Category: Theology

Can the Soul Be Weighed?

NOTE: I submitted the following as a term paper for the course “Skeptical Approach to Parapsychology” at the Rhine Education Center.

The assignment was to take a noteworthy parapsychological study and evaluate it by apply critical thinking–being neither unduly credulous nor unduly dismissive of its claims.

(Also, since the assignment was to approach the task from a scientific, parapsychological perspective rather than a religious one, I don’t simply provide a theological analysis of what the soul is, and I consider options a non-religious researcher would need to.)

The paper received an “A.”

 

Can the Soul Be Weighed?

by Jimmy Akin

A minor pop culture trope holds the human soul weighs about as much as a piece of bread, or 21 grams. This trope appears various places, including the title of the 2003 Sean Penn movie 21 Grams.

The trope’s basis is a set of experiments begun in 1901 by Duncan MacDougall, M.D. His results were published in 1907 in American Medicine and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (vol. 1, no. 5).

MacDougall weighed humans and dogs at the moment of death and—in the case of humans—found a measurable loss of weight coincident with death. After accounting for known, natural substances the subjects’ bodies could have released, MacDougall conjectured the loss of weight may have been due to the departing human soul.

 

Rationale for Experiment

MacDougall explains the basis for his experiment by stating that, if the personality survives death, it must exist as a “space occupying body.” He writes:

It is unthinkable that personality and consciousness continuing personal identity should exist, and have being, and yet not occupy space. It is impossible to represent in thought that which is not space occupying, as having personality, for that would be equivalent to thinking that nothing had become or was something, that emptiness had personality, that space itself was more than space, all of which are contradictions and absurd.

He reasons that whatever substance this personality-bearing, “space occupying body” (hereafter “soul,” for convenience) may have a measurable weight. He writes:

According to the latest conception of science, substance or space occupying material is divisible into that which is gravitative—solids, liquids, gasses, all having weight—and the ether which is non-gravitative.

MacDougall considers whether the soul might be made of normal “gravitative” matter, although he also considers two alternatives.

The first is that the soul might be made of luminiferous ether—a substance formerly believed to fill the universe and be responsible for propagating light waves through space. MacDougall thinks this option impossible, since ether was believed to be continuous throughout the universe, whereas individuals’ personalities are separate and distinct.

The second alternative is that the soul may be made of “a middle form of substance neither gravitative matter nor ether, not capable of being weighed, and yet not identical with ether.” Such a “middle form” might be non-continuous, allowing separate personalities/souls, but still not being weighable. However, MacDougall thinks it more reasonable to suppose that the soul “must be some form of gravitative matter” since it is linked organically with the body until death.

He thus proposes weighing dying individuals.

 

Examining the Rationale

MacDougall’s rationale is clever and worth examining in light of the history of philosophy and subsequent scientific developments.

Although he says it is “unthinkable” that the soul is not a space-filling body, many prior thinkers disagreed. In the Middle Ages, it was a commonplace for philosophers to regard spirits—including God, angels, and human souls—as entities that lacked extension in space. These spirits could be said to be “in a place” in an accommodated sense. When a spirit manifested its influence on something in the material world, the spirit could be said to be “in” that location (cf. Summa Theologiae I:52:1).

In the Early Modern period, there was renewed discussion of this subject, with Renee Descartes taking the position that the soul is non-extended and Henry More arguing that spirits must be extended. (An issue that arose as a result of this discussion was how a non-extended, immaterial entity could control a body since the two could not have physical contact. Parapsychologically, this would be “explained” in terms of psychokinesis [PK], though the basis or bases of PK remain very unclear.)

Since many thinkers consider the idea of a non-extended soul conceivable, we will include this possibility when considering MacDougall’s results.

From a scientific perspective, MacDougall’s discussion of ether has been superseded. Evidence against the existence of ether had been discovered in the famous, 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, and the idea ceased to be commonly used in physics during the twentieth century.

However, something like MacDougall’s “middle form” of matter/energy emerged in twentieth century science—that is, things other than ether that lack mass. Current science holds that there are massless particles, such as the photon and gluon. However, these are force-carrying particles and are not thought to form structures that would be capable of sustaining a personality independent of massive particles.

A possibility MacDougall didn’t consider was that the soul might be made of a gravitative substance different than the solid, liquid, or gaseous states known in his day. While subsequent science has proposed additional states of matter, such as Bose-Einstein condensates, none of these are good candidates for the soul. (E.g., Bose-Einstein condensates can exist only close to absolute zero, and it would seem impossible for such a substance to coexist with a warm, living human body.)

In light of parapsychological research suggesting that ghosts are not electromagnetic phenomena, an interesting thought that could not have occurred to MacDougall would be the idea that souls might be made of “dark matter”—a hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with the electromagnetic force but that does interact gravitationally. The loss of such a soul could be weighable, and yet the soul would not show up on EMF detectors. (It should be immediately pointed out that current dark matter theories do not predict the existence of soul-like objects, but neither do they completely rule them out. A dark matter soul would need to interact with its body through a form of PK rather than EM.)

 

MacDougall’s Experiments

The design MacDougall used for his experiments was carefully thought out.

For human subjects, he arranged a large platform scale on which a bed could be set, along with a dying patient, and then balanced it. The scale was sensitive to two tenths of an ounce (5.7 grams).

With patient consent, MacDougall chose subjects dying of conditions expected to result in a peaceful passing so as not to jar the scale with death throes. (All died of tuberculosis—“consumption”—except for one in a diabetic coma.)

He tracked the subjects’ weight in the hours preceding death to account for the natural loss of moisture that occurs through perspiration and respiration when the body is not being hydrated.

He then recorded any sudden change the scale registered at the time of death—to the extent this could be determined in his day. (Since electrocardiogram [ECG] monitoring was still being pioneered, this involved observing signs such as cessation of eye and muscle movement, breathing, and heartbeat—as determined by stethoscope.)

After death, MacDougall checked if the subject’s bowels had moved and whether—and how much—urine had been discharged.

For his canine subjects, MacDougall was unable to find dogs dying in peaceful ways. He thus used healthy dogs, sedated them to keep them still, and euthanized them—while monitoring their weight on scales that were sensitive to 1/16th of an ounce (1.8 grams).

 

MacDougall’s Results

Six trials were done with human subjects, with the following results (all numbers converted to metric):


Subject		 Measurement at Death Second, Later Measurement
1 -21 g
2 -14 g -46 g
3 -14 g -43 g
4* -11 to -14 g
5 -11 g
6* -43 g

The measurements at death represent sudden drops that occurred within the space of “a few seconds.”

In two cases, a second measurement was taken shortly after death:

    • Subject 2’s initial measurement was a sudden loss coincident with the last movement of the facial muscles, and the second reading was taken after cessation of heartbeat was verified.
    • Subject 3’s additional reading was taken “a few minutes” after death.

MacDougall eliminated the results of Subjects 4 and 6 (marked by asterisks) from consideration:

    • With Subject 4, MacDougall reports that “unfortunately our scales were not finely adjusted and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work”—apparently hospital employees who regarded the experiment as too morbid. However, “at death the beam sunk so that it required from three-eighths to one-half ounce to bring it back to the point preceding death.”
    • With Subject 6, although MacDougall recorded the measurement at death, he rejected it since “the patient died almost within five minutes after being placed upon the bed and died while I was adjusting the beam.”

Fifteen trials were conducted with canine subjects. MacDougall reports:

The same experiments were carried out on fifteen dogs, surrounded by every precaution to obtain accuracy and the results were uniformly negative, no loss of weight at death.

 

Eliminating Naturalistic Explanations

MacDougall sought to account for conventional material substances released by the body—moisture in the form of respiration and perspiration, as well as evaporation from urine and feces.

He tracked a slow, steady loss of weight before death due to moisture loss through respiration and perspiration, so this could not be responsible for the sudden drops coincident with the moment of death.

His subjects did not suddenly expel 11-21 grams of moisture with their last breaths. Neither did they suddenly release this amount of perspiration, which would have remained in contact with their bodies and the bedclothes and only evaporate slowly, meaning it still would have been weighed by the scale.

MacDougall did not report the subjects experiencing bowel movements upon death, though if they had, the feces “would still have remained upon the bed except for a slow loss by the evaporation of moisture depending of course, upon the fluidity of the feces.”

He reported some subjects releasing urine upon death (due to the relaxation of the urinary sphincter), however, “the urine remained upon the bed and could not have evaporated enough through the thick bed clothing to have influenced the result.”

Having eliminated semi-solid and liquid substances released by the body, MacDougall sought to account for gas that could be suddenly released at death—i.e., air in the lungs.

Physics indicates this should not matter. At ground level, the Earth’s atmosphere is pressing downward on objects, including the scale, and it does not matter whether the air is in the subject’s lungs or above the chest. The scale should not be materially affected, which is what MacDougall found:

Getting upon the bed myself, my colleague put the beam at actual balance. Inspiration and expiration of air as forcibly as possible by me had no effect upon the beam. My colleague got upon the bed, and I placed the beam at balance. Forcible inspiration and expiration of air on his part had no effect.

 

Alternative Naturalistic Explanations

Alternative explanations for MacDougall’s results have been proposed. A selection is considered and critiqued by Masayoshi Ishida in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (vol. 24, no. 1), though what follows here are principally my own thoughts.

Since the human body begins to cool at death, could the loss of heat be responsible for the observed loss in weight—either directly or due to a change in air currents (as proposed by Len Fisher)?

Neither would be plausible. Heat is produced by the small-scale motion of atoms, and the fact these vibrate less after death does not change their weight. Only a large-scale removal of atoms from the bed would produce the observed readings.

Similarly, while convection currents caused by the heat of a living body might lightly press down on the bed—if such currents existed in these cases—they would not dissipate at the moment of death. The coldness of death—known as algor mortis—takes hours to occur and is frequently used to determine time of death in criminal investigations. There would be no sudden loss of weight.

What about heartbeat or breathing? These produce vibrations that could affect a scale, and they cease suddenly at death. However, they would cause a living, prone patient to slightly oscillate up and down on the bed, and if the scale were visibly at balance when the patient was alive then it should remain even more steadily (and likely sub-perceptually) at balance upon death. There would not be a sudden drop of 11-21 grams.

It could be proposed that there was something wrong with MacDougall’s scales, that the measurements he took were botched, or that he committed fraud. However, there does not appear to be evidence supporting these hypotheses.

 

Paranormal Speculations

Lacking a good naturalistic explanation for MacDougall’s results, it is reasonable to consider paranormal explanations. These can only be speculative due to the limited data his experiment returned. Replication and new types of experiments would be needed to test individual hypotheses.

The first possibility is MacDougall’s own conjecture—that the loss of weight may be due to the departure of the soul, conceived of as a space-filling entity capable of being weighed.

If so, the soul might be a very fine structure made of conventional matter/energy recognized by the Standard Model of particle physics. Alternately, it might be made of an undiscovered form of matter that interacts gravitationally.

Questions that might be asked are what would account for the variance in numbers MacDougall saw upon death, what was responsible for the additional weight loss in the second readings, and why there was no weight loss observed with dogs.

All the readings were within a factor of ~4 (11-46g), and the readings at the moment of death were within a factor of 2 (11-21g). Given the small sample size (4-6, depending on which are counted) and the sensitivity threshold of the scale (5.7 grams), these differences might simply be due to normal variation in taking measurements.

However, it also is possible that—just as some humans have heavier bodies—some humans have heavier souls.

If further experiments showed that the second, greater readings taken in two cases represent a real, second post-mortem weight loss, it might be proposed that there is more than one paranormal “thing” that detaches at death.

This idea may correspond to certain religious conceptions. In ancient Egypt, the human was thought to consist not only of the physical body but also several soul-like entities referred to as the ba, the ka, the shut, etc. Similarly, some Christians have understood humans as being tripartite, consisting of body, soul, and spirit. Even body/spirit dualists like John Duns Scotus have held that humans have multiple intangible “substantial forms” when alive.

Such claims, in light of MacDougall’s second readings, should alert us to the possibility that the death process may involve more than the departure of a single soul-like entity.

When it comes to dogs, MacDougall’s results would be equally consistent with the hypotheses that dogs do not have souls that survive death or that their souls produce results below the sensitivity threshold of the scale used (1.8g).

Attention should be paid to how MacDougall’s results might be explained if the soul is not spatially extended, as various philosophers have proposed. Why would the departure of such an entity result in an observed loss of weight?

It seems difficult to imagine a non-extended entity having intrinsic mass, but the soul could still interact with weighable matter. This would seem to be a form of PK, and two possibilities for the loss of weight spring to mind.

First, the soul would seem to have a tight psychokinetic association with the body during life, as illustrated by the ease of producing voluntary motions (e.g., lifting an arm) and the difficulty in psychokinetically moving objects outside the body. This tight association might not instantaneously vanish upon death. The soul might retain a PK “grip” on particles or atoms within the body, and as the soul detaches during the death process, enough of these might be pulled along with it to explain the loss of weight.

Second, there may be an explanation in line with the super-psi hypothesis that psychic functioning is part of people’s activity in their everyday environments. People use their bodies to steady themselves as they navigate their surroundings, resulting in them shifting their weight as they move body parts. They might use PK to assist this process. They might even continuously, psychokinetically cause their bodies to slightly sink down as part of steadying themselves in their environment, and if this PK ceased upon the departure of the soul, it could result in the observed loss of a number of grams.

In both this and the previous case, MacDougall’s variant readings might be explained by differences in the strength of the subjects’ PK. Depending on how the death process works from the soul’s perspective, it might also explain the larger, apparently postmortem readings he obtained in two cases—as the soul detached or the PK ceased functioning in stages.

 

Conclusion

MacDougall’s 1907 paper remains intriguing, and a good naturalistic explanation for his results has not been found.

Unfortunately, the small sample size he was able to achieve greatly limits the paper’s evidential value. MacDougall wanted to perform many more experiments with human subjects, but opposition to the project made this impossible.

Thus far, it appears no one has attempted to replicate his experiment with dying humans. However, there have been attempts to do so with animals. In 1907 the Los Angeles Herald reported on an animal replication effort by H. La Verne Twining, which produced mixed results.

Unfortunately, until human replications are attempted with substantially larger sample sizes—as well as modern measurement and control methods—MacDougall’s paper remains only a fascinating, suggestive study.

A New Approach to Sola Scriptura? Can It Be Saved by Changing Its Definition?

Sola scriptura is Latin for “by Scripture alone,” and it’s one of the key slogans of the Protestant Reformation.

I often explain it by saying that it’s the idea we need to produce Christian doctrine “by Scripture alone,” meaning—among other things—that every Christian doctrine must be explicitly or implicitly contained in the Bible.

This is how I understood it as an Evangelical, and this understanding seems confirmed by experience, as Catholics are regularly confronted by Protestant Christians with the question, “Where is that in the Bible?”—a demand to produce Scripture verses as proof of some particular Catholic belief or practice.

In recent decades, a common response by Catholic apologists is to turn this question around and say, “Where is sola scriptura in the Bible?” It’s then pointed out that, if every doctrine must be provable from the Bible, then sola scriptura also must be provable. If it isn’t, then it’s a self-refuting doctrine.

How can Protestants respond to this challenge? One approach is to point to verses that a Protestant thinks prove sola scriptura, but this has not been very successful. There are no verses that outright state the doctrine, and the arguments by implication are weak and unpersuasive.

 

A Narrower Definition

Another approach that I’ve seen in recent years involves what seems to be a redefinition of sola scriptura.

For example, in his book Scripture Alone, James White writes: “Sola scriptura literally means ‘Scripture alone.’ Unfortunately, this phrase tends to be taken in the vein of ‘Scripture in isolation, Scripture outside of the rest of God’s work in the church.’ That is not its intended meaning; again, it means ‘Scripture alone as the sole infallible rule of faith for the church’” (ch. 2).

The key part of that is the last bit: the idea that sola scriptura means that Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith.

This is a narrower understanding of the doctrine than the common one, and I’ve seen it suggested that this is the historic Protestant understanding, based on appeals to Protestant confessional documents like the 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith and the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith—both of which use exactly the same language in key passages to articulate their teaching on Scripture.

 

Why This Is Attractive

It’s easy to see why the narrower definition would be attractive. The less that is claimed for sola scriptura, the smaller an apologetic target it presents and the easier it will be to defend.

I’ve even seen it suggested (not by White but by others) that when it is understood in this narrow sense, sola scriptura does not need to be taught in Scripture.

And that creates a rhetorically attractive situation for a Protestant apologist. Instead of needing to produce verses of Scripture that state or imply sola scriptura, he can simply say, “Name another infallible rule of faith,” thus putting the burden of proof back on a Catholic.

A Protestant apologist can even concede that perhaps in the apostolic age there was an additional infallible rule of faith in the form of apostolic Tradition, but he can assert that we don’t have that today. Scripture is all we’ve got that’s infallible.

Despite its attractiveness, there are several problems with this approach.

 

Actually, We Have Three Such Rules

The first problem is that, even if we grant this understanding of sola scriptura, the argument is answerable.

A “rule of faith” is something that is authoritative for faith, and we have two infallible authorities for the Faith in addition to Scripture. Apostolic Tradition is an infallible source of information regarding it, and the Magisterium is an infallible interpretive authority.

A Protestant may not be convinced that we have these two authorities or that they are infallible, but it is nonetheless true, and so a Catholic can meet the challenge of naming additional infallible rules of faith.

Unfortunately, if he takes this approach, the discussion is likely to degenerate into quibbling about the accuracy of particular Traditions or magisterial acts, so it’s better to take a different approach, however sound this one is in principle.

 

Not as Historical as Claimed?

A second problem with the reduced definition is that it doesn’t seem to accurately reflect the historic Protestant view.

Not only does it not reflect the way sola scriptura is used in practice today, it also does not reflect what is written in historical explanations like those found in the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist Confession.

It is true that the London Baptist Confession says that “the Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience” (1:1).

This uses the words “only,” “infallible,” “rule,” “of,” and “faith”—and in that order—but it also uses other words, and one is particularly important: “sufficient.”

Sufficient for what? The answer provided in this passage is that Scripture is sufficient for “knowledge, faith, and obedience,” but this is not to be understood too expansively.

Nobody thinks that Scripture is sufficient to give you knowledge of geometry or engineering or medicine. The knowledge in question is what is required for Christian doctrine concerning faith and morals.

This is reflected later in the London Baptist Confession when it states that “the whole counsel of God concerning . . . faith and life is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture” (1:6).

The same is indicated in the Westminster Confession with almost identical phrasing, although the latter is a bit more explicit, saying that the whole of God’s counsel regarding faith and life “is either expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (1:6).

“The whole counsel of God” means everything that God has told (counselled) us—everything he wants us to know about “faith and life,” or “faith and morals” to put it in more Catholic terms.

So, we find that, in their teaching on Scripture, these confessions assert more than that the Bible is the only infallible authority for Christian faith. They also say that it is sufficient in that it contains—either expressly or by implication—everything God has revealed to us concerning doctrine on faith and morals.

This raises serious questions about whether it’s accurate to characterize the historic Protestant understanding of sola scriptura as being limited to the idea that Scripture is our sole infallible rule of faith. It appears that the historic sources also indicate it’s a sufficient rule for Christian doctrine.

 

Shifting Definitions?

A fourth problem I’ve noticed about the restricted definition of sola scriptura is that it isn’t used consistently.

In Scripture Alone, after offering the narrow definition of the term, White goes on to say that “the corollary of sola scriptura is that all a person must believe to be a follower of Christ is found in Scripture and in no other source” (his emphasis).

That’s a clear statement of the sufficiency of Scripture, and here White presents it as a corollary of sola scriptura, though it’s not—at least under the dictionary definitions of a corollary as “a proposition inferred immediately from a proved proposition with little or no additional proof” or “something that naturally follows” (Merriam-Webster.com).

Even if Scripture were our sole infallible source of authoritative information about the Faith, that doesn’t require it to contain everything God wants us to know.

It would be possible for God to give us other authoritative, accurate information about doctrines he wants us to know and believe—even if this information is not contained in an infallible collection like Scripture.

What’s significant is that, instead of simply defending sola scriptura on its own, White feels the need to link it to the doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency.

The reason for that is clear: Scripture’s sufficiency is important for Protestant theology. Among other things, you wouldn’t be able to ask questions like “Where’s that in the Bible?” as a demand for scriptural proof of a doctrine if there were no claim that Scripture states or implies all of Christian doctrine.

While White seems to keep sola scriptura and the sufficiency of Scripture distinct here, other authors are not as particular.

My observation has been that when they are on the defensive in a discussion—when scriptural proof is asked for sola scriptura—they use the narrow definition.

But in other circumstances—when they are on the offensive and questioning Catholics about some matter—they use sola scriptura more expansively, as if it includes the idea of sufficiency.

It’s as if the understanding they have of sola scriptura conveniently shifts depending on the context, and it’s fair to point this out in a discussion and ask for an explanation.

 

It Doesn’t Matter

This brings us to a fifth problem with the narrow definition, which is that it doesn’t really matter whether a person uses it consistently or not—as long as he also believes in the sufficiency of Scripture.

I could imagine a Protestant saying, “When I refer to sola scriptura, all I ever mean by the term is that Scripture is our sole infallible rule of faith. That doesn’t stop me from also appealing to the sufficiency of Scripture to grill you about your Catholic beliefs.”

And that’s fine. I would challenge the idea that other Protestants commonly understand sola scriptura the as narrowly as he does, but that doesn’t prevent him from using the term in an idiosyncratic fashion.

As Humpty Dumpty says in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

In philosophy, that’s known as a stipulative definition—a meaning that you stipulate a term to have, whether other people use it that way or not. And that can be okay as long as you realize that’s what’s happening.

But it won’t save sola scriptura.

 

Sola Scriptura vs. Sufficiency

If you restrict the definition of sola scriptura to the claim that Scripture is our only infallible rule of faith, and if you believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, then you’re still going to need to be able to prove sola scriptura from Scripture alone.

You’re going to need to find the idea that the Bible is our only infallible rule of faith–as the London Baptist Confession put it–“expressly set down or necessarily contained” in Scripture.

Or you’ll need to be able to show that this claim “is either expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture,” as the Westminster Confession puts it.

How on earth can you do that? There are no passages in the Bible that expressly say, “The Bible is our only infallible rule of faith.” Neither are there passages that allow you to deduce this so that it is “necessarily contained” in Scripture.

Indeed, the argument that is usually envisioned is historical rather than scriptural, with Protestants seeking to poke holes in various post-biblical patristic and magisterial texts in an effort to show that only Scripture must be infallible.

But that won’t do if Scripture is sufficient. You’re going to need to find verses that state or imply Scripture is the only infallible source for Christians—at least in the post-apostolic age.

 

Sufficiency vs. Sufficiency

The problem is actually worse, because you’ll also need to find verses that state or imply that Scripture is sufficient—that it contains all doctrine regarding faith and morals.

There is simply no way to do this. Not only are there no verses that say this outright, there also are no verses that imply it.

Putting yourself in the position of a first century Christian will make this clear. In the first century, much of Christian doctrine was passed on in the form of oral Tradition rather than Scripture (1 Cor. 11:2; 2 Thess. 2:15, 3:6), for the simple reason that much of it had not yet been written down.

But to show that Scripture is sufficient today, you’ll either need to find passages that say or imply that all such doctrinal traditions will be written down by the end of the apostolic age or that they will lose their authority after the apostolic age, leaving Scripture as sufficient for Christian doctrine today.

There are no passages that say or imply anything close to this. Indeed, the New Testament authors tended to assume that they would be alive at the Second Coming (“we who are alive, who are left”; 1 Thess. 4:17), meaning that they weren’t envisioning a post-apostolic age.

Eventually, Paul and Peter became aware that they would die (2 Tim. 4:6-8, 2 Pet. 1:14-15), but that didn’t mean all the apostles would be dead by the time Jesus came back.

The only passage in the New Testament that unambiguously envisions a long period of time before the end is John’s discussion of the millennium (Rev. 20:1-10), and this passage says nothing about all apostolic Traditions eventually being written in Scripture or anything about them losing their authority.

As a result, the doctrine of scriptural sufficiency refutes itself. Scripture is not sufficient to teach its own sufficiency.

So, whether or not the doctrine of sufficiency is included in the definition of sola scriptura or not, the doctrine falls. Sufficiency means that Scripture must teach both that Scripture is our only infallible rule of faith and that it is sufficient for Christian doctrine.

It teaches neither, so both are refuted.

Catholic Teaching and the Kalaam Argument

While the Catholic Church holds that it is possible to prove the existence of God, it does not have teachings on specific versions of arguments for God’s existence and whether or not they work.

As a result, it does not have a teaching on the Kalaam cosmological argument, and Catholics are free to use it or not, depending on whether they think it works.

 

Catholic Liberty

Historically, major Catholic thinkers have taken different positions on the issue. St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) thought that the argument is successful, while his contemporary St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) famously thought that it does not.

Both of these men have been declared doctors of the Church, meaning that they are among the best, most highly honored theologians.

A key premise of the Kalaam argument is that the universe has a beginning, which is certainly true. The question is how we can show this to a person who doesn’t already believe it.

Back in the 1200s, modern science had not yet been developed, and this premise had to be defended on purely philosophical grounds. On that score, I think St. Thomas Aquinas was right, and the philosophical arguments that have been proposed to show that the universe must have a finite history do not work.

However, in the 20th century the Big Bang was discovered, and current cosmology is consistent with the idea of the universe having a beginning. As a result, I think a properly qualified version of the Kalaam argument can be used, based on modern science.

 

Catholic Limits

While Catholic teaching allows great liberty when it comes to apologetic arguments, there are limits.

These limits are established by other teachings of the Church, and Catholic apologists need to be aware of them.

When it comes to the Kalaam argument, this is important because not all of the versions of it in circulation rely on assumptions consistent with Catholic teaching.

In particular, the foremost proponent of the Kalaam argument today—William Lane Craig—articulates it using concepts that clash with Catholic teaching, and Catholics who wish to use it need to be aware of this so that they can do the necessary filtering.

Specifically: Craig (who is not Catholic) holds that God is not eternal in the sense that the Church understands.

He does hold that God has always existed and that God would exist if the world (including time) had never come into being. However, he holds that due to the creation of the world, God exists inside of time rather than outside of it.

 

Eternity and Catholic Teaching

The classic definition of eternity was given by the Christian philosopher Boethius (c. 480-c. 525). He defined eternity this way:

Eternity, then, is the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of everlasting [Latin, interminabilis = “interminable,” “unending”] life; this will be clear from a comparison with creatures that exist in time (The Consolation of Philosophy, 5:6, emphasis added).

Eternity, then, is “the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of unending life.” It is something possessed by God and not possessed by creatures that exist in time. We may be everlasting—and we will be, for God will give us endless life—but God is fundamentally outside of time.

Boethius’s definition became standard in Catholic thought, and it was the definition in use when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council taught:

Firmly we believe and we confess simply that the true God is one alone, eternal, immense, and unchangeable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, and ineffable (DS 800).

The same definition was standard when in 1870 the First Vatican Council taught:

The Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church believes and acknowledges that there is one true and living God, creator and lord of heaven and earth, almighty, eternal, immeasurable, incomprehensible, infinite in will, understanding and every perfection (Dei Filius, 1:1; DS 3001).

St. John Paul II made the implications of this more explicit when he taught:

These facts of revelation also express the rational conviction to which one comes when one considers that God is the subsisting Being, and therefore necessary, and therefore eternal.

Because he cannot not be, he cannot have beginning or end nor a succession of moments in the only and infinite act of his existence.

Right reason and revelation wonderfully converge on this point.

Being God, absolute fullness of being, (ipsum Esse subsistens), his eternity “inscribed in the terminology of being” must be understood as the “indivisible, perfect, and simultaneous possession of an unending life,” and therefore as the attribute of being absolutely “beyond time” (General Audience, Sept. 4, 1985).

Catholic teaching thus holds that God is eternal in the sense of being “absolutely beyond time” and that for him there is no “succession of moments in the only and infinite act of his existence.”

Everything God knows, he knows at once, and everything God does, he does at once. He doesn’t learn something, wait a little while, and then learn something new. Neither does he do something, wait a little while, and then do something new. His knowledge and his actions are all timeless and simultaneous.

 

Implications for Time

The fact that God is outside of time has implications for how we view time itself. Two key concepts we need to understand are called eternalism and presentism.

    • Eternalism is the view that the past, present, and future are all real from the ultimate perspective—that is, the perspective of God in eternity.
    • Presentism can be understood different ways, but here we will be concerned with what can be called “strict presentism,” which means that from the ultimate perspective, only the present is real. The past and the future do not exist at all.

If God is eternal, it is very difficult to see how presentism can be true. In fact, I would say that the ideas of divine eternity and strict presentism are mutually exclusive.

The reason is that, as John Paul II stated, there is no “succession of moments” for God. The “eternal now” in which God dwells constitutes “the only and infinite act of his existence.”

This means that everything that God does, he does simultaneously, and that includes creating all the different moments in time that we inhabit.

Thus, in his timeless, eternal now, God is simultaneously creating the stretch of time that we call 2021 . . . and the stretch of time we call 2022 . . . and 2023 . . . and so on.

But if God creates something, it is real from his perspective, and so 2021 is just as real to God as 2022 and 2023 and every other year in the history of the universe.

For God, our past, present, and future are equally real, and that implies eternalism.

 

Catholic Presentism?

There are Catholic thinkers who refer to themselves as presentists, but I am not aware of any who hold the strict presentism.

The response I’ve received when pointing out the fact that God must be eternally and simultaneously creating all the moments in history has been to the effect of:

Yes, of course, from God’s perspective, all of history must be real.

What I want to emphasize by speaking of presentism is that from our perspective in time the past is no longer real, and the future is not yet real. The passage of time is not an illusion.

And I agree with that. The passage of time is not an illusion. We are clearly moving through time, and if you take time as your frame of reference rather than eternity, the past and the future aren’t real, but the present is.

If these points are agreed to, whether one wants to call one’s position eternalism (viewing things from God’s eternal frame of reference) or presentism (viewing them from our temporal frame of reference) may be more a matter of semantics than substance.

But this Catholic presentism is not the same as the strict presentism described above, because that view holds that the past and the future are not just unreal from our perspective, but from God’s too. They simply don’t exist at all.

The eternalist (or Catholic presentist position we’ve described) has implications for the Kalaam argument. In particular, it has implications for two of the premises in Craig’s key arguments.

 

Actual Infinities

One of Craig’s key arguments goes like this:

1) An actually infinite number of things cannot exist.

2) A beginningless series of events in time entails an actually infinite number of things.

3) Therefore, a beginningless series of events in time cannot exist.

Here the problematic premise is the first.

The Christian faith holds that God will give us endless life in the future. We will not pass out of existence either at our death or at any point thereafter.

Viewed from within time, this endless existence is a potential infinite—meaning that we will experience an unlimited number of days, but those days don’t all exist at the same time.

However, from God’s perspective outside of time, they do all exist, because God is simultaneously creating each one of them, making them real from his perspective.

As a result, there are an actually infinite number of days from God’s perspective, and so actual infinities can exist in that frame of reference.

This means that the first premise of the argument is false from this perspective, and that fact undermines its conclusion.

On eternalism, the Christian faith implies that an actual infinity of future days does exist, and that implies that an actual infinity of past days can exist.

Speaking from our perspective inside time, this past infinity of days wouldn’t all exist at once—meaning they’re not an actual infinity from our perspective any more than the infinity of future days ahead of us is.

In fact, this corresponds to the view of Aristotle (who pioneered the concept of non-actual infinities). He held that the world had existed endlessly into the past, but this wasn’t a problem because all those days didn’t exist at the same time, making them a non-actual infinity.

 

Forming an Infinite by Successive Addition

Craig’s other key argument goes like this:

1) The series of events in time is a collection formed by adding one member after another.

2) A collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite.

3) Therefore, the series of events in time cannot be actually infinite.

Here, again, the problematic premise is the first.

(Actually, the second premise also either involves a fallacy or is just false, but we’ll focus on the first one here.)

While it may be true that, from a perspective inside time, events grow in number by adding one new event after another, this isn’t true from God’s perspective.

On Christian eternalism, God exists in a single, timeless moment and does all of his creating activity simultaneously.

He thus is not creating the different years of history in a one-after-the-other fashion. He creates all of them at once, including the infinite years of life ahead of us. From the eternal perspective, Flash! An infinity of future years exists.

And so, the first premise would be false.

 

Craig’s Position

Craig appears sensitive to these considerations, and thus he is a strong advocate of strict presentism—to the point that he is willing to say that, since the creation of time, God has a temporal mode of existence.

I think this is something he would have to do, because if the present is the only thing that exist, it would force changes in God’s knowledge.

For example, at one moment, God would know “It is currently 12:00 p.m.,” but then a minute later he would know “It is currently 12:01 p.m.” This is because God knows whatever is true, and if only the present is real then what is true changes from moment to moment.

God’s knowledge thus would have to change to keep up with changing reality, and so God would be changeable rather than changeless, and thus subject to time.

The alternative would be to say that, from his perspective outside of time, God knows things like “At point X in time, it is 12:00 p.m. and at point Y in time, it is 12:01 p.m.” This allows God to know both facts about time simultaneously, in a changeless manner that preserves his eternity.

These two ways of looking at things are often framed in philosophical discussions in terms of the “A-theory of time” and the “B-theory of time.” Without getting into the weeds, the A-theory is associated with (but not the same thing as) presentism, while the B-theory is associated with eternalism.

Also important to the discussion is the distinction between “tensed propositions,” which change their truth value over time (e.g., “It is now 12:00 p.m.”) and “tenseless propositions,” which do not (e.g., “At point X in time, it is 12:00 p.m.”).

Tensed propositions are important for the A-theory (also called the “tensed theory of time”) and presentism, while a tenseless understanding is important for the B-theory (or “tenseless theory of time”) and eternalism.

If you read Craig’s works and watch his presentations, he frequently appeals to tensed propositions, the A-theory, and presentism in order to defend his philosophical arguments for the universe having a beginning.

They are key to his presentation. In fact, he has said that he thinks that the importance of the tensed theory of time for the Kalaam argument cannot be overstated.

He’s also acknowledged that if the B-theory of time or an atemporal understanding is true, it would damage to his presentations. He would abandon the argument from successive addition (as we noted should be done, above) and that he would have to reformulate defenses of other aspects of the argument, though the scientific evidence points to the universe having a beginning.

 

Implications for Catholic Apologists

In light of what we’ve seen, Catholic apologists need to be aware that they cannot simply take Craig’s presentations of the Kalaam argument and make them their own, repeating them as if they were all consistent with Catholic teaching.

Instead, they need to use critical thinking to sort the elements that are from the elements that aren’t.

In particular, they need to be aware that the Church disagrees with Craig when it comes to God having a temporal mode of existence and having knowledge that changes (as with tensed propositions and the A-theory of time).

For a Catholic, his arguments dealing with the A-theory and tensed propositions need serious revision or abandonment.

Similarly, if God creates all the moments of time simultaneously from the perspective of his eternal now, it has implications for the past and the future, as well as the present, being real.

This undermines the premises of the two key philosophical arguments Craig makes for a finite history (i.e., that actual infinities cannot exist and that the events in time are formed by successive addition from God’s perspective).

While Catholic teaching has serious implications for the kind of arguments that can be used in support of the overall Kalaam argument, and while careful discernment is needed on this point, I agree that the argument is still sound.

I disagree with Craig that the philosophical arguments for the universe having a beginning work, but I agree with him that the scientific evidence does point in this direction, and so I ultimately agree with him that a reformulated version of the argument can be used.

How Not to Fight About Words

In his final letter, St. Paul gives Timothy an important exhortation for those under his pastoral care:

Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers (2 Tim. 2:14).

In his previous letter, Paul gives an even more strongly worded warning:

If anyone . . . does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing; he has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among men who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth (1 Tim. 6:3-5)

As you can see, Paul is not a fan of fights about words.

Yet Paul’s letters are filled with arguments about various issues. How can we square these two facts?

The basic resolution is that Paul cares about substance—that is, what a person believes—and he’s willing to argue about that. But he doesn’t want to argue about expression—that is, how a person phrases his beliefs. Paul is concerned about substance rather than style. As long as the substance of what a person believes is correct, Paul doesn’t want to quibble about how expresses himself.

I’m sure there would have been limits to this. I can imagine situations where Paul would have thought a person was expressing a true thought in a manner that was so misleading that he would have considered it worth discussing.

However, the principle remains: We shouldn’t be quarreling about words in the Christian community. We should recognize that a true belief can be expressed in more than one way, and the mode of expression is not what we should be concerned about.

This is especially true in discussions among different groups of Christians. Because language naturally changes over time, it is only to be expected that different Christians will develop their own ways of using language and their own nuances for terms.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of arguing about words in the Christian community today, and a good bit of it comes from not recognizing how flexible language can be.

People have a natural tendency to assume that words are just meant to be used the way they use them, and if somebody is using them differently, that person must be wrong.

So, let’s look at how some terms have changed over time, and see what conclusions we can draw.

We may learn something about how not to fight about words.

 

Words that Change Meaning in the Bible over Time

Though it may be surprising, there are terms that shift in their meaning even during biblical history.

That’s what you’d expect, since the Scriptures were written over a period of about 1,100 years, and nobody should expect a community’s mode of expression to stay static over that length of time. (Just look at how English has changed since the year 800!)

The matter is complicated by the fact that, not only did terms change meanings over this period, but the language itself shifted, with God’s people first speaking Hebrew, then Aramaic, and then Greek.

Nevertheless, we can track changes in meaning across biblical vocabulary:

Salvation: The basic meaning of this term is “to rescue” or “to make safe,” but there is a dramatic shift in how it is used between the Old and the New Testaments.

In the Old Testament, salvation is connected almost exclusively with being rescued from temporal dangers—ones we encounter in this life, like war, defeat, famine, plague, or death.

However, in the New Testament, the focus has shifted from this life to the next, and the salvation that is primarily under discussion is being rescued from the consequences of sin so that we can share eternal life with God.

One way of expressing this is that the Old Testament is principally concerned with “temporal” salvation, while the New Testament is principally concerned with “eternal” salvation.

Forgiveness: A corresponding shift is the way forgiveness of sin is understood.

In the Old Testament, being forgiven of a sin principally means not being punished—or fully punished—for it in this life. In particular, it means not dying as a result of the sin.

Thus, when David repents of having brought about the death of Uriah the Hittite, we read:

Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against Yahweh!”

Nathan said to David, “Yahweh has also forgiven your sin; you shall not die. But because you have utterly scorned Yahweh in this matter, the son born for you will certainly die” (2 Sam. 12:13-14, LEB).

David had been forgiven in that he would not die, but that doesn’t mean he would escape all punishment. He would be forced to witness the death of his son.

Notice that both of these penalties—David’s death and the death of his son—are temporal rather than eternal.

By contrast, when forgiveness is discussed in the New Testament, it is principally in connection with being forgiven the eternal consequences of our sins, so that we can be eternally saved.

 

Words that Change Meaning in Different Biblical Passages

Even within a single time period, words can be used in different senses in different biblical passages.

Faith/Belief: A classic example is the term “faith” or “belief” (Greek, pistis). In many New Testament passages, this concept involves trust in God. Thus, when Jesus has rebuked the wind and the waves, he turns to the disciples and says, ““Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” (Mark 4:40).

However, a different sense of the term is on display in James, who informs us that “Even the demons believe—and shudder” (Jas. 2:19). Here “faith” is understood as a purely intellectual one. Demons know the truths of Christian doctrine, but they lack the more robust faith that involves trust in God.

Still a third usage is found in St. Paul, where he says, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). Here we have faith formed by love (Latin, fides formata caritate), which combines intellectual assent, trust, and charity—the three theological virtues (1 Cor. 13:7).

 

Words that Change Meaning Between the Bible and the Fathers

Of course, language did not stop developing with the close of the apostolic era, and so we find terms continuing to change in meaning:

Witness/Martyr: The Greek term martus originally meant “witness,” and in this sense we find St. Paul writing:

For God . . . is my witness [martus], how constantly I make mention of you, always asking in my prayers if somehow now at last I may succeed to come to you in the will of God (Rom. 1:9-10).

However, this term came to be associated with those who served as witnesses to the truth of the Faith by giving their lives for it and so being “martyred.”

Following the age of persecutions in the early Church, the term became so associated with being killed for the Faith that people who were not killed became known by other terms, such as “confessors” (those who confessed the Faith under persecution, even though they were not killed).

Today, a popular Christian audience would never understand the term martyr to refer simply to a person who bore witness to something.

Sacrament: The term sacrament (Greek, musterion, Latin, sacramentum) originally meant “secret” or “mystery,” and it occurs in this sense in the New Testament, as when Jesus tells the disciples, “To you has been granted the secret of the kingdom of God, but to those who are outside everything is in parables” (Mark 4:11).

However, in the era of the Church Fathers, the term came much more to be associated with various rites of the Christian faith, such as baptism and the Eucharist.

Eventually, this usage came to predominate, and today nobody would know what you meant if you translated Jesus as saying, “To you has been given the sacrament of the kingdom of God.”

 

Words that Change Meaning Between the Fathers and the Scholastics

The Middle Ages also saw shifts in terminology that had been present earlier in the tradition:

Anathema: Though this term is found in the Greek New Testament (Gal. 1:8-9) and even has roots in the Old Testament, it shifted meaning over time, and by the Middle Ages it had come to refer to a special form of excommunication.

This form had to be performed by a bishop, who imposed it with a special ceremony. (There was a parallel ceremony for lifting the anathema once the offender had repented—which was a key goal of excommunicating him, to prompt him to repent of sin and come back to God.)

Unfortunately, knowledge of this meaning has been lost in many circles, leading to enormous confusion about the meaning of the phrase anathema sit (Latin, “let him be anathema”) in Church documents.

For example, many in the Protestant community understand anathema to mean something like “damned by God,” and take anathemas to be something that takes effect automatically and is pronounced upon all Protestants.

None of these things are true. In ecclesiastical usage, anathema referred to a special, ceremonial form of excommunication. Because it involved a ceremony, it did not take place automatically, and it was not applied to non-Catholics. Eventually, it was abolished, and it no longer exists in current canon law.

Elect/Chosen: By the Middle Ages, the term elect came to be used for a specific group of people—those who will be saved on the Last Day.

This meaning has been inherited by most contemporary doctrinal traditions, including both Catholic and Protestant ones.

However, this is not how the term is used in the Bible or the earliest Church Fathers—as I document in a study I did of this question. Instead, the primary meaning of elect was being chosen to have a special, intimate relationship with God, but not one that implied salvation on the Last Day.

The model was Israel’s status as God’s “elect” or “chosen people,” which implied a special relationship between them and God but not the final salvation of every single Israelite.

 

Words that Change Meaning Among Doctrinal Traditions

The fragmentation of Christendom into different doctrinal traditions—especially the fragmentation that occurred following the Protestant Reformation—has led to further developments in how terminology is used:

Law and Gospel: For example, while Law and Gospel are important concepts in the Bible, they have taken on unique usages in the Lutheran tradition. Thus, the Lutheran Book of Concord states:

Anything that preaches concerning our sins and God’s wrath, let it be done how or when it will, that is all a preaching of the Law. Again, the Gospel is such a preaching as shows and gives nothing else than grace and forgiveness in Christ.

It is certainly possible to go through the Bible and identify passages which speak of sin and divine wrath and compare them to passages that speak of grace and forgiveness in Christ, but these are not the primary ways that the biblical authors use the terms law and gospel. They are distinctively Lutheran usages.

In the Bible, the primary conceptualizations of law are either as divine principles given to guide human conduct or, specifically, the Law of Moses (Gen.-Deut.). Similarly, the principal focus of the gospel is God and his actions through his Son, especially Christ’s death and resurrection.

While law is related to sin and wrath, and while the gospel is related to grace and forgiveness, Lutheran theology has developed its own uses for these categories that do not map directly onto the thought worlds of the biblical authors.

Justification: A notable difference has developed in how the term justification is often understood in Protestant and Catholic communities.

The Catholic community uses justification to refer to “not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man” (CCC 1989). It also uses the term justify to mean “to cleanse us from our sins and to communicate to us the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ” (CCC 1987).

Two elements are thus found in the Catholic use of justification:

1. The remission of sins/being cleansed from sins

2. Inward sanctification/renewal/reception of righteousness from God

For the most part, the Protestant tradition has focused on justification as involving the first of these (with a corresponding understanding of justification as the impartation of legal righteousness), but not the second.

Instead, Protestant schools frequently refer to the inward renewal of the Christian using a second term: sanctification.

 

Words that Change Meaning Among Theological Traditions

Even within a given doctrinal tradition, different theological schools develop their own nuances for terms:

Regeneration/New Birth: For example, in Protestantism the term regeneration has taken on several meanings.

In Calvinist circles, regeneration is used to refer to a transformative reception of grace that occurs prior to the expression of personal faith and which makes explicit personal faith possible.

In Lutheran circles, regeneration is used to refer to a transformative reception of grace that occurs in baptism, regardless of whether explicit personal faith is present.

In Baptist circles, regeneration is used to refer to a transformative reception of grace that occurs when a person makes an explicit act of personal faith.

Predestination: Similarly, in both Protestant and Catholic circles the term predestination is understood in different ways among different theological schools.

Thus, in the Protestant tradition, Calvinists understand predestination differently than Arminians.

And in Catholic circles, Thomists understand it differently than Molinists.

 

Some Conclusions

Having gotten a sense of the ways religious terms change across time, what conclusions can we draw?

Principally, we’ve seen that there is no single way to use terms, which is the fundamental reason for Paul’s dictum not to engage in word fights.

The Bible itself shows different usages, both across times and by different authors living in the same time.

Given this diversity in Scripture itself, we should not expect doctrinal vocabulary to be frozen at any given moment in history.

What is normative is the fundamental doctrinal substance of the Faith, which was frozen with the end of public revelation at the conclusion of the apostolic age.

Even then, that fundamental content remained to be meditated upon and further elaborated, with its implications being fleshed out through the process of doctrinal development (which any accurate understanding of the history of Christian doctrine and theology must recognize).

But what are we do to about the different usages that have grown up in the Christian community?

Lest confusion result, each communion should in general retain the usages that have developed within it, though even these are not frozen and are subject to further development with time.

For the sake of accurately understanding of the Bible, of history, and of each other, there also should be an awareness of the way terms have shifted and continue to shift.

  • Exegetes need to be aware of how terminology is used in the Bible and how to translate it into the vocabulary of their own traditions—without forcing their tradition’s meanings back onto the biblical text.
  • Patristic scholars need to do the same thing with respect to texts from the Church Fathers.
  • Historians of doctrine and theology need to do it with the historical texts they study.
  • And Christians in dialogue among different doctrinal and theological traditions need to be able to do it across the biblical, historical, and contemporary texts.

Part of learning how not to fight about words is learning to translate between these vocabularies.

For example, when it comes to the terms like justify and justification, we should not suppose that there is only a single way that these can be used—or that Scripture uses them in only one sense (it does not; Scripture has multiple uses for them).

Instead, we should be able to explain how our tradition uses the term and what we mean by it—and be prepared to explain the basis for what we believe.

Catholics and Protestants typically believe in both the forgiveness of sins with an accompanying legal status of being righteous—and a renewal of the inner man by God’s grace.

We do not need to be divided by the terminological issue of whether our community uses justification to refer to just the first of these or to both, as long as we agree on the substance—the fact that both occur.

When it comes to the biblical texts, we need to be prepared to recognize that Scripture may or may not use terms the way that they have developed in our communities. We should not force our doctrinal or theological uses back onto the text.

Instead, we should seek to determine—as best we can—what the biblical authors meant, regardless of whether it corresponds to later uses.

Sometimes, it will. The different uses of faith that are emphasized in different schools today are all found in Scripture. But the conventional meaning of the term elect is not.

It is good—to the extent possible over time—to steer our vocabularies so that they correspond to the way terms are used in Scripture, but language change requires time and cannot be suddenly imposed without causing tremendous confusion and dissension.

Such dissension is precisely what St. Paul sought to avoid by prohibiting quarrels about words. As long as we agree in substance, precisely how we express that substance is a secondary matter, and—even if we think another school is departing from the language of Scripture in how they express themselves and it would be better if they didn’t—we should still be able to recognize it when they are correct in substance.

The Burden of Proof

The burden of proof is one of the more abused concepts in apologetics today. Apologetics discussions are filled with arguing about the burden of proof, whether it has been met, and—most importantly—who has it.

The Internet is buzzing with such apologetics discussions right now. Yet many of these discussions—particularly concerning who has the burden of proof—are a complete waste of time.

There is a simple rule to tell you who has the burden of proof in a discussion. Unfortunately, most who get into disputes over which side has the burden of proof don’t know what this rule is, and an enormous amount of time is wasted on trying to figure it out.

Burden of Proof in Law and Debate
Most people are familiar with the concept from the legal principle that someone on trial in the United States is “presumed innocent until proven guilty.” The burden of proof is the requirement that the prosecution must meet in overcoming the presumption of innocence.

The burden of proof is a concept also employed in debating, where the standard principle is that the side that “takes the affirmative” must shoulder the burden of proof. In other words, the side in a formal debate that argues that you should believe or do something must produce reasons why.

As a result, the burden of proof changes depending on how you phrase the resolution. To use an X-Files analogy, “Resolved: Aliens exist” will place the burden of proof on Agent Mulder; “Resolved: Aliens do not exist” will place it on Agent Scully. The burden falls to whichever debater agrees with the resolution.

This situation would be much more complicated if the opposing debaters were expected to both knock down the affirmative team’s arguments and prove an alternative position. For example, if folks were debating the resolution “Christianity is the true religion,” it could get quite muddled if those taking a negative position were expected to both knock down the Christian arguments and prove the truth of a different religion.

That kind of muddle is judged too much for the kind of formal debating that high school and college debate teams engage in. But it is precisely the kind of muddle found in apologetics.

Burden of Proof in Apologetics
Apologetics discussions are frequently like formal debates without the formal part. In other words, debating without the rules.

If one group in a discussion accepts (or can be made to accept) the burden of proof, then the outcome of the discussion can be more easily ascertained. If you are not part of the group that has the burden, then in theory your job is easy: You simply have to knock holes in the other side’s arguments. If you succeed in doing so, you win, and your opponent must acknowledge that he was wrong and convert to your viewpoint.

If only it were so easy.

In a debate, who has the burden of proof is arbitrary. It depends on how the resolution is phrased. But in a trial, it is clear who shoulders the burden: the prosecution. Horrendous social consequences would result if the reverse were true. Human experience has shown that tyranny would result if people in court were presumed guilty.

The courts, therefore, have a rational reason for placing the burden of proof on one side rather than the other. But what about apologetics discussions? Do they have a rational way to set the burden of proof with a particular side?

It would be nice if they did. To place the burden of proof on your opponent in such a discussion would make it easy for you. As a result, many apologists, regardless of the issue, seek to lay the burden on their opponents and, when challenged, try to come up with rational reasons for this.

Most of the reasons that you hear are lousy.

Atheism and the Burden of Proof
Take the case of atheists debating the existence of God. They will commonly assert that theists rather than atheists must bear the burden of proof, that it is they who must show reasons that God exists, not the atheists who must show reasons that he does not.

They might justify this claim by saying that theists should bear the burden of proof because everyone who has a belief—regardless of what the belief is—should have a reason for it. This argument has some appeal. There seems to be a basic human intuition that we ought to have reasons for our beliefs.

But it is a lousy argument for showing that theists rather than atheists should have the burden of proof. The atheist also has a belief (namely, “God does not exist” or “There are no gods”), and he too should have a reason for his belief. The atheist should share the burden of proof to the same extent as the theist.

Some atheists have asserted that the burden of proof is on the theist because he asserts something positive—namely, the existence of God. The atheist, by contrast, asserts something negative: the non-existence of God. It is “positive beliefs,” this argument goes, that require one to shoulder the burden of proof.

But why should this be so?

After all, they are logically equivalent. “X exists” and “X does not exist” are convertible. Negate them and they switch places. They can be plugged into the same logical formulas.

Let me give a more concrete example: Why should the claim “I have a brother” be held to a higher standard of proof than the claim “I do not have a brother”? Surely, if I make either claim I should have a reason for it. But isn’t the memory that I did grow up with a brother on the same footing evidentially as the memory that I did not grow up with one? Wouldn’t the fact that a brother is listed in the birth records for my family be on the same level as the fact that one is not listed in them? Why should a claim of existence require more evidence than a claim of nonexistence?

The evidence used to argue the existence or nonexistence of a brother is the same: my own memory, the testimony of relatives and family friends, what is recorded in birth and medical records. What this evidence says should settle the matter. I don’t have to produce any extra evidence to argue that a brother exists than to argue that one does not.

Sometimes to defend the claim that they should not have the burden of proof, atheists appeal to a concept known as “the universal negative.” A universal negative is a claim that nothing of a particular sort exists. For example, “There are no unicorns” or “There is no present king of France.”

The argument is that no one should be asked to prove a universal negative because it is impossible to do so, and nobody can be required to do the impossible.

To prove a universal negative, one would have to have knowledge of the entire universe so that one could verify that the thing in question does not exist, and nowhere in the universe is a unicorn and nowhere in the universe today is a man who is the king of France.

This argument is unfair because it raises the burden of proof to a new level. No longer does it concern providing reasons for believing that the thing in question exists. It now requires universe-spanning, exhaustive proof of it. This is an important distinction.

It is easy to provide reasons that one should not believe in unicorns (e.g., they are claimed to be corporeal beings but you have never seen one with your own eyes; you can’t find photos of them in biology textbooks; biologists don’t hold them to exist; most people regard them as fictitious). It is another thing to scan all of creation and prove the point in exhaustive detail.

Similarly, one could ask the atheist to produce other reasons to think that God does not exist (e.g., most people believe God to be a fiction; there seem to be logical contradictions in the idea of God; there is an absence of any evidence of miracles in history; the universe does not appear to show traces of intelligent design). The atheist doesn’t have to scan the universe in exhaustive detail to offer such reasons. He simply has to appeal to the evidence at hand, and if the evidence at hand doesn’t allow him to make such claims, then it doesn’t offer us reasons to disbelieve in God.

Ultimately, the appeal to “universal negatives” doesn’t work, because in an ordinary discussion people don’t expect their opponents to prove their beliefs by scanning the whole universe. All they want them to do is look at the evidence that is available and make an assessment based on that.

Protestantism and the Burden of Proof
Trying to shift the burden of proof to one’s opponents is a tactic not limited to atheists. Protestant apologists also try it, and on a wide variety of subjects. One of these is the principle of sola scriptura—that we should form our theology “by Scripture alone.”

An argument that is sometimes used to defend this principle is reminiscent of the atheist’s “universal negative” argument: “I shouldn’t be asked to prove that we should do theology by Scripture alone because to show this I would have to prove a universal negative, and nobody can do that. I can’t scan the universe and show that there is no other source we should do theology by, so I’m entitled to conclude that there is not.”

This argument fails for the same reason that the atheist’s argument does: Nobody is being asked to scan the universe. All one has to do is look at the evidence at hand and see whether it indicates that we should do theology by Scripture alone.

What does the evidence at hand include? This is something we could argue about. In fact, it would be interesting to argue about the criteria by which we can know that something is a source to be used in theology. Nevertheless, in the Catholic-Protestant controversy it at least could be agreed upon that Scripture itself is relevant to the question of how we do theology. If it indicates that we should do it one way, then we should. If it indicates we should not do it a particular way, then we shouldn’t.

Things begin to look bad for the Protestant case, then, when we find Scripture saying positive things about the role of Tradition in the Christian life (cf. 1 Cor. 11:2; 2 Thess. 2:15; 3:6; 2 Tim. 2:2). Things look even bleaker when it is realized that there is an absence of verses that teach Scripture alone.

The coup de grace comes when one realizes that if sola scriptura were true then there would have to be such verses. If all principles of theology must be established by Scripture alone, and sola scriptura is a principle of theology, then it must be established by Scripture alone. If it can’t be, then it is shown to be false by its own test.

Realizing this, one discovers that the advocate of sola Scriptura doesn’t have to prove a universal negative; he has to prove a “particular positive”—namely, “Scripture teaches sola scriptura.”

It is the inability to prove this that motivates Protestant apologists to appeal to the universal negative argument in the first place.

The Rule
Sola scriptura is not the only issue on which Protestant apologists will attempt to place the burden of proof on Catholics. It is a general rule that, whenever an apologetics discussion begins, both sides will try to place the burden of proof on each other. That’s where the confusion and the time wasted begin.

But, as I indicated, there is a simple rule to tell which side has the burden of proof.

I recently pointed out this rule in an e-mail discussion I was having with a Protestant seminary professor regarding the much-discussed ossuary of James and what implications it may or may not have for our knowledge of the Holy Family. During the course of the exchange, the professor asserted to me that I would have to shoulder the burden of proof if I wanted to maintain that Mary was a perpetual virgin.

My response was simple: Yes, I would . . . if I were trying to convince you of that point. Whenever two people disagree and one wants the other to change his view, then the person advocating the change always has to shoulder the burden of proof.

In our discussion, I wasn’t trying to show him that Mary was a perpetual virgin. That’s what I as a Catholic believe, but I wasn’t trying to get him to change his mind on this point. I was simply trying to get him to acknowledge that the ossuary, if genuine, did not show that James was a biological son of Mary (a point that he grudgingly and tacitly conceded).

Had I been trying to bring him over to the Catholic view on Mary’s perpetual virginity, then I would indeed have to shoulder the burden of proof.

Any time someone wants us to change a belief we have, he has to give us reasons that we should do so, and in that he takes on the burden of proof.

The trouble arises in apologetics discussions when the two sides in the discussion are trying to mutually convert each other. That’s normal in such discussions, but it results in their being two cases argued simultaneously. In an apologetic encounter between a Protestant and a Catholic, the issues being argued frequently are “Protestantism is true” and “Catholicism is true.” On the first issue the Protestant has the burden of proof, and in the latter the Catholic does.

Such discussions will always go on because it’s human nature for each side in a discussion to want to bring the other around to his own point of view. But recognizing that the burden of proof does not simply rest with one side or the other—recognizing the true complexity of the discussion—can save an awful lot of time and emotional energy that otherwise would be wasted in wrangling over who has to prove what to whom.

Bottom line: If you want to prove something, it’s up to you to prove it.

Getting Science and Religion Wrong (Plus COVID Vaccines)

It isn’t often that I come across an editorial filled with as much factual inaccuracy and misunderstanding as the recent one by Dr. Amesh A. Adalja.

This is striking, because he’s a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, and his editorial is on health security.

The piece is titled, “No, the New COVID Vaccine Is Not ‘Morally Compromised.’”

What’s wrong with the piece? Let’s look . . .

 

Pope Francis vs. U.S. Bishops?

Dr. Adalja begins by discussing the new Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine and the concerns raised about it by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He writes:

Is this group concerned about lower numerical efficacy in clinical trials? No, it seems that they have deemed the J&J vaccine “morally compromised”. The group is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and if something is “morally compromised” it is surely not the vaccine. (Notably Pope Francis has not taken such a stance).

Apart from the nasty insinuation that the bishops conference is morally compromised, what’s wrong with this is that he states Pope Francis has not taken a stand like the U.S. bishops.

Adalja bases this assertion on a news story headlined “Vatican Says Covid Vaccines ‘Morally Acceptable.’”

Here’s a piece of advice for Dr. Adalja: Don’t trust what the press says about religious topics. Always look up the original sources.

Had Dr. Adalja bothered to read the primary sources, he would have come across this document from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was authorized by Pope Francis, meaning that he put his teaching authority behind it.

The document holds that—although circumstances may permit taking vaccines like the Johnson & Johnson one—those that used cell lines derived from aborted children are morally compromised, and so the document states:

Both pharmaceutical companies and governmental health agencies are therefore encouraged to produce, approve, distribute and offer ethically acceptable vaccines that do not create problems of conscience for either health care providers or the people to be vaccinated.

So, Pope Francis takes exactly the same position as the U.S. bishops. Or rather, they’re taking the same position he is.

 

The Issue at Hand

Adalja then begins his case for why the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should not be considered morally compromised, so he argues that cell lines from aborted children are widely used in biotechnology and that they are used to find treatments for diseases.

These facts are not in question, but raises them does not engage the moral issue from a Catholic perspective.

The Catholic Faith holds that unborn children are people, and therefore they must be treated as such.

You could not kill an innocent person and then harvest his body for medical consumables. That is immoral, and that is what is happening with the cell lines in question.

The problem is not the cell lines themselves. It is the way they were harvested, which was—in essence—scavenging the body of a homicide victim.

If biomedicine needs cell lines to develop treatments, fine! But get them in an ethical way!

This is not impossible. There are perfectly legitimate ways of doing it. It’s just a question of being willing.

What the bishops want to see is not a banishing of cell lines from medicine.

Instead, they want to see public agencies and private companies—like Johnson & Johnson—get enough pushback that their consciences are activated, and they stop making morally tainted cell lines and replace them with ones that have been developed ethically.

 

Adalja Disagrees

Dr. Adalja does not recognize an unborn child as a human being. He states:

An embryo or fetus in the earlier stages of development, while harboring the potential to grow into a human being, is not the moral equivalent of a person.

Scientifically, this is nonsense. (Notice that he invokes the nonscientific category of “the moral equivalent of a person.”)

Viewed from a scientific perspective (as opposed to a faith perspective), a human being is a living human organism.

An unborn child—from the single-cell, zygote stage onward—is a living human organism:

  • The unborn are living (because dead fetuses don’t grow).
  • They are human (because they have human genetic codes).
  • And they are organisms (because they are organic wholes that are not part of another organism—as illustrated by the fact their genetic codes are different than those of their mothers).

Unless you want to invoke nonempirical concepts, you have to put unborn children in the same biological category as born ones, which is the category of human beings.

And unless your system of morality allows you to kill innocent human beings, you cannot kill them.

Adalja may not agree, but if he wants Catholics to disregard this purely objective viewpoint that is based on reason—and which also happens to be the teaching of their Church—he needs to provide arguments against it, which he doesn’t.

 

Enter the Ad Hominems

Like many who can’t produce objective arguments for their position, Adalja turns to ad hominem attacks on the Church. His overall attitude is expressed when he says:

Appeals from clerics, devoid of any need to tether their principles to this world, should not have any bearing on one’s medical decision-making.

It’s true—and irrelevant—that the bishops are clerics (as if that were a bad thing!), but they are not “devoid of any need to tether their principles to this world.”

Without invoking any nonempirical concepts, they have recognized the truth—which is entirely accessible to reason—that unborn children are human beings.

But Adalja doesn’t stop there. He then produces a brief litany of assertions that are further ad hominems.

 

The Dark Ages?

Adalja writes:

In the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church opposed all forms of scientific inquiry

This is factually inaccurate in the extreme. Dr. Adalja is apparently not a historian of science, for no historian of science would make such a claim.

It was—in fact—the clerical caste in the Middle Ages that contained the principal drivers of scientific inquiry, or natural philosophy, as it was then known.

Dr. Adalja should learn more about this period before he makes further assertions about it.

Allow me to recommend a good, popular level course on the subject that he should consider taking. (And so should everybody else; it’s really good.)

 

Lust of the Eyes?

Dr. Adalja asserts that in the Middle Ages the Church was “even castigating science and curiosity as the ‘lust of the eyes.’”

The scientific revolution didn’t occur until after the Middle Ages, so science did not exist in its present form then. Adalja’s claim that the Church was “castigating science” in the Middle Ages is thus going to be in some degree anachronistic.

But if he wants to say that “the Catholic Church” was doing this, he’s going to need to quote some official source capable of speaking for the Church—like a pope or an ecumenical council.

Yet when we click the link he has provided, we find only a statement of a single theologian: St. Augustine.

And has Adalja even understood St. Augustine?

If you read the page (from Augustine’s Confessions), you discover that the kind of curiosity he’s rejecting as trivial is the kind people have for things in theaters and circuses, about astrology, and about magic and divination. He writes:

[T]he theatres do not now carry me away, nor care I to know the courses of the stars, nor did my soul ever consult ghosts departed . . .  I go not now to the circus to see a dog coursing a hare.

Those are the kinds of things Augustine considers idle curiosities.

Adalja should really read and digest the pages he’s linking.

 

“Because It Is Absurd”?

Adalja continues:

One early Middle Ages church father reveled in his rejection of reality and evidence, proudly declaring, “I believe because it is absurd.”

This time, Adalja gives us a link to a Wikipedia page about a quotation attributed to Tertullian.

And we have numerous problems.

First, Tertullian did not live in the “early Middle Ages.” He lived in classical antiquity.

Second, he wasn’t a Church Father. He has been denied that title because of his problematic views.

Presenting Tertullian as a reliable representative of Catholicism is like presenting Immanuel Velikovsky as a reliable representative of mainstream science.

Third—as the Wikipedia page points out—the quotation attributed to him isn’t accurate. As Wikipedia notes:

The consensus of Tertullian scholars is that the reading “I believe because it is absurd” sharply diverges from Tertullian’s own thoughts, given his placed priority on reasoned argument and rationality in his writings.

Fourth, the sentiment that Adalja tries to attribute to the Catholic Church is, in fact, rejected by the Church. As Wikipedia also notes:

The phrase does not express the Catholic Faith, as explained by Pope Benedict XVI: “The Catholic Tradition, from the outset, rejected the so-called “fideism”, which is the desire to believe against reason. Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd) is not a formula that interprets the Catholic faith.”

Did I mention that Adalja really should read and digest the pages he links?

 

Finishing the Litany

Adalja finishes his litany of ad hominems by saying:

This organization, which tyrannized scientists such as Galileo and murdered the Italian cosmologist Bruno, today has shown itself to still harbor anti-science sentiments in its ranks.

The Galileo situation was much more complex that Adalja presents it—as acknowledged by Galileo scholars and historians of science. (Really, Dr. Adalja! Check out that history of science course I linked earlier!)

The case of Giordano Bruno is complicated by the fact that the needed part of the records of his trial has been lost. But his cosmological views were not the key issue. As the Wikipedia page Dr. Adalja links observes:

Starting in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno’s pantheism was not taken lightly by the church, nor was his teaching of the transmigration of the soul and reincarnation.

And, needless to say, the Catholic Church would not today support what happened to Bruno, as illustrated by its stance on the death penalty.

 

Back to the Future

All of this raises the issue of the extent to which any of this matters.

Rather than providing evidence that would undermine the Catholic Church’s position on unborn chidren, Dr. Adalja has been giving us a litany of historical ad hominems that don’t engage the issue.

His project at this point is simply to attack the Catholic Church rather than seeking to engage and interact with its views.

Yet—despite the problems with the historical examples he cites—let’s grant him all of them. Let’s suppose that things really were as bad as he says.

What does that have to do with today?

The Catholic Church clearly has a pro-science attitude in the present. Consider this quotation from the Catechism, which is just one among many:

The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers (CCC 283).

The Church runs its own astronomical observatory, as well as a special organization dedicated to the appreciation of science—the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Members of the academy include numerous distinguished scientists, including many Nobel laureates, and they are appointed to the academy based on their contributions to science, without respect to whether they are Catholic or whether they even believe in God.

Members have included famous scientists such as Niels Bohr, Alexander Fleming, Werner Heisenberg, Stephen Hawking, Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, and Erwin Schrodinger.

Given all this evidence, it is clear that the charge that the Church is “against” science is sweeping and unjust hyperbole.

 

Conclusion

Dr. Adalja’s conclusion that the Church “has shown itself to still harbor anti-science sentiments in its ranks” is a bit underwhelming.

Every group of humans harbors “anti-science” sentiments in its ranks. Even scientists sometimes harbor “anti-science” views.

So what?

The question is whether a particular instance involves such views, and Adalja has done nothing to show that the Catholic Church’s assessment that unborn children are human beings is scientifically false.

Indeed, he cannot do so without invoking nonempirical—and thus nonscientific—criteria, because they objectively are living human organisms.

What Dr. Adalja does do is provide a compelling illustration of how to get science and religion wrong.

Instead of entering into the thought of the bishops he is criticizing, identifying the relevant, underlying premises, and then interacting with them:

  • He hasn’t done his research (the bishops are basing their position on Pope Francis’s)
  • He makes bare assertions about unborn children without providing evidence for them (i.e., that they only have the potential to grow into a human being, when they already are living human organisms)
  • He turns to a litany of historically oriented ad hominems that he (a) gets wrong and (b) do not reflect the Church’s stand on science

This is not how the dialogue between science and religion should proceed.

People of whatever perspective should seek to enter and understand the thought of the other before attempting to critique it. In other words, they should do their homework.

In particular, they should avoid ad hominem attacks on the other.

It’s both unfair and irrelevant to use ad hominems to attack and dismiss religious claims, just as it would be unfair and irrelevant to use ad hominems to attack and dismiss scientific claims (which could easily be done if that were desired).

Let’s hope that lessons can be learned from this unfortunate example.

What Does the Church Actually Say About “Praying to the Saints”?

Any informed, English-speaking Catholic will tell you that the Church says it’s both permissible and beneficial to pray to the saints.

But is he right? Is that what the Church actually says?

The answer is not what you might expect.

 

Discussions with Protestants

The topic of “praying to the saints” most commonly comes up in dialogue with Protestant Christians.

In the older branches of Christianity—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and other forms of Eastern Christianity—it is common to ask the saints in heaven for their intercession.

However, in the 1500s, the emerging Protestant movement rejected this practice, and it is still widely rejected in Protestant circles today.

One key argument goes like this:

  1. Prayer should be directed only to God.
  2. The saints are not God.
  3. Therefore, one should not pray to the saints.

The key premise in the argument is the first—that prayer should be directed only to God.

How might one support this?

 

A Biblical Argument

One way of supporting the premise would be to mount a biblical case, which might go something like this:

  1. When we look in the Bible, we find that the word “pray” is used in connection with God rather than the saints.
  2. We should model our language on the way the Bible uses language.
  3. Therefore, we should use the word “pray” in connection with God rather than the saints.

One thing we need to be careful about when evaluating the first premise of this argument is what language we are talking about.

Just checking to see what an English translation for the word “pray” isn’t enough. All that will tell you is how the English translators thought the word should be used, not how the biblical authors used the equivalent vocabulary.

We need to check the original languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—to see what language the biblical authors used, and how.

To keep this post short(ish), we’ll focus on the Greek. In biblical Greek, the main verb for “pray” is proseukhomai, which appears 102 times in the Greek Bible, and the equivalent noun for “prayer”—proseukhê—appears 61 times.

It so happens that in Greek, these words are used exclusively to refer to communication with God or the gods. They even have that meaning in the secular Greek of the period.

In this, the Greek is like contemporary American English, which also associates prayer exclusively with God or the gods.

The initial premise of this argument thus looks good!

What about the second? In other words . . .

 

How Closely Must Our Language Follow the Bible’s?

In general, I think it’s a good thing to model our language after the usages found in the Bible—at least when it comes to concepts related to the Christian faith.

I don’t think we have any obligation to follow Greek usage on other terms.

For example, color terms often vary significantly from one language to another, and in dialects of ancient Greek, honey could be described as “green” (khlôros), but I don’t think that creates an obligation for English-speakers to call honey green rather than yellow or golden.

However, it is generally a good idea to model the use of faith-related words to their biblical counterparts. Thus, we’re fortunate that the English word “God/god” broadly corresponds to the Greek word theos (it corresponds less well to the Hebrew word elohim, which can refer to things we wouldn’t call gods).

Despite my sympathy for the second premise, it has limits.

The fact that languages change over time is an unstoppable phenomenon, and even when Christians try to conform their usage to what’s in the Bible, terms inevitably take on new usages over the centuries.

If we had to model our religious vocabulary strictly on biblical usage, one term we’d have to eliminate immediately is “Bible.” The Greek term this is based on is biblion, which originally referred to a sheet of papyrus and then came to mean things like “letter,” “document,” and “scroll.”

In no case did biblion mean what we refer to as “the Bible.” That’s a post-biblical usage.

Similarly, every theological community has developed religious vocabulary that differs from biblical usage in various ways.

Thus, in both Catholic and Protestant circles, the term “the elect” has taken on a theological meaning that refers to “those people who will be saved on the last day,” despite the fact that this is not how the term is used in Scripture.

In Lutheran theology, the terms “Law” and “Gospel” have taken on technical meanings that differ significantly from the way these terms are used in Scripture. (To somewhat oversimplify, Law is conceived of as any divine command, while Gospel is understood as any divine promise; but in the New Testament the most prominent usage of “Law” is for the Mosaic Law or even the Old Testament more broadly, while “Gospel” is used for the message of what God has done through Jesus.)

One may regret that these usages have developed, but the fact is that they have—and that communities are using them.

Language change over time is inevitable. The question is what to do in response.

 

Avoiding Word Fights

On two occasions, St. Paul warns us against “quarreling about words”:

Remind them of these things, and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers (2 Tim. 2:14).

If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain (1 Tim. 6:3-5)

For St. Paul, the most important thing is what is true, not the language that is used to express it.

Therefore, when a community of Christians has developed a theological usage that differs from the biblical usage, one should not fight about the terminology itself.

Complaining about an established usage is not going to change that usage. It’s only going to generate heat rather than light.

Of course, it’s fair to point out that the usage differs from what’s in the Bible.

Pointing that out can actually be helpful! It can help people remember that they need to control for the fact their theological vocabulary is different and should not be read onto the biblical text.

But once the biblical text is correctly understood, we must allow each group of Christians to express that in the language that has become established in their community.

So what about English-speaking Catholics and “prayer to the saints”?

 

“Prayer” in English

Following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, numerous French words entered English, and one of them was what became “pray” in the early 1200s.

French is based on Latin, and so the term “pray” comes from Latin roots. Specifically, it comes from the verb precare.

Precare means things like “to ask,” “to beg,” “to implore,” “to entreat,” “to supplicate,” etc.

In Latin, it is used in religious contexts—like when you’re asking God or the gods for something—but it is also used when you’re asking human beings for something.

Both usages carried over into English. Prior to the Protestant Reformation, English-speaking Christians would use “pray” to refer to making requests of God and of other human beings—including the saints.

In the latter case, what they were doing was asking the saints to intercede with God on their behalf—to serve as their “prayer partners” in heaven.

When the Reformation occurred, English-speaking Protestants objected to asking the saints for their intercession, and so the verb “pray” came to be more associated with requests directed to God.

In colloquial American English among Protestants, “pray” came to refer exclusively to speech directed toward God.

Still, the other usage survived in British English. If you read Shakespeare or watch period dramas set as late as the early 20th century, you’ll see characters saying things to each other like, “I pray you,” and all they mean is “I ask you.”

So, if a young gentleman in a British drama says to a young lady, “I pray your hand in marriage,” what it means is that he’s asking her to marry him—not that he’s worshipping her as a deity.

This is also where the word “prithee” comes from. It’s a contraction of “I pray thee.”

The human-directed usage even survives in American English in at least two contexts.

One is in legal settings. If you have a lawyer file a motion with a court, the motion will contain language that says, “My client prays that the court will do thus-and-so.”

It doesn’t mean that the client is worshipping the court. It means that he’s asking the court to do something.

The other context in which the human-directed usage survives in American English is among Catholics.

They have simply retained a usage that was around before English-speaking Protestants started narrowing the verb to only God-directed communications.

Thus, it is natural for English-speaking Catholics to talk about “praying to the saints”—meaning asking for their intercession.

So, how should the two groups deal with this in conversation?

 

Back to the Word-Fight Issue

Per St. Paul’s dictum, we should not fight about the usage of the English word “pray” and whether it should be associated only with God-directed communications.

Words mean what communities use them to mean, and the English-speaking community originally used “pray” to mean “ask,” regardless of who was being asked.

Even though the Protestant influence on English has associated the verb exclusively with God-directed communication in many contexts, other established usages remain.

A Protestant might think it would be better for those to go away, but they remain for now, and spending time complaining about them will generate heat rather than light.

To generate light, we should recognize the different usages and what they mean and, having done that, talk about the underlying truths.

For example, a Protestant might say, “In my community, ‘prayer’ is a form of worship reserved to God. When you talk about praying to the saints, are you giving them more honor than they should have as human beings?”

Of course, an informed Catholic should say, “No, and here’s why . . .” The discussion might then turn to what kind of honor human beings—especially saintly ones—should have.

Or, a Catholic might say, “In my community, ‘praying to the saints’ means asking them for their intercession. We teach that this is both permissible and beneficial.”

And, rather than getting hung up on the word “pray,” the discussion might then turn to whether it is permissible and beneficial to ask the saints for their intercession.

(As a side note, we also shouldn’t quarrel about the word “saints.” In various biblical and post-biblical usages, it can refer to the holy angels, to all Jews, to all Christians, to those Christians who are especially holy, to those Christians who are in heaven, and to those Christians who have been canonized as being in heaven. As before, we shouldn’t fight about the usage of the word but correctly note which usage is being employed and continue the discussion on that basis.)

 

Responding to Our Two Initial Arguments

With all this in mind, we can respond to the two initial arguments that were made—and do so in a way that generates light rather than heat.

Concerning the biblical argument, it’s true that the Greek term proseukhomai was used exclusively for God-directed communications, but that doesn’t finally determine the way “pray” is used in English.

As a result, if you want to say—as in the first argument—that “Prayer should be directed only to God,” you’ll need to clarify what you mean by “prayer.”

“Praying” to the saints is an established usage among English-speaking Catholics that means asking for their intercession.

The real question is not the term but whether it’s permissible and beneficial to ask the saints for their intercession.

So much for discussions about the English verb “pray.”

But there’s a noteworthy fact that will surprise English-speakers, both Catholic and Protestant alike.

 

The Language the Catholic Church Actually Uses

This is the kind of thing that you won’t notice unless you really live and breathe Church documents and think carefully about the language they do and don’t use.

It took me a while to notice and then confirm it, but if you read the documents of the Catholic Church’s Magisterium, they don’t actually talk about “praying” to the saints.

Ever.

At least not in the documents that come from Rome. (I can’t answer for every individual bishop and what he might write.)

To illustrate this, here’s a screen cap of what you find when searching the Vatican web site for “prayer to the saints”:

And here’s what we find for “praying to the saints”:

In both cases, we get no results. Zero.

It turns out that these expressions are used by English-speaking Catholics, but they are not used in official Church documents, and when those documents are translated into English, the translators are careful enough not to use colloquial English expressions like “prayer to the saints” or “praying to the saints.”

So, what do they say instead?

One thing they do is speak of “the intercession of the saints,” where the key Latin verb is intercedere (“to intercede”).

Thus, in the sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that an English-speaking Catholic would turn to for information about “praying to the saints,” you don’t find that phrase. Instead, you find “intercession of the saints” (cf. CCC 956, 2683).

However, “intercession” refers to what they do for us. What language does the Church use for what we do with respect to them?

It speaks of “the invocation of the saints,” where the key Latin verb is invocare (“to invoke,” “to call upon,” “to appeal to”).

So, we invoke (appeal to) the saints to intercede (pray for us) with God.

That’s the language the Church actually uses. “Praying to the saints” is just something we say colloquially in English.

A logical next question is: What term does the Church use in its official documents for when we talk to God?

There can be a number of them, but the key ones are the verb orare (“to speak,” “to plead,” “to supplicate,” “to pray”) and the noun oratio (“speech,” “oration,” “prayer”). These are the words you’ll find if you look in the Latin edition of the Catechism in its section on prayer.

Interestingly, in Latin these terms don’t have to be used just for communications directed to God, but they are often used that way—especially in ecclesiastical (i.e., church) Latin.

It’s thus interesting that ecclesiastical language has a preferred set of terms for God-directed communications and a different set of terms for saint-directed communications.

In that respect, it’s similar to Protestant American English.

 

One Last Thing About Word Fights

Given this, it could be tempting for some from the Protestant community to tell Catholics, “Hey! Your own Magisterium has a separate term for prayer that is directed to God and doesn’t use ‘prayer’ with respect to the saints! You should change your usage to fit official ecclesiastical-speak!”

Except . . . if the Magisterium was concerned that this needed to happen, it would mandate the change, and it hasn’t.

The Magisterium recognizes the organic way languages change over time, and—per St. Paul—it’s not concerned about quarrelling over every linguistic usage.

The English “praying to the saints” is a historical usage with a long pedigree—going back to when the term “pray” first came into the English language, and the Vatican isn’t concerned about it.

On the other hand, it’s fair for Catholics—in discussing the overall issue with Protestants—to say, “You know, I understand why you might want to have a term for communications directed to God that’s different from those directed to others. Both biblical Greek and ecclesiastical Latin have similar usages. English is different. ‘To pray’ originally just meant ‘to ask,’ and English-speaking Catholics have preserved this usage when it comes to the saints. But rather than quibble about English terminology, let’s go to the real issue instead: Is it a good idea ask the saints in heaven to be our prayer partners? Let’s not quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers (2 Tim. 2:14).”

Why Would God Create People He Knows Will Go to Hell?

This is a common question, and many have tried to answer it online.

Most of the answers are unsatisfying. They tend to do one of two things:

  1. Say a lot of stuff that doesn’t really address the issue and instead just talk “around” the subject instead of tackling it head-on
  2. Say it’s a mystery

Many of the answers you’ll find spend a lot of words on these two things (frankly, a painfully large number of words), but the first is irrelevant and the second is not very informative.

It’s true that, since God’s mind is infinite and ours are finite, we often can’t give definitive answers about his decisions, so an element of mystery remains.

However, we can often give partial answers—or at least make informed proposals. In other words, we often can do better than saying, “We just don’t know; it’s a mystery.”

I think we can do better in this case.

 

Keeping the Issue Focused

To avoid going off on tangents, let’s make the issue as focused as possible. Suppose there is a person—we’ll call him Bob—and the following is true:

  • In his eternal perspective outside of time, God knows that—if he creates Bob—then Bob will freely choose to go to hell.

We’ll also assume that:

  • In his eternal perspective outside of time, God could freely choose not to create Bob (i.e., God has free will).
  • God is just.
  • God is loving and thus does not want anyone to go to hell.

Given these things: Why would God create Bob? Let’s look at some possibilities . . .

 

Possibility #1: There Is a Competing Good

Even if people don’t want something, they may tolerate it for the sake of a competing good.

I may not want the pain of having to get an injection, but I may tolerate it in order to avoid getting a disease.

In the same way, God may not want Bob to go to hell, but he may tolerate it for the sake of some other good or set of goods.

What might these be?

 

a) Free Will (and Love)

An answer that some propose is free will. In other words, God tolerates the decisions of some to go to hell because he wants to preserve their free will—which he does for the sake of genuine love.

Love is God’s most important priority (Matt. 22:37-40), and he wants people to be able to freely choose love. Programmed, robotic “love” would lack something and not be fully genuine. This means he must tolerate the possibility that they will misuse their freedom and reject love.

All that’s true, but it doesn’t really address our issue.

If our starting assumption is true—that God knows what Bob will freely choose if he creates him—then God could simply decide not to create him.

In that case, he could stop Bob from going to hell without seeming to violate his free will. Bob would simply never have existed.

The free will defense thus doesn’t seem to work if our starting assumption is true, so what other possibilities are there for a competing good that would lead God to tolerate Bob going to hell?

 

b) God’s Glory

Perhaps the most commonly proposed answer is God’s own glory. The idea here is that it brings glory to God to have illustrations of his character that actually exist.

Bob’s going to hell provides a concrete example of God’s justice in that God did give Bob the offer of salvation—and Bob freely rejected it. He’s thus an object lesson that illustrates certain aspects of God’s character and brings glory to God.

Many will find this answer unsatisfying. If a human being were willing to let someone go to hell simply for the sake of his own glory, we would say that human was a raging egomaniac.

Of course, God is not a human being. We have only finite value, but God has infinite value, so his glorification would be worth more—even infinitely more—than the glorification of a human.

This would make it more understandable how God might tolerate the loss of Bob’s soul.

 

c) Something Else

It’s also possible that there might be a different good for the sake of which God tolerates Bob’s loss.

The history of the world involves a complex tangle of the billions of interrelated choices people make, and you could propose that—in order to set up the free will decisions of some to go to heaven—God must tolerate the misuse of free will by others.

Thus, God might tolerate Bob’s misuse of free will for the sake of making it possible for others to use theirs properly.

Or, since the universe is vast and we know only a tiny part of it, there might be some other good—perhaps one that we haven’t even conceived of—that justifies God tolerating Bob’s misuse of free will.

While both of these suggestions are possible, they are both very speculative, which means many will find them unsatisfying.

So perhaps we can look at the issue from a different angle.

 

Possibility #2: God Isn’t Being Unjust

One of our starting assumptions is that God is just. In the present context, that means it isn’t unjust for God to tolerate Bob’s free decision to reject salvation.

(You could challenge the justness of anybody going to hell, but that’s a different discussion. Here, we’re assuming that it is just for God to allow people to go to hell.)

In this case, God has genuinely given Bob the offer of salvation, and he has freely chosen to reject it, so God is not being unjust by respecting his choice.

Bob cannot—and, if he’s thinking rationally, would not—accuse God of injustice. God has been fair with him.

Is this enough to resolve our dilemma?

It certainly helps to realize that God isn’t being unjust, but it doesn’t seem to fully resolve the matter.

Our starting assumptions didn’t simply involve God being just. They also involved God not wanting people to go to hell.

So, if we’re not appealing to a competing good that would lead God to tolerate Bob’s loss, why wouldn’t he act on his desire to keep Bob out of hell and simply not create him?

There doesn’t seem to be a good answer to this question. So, while realizing God isn’t being unjust helps, it provides an incomplete answer.

 

Possibility #3: God Is Actually Benefitting Bob

But perhaps God is being more than fair with Bob. Perhaps he is benefitting him by creating him, even though he will spend an infinite amount of time in hell.

Some have argued that it’s better to exist—even in hell—than not to exist at all.

If that’s the case, then God is actually being generous to Bob by creating him, despite his damnation.

And we would know what the competing good is that leads God to tolerate Bob’s misuse of free will: It’s Bob’s own existence.

If it’s better to exist in hell than not to exist at all then that’s why God chooses to create him. Bob will actually benefit!

Whether you find this solution plausible will depend on how bad you imagine hell to be and how great a good you suppose existence to be.

Based on some of the images in Scripture (e.g., hell as a lake of fire; Rev. 20:14-15), many have thought that it would be better not to exist than to go there.

However, the images that Scripture uses to describe the afterlife are accommodated to our present understanding, which is limited by our experience of this life, and they should be read with some caution.

It could turn out that, from the greater perspective the next life will offer, even the damned will see that it is better for them to exist in their current condition than not to exist at all.

Some, even in this life, have made this argument.

 

Possibility #4: God Doesn’t Create Bob

Suppose that it’s better not to exist than to spend eternity in hell. In that case, if there is no competing good that would lead God to create Bob, he might simply not create him.

However, Bob is only a representative of an entire class of people—those who misuse their free will and reject God’s offer of salvation.

In that case, it would seem that God would not create anybody that would reject his offer, in which case hell would be empty.

This idea has been explored by various figures down through Church history, including the recent theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), who discussed it in his book Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?

Von Balthasar frames his proposal carefully. Since the Church teaches that hell is a real possibility, he only proposes we may be able to hope (not assert) that hell is empty.

The difficulty for this view is found in various statements in the New Testament that appear to indicate some people actually are in hell (Matt. 7:13-14, 21-23, Luke 13:23-28).

(For a careful analysis of part of this issue, see Cardinal Avery Dulles’s insightful article The Population of Hell.)

 

Possibility #5: Reject the Starting Assumption

If the above possibilities are not fully satisfying, perhaps we should revisit our initial assumption concerning Bob, which was:

  • In his eternal perspective outside of time, God knows that—if he creates Bob—then Bob will freely choose to go to hell.

This assumption holds that God knows what Bob would freely choose to do if he existed.

Does God have that kind of knowledge?

Historically, theologians have recognized that God has two types of knowledge:

  1. Knowledge of all possible things
  2. Knowledge of all actual things

Both of these kinds of knowledge cover everything past, present, and future.

If God creates Bob and makes him an actual thing, then God also knows what Bob’s actual choice is, which is to reject salvation.

However, suppose that God doesn’t create Bob. What does God know in that case?

By his knowledge of all possible things, God knows from his eternal perspective that it is possible for Bob to accept his offer of salvation. He also knows that it is possible for Bob to reject salvation.

But that doesn’t reveal which Bob does choose because Bob doesn’t exist and never makes the choice.

 

Middle Knowledge?

For God to know what Bob would choose if he were created, God would need an additional kind of knowledge that lets him know what people would freely choose if they are placed in certain circumstances (such as being created).

In the last 500 years, theologians have begun to explore this idea and have named this third kind of knowledge “middle knowledge,” since it seems part way between God’s knowledge of the possible and the actual.

In his book Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Ludwig Ott holds that the Church has definitively taught that God knows all possible things and all actual things, and they are matters “of the Faith” (de fide) (pp. 40-42).

However, he lists middle knowledge as only the “common opinion” (sent. communis.) of theologians (pp. 42-43).

There are a passages of Scripture that one can appeal to in support of God having middle knowledge (e.g., 1 Sam. 23:1-13, Wis. 4:11, Matt. 11:21).

However, there are only a few such passages, and they can be read in ways that don’t require middle knowledge.

There also is an argument to be made against middle knowledge.

 

Omnipotence and Omniscience

Because God is all-powerful and all-knowing, one always should be hesitant to say there are things he “can’t” do or know, but there are limits to omnipotence and omniscience.

Omnipotence means that God can do everything that can be done—in other words, anything that is logically possible. However, it does not mean that God could make something that involves a logical contradiction, where the terms themselves conflict.

For example, God could not make a square circle or a four-sided triangle, because these involve contradictions in terms. They are just nonsense—a kind of word salad that has no real meaning.

Similarly, omniscience means that God knows everything that can be known. However, it does not mean that he knows logically impossible things.

For example, God does not know the shape of a square circle or the shape of a four-sided triangle.

What about Bob’s choice to go to hell?

 

To Be or Not To Be?

If Bob exists, then he freely makes the choice, and God knows it.

But if Bob is never created, then he would never make this free will decision, and God would have to know the outcome of a free will decision that is never made.

“The outcome of a free will decision that is never made” sounds a lot like “square circle” or “four-sided triangle.”

The essence of a free will decision is that it is really possible for a person to make one choice or another when the moment comes. But if the moment never comes, then there simply is no outcome, because the choice is never made.

There is thus a case to be made that “the outcome of a free will choice that is never made” involves a contradiction in terms.

In that case, God would not know Bob’s decision—unless he creates Bob.

 

The Free Will Defense Returns

If middle knowledge involves a logical contradiction, then God wouldn’t have it, and so he would not be able to foresee what Bob will freely choose and refrain from creating him.

To know what Bob will actually choose, God would need to create him.

And in that case, the free will defense that we discussed in Possibility #1 would work!

God would create Bob, see his decision to reject salvation, and the counterbalancing good that explains why God tolerates this is his desire to let Bob have free will so that he can make an authentic choice between love and non-love.

 

Mystery Remains

While “It’s just a mystery” isn’t a satisfying answer, it is true that we can’t always propose a single, definite answer to matters involving God.

However, while his mind is infinite and ours are only finite, we often can at least sketch the outlines of possible reasons he makes the decisions he does.

In this case, I haven’t settled on a final answer to the question we began by posing, so mystery remains.

But we have fleshed out possible reasons that shed light on this question.

Which solution you find most likely will depend on your views of various matters, but at least we can have the assurance that there are solutions.

And that God is just. And that he really does offer us salvation.

The Straw Pope Fallacy


What I call the Straw Pope Fallacy is a variation of the famous Straw Man Fallacy that is applied to the pope.

The Straw Man Fallacy occurs when a person critiques an inaccurate version of someone’s position.

The name of the fallacy is based on the fact that it’s easier to knock down a straw man than a real man.

Thus, critics of a position are often tempted to try to knock down a false version of a position (a “straw man”) rather than tackling the position itself (the “real man” in the metaphor).

When a critic proposes an inaccurate version of the position he wants to disprove, it’s referred to as “setting up a straw man.”

 

An Example: Baptism & Salvation

Most Christians (e.g., people in the Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Assyrian, Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Church of Christ communities) hold that God uses water baptism as a means of communicating his saving grace to people by the power of Christ’s resurrection.

A critic might respond, “That’s clearly untrue. The physical action of water only removes dirt from the body. It doesn’t do anything with respect to salvation.”

The critic has just committed the Straw Man Fallacy, because the claim wasn’t that the physical action of water brings about salvation.

Instead, the claim is that God uses water baptism as a means by which he gives salvation through the power of Christ’s resurrection.

If you want to disprove belief in baptismal salvation, that’s the claim you need to knock down—not a parallel claim that the physical action of the water itself saves us.

The first pope—St. Peter—warned against this misunderstanding.

So did Martin Luther. In his Short Catechism, he writes:

How can water do such great things?

Answer: It is not the water indeed that does them, but the word of God which is in and with the water, and faith, which trusts such word of God in the water. For without the word of God the water is simple water and no baptism. But with the word of God it is a baptism, that is, a gracious water of life and a washing of regeneration in the Holy Ghost.

 

Setting Up a Straw Pope

It’s common—and understandable—for non-Catholics to misunderstand what the Catholic Church does and doesn’t claim about the pope.

As a result, it’s easy for them to set up straw popes—i.e., to propose inaccurate versions of Catholic teaching about the role and function of the pope.

This also can happen because some Catholics aren’t as educated in their faith as they should be, don’t fully grasp Church teaching, and make exaggerated claims.

For whatever cause, straw popes are common in apologetic discussions.

 

Infallibility vs. Sinful Popes

A classic example involves a confusion about the pope’s ability to teach infallibly.

This is often misunderstood as implying that popes can’t sin.

Critics will then point to examples of popes who have done things they regard as sinful and conclude that Catholic teaching about the pope can’t be true.

This is an example of the Straw Pope Fallacy because the Church does not claim that popes can’t sin.

The inability to sin is a gift known as impeccability, and it’s not the same thing as the ability to engage the Church’s gift of infallibility when teaching.

The latter will result in teaching that does not contain error, but it doesn’t mean that a pope will never sin.

In fact, the Church freely acknowledges that popes can sin. They have since the very beginning! St. Peter denied Christ three times!

Yet that didn’t stop Jesus from reaffirming him in his pastoral office with respect to the other disciples. Neither did it stop Peter from writing two inspired—and thus infallible—encyclical letters. (You can read the first here; and the second here.)

It’s thus knocking down a straw pope to point to individual popes who’ve done things you regard as sinful and claim this disproves Catholic teaching.

It doesn’t. The Church doesn’t teach that popes are sinless.

 

Perfect Prudence?

Sometimes the Straw Pope Fallacy involves an even more expansive idea than popes being impeccable.

Some critics cite what they take to be examples of doing things that are merely ill advised or imprudent as somehow violating Catholic teaching regarding the papacy.

That would be the case if the Church taught that popes are perfectly prudent and can’t make mistakes of a prudential nature.

However, the Church claims no such thing. There is nothing in Church teaching that says this won’t happen.

It thus would be erecting a straw pope to claim that it does.

 

Divine Guidance?

But perhaps we can find a way to improve this argument, for the Church does claim that the Holy Spirit provides guidance to the pope and the bishops as members of the Magisterium.

That God gives people divine guidance of some form—even to Christians that are not members of the Magisterium—is certainly true. St. James says so (Jas. 1:5).

Calvinists would presumably see John Calvin as a person to whom God gave special guidance, resulting in him having a particularly insightful theology. Lutherans would presumably do the same for Martin Luther, and Wesleyans for John Wesley.

And the Church acknowledges that God gives this guidance to bishops, including the pope, in a special way.

But this guidance is separate from the gift of infallibility. If infallibility is engaged, the resulting teaching is guaranteed to be free from error.

However, the more general guidance God gives is not guaranteed to have this result—whether it’s the general guidance he gives to individual Christians, to gifted theologians, or to representatives of the Magisterium, like the bishops and popes.

The Church does not teach that, when operating under general guidance, the members of the Magisterium can’t make mistakes—and certainly not in the prudential order. In fact, it teaches:

When it comes to the question of interventions in the prudential order, it could happen that some magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies. Bishops and their advisors have not always taken into immediate consideration every aspect or the entire complexity of a question.

But it would be contrary to the truth, if, proceeding from some particular cases, one were to conclude that the Church’s Magisterium can be habitually mistaken in its prudential judgments, or that it does not enjoy divine assistance in the integral [i.e., overall] exercise of its mission (CDF, Donum Veritatis 24).

Here the topic is magisterial interventions of a prudential nature—that is, when the Church teaches on a prudential matter. This is not the same thing as the prudence of policy and administrative decisions, like whether to sign a treaty or who to appoint to a particular office.

On the level of decisions about what to teach on prudential matters, the Church acknowledges that the Holy Spirit guides the Magisterium so that it is not “habitually mistaken,” but that doesn’t mean this guidance prevents all mistakes, for “it could happen that some magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies.”

If that’s the case even when the Church is exercising its teaching authority, it’s even more the case when it comes to non-doctrinal decisions, such as international relations or personnel matters.

To truly engage with what the Church teaches regarding the guidance of the Magisterium, one would need to demonstrate that the Church is “habitually mistaken” in its prudential judgments (at least on doctrinal matters) and thus that it doesn’t enjoy the kind of divine guidance it claims.

That will be difficult to do since the Catholic Church is the world’s largest religious body—a fact that suggests they’ve been doing something right.

 

What About the Pope Himself?

The above discussion involves the guidance that the Holy Spirit gives to the Magisterium as a whole—that is, the bishops teaching in union with the pope—but could we configure a version of the argument that would be more specific to the pope himself?

We could, if the Church taught that the guidance that God gives the pope is sufficiently strong that it prevents him from making mistakes in the prudential order.

However, the Church does not teach this. Although the Holy Spirit offers guidance to the Church in selecting a new pope, this guidance doesn’t guarantee that the choice of pope will be a good one!

In a 1997 interview, Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) was asked whether the Holy Spirit is responsible for the election of a pope. He replied:

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us.

Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined (John Allen, The Rise of Benedict XVI, 6).

He continued:

There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!

It’s thus quite possible for there to be bad popes, as history has illustrated.

Protestant apologist James White has recently been proposing the idea of a debate on the merits of recent statements or actions by Pope Francis and what implications they may have for Catholic teachings about the pope.

But even if one were to conclude that Francis was a bad or unsuitable pope, that would not disprove Catholic teaching, because Catholic teaching allows there to be bad popes.

It would be erecting a straw pope to suppose otherwise.

You could infer from the conclusion that Francis is a bad pope that he’s an outlier.

But you wouldn’t be showing from this single data point that the Holy Spirit doesn’t guide the overall institution of the papacy or that he doesn’t work through bad popes.

After all, the Holy Spirit provided guidance to the overall institution of the Jewish high priesthood, but that didn’t stop there from being bad high priests—like Caiaphas—who plotted Jesus’ death.

Nor did it mean that God wouldn’t work through bad high priests once they had assumed their divinely instituted office. In fact, the Holy Spirit gave a genuine prophecy through Caiaphas even when he was in the act of plotting the death of the Messiah (John 11:47-53)!

Once again, you’d need to argue against the whole line of popes and show that they—as a body—lack the guidance that the Church holds they receive by virtue of their office.

You could do that by arguing that they systematically teach false doctrine—in which case you need to debate the doctrines.

However, if you want to do it by pointing to poor prudential decisions, you’ll have a hard row to hoe, because—once again—the Catholic Church is the largest religious body in the world, making it difficult to hold that popes are “habitually mistaken” in their prudential decisions. They’re obviously doing something right!

 

Appointing Officials?

As part of his argument for debating recent actions by Pope Francis, White says:

I think I’ve made a very strong case that we live at a point in time, right now, where there needs to be a clear discussion of the positive claims that Rome makes concerning the necessity of the papacy—and not just the papacy as some nebulous, unidentifiable, foggy chimera.

But you have a pope, and that pope has a worldview. And he is using that worldview to choose cardinals and bishops, scholars on the Pontifical Biblical Commission, that will influence the teaching in Roman Catholic schools for decades.

You know this to be true. This needs to be debated.

And if you’re going to debate sola scriptura, then both ultimate claims of an epistemological authority must be on the table. It is time for Roman Catholic apologists to stand up to their own claims.

White thus sees the pope’s appointment of cardinals, bishops, and biblical scholars as relevant to the question of whether Catholic teaching on the papacy is true.

Why would these be relevant?

Further light is shed on this question at another point in the video, where he says:

The worldview that allows Francis to look at the tradition, primarily delivered to him in the South American church, and interpret it the way he’s interpreting it, and then acting upon that—in putting people in positions of authority—results in the papacy teaching something differently now than it did in the past.

The concept of infallible teaching authority has to have meaning. Or your claims, and my claims, are empty.

White here relates the appointment of various individuals as somehow affecting “the concept of infallible teaching authority.”

His argument seems to be that Pope Francis has a worldview that leads him to appoint officials that will have an influence on Catholic teaching that will result in it changing in some way. He also said:

I remember very, very clearly pointing out a contradiction—this is back during John Paul II—a contradiction between what John Paul II had said, and [what] a previous bishop of Rome had said.

White thus takes differences in Church teaching over time—such as the one he remembers finding between John Paul II and a prior pope, or the ones he thinks Francis’s appointees might one day produce—as contradicting “the concept of infallible teaching authority.”

 

No Doctrinal Development?

I have to have some sympathy for White, because there are a large number of Catholics who say things like “[Catholic] Doctrine can’t change.”

As I point out in my book Teaching With Authority, the Church does not use this language.

Instead, it acknowledges that doctrinal development happens over time:

In order to serve the People of God as well as possible, in particular, by warning them of dangerous opinions which could lead to error, the Magisterium can intervene in questions under discussion which involve, in addition to solid principles, certain contingent and conjectural elements. It often only becomes possible with the passage of time to distinguish between what is necessary and what is contingent.

The willingness to submit loyally to the teaching of the Magisterium on matters per se not [infallible] must be the rule. It can happen, however, that a theologian may, according to the case, raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents of magisterial interventions. Here the theologian will need, first of all, to assess accurately the authoritativeness of the interventions which becomes clear from the nature of the documents, the insistence with which a teaching is repeated, and the very way in which it is expressed. . . .

In fact, the theologian, who cannot pursue his discipline well without a certain competence in history, is aware of the filtering which occurs with the passage of time. This is not to be understood in the sense of a relativization of the tenets of the faith. The theologian knows that some judgments of the Magisterium could be justified at the time in which they were made, because while the pronouncements contained true assertions and others which were not sure, both types were inextricably connected. Only time has permitted discernment and, after deeper study, the attainment of true doctrinal progress (CDF, Donum Veritatis 24).

The Church thus acknowledges that, as it seeks to articulate Christian doctrine, its statements have varying levels of authority.

As long as these are not on the infallible level, they can contain both “solid principles” that are “necessary,” as well as “certain contingent and conjectural elements,” and that “it often only becomes possible with the passage of time to distinguish” between them.

This process, which occurs under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is referred to as doctrinal development.

Therefore, it is possible in particular situations to consider non-infallible teachings and “raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents of magisterial interventions.”

Which is to say: Non-infallible teachings are not infallible.

They have differing levels of authority, from the tentative to the very firm, and their overall reliability is found in the guidance that the Holy Spirit gives the Church even when infallibility isn’t being invoked. But they can contain “contingent and conjectural elements” that will be removed over the course of time as the Holy Spirit guides the Church “into all the truth” (John 16:13).

Therefore, one erects a straw pope if one proposes that no imperfections and no doctrinal development can occur.

This seems to be what James White is doing, because merely finding a difference between what John Paul II said and what a prior pope said does not engage “the concept of infallible teaching authority”—with one possible exception.

 

The Real Issue

The one exception occurs if you can find:

  1. A papal teaching that is infallible,
  2. A Church teaching that is infallible (whether by a pope or the Magisterium in general), and
  3. Both of these teachings contradict each other.

If you could find such a situation, then you would have a disproof of papal infallibility by counter-example, which is one of two strategies one could employ (the other would be a disproof of the doctrine on the level of principle rather than by example).

Consequently, this is the real issue for example-based disproofs of papal infallibility. Everything else is a distraction that involves setting up a straw pope.

It does not matter if:

  • A pope commits sins
  • A pope does imprudent things
  • A pope is a bad pope
  • A pope says something different than what has been said in the past

To disprove papal infallibility by counter-example you need an infallible papal teaching that contradicts another infallible teaching.

Nothing else will do the job.

I’ve already explained why I’m not interested in debating statements or actions by Pope Francis for various practical reasons.

However, the above explains why on the doctrinal level: Pope Francis has never attempted to teach infallibility on a matter of doctrine, and therefore the relevant issue is not on the table. Such a debate would, of necessity, be an exercise in irrelevance.

Which is what the Straw Pope and the Straw Man fallacies are—fallacies of relevance.

To actually do this kind of disproof, you’d need to comb through the list of papal documents that contain infallible definitions (and, as I point out in Teaching With Authority, the list is quite small) and then find a contradiction to another infallible teaching.

 

But . . . ! But . . . !

The above will not be satisfying to many critics of the Catholic Church, because it makes their job much harder than it otherwise would be.

It’s one thing to argue that a pope sins, does imprudent things, is bad at his job, or says something different than prior popes.

It’s another thing entirely to find contradictions between items in the relatively modest body of infallible teachings.

Some may argue that they ought to be able to appeal to these other things—that the papacy should work the way they want it to.

And one can have some sympathy for them, as individual Catholics sometimes make exaggerated claims that would support a more expansive view of how it works.

But the fact is that the Church does not teach such a view. The Church teaches that the Holy Spirit provides the Magisterium guidance that guarantees the reliability of its teachings in a general fashion, but he only guarantees the complete reliability of specific teachings when they are taught infallibly.

Consequently, if you want to disprove infallibility, it’s to that set of teachings you must appeal.

You can’t disprove infallibility by appealing to non-infallible teachings (or things that aren’t even teachings).

You can say that the Church should teach something else about the papacy—something that’s easier for you to knock down.

But that’s the definition of attacking a straw man—or, in this case, a straw pope.