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Patricia Shadi

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Mike Bodtke

Madie Manning

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Meredith Lohr

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Patrick Kelly

Blake Holzgrafe

“As the eleven were at table, he appeared to them and rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart…Jesus continues: ‘Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned’”

(MK 16:14,16)

1. Christian Belief as an Act of the Free Will

1.Science: Belief is determined by weighing the evidence objectively by the intellect.

Faith: Belief is determined by an act of the will to accept gift of God that is beyond the intellect’s competence.

“When he had cone indoors, the blind men came to him, and he asked them, ‘Do you believe that I am able to do this?’ ‘Yes, Lord,’ they replied. Then he touched their eyes and said, ‘According to your faith will it be done to you.’” (MT 9)

2. Christian Belief is without Empirical Evidence

2.Science: Belief is to be based on evidence

which is able to be analyzed empirically and objectively.

Faith: Empirically demonstrable evidence of God is not possible as God is not of the natural world. If there were empirically demonstrable evidence of God, it would destroy the virtue of faith and our free will.

3. Christian Belief is Focused on the Person of

Jesus

“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’” (Jn 11:25-26)

3.Science: Believes accounts, ideas, statements, theories, reports, etc. because the evidence compels the intellect to accept them as true.

Faith: The Gospel is not about believing things. It is about believing in the Person of Jesus Christ, who cannot be measured.

Christian Belief as an Act of the Free Will

Christian Belief is without Empirical Evidence

Christian Belief is Focused on the Person of

Jesus

“We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.”

-Richard Dawkins

“According to the scientist, belief should be allocated to the strength of the evidence presented. We should believe more with stronger evidence and less with weaker evidence.”

-C.S. Lewis

I think immediately of the martyrs, who are the most authentic witnesses to the truth about existence. The martyrs know that they have found the truth about life in the encounter with Jesus Christ, and nothing and no-one could ever take this certainty from them. Neither suffering nor violent death could ever lead them to abandon the truth which they have discovered in the encounter with Christ.

This is why to this day the witness of the martyrs continues to arouse such interest, to draw agreement, to win such a hearing and to invite emulation. This is why their word inspires such confidence: from the moment they speak to us of what we perceive deep down as the truth we have sought for so long, the martyrs provide evidence of a love that has no need of lengthy arguments in order to convince. The martyrs stir in us a profound trust because they give voice to what we already feel and they declare what we would like to have the strength to express.

“The perpetual agreement of the Catholic Church has maintained and maintains that there is a twofold order of knowledge: we know one level by natural reason, and the other level by divine faith.”

Besides those things to which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, are incapable of being known naturally for the divine mysteries, by their very nature, far surpass the created understanding.” (Dei Filius III 4, abridged)

Urged to reflect upon myself, I entered under your guidance the innermost places of my being; but only because you had become my helper was I able to do so. I entered, then, and with the eye of my soul, such as it was, I saw the incommutable light far beyond my soul and transcending my mind: not this common light which every carnal eye can see, nor any light of the same order; but greater, as though this common light were shining much more powerfully, far more brightly, and so extensively as to fill the universe.

The light I saw was not the common light at all, but something different, utterly different, from all those things. Nor was it higher than my mind in the sense that oil floats on water or the sky is above the earth; it was exalted because this very light made me, and I was below it because by it I was made. Anyone who knows truth knows this light.

(Augustine,

Confessions)

1356

Tolerance

1. a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry.

2. interest in and concern for ideas, opinions, practices, etc., foreign to one's own; a liberal, undogmatic viewpoint.