Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

Are Fine-Tuning Arguments for God (or the Multiverse) Circular?

In a recent video, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues that design arguments for God’s existence commit the fallacy of begging the question—also known as circular reasoning.

Do they?

Before we began, I want to lay my cards on the table and say that I’m a fan of Sabine Hossenfelder. She’s smart, well qualified, and a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.

I appreciate her commitment to explaining physics in comprehensible terms and her willingness to challenge ideas that are fashionable in the physics community but that are not well supported by evidence.

She also doesn’t reject religious claims out of hand—as many do. Instead, she typically concludes that they are beyond what science can tell us, one way or the other.

 

A Finely Tuned Universe?

In her recent video, she notes that many people argue that the laws of physics that govern our universe seem finely tuned to allow life to exist. Even slight changes in the constants they involve would prevent life from ever arising.

An example she cites is that if the cosmological constant (i.e., the energy density of space) were too large, galaxies would never form.

Similarly, if the electromagnetic force was too strong, nuclear fusion would not light up stars.

Given all the values we can imagine these constants having, it seems unlikely that the laws that govern our universe would be finely tuned to allow life to exist just by random chance, so the question is how to explain this.

 

God or the Multiverse?

One proposed explanation is that the universe isn’t finely tuned by chance. It’s finely tuned by design.

Some entity with immense, universe-spanning power (i.e., God) designed the universe to be this way, and in religious circles, this type of argument is known as a “design argument” for God’s existence.

Another proposed explanation is that our universe is finely tuned for life by chance. But since it would be improbable to get a finely tuned universe with a single throw of the dice, it’s inferred that there must be other throws of the dice.

In other words, our universe is just one of countless universes that contain other laws and constants, and we just happen to be living in a universe where the things happen to come up right for life to exist.

(After all, we wouldn’t be here if they didn’t.)

Such a collection of universes is known as a multiverse.

 

God and the Multiverse?

From a religious perspective, the multiverse hypothesis can look like an attempt to get around the obvious implication of the universe’s apparent design—i.e., that it has a Designer.

However, that doesn’t mean that the multiverse doesn’t exist. If he chose, God could create a vast array of universes, each of which have different laws, and not all of them may contain life. (After all, most of our own universe does not contain life!)

Similarly, from the perspective of someone who believes in the multiverse, multiple universes wouldn’t rule out the existence of God, because you could still need a God to explain why the multiverse exists at all.

The God hypothesis and the multiverse hypothesis thus are not incompatible.

 

Both Are Possibilities

Dr. Hossenfelder acknowledges that both God and the multiverse could be real, but she says—correctly—that this would not add to our knowledge of how our universe works.

If God exists, that doesn’t tell us what the laws of our universe are. We still have to discover those by observation.

And if the multiverse exists, that also doesn’t tell us about the laws of our universe. Observation is still necessary to figure them out.

 

Circular Reasoning?

Her claim is that the fine-tuning arguments for both God and the multiverse don’t work—and, specifically, that they involve circular reasoning.

She fleshes out this claim along the following lines:

  1. To infer God, the multiverse, or anything else as the cause for why our universe seems finely tuned, you need evidence that our universe’s combination of constants is unlikely.
  2. However, the only evidence we have is what we have measured, and—precisely because the constants are constant—we always see them having the same values.
  3. Therefore, we have no evidence that the combination we see is unlikely.
  4. So, advocates of these views must assume what they need to prove—that the combination is unlikely—and that’s circular reasoning.

 

The Pen Objection

Dr. Hossenfelder seeks to head off an objection to her argument by pointing to a parallel case: Suppose you saw an ink pen standing upright on a table, balanced on its point.

It seems very unlikely that a pen would be balanced in this way, and so you’d suspect there was a reason why the pen was standing like this—perhaps a special mechanism of some sort.

But, she says, the reason that we can rationally suspect this is because we have experience with pens and know how hard it is to balance them this way.

Therefore, it would not be circular reasoning to propose an explanation for the oddly balanced pen.

However, the only experience we have with the constants of nature is the set we see. We thus can’t estimate how likely or unlikely they are to occur, because we don’t have evidence about the probability of this combination of constants.

 

What Do You Mean by “Evidence”?

The problem with Dr. Hossenfelder’s argument is the way she uses the term “evidence.”

In the video, she seems to assume that “evidence” must mean empirical evidence—that is, evidence derived from observation using the physical senses (and their technological extensions, like radio telescopes and electron microscopes).

This is the kind of evidence used in the natural sciences, and so you also could call it “scientific evidence.”

However, this is not the only kind of evidence there is.

Fields like logic, mathematics, and ethics depend on principles—sometimes called axioms—that cannot be proved by observation.

The evidence we have for them comes in the form of intuitions, because they seem either self-evidently true or self-evidently probable to us.

Since each of these fields is part of or closely connected with philosophy, we might refer to this intuitive evidence as “philosophical evidence.”

Whatever you want to call it, it’s evidence that we depend on—certainly in every field that involves logic, mathematics, and ethics.

Science involves all three, and so, while the scientific enterprise depends on observational evidence, it also depends on intuitive, philosophical evidence.

 

Do We Lack Observational Evidence?

It’s true that we can’t observe other universes, and so we lack observational evidence of the laws and constants that might be at play in them.

But does this mean that we lack any observational evidence that constants could have different values?

Confining ourselves strictly to our own universe—the only one we can observe—we see that not all constants have the same value. For example:

  • The strong coupling constant is about 1
  • The fine-structure constant is about 1/137
  • The top quark mass is about 1/10^17
  • The bottom quark mass is about 3/10^19
  • The electron mass is about 4/10^23

Clearly, we see things that we regard as constants with different values, even in our own universe. The constants I’ve just listed span 23 orders of magnitude!

Why do all these dimensionless constants have different values?

That’s a natural question to ask!

And so, one could argue that we do have observational evidence that constants can have different values—not from universe to universe but from constant to constant—and that leaves many people asking why.

 

Variable Constants

Further, we even have evidence that some of these constants may vary over time.

In particular, we have evidence that the fine-structure constant—which deals with the strength of the electromagnetic interactions—may have varied slightly over time within our universe.

Dr. Hossenfelder says in her video that this “has nothing to do with the fine-tuning arguments,” but this seems false.

If we have evidence that some things scientists initially took as constants aren’t constant after all, then it further raises the question of why they have the values they do.

 

The Evidence of Intuition

I’m not at all convinced that we don’t have observational evidence that invites us to ask why the constants we see in our universe have the values they do.

However, even if I were to waive this point, we still have one other line of evidence: direct intuition.

People who study the constants can imagine them having different values. We can, for example, imagine the electron mass being twice—or half—what its measured value is.

That makes it rational to ask why a constant has the value it does. As theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman famously said about the fine-structure constant:

It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.)

Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed His pencil.” We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out – without putting it in secretly!

 

In Search of Explanations

Finding out the explanations for things is a key part of the scientific enterprise. The same is true of the philosophical enterprise.

We have a powerful (philosophical) intuition that things we encounter have explanations, and thus we seek them.

In philosophy, this intuition is sometimes framed as the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and while precisely how to formulate the principle is controversial, some kind of sufficient-reason quest is behind the scientific enterprise.

It would not do at all—and it would not be scientific at all—to encounter phenomena like stars shining, plants growing, and objects falling and say, “Those are just brute facts that don’t have explanations.”

Our intuition tells us that they need explanations, and it is the task of science to find them—to the extent it can—based on observation of how they work.

When we discern that many of these phenomena can be explained in terms of a set of underlying laws and constants, it’s then natural to ask what the explanation for these is—particularly when we notice that if these things were even slightly different, we wouldn’t be here.

 

The Limits of Science

Ultimately, Dr. Hossenfelder doesn’t deny that explanations for these things exist. She specifically says:

But this does not mean god or the multiverse do not exist. It just means that evidence cannot tell us whether they do or do not exist. It means, god and the multiverse are not scientific ideas.

The problem with this is how she’s using the word “evidence.” She’s taking it to mean empirical/observational/scientific evidence.

And it’s true that, at least in any conventional sense, you can’t do a laboratory experiment that shows that God exists—or a laboratory experiment that shows the multiverse exists.

Consequently, both ideas are beyond what can be proved scientifically.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t argue for them on other grounds. You can, in fact, argue for them based on your intuitions about what needs to be true in order to explain the constants as we see them.

This makes God and the multiverse subjects of philosophical argumentation rather than scientific demonstration.

 

Not Circular Reasoning

And that means that the charge of circular reasoning is false.

It would be circular reasoning to simply assume that it’s improbable the values of the constants we see in our universe should have the values they do.

But it’s not circular reasoning to say, “I have a strong intuition that this calls for an explanation” and then reason your way to what you think best explains it—even if that explanation lies beyond what’s scientifically measurable.

In other words, just because you’re doing something beyond science, it doesn’t mean that you’re simply begging the question.

 

The Return of the Pen

Let’s apply this insight to the ink pen example that Dr. Hossenfelder brought up.

Even if I’d never before seen a pen–or any similar object–it would make sense, when I first encountered one, for me to ask why it is the way it is.

Just like scientists and philosophers ask this for anything else they encounter.

I don’t need to know how likely or unlikely it is that an ink pen would be balanced on its point. The fact I can conceive of it being otherwise makes the question of why it’s standing rational.

Just asking the question is not begging the question.

And neither is having an intuition that it’s unlikely to be standing on its point (or in any other position) without an explanation.

 

Tying up Loose Ends

To keep things simple, I haven’t responded to everything Dr. Hossenfelder says in her video, since I wanted to keep things focused on her main argument.

However, I would like to circle back to the God hypothesis and the multiverse hypothesis as explanations for the apparent fine-tuning of our universe.

Personally, I like the idea of there being multiple universes—not for scientific or philosophical reasons, but just because I think it would be cool.

I’d also be fine with them having different laws and constants governing them. That would only add to the coolness.

But—speaking philosophically—there would still need to be a reason why the whole collection of them exist and why the laws that govern them vary from one to another.

Elsewhere, I’ve written about this as a “cosmic slot machine”:

If there is a multiverse with every possible combination of natural laws in the universes it contains . . . what is driving the change of laws in each universe? If there is a cosmic slot machine, whose innards cause the constants to come up different in each universe, why is that the case?

To explain the existence of such a cosmic slot machine, we’d need to appeal to something beyond the multiverse itself.

And so, whether or not there is a multiverse, I favor the God hypothesis.

When Were the Gospels Written?

Here is a brief post to draw together treatments I’ve written on the subject of when the four canonical Gospels were composed.

Determining the dates of Luke and Acts is a key first step in determining the dates of the others, so it is treated first.

I also treat these in my book The Bible Is a Catholic Book.

Posts in this series:

Related to the question of when the Gospels were composed is the order in which they were written–especially the order of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (i.e., the “Synoptic Gospels”). This is known as the Synoptic Problem.

I have written about the Synoptic Problem rather extensively here.

Some additional posts related to the dating of the Gospels and other New Testament books include:

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).”

Music and Grieving

After my wife, Renee, passed on from cancer in 1992—at the startlingly young age of 27—I did a lot of grieving.

One of the things that helped me through that process was listening to the music of two Christian recording artists.

I’ve mentioned them a few times on Catholic Answers Live when people call in who are dealing with personal losses, and I thought I’d blog about them in hopes that the information could be helpful to others.

I’m not impressed by a lot of artists, but I am by these two. They’re both very talented musicians and songwriters—and not just about grieving. Their music deals with a lot of situations from life and is well worth listening to whether you’re grieving or not!

Their names are Mark Heard and Billy Sprague.

Both artists are Evangelicals (or, I should say, Mark Heard was Evangelical; he passed just a couple of weeks before Renee did).

They both lost people, and this informs their work. They have a sense of the reality of suffering, but framed with a Christian worldview that emphasizes hope and redemption.

This combination—suffering, hope, and redemption—made their music very helpful to me.

It can still make me tear up—in a good way. (In fact, I did writing this post.)

Here are a few notes on the artists, as well as some of the albums that I listened to—and particular songs that I found helpful.

These were a comfort to me, and I hope they will provide comfort to others.

Whether you’re grieving or not, I recommend both these artists!

 

Mark Heard

Heard’s music ranges across a variety of musical styles (rock, country, zydeco) and is very thoughtful.

It is filled with powerful images, complex emotions, and subtle biblical references.

I’ve blogged about it—in connection with Renee’s death—before. You can read about that here.

Here’s a recording of Mark’s song Treasure of the Broken Land.

 

Billy Sprague

Sprague’s music also ranges across a variety of musical styles, but it is primarily rock and orchestral rock-oriented. It is clear that one of his major influences has been the Beatles.

His music tends to be more overtly Christian (e.g., Sprague will just come out and say “Heaven Is a Long Hello”—whereas Heard will allude to being reunited with our loved ones by mentioning “miraculous circumstance where the blind ones see and the dry bones dance”).

Here’s a recording of Billy’s song Press On.

 

Comparison

Sprague tends to be more explicit, whereas Heard relies more on allusions. Both the more direct and the less direct approaches are helpful in reaching and processing emotions.

Both artists have music that is very beautiful and can be emotionally powerful for a grieving person (or anybody).

Both also have music that contains of sorrow and hope. Heard’s helped me process feelings of sorrow a little bit more, while Sprague’s helped me feel hope a little bit more.

This made them both good for the different stages of grieving.

 

Mark Heard Discography for Grieving

Album: Dry Bones Dance (1990)

Key Songs:

  • Rise from the Ruins
  • Dry Bones Dance
  • House of Broken Dreams
  • Strong Hand of Love

 

 

Album: Satellite Sky (1992)

Key Songs:

  • Satellite Sky
  • Orphans of God
  • Language of Love
  • Treasure of the Broken Land

 

 

Billy Sprague Discography for Grieving

Album: Torn Between Two Worlds (1992)

Key Songs:

  • Heaven Is a Long Hello
  • Waiting for the Day
  • For the One Who Sleeps
  • You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down

 

 

Album: The Wind and the Wave (1993)

Key Songs:

  • Press On
  • A Way Back
  • The Blessing (of the Fleet)
  • The Sacred Journey

Motivation to Say the Liturgy of the Hours

Someone writes:

What advice would you give to a priest that had trouble staying loyal to the liturgy of the hours–especially if they have trouble finding them fruitful or just a checklist thing to do?

I’d have several pieces of advice:

 

1) We all go through periods of spiritual dryness in which particular activities do not seem fruitful to us and more like a checklist.

Do not worry about this. Accomplishing our duties even when they do not seem personally rewarding actually increases the merit of doing them, as it is persevering in spite of difficulty.

This represents the principle that God uses to bring good out of adversity, the supreme example of which is Christ’s redemption for the world from the Cross. However, the same principle is at work in our lives when we do what we should in spite of the difficulties. It applies to praying even when our emotions run in another direction, and it thus applies to praying the Liturgy of the Hours specifically.

 

2) In terms of making the Liturgy of the Hours feel more relevant, it can be helpful to remember that it is not done principally for the one praying it. It is principally for God and for his Church. This is why it is a work of liturgy (Greek, leitourgia = “a work done on behalf of the people”) rather than a private devotion.

It is thus in the same category as saying Mass, and it may be helpful to think of it in that way. Tell yourself, “I’m going to say the Liturgy of the Hours now, just like I say Mass–to praise God and pray on behalf of his people. This isn’t for me. It’s for love of God and love of neighbor. I’m doing it, no matter what my emotions may be, because I love them both.”

 

3) One reason that saying the Liturgy of the Hours may feel different than saying Mass is that it is often done alone.

This can be changed. One can start a small group to pray the hours together–a group consisting of priests, deacons, laity, or a mix of some of each of them. This even can be done via online meeting (e.g., Skype, Zoom).

Having a scheduled time or set of times where one will be meeting with other people can be very effective in helping one fulfill a schedule. It is easy to let things slip if they depend only on us, but if they are done with others, we are much better about accomplishing them.

If it’s not possible to have a group pray all of the different hours, it is possible to cover at least some of them this way (e.g., morning and evening prayer, and perhaps others.)

Also, involving a group of people can help bring out on an emotional level the fact that this isn’t just for us. It really does involve Christ’s Church in a broader way.

 

4) If one must say the Liturgy of the Hours alone, it may be helpful to employ an electronic aid, such as text-to-speech or a human voice recording.

If one has an electronic copy of the Liturgy, one may use a text-to-speech function to read the text aloud.

Alternately, one might use a recorded version of the Liturgy, such as Praystation Portable.

These may not be traditional solutions, but technology has now made them possible, and there is nothing illicit about using them.

I, personally, find both text-to-speech and voice recordings (audio books) very helpful when getting through texts, and there is no reason that the principle cannot be applied in this area for those who find it useful.

In fact, millions of people already listen to recordings of private devotions like the Rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet as prayer aids.

I hope this helps, and God bless you!

Why Do You Need a Priest for Confession?

Someone writes:

Why do we know that John 20:23–forgiving sins–pertains only to the apostles and their successors, but other things like the commandment to proclaim the gospel to al the world applies to lay people as well?

 

BACKGROUND ON JOHN’S GOSPEL

John’s Gospel avoids the term “apostle(s).” This term never appears in John. Instead, he refers on a few occasions to “the Twelve.” However, his preferred term for Jesus’ close circle of followers is “the disciple(s).” This appears over and over again, and it is clearly his favorite designation for people who have close ties with Jesus.

It also is the author’s preferred designation for himself: He is “the disciple” Jesus loved, not “the apostle” Jesus loved.

There is a significant case to be made that the author of the Gospel is not John son of Zebedee (i.e., not John the Apostle) but a different eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry known as John the Presbyter/Elder, who is discussed by some early Church Fathers and who apparently was a member of the Jerusalem aristocracy.

(Note that the beloved disciple is personally known to the high priest *and* his household staff–John 19:15-16–so he’s been to the house multiple times, enabling him to be recognized at night by the staff, and it took his intercession to get Peter admitted to the high priest’s courtyard; it is quite unlikely that an uneducated Galilean fisherman [Acts 4:13] would have this kind of relationship with the high priest; I may write more about the John the Presbyter theory; it’s been a special study of mine for awhile).

If this theory is true, it would explain John’s clear preference for the term “disciple” over “apostle.” The author is not an apostle or a member of the Twelve, but he is a disciple–a close follower of Jesus and an eyewitness to his ministry.

He thus frames his Gospel in a way that focuses on his qualifications as an author–he’s an eyewitness and a very close disciple of Jesus–rather than on factors that would cut against his qualifications (he’s not an apostle or a member of the Twelve).

 

INTERPRETING JOHN 20:23

As you’d expect, given the above, it is “the disciples” who are present when Jesus institutes the sacrament of confession (John 20:20).

Because of the ambiguity of the term, it could be understood as applying only to the Twelve or to the Twelve plus other core disciples, mirroring the fact that the minister of the sacrament is not only a bishop but also priests. (On this view, John the Elder may have regarded himself as a presbuteros/presbyter/priest, especially in view of his later activity in the Church–and also the fact he was present when Christ instituted the Eucharist and commissioned the first priests. In fact, he was the host of the dinner, as illustrated by his position at Jesus’ side.)

John 20:23 thus may provide even more direct support for the exercise of the sacrament by priests (rather than just bishops) than might first appear.

Whatever one makes of the exegesis of John 20:23 on its own terms, the early Church clearly associated the exercise of this sacrament with the episcopacy and priesthood. Ordinary believers could not absolve sins. They might be present at the absolution, if it was done in a public church service, but they themselves could not perform it.

The presumed logic behind this would be that a decision involving spiritual discernment had to be made. Jesus did not only give the ability to forgive sins but also the ability to retain sins. Therefore, discernment is called for: Are the person’s sins to be forgiven or retained? Is he genuinely repentant of them? (And, in an early Church context, has he done his assigned penance? And how much penance should he be assigned?)

These decisions fall naturally to the clergy, who have the spiritual expertise, endowment, and authority to make such determinations in a way the laity don’t.

It is clear that Jesus wanted certain functions in his Church reserved to its appointed ministers–otherwise, Jesus would not have instituted a hierarchy in his Church, which he did by appointing the Twelve–and in light of that decision, the faithful in the early Church had to ask themselves which functions were appropriately reserved to its ministers.

The Holy Spirit led them to recognize that the functions associated with the sacrament of confession were among these, and so it is partly by Tradition that we know this to be the case.

This Tradition was then declared infallibly when the Council of Trent defined that the minister of confession is a priest (Canons on Penance, can. 10).

 

THE EVANGELIZATION MANDATE

Properly speaking, the mandate of evangelization also falls on the clergy in a way that it does not fall on the laity.

Thus, Christ gives the Great Commission to “the Twelve” (Matt. 18:16; well, “the Eleven,” since Judas has killed himself).

However, it was made clear from the text of the New Testament that sharing the faith was something all Christians could and should–to the extent their skills and circumstances allowed–participate in. Thus, both Paul’s and Peter’s letters encourage ordinary Christians to act in ways that will win people to Christ and to be prepared to discuss their faith with outsiders.

We thus have explicit biblical mandate for evangelistic activity on the part of the laity as well as the clergy.

The Tradition has also emphasized this.

 

CONCLUSION
 
Scripture provides explicit support for both laity and clergy evangelizing, but it does not do the same thing for administering the sacrament of confession.

The Holy Spirit led the Church in a way that clarified the minister of that sacrament, and the clarification is manifest in Tradition.

This Tradition was then infallibly taught at Trent.

The presumed basis is the fittingness of having the clergy make the kind of decisions involving discernment that this sacrament requires, given the stakes involved (forgiveness vs. non-forgiveness).

If you’d like a modern, everyday parallel: Everybody at a car dealership can encourage you to buy a car (i.e., evangelize for the business), but only certain people are trusted to do the sensitive paperwork in making the actual transaction (i.e., the finance guys).

It makes sense in an organization for everyone to encourage its overall goals but to reserve its more sensitive functions to specially qualified individuals.

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.