I also think I should add that this process has been extremely difficult and mentally taxing. My faith is extremely dry now and I suffer from a great inner darkness--a desolation. I have been in and out of depression and I always fear I'm on the cusp of despair. I want to affirm belief in God, the Resurrection, the Catholic Church, but I doubt too much. I have been tempted in these last several weeks to adopt a sort of agnosticism or, even worse, nihilism. I think it ridiculous that only a month ago I thought I could likely become a priest--I feel very far from this now. I have lost my sense of the sacred, I don't see beauty in the mass, Adoration has become slow and even boring, prayer has become monotonous.

I know I can't press forward, I can't authentically believe in revelation, scripture, the life of Christ, the Catholic Church, unless I revisit these intellectual issues. I need to set a rock-solid foundation before I rebuild. I do observe that some people never do this, in fact some people don't seem like they need to do this--I envy them. I, however, find myself cursed with an ever-burning desire to intellectually justify everything I believe. I don't think that my mother, my friends, or any lay Catholic who is devout but doesn't pursue the intellectual projects, is any lesser of a Catholic or theist for doing so. Their beliefs may conform to reality regardless of whether or not they spend their time reading philosophical and theological tomes. 

Last edited by RomanJoe (5/11/2017 8:55 pm)

I don't have anything to add to Alexander's reading suggestions. For my own part, Catholicism has always seemed like the only live option given Christianity.

The reason for expecting revelation in the first place is its necessity. Man cannot save himself and cannot get by on his own, so God had to reveal himself if man was going to have a relationship with him. And he did. I likewise think that once you have revelation, it has to be safeguarded, and something like the structure of the Catholic Church is necessary to that end. (Without getting into the historical weeds, which I'm not competent to do, the mileage of this argument will vary, and it will be especially contested by the Orthodox, whereas Protestants, I suppose, would be more inclined to try to reject the requirements of historical continuity and of visibility on Christ's Church--either by claiming mere Christianity is sufficient, or that scripture is sufficiently perspicuous, or something of the sort.)

I will pray for an increase in your faith and for your vocation, whatever it is. The fact about faith is that it is distinguished from reason precisely in that its grounds are less than coercive. Every Christian vocation demands sacrifice, but the scale of the sacrifice in the priesthood can perhaps elicit doubts--because why should one give up everything, if it might all be false?

That faith can be tested in that way is why it's appropriate to recognize that it is not just a certain kind of epistemic state but is a virtue. Living faith has the sort of resiliency characteristic of all virtues, and it needs that resiliency, given what it has to get Christians to do: pursue God's will, even as wayfarers who see now only through a glass, darkly.

DanielCC wrote:

Let's look at this one point at a time starting with the most general:

What are the nature of your doubts concerning the existence of God?

What are the nature of your doubts concerning the nature of the soul?

I don't see how the A-T proof for God's existence gets us to a being that exist as pure act. It can get us to a being whose causal power is pure act but that would make its nature far-off from what God usually is--That is, it could still have potentials in many ways.

I also don't see how establishing the existence of God does anything to tell us that he is personal or interacts in the world. Why something with agency and not a blind force?

If the soul (or mind) is material then we are all destined to be gone for eternity at the grave--life is brutal, short, and meaningless. We wouldn't be made in God's image--we would be the mindless slag of the universe that eventually falls apart. 

RomanJoe wrote:

I don't see how the A-T proof for God's existence gets us to a being that exist as pure act. It can get us to a being whose causal power is pure act but that would make its nature far-off from what God usually is--That is, it could still have potentials in many ways.

This has more metaphysical baggage than what it seems, it has more to do with possibility, which I think Daniel was trying to address in another thread.

RomanJoe wrote:

I also don't see how establishing the existence of God does anything to tell us that he is personal or interacts in the world. Why something with agency and not a blind force?

If A-T is true, the intellect is an actualized potential, and thus the Purely Actual Causal power or what have you, must have the intellect in some sense.

Since others have already commented on deep, spiritual and intellectual causes, a slightly unceremonious suggestion: twenty to thirty minutes jogging, bicycling, or doing other exercise every day (or as many as you can), and a multivitamin.

Our culture tends to ignore “the whole man” (to borrow an old Greek idea).

(If you're already a sort of Schwarzenegger-like figure, feel free to ignore this post.)