Transcript

In the fourth century, intense deliberations over theological questions gave rise to the Nicene Creed.

This formal statement of faith is the foundation for both Eastern and Western Christianity.

And to this day, most Christians around the world would subscribe to it.

In our age of secularism, skepticism, and disaffiliation, we attend to the most basic issue first.

What does it mean to believe in God?

The Nicene Creed is one of the most elegant, intelligent, and succinct statements of Christian belief that's come to us from the ancient world.

But it's much more than just an ancient text.

It's a living text.

Because at Catholic Mass and many other liturgies in the Christian world besides, it's recited as a message.

It's recited every Sunday.

Therefore, it's one of the best ways to understand what it is that Christians believe.

I'm going to spend the next lectures now talking about the theological meaning of this great statement of Christian belief.

You know, the best we can figure is that the original Greek form began with the word pistuomen, which means we believe.

But other Greek versions had pistuo, which means I believe.

In the Latin version, credo in unum Deum, it begins, I believe.

When I was coming of age, the first many years of my life in the Catholic Church, we said, we believe.

In more recent years, we've been saying, I believe.

Well, I think that ambiguity in a way is kind of eloquent.

I wouldn't want to resolve it.

There's great value in saying, we believe.

Because the Christian thing is not an individualist, it's an enterprise.

No, no, we believe together.

We believe as a community.

Think as you're reciting that creed on a Sunday, maybe there's an article of the creed that you're having a little more difficulty with.

But someone else in the same crowd has no trouble with that article.

And then vice versa.

In a way, we support each other in our belief.

On the other hand, the I believe has a great value.

Because it's a bit like an oath.

When you can stand there on your own two feet, and in your own name say, I believe this, you're taking a very strong stance.

So I'm okay, the opening word either is we or is I believe.

I think each has a value.

What I want to really focus on though is that second word, believe.

I think today, it's one of the most misunderstood words in the religious lexicon.

And what do I mean?

Well, a lot of the critics of religion today will say, well, isn't that nice?

Religious people, they don't really know these things.

They can't prove them scientifically.

They have no good arguments for them.

Rather, they're playing a kind of make believe.

I'll believe certain things on the basis of no evidence.

Now, can I just say this right off the bat?

And if you get nothing else from these lectures, but you remember this in a way I'd be happy.

That's not what believe means.

When serious Christians use the term, it does not mean accepting things wildly on the basis of no evidence.

Authentic belief is never infra -rational.

What I mean is it's never below reason.

It's always supra -rational.

It's beyond reason and inclusive of it.

Let me look at it a little more exactly by looking at both sides of the equation.

What I mean is from the side of the believer and then from the side of the object of the belief.

So I believe.

John Henry Newman, one of my great intellectual heroes, spent a lot of his time delving into this question.

He was battling John Locke, the great English philosopher.

Locke had said, the quality of our ascent should be directly proportional to the quality of the inferential support that we can garner for that ascent.

A fancy way of saying, if I've got a really convincing argument for something, then my ascent should be total.

If I've got kind of a middling argument, then my ascent should be middling.

If I've got a very poor argument, then my ascent should be at a low level.

Well, it seems commonsensical enough.

But Newman stood athwart this.

He said, maybe in a higher world that's true, but in this world, we rarely think that way.

In fact, most things that we claim to know, in fact, are not based upon clinching absolute arguments.

His famous example is, who doesn't know that Great Britain is an island?

And yet, there's no absolute clinching proof of that.

Rather, we know it as a result of a whole conjuries of experiences, intuitions, witnesses, books, et cetera.

Newman says, look, every history book I've ever read about England assumes it.

Every map I've ever seen takes it for granted.

Every person I've ever talked to about England would assume that Great Britain is an island.

My own experience, maybe moving around the shore of Great Britain, affirms it.

The point is, I assent to that claim on the basis of a whole conjuries of different things, arguments, hunches, intuition.

So it goes, Newman argued, in regard to almost everything we claim to know.

Think, for example, of even the scientific facts that we know.

Well, how many of us have actually verified these things directly?

No, no, we rely on the findings of people that came before us, and they on the findings of people that came before them.

So, in the religious order, Newman said, the same thing obtains.

We're not believing things just sort of wildly with no justification.

Rather, we know religious truth the same way we know any other truth, by a coming together of argument and deed, but also experience and hunch and intuition and witness.

That's why Newman said beautifully that faith is not opposed to reason.

Faith, he said, is the reasoning of a religious mind.

Isn't that good?

It's the way we reason about the things of God.

You see, Newman's argument is what they call in logic a tu quoque.

That means, you too.

I mean, you do the same thing.

Everyone that claims to know usually does so on the basis of this coming together of various points of view, all of which tend in the same direction.

So don't tell me that my belief is somehow primitive as opposed to your knowledge.

In fact, we all know most things that we know in a very similar way.

Okay?

That's belief from the side of the believer.

Now look at it from the side of the object of belief.

I'm going to say much more about this in a second, but God is the object of our belief.

God is not a thing in the world, not one reality among many.

Rather, God is that power through which the whole of the finite world comes to be.

Do you see, therefore, how it's simply inappropriate to use words like, knowledge and certitude and direct perception when it comes to God?

I mean, maybe things in our range of immediate experience I can use language such as that.

But God?

No, God's always seen out of the corner of my eye.

You know that beautiful scene in the book of Exodus when God tells Moses that he'll be passing by and he puts Moses in the cleft of the rock.

But he says, you can't see me face to face.

You can only see my backside.

Well, the tradition has interpreted that to mean, I never see God directly with these eagle eyes and with this sort of controlling mind.

No, no, God's always seen indirectly at best.

And therefore, belief rather than clinching certitude seems to be the right language to use in regard to God.

Bishop, why does the church need creeds at all?

You know, it's interesting that really, in all the great world religions, Christianity is unique that way, that we have these carefully articulated creeds.

Some religions are really all about ethical behavior.

They're about kind of a mystical experience.

Christianity from the beginning, from the earliest days, has wanted to lay the thing out logically.

Now, to some degree, the creeds arise out of baptismal ceremonies.

So if someone's about to be baptized and they're asked, you know, what do you believe?

Do you believe in God?

Do you believe in Jesus Christ?

So the Nicene Creed, for example, is an elaborated version of that.

So they're related to making this stance.

As you enter into the church, are you willing to say, yes, I believe in these things?

I'd also say this, that a logos theology is behind some of it.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And so Christianity from the beginning has been very interested in logic and the things of logic.

It reached out, Cardinal Ratzinger said this, Pope Benedict eventually, Joseph Ratzinger said, the church in the early days opted not for mythology, but for philosophy.

And the reason is logos.

The logos became flesh.

And therefore those who spoke logically of the logos in things, they became attractive to Christianity.

Well, the creeds participate in that.

They're a logical laying out of the faith.

Why is the Nicene Creed of 325, particularly important to study today?

Well, I think the Nicene Creed is important for today because of the unaffiliated.

There are so many people today who have announced that they are not religious.

You know, so when I was a kid, back in the 1970s, about 3 % of our country would have said I have no religion.

Now it's 26%. That's a huge leap in a short period of time.

I know from my dealings online with nonbelievers and skeptics, there's an army of people out there who don't really believe or really know what Christians believe.

They have impressions.

They have, you know, false ideas.

They have this and that.

But very few, in my experience, have a clear sense of what we actually believe.

And I think the great virtue of the Nicene Creed is there it's laid out.

However, it does need to be unpacked.

You know, what do all these terms mean?

But I think especially for the so -called nuns, the N -O -N -E -S, those who have no religion, I think something like the Nicene Creed is very important.

Okay, so we covered two terms.

I, or we, believe.

How about this little word?

In. I love in the Latin we say credo in unum Deum.

I believe in one God.

But in Latin, in can designate a place.

Like I'm in urbe.

I'm in the city.

But in, when it's used, as in this case, with the accusative.

In unum Deum.

That designates motion toward.

Credo in unum Deum means I believe into God.

The fullness of God's mystery.

Well, I can never grasp that.

Rather, I'm always on a journey into the mystery of God.

How beautifully, by the way, St. Bonaventure puts that in the title of his famous book.

Itinerarium mentis in Deum.

Same thing there, by the way, in Deum.

The itinerarium, the journey, mentis, of the mind or the soul, in Deum, into God.

Well, that's the whole spiritual life.

What's the creed?

Not the fullness of Christian life, but rather signposts on the way.

Guardrails even, to direct us on the journey into God.

How do we come fully to understand the great truths of Christianity?

Through the liturgy, through the sacraments, through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, through the witness of the saints, etc. But the creed, these great statements of belief, are the signposts on the itinerarium mentis in Deum.

Credo in unum Deum.

I believe into one God.

Okay?

We now come to the word that is the key word in the entire creed.

The creed is all about God and the things of God.

Belief, as we're using it here, has to do with God and those things in relation to God.

So what can we say now about this great object of our belief about God?

Well, as I said, when I use the word God, I am not intending any being, any being in the universe.

It's a mistake, by the way, that atheists old and new make all the time.

Looking around the universe to see evidence of this being, God.

Some say there is one, some say there isn't. Let's look for traces.

Well, that's precisely the wrong way to look for God.

You know, as I'm looking around this beautiful room, this wonderful Santa Barbara mission, I can see in every nook and cranny of this room evidence of the architect.

Right?

The architect who thought this building through.

Again, in every detail.

I can guess a lot about the mind, about the style, about the intention of the architect.

But what don't I do?

I don't look around the building to find the architect.

Oh, there he is.

So there's the roof and there's the walls and there's the decoration, there's the layout, there's the stairs, there's the sanctuary.

Oh, and there's the architect.

No, he's not one of the items within what God has made.

So it goes now with God.

Is God's mind, intention, will, love, evident in every nook and cranny of the universe?

Yes.

Yes.

But is God one of the items that I can pick out among other items in the universe?

No. God is not a being.

Thomas Aquinas says that over and over again.

Not even the supreme being.

So you say, well, here I am, here's this building, there's planet Earth, there's Jupiter, and then I suppose there's the great galaxies, and then there's God must be the highest of all beings.

No, says Thomas Aquinas.

God is not in any genus, not even the genus of being.

It's very interesting, isn't it?

He just means what I've been saying.

He's not one of the items within the universe.

Rather, God is the reason why there's something rather than nothing.

God, rather, is the source from which all finite existence comes.

God is the reason why there's a universe at all.

I think actually once we clarify the meaning of the word God, a lot of the classical objections to God sort of fall away.

Many of them are born of the assumption that God is one of the items in the universe.

Okay, so at this point, we reach a sort of impasse.

Suppose an atheist were to say, yeah, okay, Bishop, I get that.

I get what you're talking about.

But I say there's nothing behind the universe.

There's just the universe.

You say, no, there's a great creative source behind the universe.

Which one of us is right?

Well, are we just stuck at that point?

No. The Catholic Church has argued now for centuries that reason can explore the issue of God's existence, that we can, we can know with the light of our natural reason that God exists.

And of course this idea is grounded in the Bible itself.

Listen.

The Bible says the heavens are telling the glory of God.

Somehow looking up at the splendor of the heavens, we learn something about the being, the reality of God.

How about this from St. Paul?

His eternal power and the divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.

So the wager is that by looking at certain features of the universe, we can intuit the existence of this great cause that stands behind the universe.

Now there are some people who don't require proofs or arguments.

They just believe naturally.

Can you say a little bit more about the ease with which some people just come to faith?

You know, I think of my grandmother here, who was a woman of extraordinary faith.

It would never have occurred to her for a moment not to believe in God.

But I sincerely doubt she ever had any exposure to formal arguments for God's existence.

If I had talked about God being actus purus, she wouldn't know what I was talking about.

I think for a lot of people, what's contained explicitly in things like arguments are kind of implicitly known.

If I had said to my grandmother, Grandma, do you think God is sort of behind all things?

I bet she would have said, yeah, sure.

Or, you know, God is sort of the cause of all that happens.

Yeah, of course.

That she would have intuited what the proof lays out very explicitly, you know?

Or if you'd said maybe God is behind, you know, the great order in the universe and what the sciences discover, Grandma's kind of what God has placed in the world.

I bet she would have said, yeah, that makes sense, you know?

So I think for a lot of people, they intuit implicitly what the proofs bring out explicitly.

But also I think of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the Protestant theologian, who said, it's like some people with a natural gift for music, some people just don't have an appreciation for music.

He thought some people had a natural gift for religion.

They were just, they got it right away.

Other people struggle, and I know that.

I mean, from my dialogues with nonbelievers and skeptics and people that say, look, I want to believe, but I just, I don't have it in me.

I think there is that.

There's like a natural ease of religion.

My grandmother had that.

My mother had that.

My father has it.

Not everybody does.

So speaking now like as a pastoral person, as an evangelist, I think you've got to have a lot of tools in your kit, you know?

Some people respond really well to arguments.

Good, good.

They like to engage it that way.

Others, they won't get to religion through that route.

But there are other routes, you know?

So I think it's a mixed bag.

Maybe talk a little bit more about the benefits of the intellectual arguments for God's existence, especially for when people are going through tough times.

Well, it can happen that people get stuck, you know?

An objection is raised, or they have an experience that kind of militates against belief in God.

I think for them, arguments can be useful.

Not as though that's the whole story, you know?

But they can open a door.

They can get someone over an obstacle.

And then once that happens, they can move, you know, closer to religion.

So I see them that way.

Thomas Aquinas referred to his arguments as monoducciones, which is Latin for mono means by the hand, ducere, to lead, right?

To lead you by the hand.

So you take a little kid and say, come on, let me show you something.

And you lead him by the hand.

And then you introduce him to a world.

Well, that's what the proofs do in some cases, the arguments.

They can lead you by the hand so that you can come to a keener appreciation of religion.

But I find them a lot funnier.

They're not functioning that way for people.

They get them over a block.

They open a window.

They open a door.

But you got to go through the door and go through the window.

They don't do all the work.

What I want to do then in the remaining time in this lecture is look simply at two of these approaches to God.

There are, by the way, dozens.

If you look at the history of philosophy, go on even websites today and look through the debates about God, you'll see the dozens of arguments that have been proposed by people in the tradition.

In regard to God's existence.

I'll look just at two in the time that we have.

You know, one of the great objections to God comes today, as I've been hinting, from the world of science.

Science knows a lot about the world.

Science measures, experiments, understands even, it seems, the very beginnings of things.

Doesn't science, therefore, preclude belief in this mysterious cause you're calling God?

A lot of people today, especially young people, are in the grip of what I would call scientism.

That's the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge.

Look, if that's all we can know, what the sciences tell us, what scientific observation, experimentation yield to us, well, then that does seem to rule God out of court.

What I want to do now in this first approach is take on this challenge and to go, in fact, right into the very heart of the sciences, and show that if we go into that place, we are actually led not away from God, but toward God.

Every science, I don't care what you're talking about, psychology, physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, any science you can name, is predicated upon this one great mystical intuition.

I'm using that word mystical on purpose.

Namely, the intuition that being is intelligible, that the universe in its totality and in every detail, in every nook and cranny, yes, from the grandest macrocosmic level to the smallest microscopic level, everything in the universe is marked by intelligibility.

That means form, pattern, meaning, something that corresponds to the questing mind.

Think about that.

I mean, if a scientist didn't assume this principle, she couldn't get her work off the ground.

She'd simply meet a chaotic universe.

She assumes she's going to meet a universe marked by intelligibility.

The medievals put it this way in their usual pithiness.

Ens est shibile, they said.

It just means being is knowable.

Here's how Albert Einstein put it.

This is my favorite quote from Einstein.

Einstein is very interesting on this because people quote him on both sides of this question.

But here's the one I think is most interesting.

Einstein said, The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible.

Let that sink in from the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

The strangest thing about the universe, the most incomprehensible thing, is that it's comprehensible.

See, we take it for granted, but we shouldn't. The longer you stare at this fact, the stranger, the odder it seems.

Here's a challenge that some religious scientists have offered to their non -believing colleagues.

Where do the laws of nature come from?

See, that's the next question, isn't it, that presents itself.

Once you say the universe is radically intelligible, how do you explain that?

Where does that come from?

In his wonderful introduction to Christianity, the great Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, said the only finally valid explanation of the radical intelligibility of the universe is some great intelligence that has planted intelligibility in things.

In other words, go to the very heart and foundation of the science and you are led to a creative intelligence which has imbued all of matter and all of finitude with pattern, meaning, and intelligibility.

Ratzinger makes this wonderful observation.

We betray this even in our language.

We speak of recognizing certain truths, don't we?

Well, that word's interesting.

Recognize.

Re-cognize.

To think again.

So when the scientist is recognizing a truth, she's thinking again what has already been thought.

Her inquiring mind now corresponding to an intelligibility which has been placed there by a great intelligence.

And here we can make appeal to the Bible, can't we?

In the prologue to John's Gospel.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And through that Word, all things came to be.

That's not just pious boilerplate.

In the beginning was something like intelligence, the Word, pattern.

And through that Word, all things came to be.

That's exactly why all things are marked by intelligibility.

In other words, the mysticism invoked at the beginning of John's Gospel is the condition for the possibility of the work of the sciences.

You know what's interesting?

Many have pointed this out, not just Ratzinger.

It's not accidental that the physical sciences, that we call the modern physical sciences, emerged when and where they did.

In other words, out of the Christian universities of Europe, think of the great founders of the modern physical sciences.

They were trained in the universities of the Christian West.

What did they take in from their culture?

They took in these great religious intuitions that the world that we know had been created by an intelligent God.

That gave them two things.

One, the conviction that the world is not God.

The world is not divine.

Therefore, we don't worship nature.

We can explore it.

We can examine it.

We can experiment upon it.

And it gave them the view that all reality is marked by intelligibility.

Once those two were in place, I can examine, analyze, experiment, and I go forth with utter confidence I'm going to meet the intelligibility of the world.

The sciences can get off the ground.

What made them possible were these fundamental theological assumptions.

You know, just one more observation here.

And this has come up in some interesting recent conversations.

The applicability of mathematics is in itself an argument for God's existence.

And what do I mean here?

Well, the fact that mathematics, this highly abstract science, dealing with number and pattern and form and so on, in the most abstract sense, can be used to build a bridge, can be used to erect a building, can be used to create a nuclear reactor.

My point is that's possible if and only if the great intelligibility that's inherent in mathematics corresponds to an intelligibility already in nature.

That's a strange and mystical fact that we can use mathematics in a practical way.

It means that the world has been thought into being.

Bishop, a couple terms I hear tossed around are intelligibility and intelligent design.

What's the difference between these two?

Well, there's a major difference between them because I don't really subscribe to the intelligent design argument.

And again, I'm going to be oversimplifying a bit.

But the argument there is that within a basically evolutionary framework, there are certain biological organisms that have what's called an irreducible complexity, which can only be described, it can't be explained in evolutionary terms, but only through interventionary terms, that an intelligent designer at some point had to intervene to make that organism possible.

Now, there's a big debate that goes on among the scientists about the biology.

My major problem about it, though, is it tends to see God as one fussy intervening cause among many, as though from time to time God has to intervene to sort of set things in a certain order.

And I think that's born much more of an Enlightenment sort of deist conception.

The argument I was using is not from intelligent design.

It's from objective intelligibility.

So it's pointing at something far more basic and far more universal than mere biological irreducible complexity.

It's talking about the fact that in every nook and cranny, the universe is marked by intelligibility or by form.

Enza shibile, as I said, being is knowable.

So it's a much more universal and fundamental fact.

And I think that can be explained only through recourse to some kind of grounding and creative intelligence.

So the language is a bit similar, but they're very different arguments.

Okay, the second approach I want to use, and I'll close this talk with it.

The argument from contingency.

You can find it in different forms in a lot of the great philosophers and theologians of our tradition.

And I find it's a very helpful way to see the reasonability of believing in God.

The argument from contingency.

How does it start?

Well, it starts with something that's very much part of our ordinary experience.

That the things around us, the states of affairs that obtain, exist, but they don't have to exist.

So, for example, here I am at this podium giving this lecture, surrounded by this nice crew of people with cameras and lights.

I'm in this beautiful setting.

This state of affairs is obtaining.

It exists, right?

But does it have to exist?

Well, obviously not.

I mean, I didn't have to exist.

I might have stayed in bed this morning.

This crew might have missed their flight from Chicago.

This building might have been destroyed by an earthquake last night.

I mean, there's all kinds of reasons why this wouldn't exist.

It exists, but it doesn't have to exist.

Now, true of this situation, true of practically everything you experience, true of all the things around us, from cars and animals and plants to planets, they exist, but they don't have to exist.

What do I conclude from that?

I conclude that they don't explain themselves.

And therefore, I have to look for a cause or a set of causes to explain them.

Now, can I suggest to everybody, that intuition, which is a very valid rational intuition, is what lies behind all the sciences, too.

How come scientists look for causes?

Well, because they realize this truth, that things around them, states of affairs around them, objects and animals and so on around them exist, but don't have to exist.

An explosion happened.

Well, how do you explain that?

It didn't have to happen.

So you begin to look for causes.

So, let's come back to my example of this state of affairs.

Here I am in this beautiful church in front of this crew giving this lecture.

There must be causes for it.

Well, yes, indeed.

For example, the fact that I'm at least relatively healthy.

That enables me right now to be pronouncing these words.

The fact that these cameras in front of me are functioning.

The fact that these lights are on.

The fact that there is oxygen in this room, which enable me to speak and to stay alive.

The fact that I'm standing on a stable platform.

These are all causes that are allowing this state of affairs to exist.

You say, okay, makes sense.

But is your mind satisfied?

Not at all.

Your mind continues to ask, well, okay, how about those causes?

Do they explain themselves?

Or are they themselves contingent?

It's cool.

That little word contingent from the Latin, contingere, means to touch with.

Remember in the Latin of the Gospels, Jesus says, Noli me tangere, to Mary Magdalene.

Don't touch me.

Noli me tangere.

Contingere, contingent, means touching upon.

So this state of affairs, as I said, is touching upon all sorts of causes that produce it.

Okay, are they self -explanatory or are they contingent?

Well, I mean, just a moment's reflection reveals that they too are contingent.

Think of, I said, well, you know, the fact that I'm relatively healthy is a cause of my giving this talk.

Well, yeah, but what causes my health?

Well, the functioning of all kinds of systems with my body.

I suppose the food I took in this morning.

I suppose, again, the oxygen I'm breathing.

Those are the causes of my good health.

How about these cameras?

Well, they're dependent upon all sorts of factors.

Including, I imagine, the electrical grid or whatever within this building.

Think of the stability of the ground I'm on.

Well, that's dependent upon the stability of the Earth.

How about the Earth itself?

Well, that's dependent upon the orbit it's in around the sun.

If it went off that orbit, it'd be flying off into space and we wouldn't be standing here.

How about the fact that the temperature in this room is such that it's not so hot we'd all be destroyed, so cold we'd all be killed?

My point is, that first set of causes are themselves contingent upon a whole other set of causes.

Now, how about the things I just mentioned?

Well, again, a moment's reflection reveals that they too are contingent on ever higher causes and sets of causes.

Okay, okay, so far so familiar.

But here's the hinge of the argument.

Can this process go on forever?

Can I just say, well, I suppose it just goes on and on and on and on infinitely?

One cause depending on another, depending on another, depending on another, back, back, out, out, out, forever and ever, infinitely?

Well, the answer is no.

Because to say that is repugnant to reason.

To say that is never adequately to explain the state of affairs that obtains right now.

The fact that I'm here giving this talk, if I just say, oh, no, I postpone the causal explanation infinitely, then I don't explain why I'm standing here in front of you.

You know what I love is those who say, oh, you know, religious people, they lack critical intelligence.

I say no, on the contrary.

I say keep opening your mind.

Keep asking the relevant question.

Keep asking until you find the valid answer, which is we must finally come to some reality which is not caused, which is not deriving its basis from something outside of itself, that exists, listen now, because its very nature is to exist.

Thomas Aquinas called this the uncaused cause.

He also called it the necessary being.

An endless appeal to contingent causality explains not one little thing.

The even essence, contingency, non -self -explanatory quality of the world leads us finally toward some reality that does explain itself, whose very nature is to be.

This is what people mean when they use the word.

Bishop, I'm struggling with the relationship between faith and reason.

Can you say a little bit more about that?

Yeah, you know what's helped me in that regard is the way we come to know another person.

So if I want to find out about someone, let's say I'm kind of intrigued by a person, well, I can use my reason to a large extent.

I can Google that person.

I can look him up on Wikipedia.

I can do an Internet search and find out a lot of information.

Indeed, you know, maybe where he was born, his family, where he went to school, his job.

I can find out a lot.

Moreover, I can talk to his friends.

I can talk to other people that have dealt with him and get their impressions.

Moreover, I can get my own impressions.

I can meet the person or observe him from a distance or whatever.

In that process, my reason has the prime role.

I'm actively finding out what I can.

Well, so it goes in the religious order.

I mean, I can use my mind to understand God.

And so the famous arguments are examples of that.

I can search out God, and I can come to real knowledge about God.

Now, go back to the coming to know a person.

At the propitious moment, if you really want to know someone deeply, you want to know that person's heart, you can't get at that through reason alone.

There's got to be a moment in the relationship when the person opens his or her heart, where she tells you something you'd never know on your own.

It's something so secret and so intimate and so unique to her that she can only open her heart to you.

Now, at that moment, you've got to make a decision.

Do I believe her or not?

So, you might test it.

Is what she's telling me in line with what I already know?

Or is it like totally out of step with it?

Does it reflect this person as I've come to know her on my own?

Have I learned to trust this person?

And if all those things come together, I probably will say, yeah, okay, I believe.

I've chosen to believe what you've told me.

I can't verify it on my own.

Even in principle, even if I wanted to, I couldn't. But you've told me something about yourself, and because I've come to trust you, I've come to believe you, right?

See, Aquinas says, it's a very interesting thing, that in faith, it's a strange moment when the will commands the intellect.

See, normally the intellect commands the will.

The intellect directs the will.

But when it comes to faith, your will directs the mind.

Your will says, believe that.

Believe that.

Because I've come to love the God who's spoken to me, and therefore I believe.

To me, that's a really telling analogy for faith and reason.

We don't eschew reason.

Like, I just leave that behind.

I just run off into pure faith.

No, no.

Exercise your reason all the way, all the way.

And at the end of reason, when reason's done all its work, then you're ready for this move of faith, you know?

The problem would be the infrarational, what's below reason.

So before I exercise any of my own reason, I just start believing any old thing.

Well, that's credulity.

That's superstition.

What I'm talking about is a faith on the far side of reason.

Does that make sense?

Reason having done all of its work, now the heart opens to the heart of another.

In this case, the heart of God.

That's why Newman's, Cardinal Newman's great motto, cor ad cor loquitur.

Heart speaks to heart.

That's what happens at the moment of faith.