As for the title, there are some arguments against sola scriptura here, here, here, and here. They won't get you from Christianity to Catholicism, but they might narrow the gap.

John West wrote:

As for the title, there are some arguments against sola scriptura here, here, here, and here. They won't get you from Christianity to Catholicism, but they might narrow the gap.

Thank you, it's good to see that Feser has written about it. Do you know if Feser has ever recounted his conversion story from theism to Catholicism? I've read his atheism to theism conversion story but I can't recall him ever discussing his conversion to Catholicism. 

Jason wrote:

HI RomanJoe,

After reading through your post and skimming your blog I must say that you seem to be going through a dry spell that most if not all believers go through from time to time. I myself have gone through dry spells time and time again in my walk with Christ but nothing on the scale that you seem to be going through and I sincerely hope and pray that you come out of it stronger soon.

What I can tell you from my experience is that firstly you need to have someone whom you trust to regularly pray for you. For me it has been my parents. They have been faithful Catholics all their lives and whenever I ask them to pray for me they do so without hesitation. I cannot begin to specify how much of an impact someone's sincere prayer can have in your life.

Secondly, in my experience whenever I have had a dry spell it has been totally because of my own doing. Every time I have allowed the slightest bit of pride, envy or lust in my heart I have had the dry spell. Sometimes I do not even know if I have allowed something like that in my heart but when I sincerely ask God to show me what is wrong in my heart, He shows it to me.

Thirdly, I think that doubting something is a good thing but when you doubt you do not go all the way to the beginning but you take a few steps back, wrestle with the questions, find the answers and then move on. There will always be questions that you will ask or people around you will ask that will create doubt in your mind but sometimes you use reason to counteract those questions, sometimes you use faith to counteract it or sometimes you use your own (or people you trust) experiences in life to counteract it. Let your faith and experiences in life take you forward till reason catches up and vice versa. Just trusting on reason alone to counteract everything will leave you always wanting.

I wish you the very best and hope and pray that this dark period in your soul will be transformed to a brightness that can only come through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Thank you. Your own experiences resonate with me--pray for me and I'll do the same for you.

DanielCC wrote:

Have you read William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith? Something gives me the suspicion that it might be more useful to you at this point than a specifically Catholic manual.

RomanJoe wrote:

I am very familiar with the first two of Thomas' ways. I admit I haven't brushed up on the other ones in awhile--last time I did was a couple years back when I read The Last Superstition for the first time.  

RomanJoe wrote:

I am aware, and I do think that proportionate causality can provide a decent explanation. 

For both these points, if you want a really good traditional Neo-Scholastic Natural Theology manual I'd recommend Graham Joyce's Principles of Natural Theology. He gives a good account of the Divine Attributes from what I recall.

Although as a Catholic with a direction towards the priesthood you will naturally tend to lean in the direction of Thomism, I don't think Thomas' Five Ways are the most fundamental or epidemically apparent proofs in natural theology.  I would tend to emphasize some form of PSR Cosmological Argument, even if you don't go into the minutiae of giving an exact formulation of a weak or strong PSR - after all a refusal to give an explanation for contingent beings a la the common atheist cry of 'brute fact' is tantamount to turning one's back on rationality. On an entirely different track consider the moral argument, as given in its negative formulation by Sartre, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky 'If God is Dead Everything is Permitted' (which also means nothing is inherently worth doing) - if you have a strong intuition that there are such a thing as objective values then that intuition is the basis for a theistic intimation.

Further more: lurking in the background behind all the aforementioned proofs is the uncontroversial premise of the Modal Ontological Argument - that if a perfect necessary being is even possible then it exists*. Here we could do further work analyzing the properties we stipulate as conducive to perfection ('Great-Making') and try to show by analysis that they are compossible. Even if we don't go down this route though, we should bear in mind the possibility premise - if we have good reasons to postulate God elsewhere in our metaphysics this gives us some abductive ground to consider that premise justified. 

*This holds for any necessary being on S5 logic, so if a the notion of being which is pure actuality is free from internal contradiction then it too must exist.

Oh yes, I love Dr. Craig. He was the person who first go me into theology and philosophy. I have quite a few of his books and have found his arguments very helpful--especially his presentation of the Leibnizian contingency argument (though I think he might make a jump in calling God a necessary being--I don't think the premises show that God is necessary, at most, they show he's an immaterial, very powerful, sustainer of reality who may or may not be contingent). He invokes Occam's razor though, which is acceptable. I think I never gave Thomas too much attention. I've read through Feser's TLS and Aquinas, and I have read through parts of the ST and SCG before--but I haven't intensely studied Thomist thought. This is one reason why I joined this forum. You make a good point about the moral argument--I'm familiar with Craig's, what are some other good ones?