Faith and Reason | Catholic Central

The Catholic Church requires you to check your brain and abandon all logic at the door, right? Actually, no. In this episode, Kai and Libby break down the different tools that the Church uses for finding different kinds of truth, and where Faith comes in.

From Family Theater Productions in Hollywood.

[LedezVid]

Catholic Theology teacher here, keep up the good work!

[maryvictor]

THANK U "CATHOLIC CENTRAL" - YOU ARE DOING VERY WELL. YES, THANKS, AND MAY THE LORD BLESS U ABANDUNTLY. YOU ARE IN MY PRAYERS DAILY. AMEN, SABA K.

[veronicasingermacias]

These are such amazing videos! I wish more people knew about them! God bless you and your work.

[MrFossilabgfyth]

I believe that faith and reason can coexist. You can have both.

[Camelepiz]

Bwahaha parking in L.A. Great job, as usual.

[Kokiri]

Thanks for putting out this video--as a non-religious person, this gives me a bit more insight into the way Catholic folks view the world.

I'm curious about a few points you made. First is the idea that faith is needed to answer questions that evidence and reason cannot answer (or have not yet answered). I think non-religious, scientifically minded people agree that questions like "Is there a god?" can't be addressed by science--it's a great example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis, a claim that has no way of being proven or disproven. But instead of responding to that by searching for a specific answer through faith, we're content to say that we don't know and we have no way of knowing, and therefore there's no reason to believe anything in particular about it. This attitude seems very similar to your statement around 3:56 about embracing uncertainty, so I'm curious why people of faith who share this perspective instead respond by seeking an answer.

Second is the idea around 0:08 that faith is needed for a sense of awe and wonder at our place in the universe. Many non-religious people, even those who might be considered militant atheists, have powerful experiences of awe and wonder when contemplating our existence, completely in the absence of beliefs about any objective meaning or purpose to life. In material terms, we would view that feeling as something that's hard-wired into the human brain, something that as individuals brings us a profound sense of meaning but that has no significance outside of our subjective lives. Why do religious people view faith as a vital component of this experience?

Finally, I'd like to better understand why theology and faith are included along with philosophy in your list at 3:02. I agree that science can't provide an objective reason for "why" killing an innocent person wrong, but I also think looking for objective reasons for subjective judgments like "right and wrong" doesn't make sense in the first place. Moral values vary widely across cultures and throughout time, and they simply depend on what people believe to be right and wrong. I realize this perspective can sound very cold and calculating to people of faith, so let me assure you that I'm a very compassionate and empathetic person and I completely agree that killing innocent people is wrong. I feel this deeply on an emotional level, and I also think it's the best course of action for us to prosper as a society. But fundamentally, that belief isn't coming from a scripture or religious leader; it comes from the fact that our brains give us the ability to empathize with and feel compassion for other people, with the result being that most of us have agreed to hold "reduce human suffering" as a core guiding principle in our lives. For me and other non-religious people, this deep conviction toward kindness and empathy comes directly from our shared humanity, so it's difficult to understand why faith and religion play such a critical role in it for others.

I realize this is quite a long comment, so thank you in advance if you take the time to respond. I hope you have a good day!

[dnlorbe]

I learned more in this 6 minute video than I do in an hour of church. Thank you

[geliantabjan]

Why is reason necessary in nourishing the faith?

[cheechak]

"The Bible teaches that salvation is through Christ alone. In Acts 4:12, Peter says, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
The Catholic Church affirms the truth of this statement, yet also teaches that non-believers can be saved:“Those also can attain to everlasting salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or his Church, yet sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does divine Providence deny the help necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God, but who strive to live a good life, thanks to his grace” (Lumen Gentium, no. 16).
The key to this is the word “knowing.” Lumen Gentium speaks of salvation for those who “through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or his Church.”
Such a view squares perfectly with the Church’s traditional understanding of “outside the Church there is no salvation” since, as officially used, this phrase referred to those who knowingly rejected the truth or authority of Christ and his Church, not to those in invincible ignorance.

[MrXmager]

Can some one tldr the defintion of faith they gave? I didnt ever catch it?

[PatrickSteil]

Awesome. Just figured out the reason our society is failing is because perhaps we tried to divorce faith and reason.

[MrXmager]

Truth and morals you presented as a false ditchomy

[francescoc]

Reasons why there is no god:

1) Life does not need to have a meaning.

2) All religions are shaped by the culture of that specific geografical area hence any god is made in the image of people: this means that god is just in your brain.

3) You just follow your family's religion as you were indoctrinated from the very beginning of your life. Your family was indoctrinated by their parents and so on until the days when religious education was mandatory.
This much depends on the area where you were born. Basically what you know does not exist: it has just been told you to believe in it since when you were young and not able to do a critic about life.

4) If religion books were cancelled, they would have re-written differently (e.g. would a re-written version of the Bible - the word of god - describe that sun goes around the earth nowadays?).
Instead, if scientific researches were cancelled they would have re-written in the same way cause they are based on objective evidence.

5) 4, 200 religions in the world: how do you prove yours is the true one and on which evidence you discredit the others?

6) The most popular religions just coincide with the most dominant/rich/colonialist countries as they were spread by force/political influence

7) When people could not cure themselves they relied on witchcraft. Once science found the cure, witchcraft got extinguished. By analogy, religion works in the same way as witchcraft as it is just an irrational method of compensation for material life problems and it disappears when issues are fixed materially. Religion just gives you the illusion to obtain something that you will never get.

8) If you say "what was there before universe?", then I say, "what was there before god" ?

9) It has already been demonstrated by science that organic matter can be generated by inorganic matter (check the Miller-Urey experiment)

10) Big bang: explosion which determined life and continuous spreading of energy nowadays. Human production/reproduction is just an expression of that energy keeps spreading. Before the big bang there was neither space nor time, hence a god couldn't exist.

Extra point: We are all here discussing because of CONSCIOUSNESS.
Humans are the only ones who are provided with CONSCIOUSNESS in such a way that they can think, plan, construct even under long-term outlooks.
CONSCIOUSNESS is therefore a system of defence to better allow our survival and it is the result of an evolved brain which took millions of years to develop to this level: it's not a gift of God...
Please feed consciousness with reasoning instead of superstitions and useless beliefs because thank to this refined defensive system we have finally managed to understand how we came here.

The rest is just useless faith which might even undermine our specie by diverting the natural purpose of our consciousness...