I recently took a look at a few of Robert Barron’s videos dealing with his basic arguments for believing in God:
- “Why do we believe in God?”
- The three answering Christopher Hitchens
- His response to Bill Maher’s film “Religulous”
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| his book by the same name |
If you don’t know who Robert Barron is you can find out more about him and his ministry at
http://www.wordonfire.org/. Robert is a prominent theologian in the catholic church. He is the Francis Cardinal George Chair of Faith and Culture at University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois, and was ordained an Archdiocesan priest in Chicago in 1986.
In recent times he has made a name for himself by utilizing emerging technologies in an effort to both catechize catholics and offer basic apologetics to anyone who would care to listen or watch. If you haven’t seen his videos I highly recommend taking a look. He covers a great number of things in them all of which are done concisely and with an impressive degree of clarity, however none of them are probably going to blow your mind. As I was watching the video’s with my wife she commented to me. “This is apologetics 101,” and she’s right Fr. Barron doesn’t offer anything new (at least in the proof for God videos listed above) he just offers it in a way that is palatable and aesthetically geared for the widest consumption.
It seems most of what he wants to do it get the conversation about God into the right place. He argues (in the video against Christopher Hitchens) that atheism makes the mistake of turning God into simply a unnecessary category of causality among many, and then, invoking Occam’s razor eliminates him as unnecessarily complex.
If we look to God as simply an ingredient among many in a chain of causes and relationships within the mechanism of the universe (e.g. why is it raining, where do babies come from) we have made a category error. Fr. Barron tries to move the conversation about God into a realm where God fits the answer better. Here are Fr. Barron’s arguments for God in a nutshell.
Argument from desire: You can’t desire what you don’t know. Since we desire something good and just, which we can’t find here (nothing is good enough or just enough), THEREFORE there must be something that has given us the desire for that that can fulfill it. That good and just thing is God.
Argument from intelligibility: Science assumes being IS intelligible. The world has an underlying logic. There are rules that if follows and we can recognize them. He mentions that the current Pope, Benedict XVI, argues that when we recognize the world we “re-cognize,” we re-think the logic or logos that has formed the systems of this world. That logic is God, who is in nature intelligible.
Argument from Contingency: The world exists but it doesn’t have to exist. Basically put we can ask why is there something rather then nothing. We don’t have to exist, but we do. To find the cause of the existence of the universe we have to go outside of the universe. That cause, he says, is God.
In a way of combing these three arguments Fr. Barron quotes Dorthy Day who says she felt a gratitude that is so enormous that there was nothing she could find that would correlate to that gratitude. She had to go outside of the world in order to find the source of graduated that she recognized in herself.
What do you think of his “proofs” for God?
Have any of these ever convinced you?
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