APOLOGETICS

Divine Condescension: Two Apologetical Arguments

by Theodore P. Rebard, Ph.D.

Upon being offered scriptural arguments for certain teachings, non-believers and believers alike ask a question that amounts to this: "Why should I believe the Bible?" Often the reply is given directly or indirectly by reference to this text of St. Paul (2 Tim. 3:16), "All scripture is inspired of God ... for reproof, correction, and training in holiness." It is easy to see, especially for the non-believer, that this answer involves a circular argument: it assumes just exactly what it is supposed to prove, namely that Scripture is divinely inspired.

How is it possible to "break in" to the circle? It has been the tradition of the Catholic Church since the earliest times to recognize that human reason, alone, and unassisted by supernatural grace, works as a prologue to belief. In other words, reason shows that what the Church teaches is both possible and plausible, even while it is not formally demonstrable.1 All the while, we must also acknowledge that reason, while assisting belief, is not a substitute for faith.

Not only formal, technical philosophy, such as that of St. Thomas Aquinas, but simple experience also teaches that there are in human beings two distinctive ways of having a relationship with reality: the first is the dynamic thrust of the intellect towards truth, and the second is the desire of the will to possess and enact goodness.

As to the first, pagan Aristotle himself made the simple opening gambit of his book on Metaphysics to read: "All men by nature desire to know."2 That is, the craving for understanding and explanation of all things is built into our very human identity. As for the second, Blaise Pascal, 17th century scientist, philosopher, and mathematician noted in his Pensee, that there is in man an "abyss" of desire, which is unfillable by any of the (limited) goods we know in experience.3 These two parallel paths along which our lives are naturally propelled distinguish humans from brute animals according to human (intellectual) knowledge and (free and responsible) love.

While it may immediately seem to suggest the uninteresting and irrelevant, it is important when considering the intellectual path to God (i.e., arguments for God's existence) to note that the issue is endlessly interesting precisely because it is intimately relevant to life. In fact, while the argument I will sketch here is several centuries old and somewhat "dusty," it is also, from another perspective, new and altogether relevant to daily life.

Here a metaphor maybe helpful. If we were to read in the morning newspaper that astronomers had discovered a new planet orbiting the sun, this might well be relevant to professional astronomers' work, but it would make no difference in one's own daily life. The issue at hand in this article is not like the astronomers' new planet. Rather, knowledge of God and the plausibility of His revelation are important, and make a daily difference. This article will show just how relevant and how major a difference is caused by the real knowledge of God's existence.4 We now move to intellectual proof for the existence of God, and some of His attributes.

St. Thomas' reasoning for the existence of God begins with simple and ordinary facts of experience; the strength of this approach is that it begins in the familiar and undeniable, and that its conclusions are therefore equally real and undeniable. Let us consider this fact: there are things in experience which are, but which might not-be.5

In order to account for the actual existence of these things, we must and routinely do have recourse to their causes. Thus the mare and the stallion account for - that is, explain -the actual existence of their colt.6

The sequence of cause and effect can, hypothetically, either go back (regress) without end, or it can have a beginning. But, if it has no beginning, we really have no explanation of it; rather, we have simply a larger version of the original problem, how to explain the things that are? To say, then, that there is no first cause is to say that all things are unexplained, unaccounted for. This is to indicate that nothing is understandable, for what causes do is explain.7 But if there is a first cause, it is its own explanation - that is, it must exist precisely because of the very kind of thing it is. Its very nature is to exist, as we find God saying of Himself in Exodus, "I Am Who Am."8

Speaking of this first cause, this being which must exist because of His very nature, is another way of saying "God." Let us note that it is necessary to go beyond the ordinary sequence of cause and effect to find this first cause. Consider, for example, the analogy of an electric railroad train, the electric supply cable supply of which is outside and beyond the electric railroad train itself, and which explains the motion of its cars. Each car is in a way the cause of the movement of those behind it, but the movement of the entire train is unexplained unless we find its outside power-source. In saying this we are making two points: first, that God is "transcendent," that is, "above and beyond" creation, rather than part of it, or creation's being part of God; second, that human reasoning reaches from the mundane to the sublime. In fact, we might call such a proof an elevation of common sense to the level of the sublime.

By no means is this the only argument Thomas offers for the existence of God, but it is surely sufficient. Let us note one further feature of this argument: by the same token that it begins in humble facts and reaches the intellectual affirmation of God's existence, it also shows that everything in experience is a starting-point to reach God, and that each thing in experience is in this sense a manifestation of God - we might say, a natural epiphany.

There is another and somewhat different way in which human experience reaches out towards God. This is by willing, by choosing. It is of course by making choices that we carry forward our lives, and no ordinary day's life could be lived without choosing.

The first of two features of the human will to point out is that willing is always sequential, as is clear from the fact that what, at any particular time, are given from which to choose are the result of choices already made. And choosing continues to be sequential, as, for example, when I choose to take the car to the mechanic in order to carry out my prior choice to have it repaired, and in order to go on with the use of the car to drive to work. I sometimes wonder whether this sequence will ever end!

The ability to make free choices is directly dependent on intellectual knowledge. St. Thomas quoted St. Augustine approvingly in saying that no one wills what he does not know. Just as intellectual knowledge is universal in its scope, so is willing. In other words, neither is satisfied by any single thing, be it known or willed. This indicates the second of the two features of the human will that we should observe: the will is insatiated by anything we encounter in this life; no thing is quite enough for us. Every adult can laugh gently and benignly when a child promises that if he is given a horse or a swimming pool or some other thing that he will never again want anything. The adult knows that nothing in this life entirely fulfils human ability to desire. In fact, the one infinite thing about so-very-finite man is his ability to desire.

These two features of human willing have two implications that come together. First, my choosing must have an end, or my life is pointless. St. Thomas put the matter this way: if the pursuit of ends [choices] went on endlessly, such that one thing is always pursued for the sake of another, and so on to infinity, nothing could finally be achieved. But to desire and pursue what cannot be achieved is senseless and absurd, and so our choices would all be absurd.9 So there must be an absolutely final end, or all our choosing would be like so much re-arranging of deck-chairs on the Titanic. Second, this end, unless absolutely infinite and perfect, would eventually bore me. So, my choosing must aim at a first and infinite good, which is therefore utterly unlike any good thing I know in this life.

I hope to have sketched out the two distinctively human approaches to God through experience, one finding God as the end of the intellectual drive to understand, and the other finding God as the end of choosing. The first calls God true, the second, good. To be human is to know and to love, and in the end these two dynamisms of human nature point to the same goal. This reasoning shows the existence of a real and good God, knowable and relevant, and (by implication) that God provides for man -so he quite plausibly might have revealed Himself through Scripture and the teaching authority of His Church.

Yet there is another problem which is in fact created by these very solutions! Between man and God there is an infinite difference, as our very arguments have emphasized. An infinite gap is not traversable, though, and we seem to be caught in the fix that trapped the Bostonian couple driving in Maine in an old story: asked how to reach a certain town, a local down-easter thought a moment, and professed to the city folks, "Come to think of it, you can't get there from here."

All efforts to discover the solution to the problems built into human nature of intellectual drive for explanation, and of the craving of the will to be satisfied, seem now to have failed in the very moment of their success. No matter that God exists and the ultimate and universal explanation of all things and the ultimate goal towards which all human works aim, for He is beyond us by too great a distance, in fact, an infinite distance.

Yet we give up too hastily if we capitulate to the merely apparent difficulty too quickly. Rather, instead of being a stumbling block, the very solution and problem we have reached itself is the clue that makes the Gospel plausible in principle; our stumbling-block can in fact become "the stone set at head of the corner," for what is too far for finite man to traverse, is quite within range of God's infinite ability. We cannot by ourselves get from our place to God, but God can reach us and draw us up to Himself. And this is exactly what we are told in the Gospel of John: "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son."10 What He offers us by grace through His Son is the startling degree of intimacy of which St. Peter writes, saying that we shall become "sharers of divine nature."11

We have seen that using the Bible to prove itself presents a logical problem: one must accept exactly what is questioned in order to have it proved. By consideration of the natural direction of the intellect towards explanation and the will towards fulfillment, we discovered that our very human nature places us on a twofold path toward God. The intellect proves His real existence, and the will reaches towards Him as its end. Yet these very proofs were the source of a new trouble - we discovered God, while good and provident, to be infinite and beyond all human reach. And finally we were able to take advantage of this very weakness to show how plausible and how important is the promise of the Gospel, the good news who is Jesus Christ.

1 This doctrine is explicitly taught by the First Vatican Council, and indeed in the nineteenth century there were numerous pre-Vatican I iterations of the position. See, for example, Vatican I, Constitution on the Catholic Faith, chapters 1-4, and the canons on these. Let us note also St. Paul's reproof of the Romans for their failure to know God through nature (Romans 1:20), and the affirmation of human wisdom and the knowledge of God in Wisdom, 13. Last and very important for the apologist, note that the book of Ecclesiastes is a very forceful demand on the part of reason and experience to be rescued from the vanity of life. Ecclesiastes asks the question to which the remainder of Scripture is the answer.

2 It is not insignificant, too, that Aristotle's Physics ends with a treatment of God.

3 Pascal's mentor was none other than St. Augustine, who was able to teach this lesson from the experience of a restless and even turbulent life.

4 An excellent index of how important a question is, can be found by considering what difference is made by a "yes" vs. a "no" answer.

5 See St. Thomas' Summa Contra Gentiles, book I, chapter 15: "We find in the world, furthermore, certain beings, those namely subject to generation and corruption, which can be and not-be. But what can be has a cause because...it must be owing to some cause that being accrues to it. Now, as we have proved by the reasoning of Aristotle, one cannot proceed to infinity among causes. We must therefore posit something which is a necessary being....This is God, since He is the first cause."

6 Note that while this sometimes is a chronological sequence, it is not necessarily so. Thus, the act of reading, for example, is accounted for by the light, the act of the will choosing to read, the ability to see, and so forth, all at the same time. Or in a simpler example, the coat remains on the wall because it depends on the (simultaneous) causality of the coat-hook. St. Thomas is not interested in proving that time has a beginning, but rather merely that God exists, and this is knowable through the things of ordinary experience.

7 If nothing is explained, then nothing makes sense. If nothing makes sense, the human life, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, true and false, also make no confusion. This why Fyodor Dostoyevsky has one of his characters say, "If God does not exist, all things are permissible."

8 In the Summa of Theology, Part I, question 13, article 11, St. Thomas shows that HE WHO IS is the most perfect Name of God.

9 Paraphrased from the Commentary on the Niccomachean Ethics, book I, lectio 2, n. 21.

10 John 3:16.

11 I Peter.