My friend has converted to Catholicism. So have many other friends of mine. Felled by the unstoppable force of ’s arguments, my most brilliant friends are falling left and right before the steady march of the miracles. And yet I have not converted, and so far, I have no plans to. So why are so many people converting? And why am I not?
The main reason that so many people are converting is all those Catholic miracles. You can peruse Ethan’s Substack for more of them, but Catholicism does seem to have some pretty impressive apparent miracles. St. Padre Pio had stigmata for decades that healed fully at his death, a number of seemingly miraculous healings, and medically inexplicable temperature readings of over 120
At Lourdes, after a girl named Bernadette had a vision as of Mary, where Mary announced “I am the immaculate conception,” there were a spate1 of seemingly medically inexplicable healings. And more abound: eucharistic miracles, Fatima, etc. I’m a lot more skeptical of Fatima, and I totally lack the relevant expertise to investigate Eucharistic miracles, but I’ll admit: I find some of the Catholic miracles spooky, especially Lourdes and Padre Pio.
So why am I not planning on converting? I’m not going to go in the weeds on all the arguments (especially because a lot of the historical stuff is dependent on higher-order evidence and above my paygrade). I’m just going to describe at a high level how I’m thinking about this.
The first big reason: I find the case against Catholicism really strong. The three things that give me the most pause are hell, normative ethics, and Biblical inerrancy.
On hell, Catholics are committed to eternal conscious torment. I find that view just about as implausible as views get. I don’t think it’s remotely plausible that the best world that God could dream up is one where he consigns lots of people to the flames, where the worm dieth not, and the flames of hell cause them to suffer forever.
Now, maybe there’s a way to avoid the claim that people suffer infinitely in hell. Perhaps their suffering decreases in intensity, so that the total quantity is finite. But even aside from infinite suffering, it’s just so implausible that the ultimate state of people would be *this—*that God can’t think of a better way.
On normative ethics, Catholics are committed to a kind of absolutism about the wrongness of certain classes of acts. These teachings are binding though not infallible. Examples of these include masturbation, fornication, homosexuality, and direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being (this last one is probably infallible). This would require me to believe four separate things that I find very implausible:
Deontology, at least in the minimal sense of thinking that certain acts are ruled out even if they have good consequences.The falsehood of various liberal views of sexual ethics.
Absolutism about the moral prohibitions.
Absolutism even about the prohibitions on sexual ethics.
Rejecting 2 would come at some cost but not insurmountable. Rejecting 1 would be costly as well. I just find deontology so implausible. It suffers from a number of fatal counterexamples. But 3 and 4 are where things get really bad. Risk arguments destroy absolutism about deontology. And if anything is obvious, it’s that if the only way to prevent everyone on earth from being tortured forever was for a loving gay couple to have homosexual sex, then it wouldn’t be wrong for them to do so. I cannot believe—as a purely psychological matter—that such a thing is false. It’s completely absurd. We’re reaching skeptical scenario levels of implausibility here.
Maybe there are some ways around having to affirm these things as a Catholic through some kind of interpretive acrobatics. But at the very least, I think you’ll have to pay a cost.
Now, I realize Catholics have arguments for why I shouldn’t trust my moral intuitions. Our hearts are darkened by sin, and thus we cannot see clearly. But come on, some views are just so implausible that even if you can tell a story about how we might be wrong about them, it can’t possibly be rational to affirm them. If you tell me that the law of non-contradiction is false, even if you tell some debunking story, I’m just way more confident in the law of non-contradiction than your debunking story. And I find it way more obvious that using contraception to prevent infinite torture would be permissible than I find even the law of non-contradiction. It just can’t possibly be wrong.
Then, the last consideration: Catholics are committed to some kind of Biblical inerrancy. Now, the exact details are debatable. Dei Verbum says, in a passage generally agreed to be without error:
In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him (2) they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, (3)
they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted. (4)Therefore, since
everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings (5) for the sake of salvation. Therefore “all Scripture is divinely inspired and has its use for teaching the truth and refuting error, for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind” (2 Tim. 3:16-17, Greek text).
I think the Bible is run through with errors about morality, history, genealogy, authorship, and more. I don’t think it’s plausible that the Holy Spirit would assert a lie about the author of Daniel, for example, or a barbaric moral claim. While one or two apparent errors would perhaps be explicable, they are too numerous and serious for Catholicism to remain plausible.
These are the three considerations that move me the most. But then there are some other things. For example, I’m pretty sure that Jesus didn’t declare Peter the Pope. It would be weird if this was among the most important things he ever did, but it’s only mentioned in one highly ambiguous passage in Matthew. Then, the fact that Peter is the Pope doesn’t really come up at any other point in the Gospels, even during major theological disputes. Also, my sense having not looked too carefully at the historical evidence is that there isn’t good evidence for early Popes, and this is granted even by Catholic historians like Eamon Duffy. My sense is that this is also generally agreed upon by secular historians without a dog in the fight.
Similarly, my sense having not looked into it too carefully is that the Church has flip-flopped on some important issues, like whether there’s salvation outside the Church. Unam Sanctam says, “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Admittedly, there’s a complicated debate to be had here, and I could be wrong, but just on its face, it really looks like they flipped. I need to do more reading about this, though.
Similarly, the Marian dogmas seem like they were made up later. We don’t have early evidence for them. The first suggestion that Mary was perpetually a virgin comes in a second century apocryphal text called the protoevangelium of James, where the author was lying about being James. And if Mary was forever a virgin, it’s weird that the Bible refers to Jesus’s brothers without giving any hint that they weren’t biological brothers. The word for brother is adelphoi, and it can occasionally mean broader relatives, and it can refer to step-brothers.
But it would be pretty weird if the New Testament kept talking about Jesus’s step-brothers, using the standard word for brother, without ever clarifying. The word syngenes was a perfectly good word for relatives. Matthew 1:25 says Joseph “but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son,” which implies that they had marital relations afterwards. And various other passages point in a similar direction. The bodily assumption of Mary that Catholics are dogmatically committed to came even later!
I don’t mean to suggest that this is decisive on its own. But it sure seems like a lot of Catholic doctrines are made up later, without outside historical evidence. Combine this with doubts about divine simplicity, general concerns about Christianity, and other weird Catholic doctrine like transubstantiation and Baptismal regeneration, and I find it really hard to believe in Catholicism. The case against strikes me as very strong.
Worse, the case against is cumulative. There are many different kinds of considerations. If the only arguments against were normative, then I might suspect that my moral intuitions are flawed. But when they’re also Biblical, theological, and historical, and when they depend on many different kinds of intuitions, it just seems hard to believe.
In contrast, there is only one argument for Catholicism that moves me at all: the argument from miracles. Now, the miracles are somewhat independent; there are many different types of Catholic miracles. But if it’s possible for clear investigation to turn up one seemingly inexplicable miracle, probably it can turn up a bunch of seemingly inexplicable miracles. If it turns out that there’s a naturalistic explanation of all the Lourdes healings, probably there is one for the Eucharistic miracles too. Some of these miracles strike me as impressive, but if I’m wrong about the impressiveness of the first, probably I’m wrong about the impressiveness of the rest too!
I might just be kind of a dupe when it comes to miracles—underestimating the power of human credulity. Some things that I’m pretty sure aren’t naturally inexplicable but that I was surprised to learn:
A bunch of people have thought
witches stole their penis. How could you possibly be mistaken about that sort of thing?We have a bunch of testimonies of an obvious con-artist named
Sathya Sai Babadoing naturally inexplicable things in broad daylight. People attest that he teleported, read minds, made food appear by magic, bilocated, and had a mysterious odor that could be smelled at a great distance, even by skeptics, just like Padre Pio did. And those aren’t even theonly impressive miraclesattributed to a Sai Baba!Throughout Iran, a bunch of people said they saw
Khomeini’s face in the moon.A
bunch of childrengo into deep trances where they claim to see Mary, move synchronously, don’t blink for many minutes on end, and stop reacting to pain, even in cases where it’s very clearly non-miraculous.Children said that they saw
groups of aliensdescend from the sky. They didn’t recant (the children, not the aliens. Though I guess the aliens didn’t recant either). Wesimilarlyhavegroups reporting they saw fairies.The
Piraha claimto see spirits in broad daylight that outsiders can’t see. In one case, an outsider visiting a tribe saw askeleton dancing.There are a bunch of examples of
people looking at the sun, seeing it spin, seeing it move, seeing it change colors, and witnessing it not being painful to gaze at.We have reports of supernatural healings associated with a Protestant faith healer who makes false prophecies and has visions of rapture theology that led to many conversions. More detail in a footnote.
2We have reports of seemingly
naturally-inexplicablememories of past lives. Some led people in the direction of Christianity, so it’s not plausible that they’re done by deceptive demons, even given Catholicism.A
giant firing squadtried to shoot the Bab, the founding figure of the Bahá'í Faith, and yet they all missed.
In light of these, there are a few different possibilities:
Miracles don’t really happen, we’re pretty good at fooling ourselves, and thus we falsely think a bunch of miracles happened that didn’t.
Miracles do happen, but God doesn’t care too much about denomination and is even willing to do miracles that lead a bunch of people to false religions. Maybe he’s not too concerned that, say, healing people at Lourdes led people to Catholicism.
Miracles do happen, but the only ones with vindicatory implications are Catholic.
Miracles do happen but God mostly gives out miracles to Christians pretty indiscriminately. So, for example, he’s happy to let Catholics have major miracles that convert people to Christianity, just like he’s happy to make apparitions of Mary mostly appear atop Coptic Churches, rather than Catholic ones.
I don’t find that the miracle record conclusively favors any of these over the other. If I can be wrong that people won’t think witches stole their penises, that they saw Khomeini’s face in the moon, that they saw a man teleport and read their minds, that they saw a s…
