Three Arguments for Christianity: Ontological, Moral, and Historical
The three arguments that swayed me from hard-nosed Atheist to faithful Catholic.
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So about a year ago, the science fiction author John C. Wright posted a three-step argument arguing for the Catholic faith.
And I found it very influential.
If I can find the specific article, I'll link down to it below.
I'd like to provide my own version of that, based upon the arguments, the process that brought me to the Catholic Church.
And it's the three steps, my three steps, are the ontological argument, followed up by the moral argument, and finally, the historical argument.
And this, briefly, is why I am a Catholic.
Now, the first is the ontological argument.
And I've mentioned Gödel's incompleteness theorem before, okay, and there's other issues that come along that have the same core problem, inadequacy.
Black box, if you will, the halting problem is one of them, although it applies more to, well, in my mind, in the philosophical sense, it applies more to the mind and what is the mind, although it is about computers.
But I'm going to stick just to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
I could make this a lot more complex, but I want to boil it down to the points, the major points.
Because here's the thing.
If you use logic, if you use rationality, if you believe in debate, if you believe in the scientific method, then you have faith in a supernatural entity.
Big of a big claim.
I get that.
And kind of hard to wrap your head around.
But Gödel's incompleteness theorem relies upon it.
So what is Gödel's incompleteness theorem?
What is it if we put it into words?
Because it's actually a very complex mathematical formula that heck is above my understanding of mathematics.
But what it boils down to is that the math that we use, okay, everything that the Cartesian coordinate system, the arithmetic that you learned in school, the math that goes into both Boolean algebra, which is the basis of electronics, and is nearly indistinguishable from the philosophy of logic.
The only difference is the philosophy of logic has a few extra parts that we don't really use in electric circuits.
All of this is based upon set theory.
Now, in high school, you probably learned about the difference, the whole set of numbers, which is 1 to infinity, the integers, which is 0 to infinity, and the natural number system, which is all numbers positive and negative.
And I hope I'm not getting that backwards, actually.
I might have the whole and the natural backwards, but regardless.
You see, all of these are sets of axioms, of statements that are taken to be true.
We start off with these axioms.
We're going to say, you know, we're going to create a system by which 2 plus 2 equals 4.
You know, we're going to say it's a base 10 system.
We're going to have axioms such as you cannot divide by 0.
Because as soon as you start dividing by 0, the entire thing falls apart.
All math stops working if you allow dividing by 0.
So that's one of the axioms that we use in day-to-day set theory.
And of course, there's other aspects of this as well.
There's infinitesimal, infinitesimal mathematics.
And I'll give you a brief example of this, which I'm completely stealing from Eliezer Yutkowski.
How do you add two infinities?
Easy.
Imagine you have a hotel with infinite rooms, and infinite people come on a bus.
And so you put the infinite people in your infinite rooms, and so the infinity filled the infinity.
But now a second bus of infinite people shows up.
What do you do then?
Well, it's quite easy.
Because you have infinite rooms, you ask everybody to jump over one space.
So the first infinity fits into all of the odd-numbered rooms, and the second infinity goes into all the even-numbered rooms.
Okay, and this is not just some sort of mental trick or puzzle or riddle.
These are actual mathematics that you do need to use to accomplish certain things, aside from just being a pretentious git.
So all of the math we use has certain assumptions, certain axioms, certain statements that are taken as a priori truths.
And see, we know that this math works.
Okay, this math builds computers.
This math formulates arguments.
You know, without this math, this camera would not be working.
The electronic circuits would not exist without this math being existentially true.
And so Gerdel went out to take all of the true math that we know, because we can prove some of it, but we can never prove all of it.
And he tried to prove all of it.
He tried to demonstrate that the math that we use is consistent and coherent.
That it does not contradict itself, that it all fits together.
You know, he tried to basically take all of this stuff and wrap it into a circle that would prove itself.
You know, that this circle demonstrates that the circle exists.
What he accidentally did was he proved.
And again, this is not prove like a scientific proof, okay?
There's no such thing as a scientific proof.
All you ever do is disprove things in science.
Right?
It's heck, you go try and fix your car.
Oh, it won't start.
Let's change the battery.
You put a new battery in and it works.
You didn't prove that the old battery was dead.
For all you know, an invisible gremlin could have been messing with your car and it just happened to leave at the same time.
Point is the car works.
It's good enough.
You know, good enough for government work.
That's what science is.
Mathematical proofs can't be argued with.
Okay, science can always be amended.
We can always discover something new that tells us the universe works in a completely different manner than we thought that it worked.
Not so with math.
When you prove something mathematically, there's no more argument.
There's no capacity for argument.
Okay, you're never going to take a logical syllogism and prove it wrong.
You could possibly prove Einstein wrong, but you're never going to prove a syllogism wrong.
And Gödel proved that we can't prove math.
We can prove part of it, some of it, but not all of it.
And so if you use logic, If you believe in the objective truth, if you believe in science, then you are taking as a matter of faith that there is a supernatural entity that declares math to be true.
God of mathematics.
Now, this God is a very small God, doesn't need to have any political or moral opinions, doesn't need to have a mind or a personality, but it is a supernatural truth.
Okay, supernatural, above nature.
And ergo, not something we can directly observe, not something we can directly inquire about.
Not something that can be tested or proven, because you need to assume its existence before you even get to the whole testing and proving thing.
So everybody that's not part of Atheism Plus, everybody that is an atheist, skeptic, rationalist, scientist, etc., they believe in the supernatural.
They believe in that supernatural God that just said one word, two plus two equals four, and just made all of that fact before the universe began, before there was time for before to happen within.
Gerdel proved that math cannot contain itself, that it needs to be contained in a greater container.
And so our entire understanding of the universe is predicated on the supernatural existing.
Something before, something above, something grander, something more infinite.
So that's the ontological proof.
If you believe in math, you already believe in a supernatural entity.
You believe that there is more to reality than what we can directly observe.
And as soon as you start to acknowledge the existence of the supernatural, well, that God of math, could he have done other things?
Could he have been a bit more than just a God that says 2 plus 2 equals 4?
Could he have opinions?
Could he have, for instance, beauty?
We can't really nail down what beauty is, but we know it's out there.
You know, we can try and point to it.
Composition, for instance, I'm going to, very soon, I'll have the live stream for the backers of my Patreon.
And one of the things I'm going to be talking about is the composition of one of the shots I use.
And composition, you can't really put your fingers on it.
Okay?
You either get it or you don't.
And yet, if you get it, you can talk reasonably about it.
There is something to beauty.
And that kind of suggests that maybe there's a supernatural truth to beauty, sort of like Plato's forms.
And what about morality?
Is morality merely herd instinct?
Or is there some higher calling?
It's still something that we're learning about as a species.
We certainly haven't figured it out.
And quite possibly we'll never figure it out.
Because, like math, it's bigger than us, that it requires this faith in the supernatural.
And you see, this is my second argument that eventually leads to cathodicism.
The moral argument.
One of the brilliant statements in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, I believe.
You know, Luke asks Yoda, is the dark side stronger?
And Yoda says, no.
It's faster, it's easier, but it's not stronger.
And I've brought this argument up in the past, but this is the thing about evil.
In one moment, you know, go buy a gun and then go walk down to the mall and go shoot a bunch of people.
And you will do more evil in an hour than you can pay back in a lifetime.
If you devoted the rest of your life to trying to heal the hurt that you caused, that's not enough.
It would take 100 lifetimes.
You know, it would take an infinite number of lifetimes to heal the pain that you caused by doing that.
In one moment, you can do more evil than you can ever pay back.
And in fact, I think all of us have already done that.
Just with subtle things.
The cruelty we showed to one another in high school, hurt feelings, romantic heartbreak.
You know, we've all used people.
We've all done very bad things to other people.
And maybe just not, I'm not saying you murdered somebody or raped somebody, but you've hurt people in a way that you can never repay it.
You can never take away the injury that you did to that person.
Not if you devoted the rest of your life to it.
And so, yeah, faster, easier, only takes a moment to do evil.
And yet good can do so much more.
Evil can just tear down, destroy, and break things.
With good, you can actually build things.
But see, there is such a moral debt.
The amount of suffering that exists in the world that we have put upon one another, there's just so much of it.
And if you make an honest, moral accounting of yourself and everybody you've hurt, everything you've screwed up, everything you've failed at, you're not able to pay for it.
But somebody's gotta.
And so in ancient times, you know, the Jews, they used to sacrifice the scapegoat, right?
They'd say, the goat, we're going to put all of our sins, all the evil that we did to one another this month, we're going to put it onto the goat and send it out into the wilderness to die.
Other places, other religions, you find similar practices.
Okay, human sacrifice is human sacrifice and cannibalism.
These are inherent to our species because we are such nasty people to one another that we can never pay back the debt.
And so we need to take that, we need to take that guilt and put it onto somebody else, an innocent person, and make them suffer.
If you look at Hollywood culture, you see this playing out all the time.
Where you get somebody like Brittany Spears or whomever, you get one of these teen idols, right?
And everybody just worships them like a god, you know, when they're a kid.
And then when they get older and they're in a rough patch, they become a laughingstock.
It's effectively cannibalism.
And if you go back to Ireland, you had the kings that would be married to the land.
And if you had a bad season, if you didn't get enough rain for your crops, well, put the king to death.
It's his fault.
Same thing.
Human sacrifice, animal sacrifice.
The moral debt has always been blood.
And it always will be.
So all of a sudden you can see why having God himself, that completely good and innocent God, condemned to hell and bleeding blood for that moment on cavalry.
You can start to see why that would be necessary.
Because we are some pretty shitty people.
And only the death of the true innocent who knew our temptations could possibly pay back that debt.
And the final argument is the historical.
There isn't a lot of evidence that Christ existed.
It's not a lot.
But there's a little bit.
It's just enough.
No amount of evidence is going to convince somebody that doesn't understand why Christ needed to exist.
But it's enough to convince somebody that finally sees that he needed to.
You know, Christianity is the only religion that can be scientifically disproven.
You go climb up Mount Olympus in Greece and you don't find the Greek gods.
And you come back down, you tell everybody, they're like, well, what do you think?
You know, the gods exist in a lofty realm.
The same thing goes for the Hindu gods.
Okay, they supposedly live atop Mount Everest.
But nobody's found them.
That doesn't change any.
That doesn't detract from Hinduism.
Judaism.
You know, you go back and it's like, well, the Bible's not completely accurate.
Well, it's an oral history that got written down.
Okay, of course it's not completely accurate.
Native American legends.
You know, yeah, okay, coyotes don't actually talk.
We get it.
Christianity, though.
And if you go to a good church, they really hammer this home.
If Christ did not live, die, and then live again, if he did not rise from the dead, then our faith is in vain.
It means nothing.
If there was not a historical Christ, not some moral teacher, okay, not some guy that performed a few miracles, that cast a few magic spells.
No, a man that died on the cross for our sins and then rose from the dead and then ascended to heaven.
If that didn't exist, we throw out the church.
Okay, maybe we keep the New Testament because it's got some cool stories and it's got some good homilies in it.
Yeah, sure.
But nobody's a Christian anymore.
Paul was absolutely clear about this.
There was an objective event that happened.
There is something that happened.
And if that didn't, if it's based upon a lie, if it's based upon a fable, then everything else he said in his life, his whole life was wasted.
Dogs moving around.
And if you're a Christian, that's what you believe.
Not that he was a great moral teacher, but that he was God incarnate and that he died for our sins.
And see, here's the thing.
People were not stupid 2,000 years ago.
Okay?
You know, you say, oh, yeah, yeah, this guy totally got raised from the dead.
They'd say, yeah, and I've got some swampland in Greece to sell you.
People were not stupid.
Okay, they knew that this stuff was nonsense.
In fact, if you read the Gospels, time and again, the apostles doubt Christ.
Because, like, this stuff doesn't happen.
Okay, like, God coming, that's ridiculous.
Like, they wanted to believe him.
They followed him, but they constantly doubted him.
Because just this, this doesn't happen.
This is BS, okay?
This is like a science fiction story.
You know, it's like, okay, yeah, we understand that, you know, cult of Mithras, you get high and then you douse yourself in blood while, you know, people are beating on drums and chanting really cool experience and you see some trippy stuff.
But it's not real, okay?
Stuff doesn't really happen.
And even after the resurrection, at first they didn't recognize him.
Which again is a really weird thing to put in there because you would think that if you just saw your friend get put to death and then you ran into him, you'd be you'd be shocked.
Like, what are you doing here?
But that's exactly it.
You know, I had this experience where I was back in high school.
I was dating a girl in the next town over.
And I was just walking through the hallways of my school in between classes.
And she was just standing there in the hallway.
And I kind of looked at her and I knew that I knew her from somewhere.
So I just kind of nodded at her and I kept walking.
Couldn't remember her name.
15 seconds later, it comes to me that that's my girlfriend.
See, I hadn't expected to see her there.
You know, like, why would, you know, she lives, you know, like a half hour away.
Why would she be at my school in the middle of a school day?
And so those bits were after the resurrection.
You know, they don't recognize Christ.
He's talking to them.
And he's like, why are you guys upset?
Because Jesus got killed.
So there's these bits that really ring true.
If you were trying to create a cult, if you were trying to pass us off, this is too idiosyncric, syncric.
It doesn't fit if you're just trying to put together a really good story.
But when you start talking about something that, something impossible, that actually happened, it starts to make a lot more sense.
So those are my strongest arguments, folks.
I might expand that into a larger philosophical work at some point, but those are the basics.
