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Chapter 1

What Is Apologetics and Why Is It Important?

The most riveting scene in the movie A Few Good Men unfolds when a tenacious prosecuting attorney grills Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (played by Jack Nicholson) about his alleged role in a murder. The relentless cross-examination inexorably forces Jessup closer and closer to admitting something he is trying to conceal. Eventually, the prosecutor shouts, “I want the truth!” Jessup cracks under the strain and bellows, “You can’t handle the truth!” and then admits his guilt.

That message, whispered cajolingly — “You can’t handle the truth” — is the subtle, imperceptible subtext of much that modern culture insists is important: mindless entertainment, our mass addiction to gadgets and games, feckless pursuit of pleasure and distraction, surfeiting our bodily appetites for sex, drink, and food. None of these are truth. Worse yet, our tendency to immerse ourselves in futile, worldly amusements prevents us from ever really grappling with the Big Questions of life, such as: “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my life?” and “What happens to me when I die?” As Socrates famously declared, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” How sad that so many people never take the time to examine the things that really matter, stretching forth their minds and hearts toward the truth, toward God. Apologetics is a practical way of using logic and facts to help others lift their eyes from base, inconsequential distractions and gaze upward to contemplate the truth in all its beauty.

Apologetics accomplishes this task by offering those who will listen rational explanations and defense of the truth, the highest and most important of all including the truths that God exists, He loves you, He wants you to be happy, in Jesus Christ He took a human nature to save us from our sins, He died on the cross for our salvation, He promises forgiveness to all who will accept it. He established a Church replete with many treasures, all for us: the Holy Eucharist and the sacraments, the Holy Bible, Apostolic Tradition, and so much more. All of these truths are worth defending because they are life-giving and beautiful. Without knowing them at least to some extent, no human being can be truly free or completely happy.

Truth is the intellect’s most precious possession. It is to the mind what accurate navigational coordinates are to an airline pilot or what a physician’s correct diagnosis is to the patient. A pilot who navigates according to faulty coordinates will not reach his intended destination. A patient who receives an erroneous diagnosis of the pain in his abdomen could very well die if the wrong course of treatment (or no treatment at all) were prescribed. Truth enables us to avoid errors and to arrive at correct conclusions. Knowing and living according to the truth is always important, even in small things, while in serious matters, such as engineering a suspension bridge or calculating how much fuel to load into an airliner flying from Los Angeles to Sydney, the lack of truth can be catastrophic.

Common sense and our own personal experiences tell us that a mind imbued with truth is clearer, broader, brighter, and more vigorous than one in which the truth is not present. That mind, by comparison, is dark, cramped, shallow, and sluggish.

Your mind is designed for knowing truth just as your body is designed for drinking water. The purer and more abundant the water, the healthier your body will be. When water is scarce or dirty, the body gets sick. But while the body can imbibe too much water, the mind can never have too much truth. The human mind is limited, yet it nevertheless has an infinite capacity for truth because God, who is truth personified, is infinite. We must know and embrace truth and be ordered toward it just as the needle on a compass points toward true north, which it will do so long as the compass is free from interference or damage.

Try to imagine how unpleasant and dangerous this world would be if no one cared about truth for its own sake. If no one made an effort to push past mere human opinions and preferences and strive to know the truth about such things as mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry, the world would be a very dangerous place indeed. For example, how could you know whether a bridge is safe enough to drive your car over the one hundred foot deep gorge that it spans? If the engineer who designed that bridge did not know the absolute truth about the math and physics of bridge-building but, instead, based his calculations solely on his own private opinions and preferences, chances are, his handiwork wouldn’t last very long, nor would those who happened to be driving their cars over it one time too many.

Now try to imagine a world in which mathematicians, engineers, physicists, biologists, and the rest did care about and strive for knowing the truth about things but there was no external, objective means for any of them to ever really know if he or she had actually found the truth. In this world, there are no standards against which one’s individual efforts to ascertain the truth could be tested, no way for their conclusions to be verified or disproved, no recourse to an external standard by which calculations, working hypotheses, and theories could be tested and vindicated or disqualified. It’s obvious why no one would want to live in that world either. It’s hardly better than the first.

Now, the third scenario is not hypothetical. It’s the real world in which we find ourselves today. In every scientific discipline, ascertaining the truth about things and valuing truth for its own sake is not simply highly prized but is absolutely demanded, and thus, rigorously and relentlessly pursued across the board. The empirical method has become the primary means of testing the reliability and accuracy of claims by comparing and contrasting them with empirical data. This enables scientists, mathematicians, and so on, to avoid conclusions based on bias rather than objectively verifiable data.¹ We can thank God that we actually live in this world. In the world of science, mathematics, accounting, et cetera, discovering and adhering to objective standards of truth are not just important but are rightly regarded as absolutely necessary.

Okay. We all understand that truth is important in math, science, et cetera. No one argues with this. But for some strange reason, many people today seem to take a very unscientific approach to matters of faith and religion. And in my own search for answers to the question, “Why be Catholic?,” I determined early on that merely having a good feeling about the Catholic Church is no substitute for knowing whether or not the teachings of the Catholic Church are true. For me, plausibility is not enough. I need to know whether these teachings are, in fact, the truth. Because if they aren’t, I decided, I want no part of the Catholic Church. In fact, if Catholic teaching is false, or if even some Catholic teachings are false, then, I told myself, I’d hit the door running and never look back.

Over the years, I’ve been challenged by countless Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons with biblical and historical arguments against various truths. Other challenges came from Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other non-Christians, not to mention atheists. Each in his own way and with his own set of objections, challenged my Catholic beliefs using, variously, the Bible, historical events, logical arguments, claims to revelations that were incompatible with the claims of Jesus Christ, science, and the dull yet forceful cudgel of denying God’s existence. More than a few atheists have over the years taken their fair share of whacks at my belief in God, though with about the same effect as one who attacks a piñata with a feather duster.

As a youth, passing through a gauntlet of arguments Bible-believing critics have used trying to convince me that the Catholic Church is not Christian, I always knew, in the back of my mind, that eventually I would encounter more sophisticated and formidable arguments against the Catholic Church. But when newer and more formidable arguments against Catholic teaching popped up, something fascinating happened each and every time.

I’m talking about how the objective standards of truth I turned to (whether historical, biblical, or logical) always seemed to vindicate the Catholic teaching under question. I say “seemed” in that even if it didn’t seem vindicated in the eyes of the Protestant or the atheist with whom I was discussing matters, I became convinced that the other guy’s argument just didn’t hold water.

Some arguments in defense of the Catholic Church can be tested empirically, others cannot. But this is not a problem because not all evidence needs be scientific to be valid and legitimate. Unlike mathematical or material things, such as atoms, azimuths, and animals, I am not suggesting that theological propositions — such as the existence of God or the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist — can be proven scientifically. While there are objective, empirical methods for measuring, verifying, and even disproving theological claims, they cannot be positively proven with mathematical certitude the way, for example, it can be proved that the radius of a circle is equal to pi times its radius squared.

The goal of this book is not so much to prove the truth of Catholic teaching but to show how, using biblical, historical, and logical proofs, one can demonstrate confidently and effectively that Catholic teaching is reasonable, consistent, and compelling. The old saying is true, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Which is why, in this book, I will teach you how to “salt the oats” so that the horse will want to drink the water.

Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft explains what steps one must take in assessing any truth claim, whether scientific or religious, if the one making the assessment wants to be logically consistent and truly open to the facts.² Regarding the question “Can you prove life after death?” Kreeft says:

Whenever we argue about whether a thing can be proved, we should distinguish five different questions about that thing:

1. Does it really exist or not? “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

2. If it does exist, do we know that it exists? A thing can obviously exist without our knowing it.

3. If we know that it exists, can we be certain of this knowledge? Our knowledge might be true but uncertain; it might be “right opinion.”

4. If it is certain, is there a logical proof, a demonstration of why we have a right to be certain? There may be some certainties that are not logically demonstrable (e.g., my own existence, or the law of noncontradiction).

5. If there is a proof, is it a scientific one in the modern sense of “scientific”? Is it publicly verifiable by formal logic and/or empirical observation? There may be other valid kinds of proof besides proofs by the scientific method.

Kreeft continues:

The fifth point is especially important when asking whether you can prove life after death. I think it depends on what kinds of proof you will accept. It cannot be proved like a theorem in Euclidean geometry; nor can it be observed, like a virus. For the existence of life after death is not on the one hand a logical tautology: its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, as a Euclidean theorem does. On the other hand, it cannot be empirically proved or disproved (at least before death) simply because by definition all experience before death is experience of life before death, not life after death.

“If life after death cannot be proved scientifically, is it then intellectually irresponsible to accept it?”

Only if you assume that it is intellectually irresponsible to accept anything that cannot be proved scientifically. But that premise is self-contradictory (and therefore intellectually irresponsible)!

You cannot scientifically prove that the only acceptable proofs are scientific proofs.

You cannot prove logically or empirically that only logical or empirical proofs are acceptable as proofs.

You cannot prove it logically because its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, and you cannot prove it empirically because neither a proof nor the criterion of acceptability are empirical entities.

Thus scientism (the premise that only scientific proofs count as proofs) is not scientific; it is a dogma of faith, a religion.

When assessing the truth claims of the Catholic Church, scientifically verifiable evidence is important and helpful, but it is not the only kind of evidence to consider. John Henry Newman, for example, arrived at his conclusion that “to become deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,” in part because of the power of the objective historical data he analyzed. But it also involved his willingness to draw the necessary conclusions toward which the data points.

For example, as early as the year A.D. 90, Pope Clement issued directives to the members of the church at Corinth on how they were to resolve certain vexing controversies that roiled that Christian community. In breathtakingly direct language, he asserted his authority over their affairs in a way that one could only expect would have provoked indignation from the Corinthians unless his authority were not recognized by them.³

“Hey, Clement,” one can just imagine the Corinthian leaders retorting, “mind your own business! You take care of your church and we’ll take care of ours.” But they did no such thing. In fact, for generations the Church in Corinth revered Pope Clement’s letter, regarding it as inspired Scripture and including it among the books of the New Testament read during the Divine Liturgy.

Many examples of Catholic teaching, including the papacy, the Eucharist, the sacraments, honoring Mary and the saints, the existence of purgatory, the Mass as a sacrifice, and infant baptism were clearly present in the early Church. My book Why Is That in Tradition? details much of the evidence for these claims. The facts of history, for example, as well as the objective data found in the Bible, are important empirical streams of evidence in the work of apologetics. They assist us in the process of validating or invalidating various theological claims. But those bodies of evidence are really only useful to apologetics when used in discussion and debate between those who already believe in the trustworthiness of the Bible; for example, Jews, in the case of what Christians call the “Old Testament,” and Christians, in the case of the Old and New Testaments. Atheists and non-Christian believers in God, however, do not place any stock in what the Bible says.

Discussion between Christians and atheists involves what is known as “natural apologetics,” an approach in which the Christian seeks to demonstrate the reasonableness of theism solely on logical, rational grounds (that is, without any appeal to anything like “divine revelation,” which atheists reject in any case).

Apologetics geared for non-Christian theists, such as Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, requires what’s known as “Christian apologetics,” in which the common-ground belief that God exists (regardless of how “God” may be understood in any given religion) becomes the foundation upon which the Christian can build the case for the claim that Jesus Christ is truly God incarnate. This is done by demonstrating the ample rational and historical evidence that corroborates this claim.

My experience of encountering objections to Catholic teachings, listening closely to the objection, testing the objection, and drawing a conclusion as to whether or not it was correct usually happened informally, in discussions with non-Catholics, non-Christians, and nontheists. Sometimes these interactions went on long enough to afford me ample time to really dig into the evidence, pro and con, and finally make a determination based on a fair amount of careful study of the facts. Examples of this kind of thing would include long-term apologetics discussions with non-Catholic friends who, over weeks and even months, kept up a sustained effort to dissuade me from being Catholic. Other times, the time frame was more compressed but still significant. One particularly vivid memory of this kind of encounter sticks out in my mind.