of people so i see him as uh and i pray for him too he's like i need to buy his new book it seems like it's man i i don't know i don't like to make predictions about other people but it just seems to me like he might i agree yeah you see i'm saying what do you think though about um i always it feels a little dirty when every catholic youtuber kind of capitalizes on him talking about jesus and crying about it i don't mean dirty and i'm not oh those clubs that are just going around exactly and i'm not impugning the motors of these catholic youtubers i think it's fine that they're addressing it maybe i'll even address that it's good we're addressing it now right um but you know there is it does feel a bit dirty when you get the sense that we want him on our team that is a great point and i was always kind of off put from that um and i would highly recommend not doing that uh unless that somebody really is on your team right and the reason being is if uh there's like a cool person out there and you try and get them on your team and you find like one quote or one clip from that person like oh look they're on they're on my side and then somebody investigates them and they're like actually no they're they're not really on your side you're going to lose a lot of credibility doing something like that so yeah i do think that's true of jim gaffigan and other sort of i don't know enough about him catholics who um were catholic uh were even somewhat proud of their catholicism and then might come and speak about homosexual marriage or transgenderism in a positive light you're like ah and it's yeah i just i don't know i guess i'm okay with if there's not as many i mean i i don't know if people think that i'm a cool person or not um but i just would what are the reasons right and if we have some cool people on our team great i hope i pray that jordan peterson i think he seems pretty cool to me he becomes catholic yeah that would be awesome but yeah we shouldn't we shouldn't be like saying like look at he's he's one i mean he's clearly thinking through things right and you know i don't i don't i honestly don't know enough about him i did read his first book and i enjoyed it well he was just i just had jonathan pagio who is an orthodox icon carver and an orthodox christian on my show a couple of months ago and jonathan was just on peterson's podcast last week oh really and uh this is where peterson spoke about he even teared up talking about christ and posted an image of saint michael in his twitter feed something to the effect of when words fail say michael defend us wow i mean it's yeah yeah jesus i mean it looks looks like something is at work in him yeah you know and he suffered a lot too and it just goes to show you know that uh the the purpose that suffering can serve even if it doesn't seem like it's serving any purpose at that time right yeah yeah if anyone wants a good book on suffering eleanor stumps wandering in darkness is just a masterpiece good i have to put that one out there for you i've had her on the show before have you really yeah she's she's brilliant yeah i love her she was she's a big influence yeah yeah yeah groovy glory to god man all right let's go see how many questions we have here [Music] if i can give stump another plug real quick she's also got an excellent little book thin called the god of the philosopher and the god of the bible so people are just interested in in that project of reconciliation it's a very good book yeah that kind of reminds me of pascal right i want the god of the bible not the god of the philosophers right she's going to say they're the same they're the same thing well i'm looking for questions i don't think we have much many more all right he's tonight thanks for tuning in everyone i hope that this is yeah this has been great your podcast is called what it is called the pat flynn show the humbly and originally named show and my website is chroniclesofstrength.com so if uh we're not talking this type of thing we're usually talking like swinging kettlebells and yeah whatnot [Music] glory god man well thank you for being on the show pleasure thank you for being here thank you all right see you later and thanks to everybody in the live stream [Music] [Music] [Applause] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 38,868

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: 0Qho1iam4XA

Length: 79min 32sec (4772 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021