Once again, as so often in the few weeks since I discovered Jennifer’s blog, I find that she’s said just what I would have wanted to have said, if I’d been asked the same question, and if I’d been given the grace to understand the answer so well. In this post, she responds to the following comment:
How sad to see that you abandoned reason for faith. would it not be even better if you started living your life as if it mattered in it’s own right and not just so that you could get into a special heavenly club. I think doing good for no other reason then such a selfish desire is despicable.
Jennifer gives a typically detailed and thoughtful response, but the heart of it, for me, is this:
But these concepts — “heaven,” “hell,” “eternity” — are still vague enough in my mind that they don’t motivate me on a gut level. So while I know on an intellectual level that I want to go to heaven and stay out of hell, I have never avoided doing something bad because of the thought, “If I do that I might go to hell!”
There is a very big motivator, however, that is related to the concept of heaven: I don’t want to reject God.
(Emphasis mine.) That’s exactly right. I know that God loves me. How well I know that feeling I get just after I’ve gone out of my way to do something I shouldn’t have done that I know will disappoint Him—that feeling that makes me want to reject God because I don’t want to face Him in my sinfulness. I don’t like that feeling. The hard part is remembering how awful it is before I do whatever it is that I want to do.
The View from the Foothills 
You quote an unknown person who says “How sad to see that you abandoned reason for faith.”
The problem with that statement is that people have come to accept the idea that it’s one or the other. If you embrace God, you’ve abandoned ‘reason’.
Humans have embraced the idea that it’s a personal choice, and you can choose whatever you want. Relativism (which has nothing to do with Einstein’s theory of Relativity).
The truth is that there is only one right answer. If the God we worship exists, all other choices are wrong. IF, on the other hand, evolution (or Allah, or Budha, or …) were the truth, all other possible choices would be wrong.
The second problem is that we’ve come to the belief that ‘reason’ will tell us all we need to know about reality. That’s a rather arrogant belief (yes, belief). The universe is much larger than we are, or that we can understand. The God christians worship exists outside that universe – we don’t have a chance of evaluating Him with our puny ‘reason’, it requires faith.
True ‘reason’ will lead one to the realization that reason alone is insufficient.
Of course, if you accept the existence of some Creator outside of the reality we perceive, then you must deal with your relationship to that Creator – there’s the real rub.
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John,
You’re right, of course, that “faith vs. reason” is a false dichotomy. It should be clear from my posts on how I became a Catholic that reason played a large role in the process. I expect it to take all of my reason to live my faith as God intends.
I take your point that “If the God we worship exists, all other choices are wrong. IF, on the other hand, evolution (or Allah, or Budha [sic], or …) were the truth, all other possible choices would be wrong.”; however, as you’ve stated it, this isn’t quite right.
Christianity in general, and Catholicism in specific, says quite a bit about the nature of God, e.g., that the Godhead is three-in-one, that God is all powerful, all knowing, all good, and so forth. If Christianity is right about these things, as I believe it is, then Islam, Buddhism, and so forth are wrong insofar as they disagree. Islam, for example, certainly agrees that God is all powerful, and here it is right; but it denies the Trinity, and here it is wrong.
Similarly for evolution. So far as evolution is a description of the physical process of speciation, as evidenced by the geological record, the Catholic Church has no quarrel with it. It is only when proponents of evolution move beyond the scientific realm into that of metaphysics, and claim that Random Chance and material processes are the sole cause of All That Is that a problem arises.
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Dear Will,
Hate to open up a can of worms, but I recently read a well-argued book about evolution that states categorically that the “geological” (i.e. fossil) record shows the exact opposite of what you state. In fact, no fossils have turned up that irrefutably show one species changing into another. There is ample proof of change within a species (such as eohippus leading to today’s horse) but no evidence that one species evolved from another. This is sheer propaganda. On the strength of this book, I have abandoned any belief in evolution by natural selection. The fact that the Catholic Church “has no quarrel with it” is sad.
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Mark,
As I’ve argued before, the “Book of Nature” says what it says, though we might have a greater or lesser skill at reading and understanding it. The scientific consensus, at this time, is that speciation occurs through natural selection (though I suspect that that statement is a gross over-simplification of what scientists actually think). It’s the job of scientists to come up with theories that explain the geological evidence. It’s not the job of the Church. It’s the job of the Church to maintain that God is, indeed, in charge of the whole process.
Is the Church giving her assent to the current scientific consensus? No, I’d say not. The Church is merely acknowledging the evidence and accepting the word of those who have studied it–where it isn’t clearly in contradiction to the Faith.
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