I've been Catholic for most of my life, and I was a very active Catholic. I've been to WYD 2002, participated in several prayer/religious groups over many years, read and understood everything I could. As such, I have a lot of first-hand experience and, overall, it's overwhelmingly positive. I still think most of what the Church teaches is right, people need to listen to it more, and people need to experience being Catholic first-hand before making hasty judgements.

That said, I now disagree with some fundamental tenets of faith, and therefore cannot consider myself to be Catholic anymore. I've met one of my best friends in a prayer group: he's now joined a religious community. We remain very close friends nonetheless and write to each other often. In my last letter to him, I've taken the time to explain, as best as I could, my reasons for rejecting Catholic Faith.

This is still an ongoing debate: the letter was originally in French: and it's not written as an essay, the structure could really use some cleanup. Also, keep in mind I am writing to someone who knows faith very well, so I use a lot of terminology some might not be familiar with. Still, I think there's a lot of good stuff in there for both believers and non-believers to ponder on, so I thought I'd translate it and share it. Enjoy.

My dear friend…

[text omitted]

As I’m writing this letter, foobar2000 just selected [a particular piece of music that holds meaning to both of us, particularly concerning recent events]. Strange coincidence! But a coincidence nonetheless. I don’t use the words “grace”, “sign”, “providence”, which would presume of an intention other than mine or someone supernatural. I’ve chosen this playlist because my playlists are sorted alphabetically and it’s thus one of the first to meet my eye [it starts with A]; I’ve liked [this artist] for seven years; and I was about to talk about religion, so, more or less consciously, I’ve chosen something of a religious character. [This piece] comes right after [another] which is one of my favorites and which I’ve therefore selected first. This is a natural and sufficient explanation of the selection of this piece. It has taken me a bit of thought to come up with it, and I’m not entirely sure it is perfectly accurate. Nonetheless, it is enough for me.

A few years ago, I might have forced myself to see, in this apparently meaning-rich coincidence, God’s presence. (I admit that the example is rather trivial, but grand miracles being rare, it is on such trivialities that faith sustains itself most of the time.) Rather than formulate a simply natural explanation like I just did, I would have presumed of a particular action of God at this moment. (Note that I’m not talking about the hypothetical general action of God by which he maintains all things in their being and order, a blind force that causes both the worst cataclysms and cruelties of nature and makes the sun rise. When we talk about Providence, of the “ask and you shall receive” and all that, it seems to me we’re talking about something more than blind nature, whether this nature has God as its engine or not. We’re talking about God doing something here, now, for me, something special that otherwise, by itself, wouldn’t have happened. This is what I mean by “Providence”, even though I’m not a theologian and might be using the term incorrectly.)

So, facing an apparently “providential” event, I have basically three options:

• I can try to find a natural explanation
  
  
• I can think Providence caused it and wonder how it did it
  
  
• I can think Providence caused it and not ask questions, God being almighty, there’s no point trying to understand.

We just did 1) and we found a satisfactory explanation. Let’s do 2). What has God done to select [this musical piece] while writing to you? Changed the order of my playlist? No, it’s still in alphabetical order like it’s always been. I’ve noticed nothing unusual in how my computer behaved. I can therefore exclude that God influenced my computer. But he could have influenced me. He could have inspired my selection. And I think this is the most common example to illustrate Providence: God inspired someone to do this or that.

But this explanation relies on inspiration’s obscure nature. We don’t have a good understanding of where inspirations come from, especially artistic ones. It is therefore easy to see the action of God there, since it conflicts with no known explanation. We can observe, in general, that we tend to see God where natural causes are not well-known. A deep study of physics has evacuated miracle from, for example, meteorological phenomena. Or, ancients perceived as possessed by demons many people who in fact had mental problems. Today, a domain that remains largely unknown is the human mind. The brain is difficult to study and understand, its study is slow. How surprising, then, that one of God’s usual modes of action is “inspiration”! Come to think of it, this explanation assumes a physical action by God: mental phenomena are not immaterial (as ancients though), but electrochemical, i.e. neuronal interactions. Science can, eventually, study them. We must therefore assume that no scientific study will explain at least some “inspirations”, being caused supernaturally. At the rhythm research is progressing, such an assumption will probably be proved wrong in decades to come, like all theories on divine action that were made useless once we understood how natural forces could provide an explanation.

So, we can remove “inspiration” as a mode of action for Providence, as a hypothesis based essentially on ignorance and assuming too much of future scientific discoveries on the human brain. What remains then? How did God choose [this musical piece], if he did not act on my computer nor on myself? Honestly, I don’t see. So, while I could find a satisfactory natural explanation, I could not find a satisfactory supernatural explanation.

At this point, if we still want to maintain God’s involvement in this, remains option 3), that is, blind my intellectual curiosity, and say something like [a certain biblical reference you sent me]: “That your faith rests, not on the wisdom of men, but on God’s power” (1 Co 2,5). There are all sorts of problems with that. First, the one assuming God’s action, here, is me, me with my limited intelligence. Why would I be right? How does God’s power make me right? Unless we assume God inspired me that he inspired me. But at this point we’re obviously going in circles: this new inspiration presents the same problem.

Another problem is that I cannot really blind my intellectual curiosity. The human mind doesn’t cope with absurdity: it’s worrying and admitting it is putting one’s mental health in peril. When I pretend to blind my intellectual curiosity, I’m deluding myself, as I cannot remain without an explanation: in fact, I’m designating the first draft of an explanation as satisfactory (for example “God inspired me”), maybe unconsciously, while consciously I proclaim that God moves in mysterious ways and that I’m not trying to understand. I’m familiar with this scheme of thought, having long been a believer: today I find it dangerous. It’s self-delusional, and as such cannot lead to anything good. Civilization has made much progress because of sincere, objective investigation of nature, and certainly not because of blindness.

So the only thing that remains is the natural explanation of the phenomenon: complex, detailed, empirical; it doesn’t have the apparent elegance of the “Providence” solution; it doesn’t bring me the comfort of a well-intentioned, supernatural look upon me; it has however the immense advantage of being plausible and sufficient, without any mental gymnastics. Once again, maybe you can easily accept this in this particular case, since the example is trivial. But you can do the same reasoning for the choice of [something he randomly picked in a collection of Bible quotes that, coincidentally, illustrated his thoughts perfectly], and for the vast majority of cases where Christians talk about God like he did something in particular for them. At least, that’s what my religious experience has taught me.

Faith is a virtue, and a virtue is something that one acquires through repetition. I think it is possible, through repetition, to start seeing God everywhere, without having sufficient evidence, and that systematically, it’s a superfluous hypothesis since natural causes are enough to explain the phenomenon. A bit like it’s possible to make a tree grow the wrong way by pulling it on one side.

That said, maybe you agree with me: maybe you don’t see God everywhere, and you’re one of those Christians who admit and contemplate God’s silence. Like Job who implores God for an entire book of the Bible without answer.

But God’s silence presents much bigger and obvious problems than his Providence. It directly contradicts the word of Jesus (Mt 7, 7):

⁷ “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
⁹ “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? ¹¹ If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

I’ve tried, I don’t see how to reconcile this “Father who gives good gifts to those who ask him”, and Job’s God, or more precisely the God of the world you and me live in, the God that does and says visibly nothing, who doesn’t move objects or change the electrical charge of neurons in our brains. It’s affirming one thing and its contrary. Maybe there is an explanation, but I cannot assume it exists. I’ve spent a lot of time inside the Catholic Church, I’ve read a lot, and I’ve spent a lot time thinking and discussing with priests, religious people, other Christians etc. I consider having searched honestly, and having heard enough bad explanations to conclude that most Christians, even among the most scholarly, have no idea how to solve this, and they expect me, like them, to believe without understanding. OK! I’d love to! But what shall I believe in, the God who gives or the God who gives not? No answer? Very well, then I cannot. I cannot believe one thing and its contrary, and I can’t fake that it’s not a contradiction.

So, to summarize the last 3 pages, my main problem with Christian faith, is that God does visibly nothing and has no way to act. Prayer is a monologue, at best a silence; on one hand I hear about “Providence”, on the other I’m taught I shouldn’t take God for a genie that does magic tricks. All of that is more coherent with a God that doesn’t exist than the Christian God.

My next main problem is that Christian faith has once been coherent with scientific theories and today is not. From year 0 to St. Thomas Aquinas approximately, people were mainly wondering how to marry faith and reason. And they did so spectacularly, mainly with the re-discovery of Aristotle, the greatest scientific authority until Renaissance. St. Thomas Aquinas marries in a marvelous way Christian faith and aristotelician theories on form, matter, substance, accident, genres and species, mutable vs immutable beings, substantiality and immaterialness of human intelligence, etc. Such a perfect harmony this was, that the Church basically made this doctrine its own: until the XIX^th this is THE theology; the council Vatican 1 proclaims, for example, that “the existence of God can be known with certainty by reason alone”. The only way reason alone can know with certainty is by a proof. At this time, it is still widely believed that there are real proofs of God’s existence, i.e. St. Thomas Aquinas quinque viæ. But while these proofs are based on scientific concepts, these concepts are aristotelician and have no relevance in modern science. These concepts have no meaning today, and with them goes St. Thomas Aquinas demonstration. I don’t know anyone, even among Christians, who would seriously argue today that God’s existence can be formally proven, based on modern scientific knowledge. And, still, it’s a dogma.

And it doesn’t only concern God’s existence: it’s all of man’s spirituality that goes down the drain. Spirituality is a concept that basically encompasses a series of mental phenomena, and we know today that the human brain is some sort of electrochemical computer, that is well able to cause these phenomena, even though our comprehension of it remains limited. For example, I’ve myself experienced that memory is an activity of the brain, having temporary lost it when I fell on my head while mountain biking. I therefore know, first-hand, that without my brain I would have no memory.

Let’s consider now every element of Christian doctrine that depends on the spirituality of man. For example, that after death, we go to heaven before the resurrection of the body. We therefore go there in spirit only. Without our brain. Without our memory. And the brain is responsible for much more: emotion, intelligence, desire, consciousness… finally, what exactly is going to heaven? Nothing! An “I” empty of all that defines it. It’s absurd.

Let’s talk more about eternal life. I’m a limited being. I have limited strength, limited dexterity, limited intelligence. Why would I need an infinite being to be satisfied? We are happy doing and possessing things that fit us. God doesn’t fit me, him being infinite and me finite. This is not a vain question: St. Thomas Aquinas takes the time to answer it. Based on aristotelician ideas, he answers (Ia IIae) that (Q2) the body is made for the soul just like matter is made for form, therefore the end of man cannot be some good of the body; and (Q3) that man cannot be perfectly happy as long as there remains something to be desired and looked for, and that since the object of intelligence is the essence of things (i.e. what they are), intelligence is not satisfied until it knows the being that is cause of all others. To which we can easily answer that matter and form are concepts that are today obsolete and void of meaning, and that man being not infinite, its end cannot be an infinite happiness, therefore it does need an infinite being to satisfy itself. Happiness on Earth is limited, but this fits our limited nature. I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly thrilled at the thought of contemplating God for the rest of eternity, it sounds infinitely boring. It also sounds like my ability to contemplate is the only one capable of making me happy: but I can a variety of things that make me happy! Finally, if seeing God was really my end, wouldn’t I be, naturally, tending towards it? But this implies that I die and I’m rather horrified by death.

I could go on for a long time, but to summarize, eternal life has no common measure with human nature as we know it. It doesn’t fit what we are. We eat and reproduce, but up there we won’t need to. You can consider most of what the human body does and come to the same conclusion. All that remains is perhaps “love”, as if “love” could be taken separately from any bodily, material context. I cannot imagine this notion of disincarnate love.

In a world without God, life has no ultimate goal: but the goal presented by Christian faith isn’t very enticing, if you look closely. To think of it, I have not existed for most of natural history: the Universe has existed for 13 billion years, and I’ve existed for only 24 of them. Somehow, I seem to cope with that just fine. I’ll probably cope just fine with not existing for the next few billions of years. My existence is, for a fact, limited in time by my birth: why shouldn’t it be limited by my death?

I’m not trying to minimize death: it’s a terrifying thought. I don’t see why I keep on living if I’m to be annihilated in a short amount of time. But at the same time, what other options could there be, how could I not be annihilated when I know I’ll lose my entire body, which grants me all my mental and physical abilities? There’s no satisfactory answer, even in Christian religion. I therefore don’t feel like I’m “missing something” by not believing in it. At worst, I’m wrong, but sincere, and since I’m baptized I shouldn’t end up in Hell.

While I’m discussing things I don’t believe anymore, the Eucharist: the bread that becomes physically the Body of Christ, while keeping the appearance of bread. This is very difficult to believe, to start with: visibly, this is still bread, and the explanation is a double miracle: that the bread became the Body of Christ, and that Body of Christ took the appearance of bread. Let’s admit it (through faith, let’s say). Can you explain what you mean by “This is the Body of Christ”, physically? Ancients will tell me the substance is that of Christ, but the accidents are that of bread; and moderns will either tell me something heretical like “it’s a symbol”, or something stupid like “have faith, don’t ask questions!” To ancients I answer that substance and accidents are an obsolete scientific theory, and that according to modern science, this is nothing more than regular bread. To moderns (those who are not heretics), I answer that they are unworthy of their predecessors, who did not fear asking questions, and that no one can be expected to not ask questions.

You say “I hope you are still searching”. I am always open to changing ideas, I’ve done it and I’ll do it again if necessary. But I’m not as actively searching as I was, let’s say, 7 years ago; at some point, you make up your mind and move on. I don’t think you put in question everything you believe in every day, it’d be an impossible anguish; me neither.

[the rest of the letter is off-topic]