Peter Kreeft - Handbook of Catholic Apologetics: Reasoned Answers to Questions of Faith

HANDBOOK OF CATHOLIC APOLOGETICS:

REASONED ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS OF FAITH

REASONED ANSWERS
TO QUESTIONS OF FAITH

Peter Kreeft and Father Ronald K. Tacelli, S.J .

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Based on the book originally published by InterVarsity Press as
Handbook of Christian Apologetics .
1994 by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli
Retypeset and printed by permission of InterVarsity Press,
P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA.

Cover art: Photographs of stained glass windows by
Brother Lawrence Lew, O.P.

Cover design by John Herreid

Printed in 2009 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
Chapter 17 2009 by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-279-4 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-702-0 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2008926714
Printed in the United States of America

To Mr. and Mrs. Ciampa
my second parents
with love and gratitude

To John Kreeft
who had a large role in shaping this book
and a larger role in shaping
one of its authors

CONTENTS

A PERSONAL PREFACE

Our compelling reasons for writing this book are three:

We are certain that the Christian faith is true.

We are only a little less certain that the very best thing we can possibly do for others is to persuade them of this truth, in which there is joy and peace and love incomparable in this world, and infinite and incomprehensible in the next.

We are a little less certain, but still confident, that honest reasoning can lead any open-minded person to this very same conclusion.

Part 1

INTRODUCTION

Outline of Chapter 1

The Nature, Power and Limitations of Apologetics

About this book

About reason

Restoring the older notion of reason
as more than subjective
as more than calculative

Using Aristotelian logic

Faith and reason are allies

Objective versus subjective reason

Nonrational arguments are not irrational

Reason as friend
of authority
of faith
of hope
of love
of symbolism

A minilesson in logic
Terms must be clear
Premises must be true
Arguments must be logically valid

Probable arguments and converging clues

Questions about arguments

Distinguish the questions of
truth
knowledge
certainty
proof
method

A summa-style format

About apologetics

Answers to objections to doing apologetics
Life and love are more important than rational argument
People dont decide what to believe by logical reasoning

Reasons for doing apologetics
To unbelievers: to lead up to faith
To believers: to build up faith and aid love
To engage in spiritual warfare

Concerning methodology
We do not assume any school of methodology
The arguments in this book should be used with sensitivity to personal and social contexts

The need for apologetics today

Our civilization is in
social crisis
intellectual crisis
spiritual crisis

Mere, or orthodox, Christianity

CHAPTER 1

The Nature, Power and Limitations of Apologetics

About This Book

We are writing this book because we have been besieged with requests for it.

We both teach philosophy of religion at Boston College, and students often ask us where they can find a book that lists, outlines or summarizes all the major arguments for all the major Christian teachings that are challenged by unbelievers todaysuch as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the trustworthiness of Scripture, and the divinity and Resurrection of Christand answers the strongest and commonest objections against these doctrines. We were amazed to find that no such book exists! There are thousands of books on apologetics, and some very good ones, but not one of them summarizes apologetic arguments as Aquinas summarized theological arguments in his Summa Theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles . This book is written to begin to fill that vacuum.

We even thought of titling it Summa Apologetica , but our publisher wisely rejected that title as unmarketable. Comparison with Aquinas Summa s may seem arrogant, even ludicrous; but we mean it to refer to the genus, not the genius, of Aquinas works.

There were many summas , or summaries, in the Middle Ages, which condensed many arguments into a small space, carefully organizing and succinctly explaining them. A summa is meant to function as a digest or mini-encyclopedia. It need not be read in order from beginning to end. It can be used as a reference book or handbook. That genus is at least as useful today as it was in the Middle Ages, for two reasons. For one thing, we moderns, like the medievals, respect scientific order, clarity, rationality and structure. (It is a popular but wholly indefensible myth that the medieval mind was unscientific, irrational, unquestioning, vague or crude. If anything, it was rational to a fault. It was the mind of a librarian, positively reveling in order.)

The second reason is that we moderns are all terribly busy (though our technology should give us great leisure!) and we want time-saving devices, digests and bottom-line summaries. Yet that desire is not fulfilled in modern apologetics. The contents of that noble art are usually diffused, not collected. Most apologetics books make ten points in fifty pages. This book aims to make fifty points in ten pages.

One point of comparison with a medieval summa , then, is the genus: summary. A second is that, like a summa , it is written for beginners (as Aquinas said in the preface to his Summa Theologiae ), that is, for a general audience rather than for a scholarly and specialized one. It means to bridge the gap between the scholarly and the popular that so sadly divides and weakens modern theology and philosophy. A third point of comparison with a medieval summa is the division into small, bite-sized chunks. This follows from the previous point: since we are beginners, we need (but seldom get) the aid of clear outlining, numbering and divisions. Descartes was right in this, at least. The second step of his famous Method notes that a difficult problem is made much easier by analyzing it into smaller pieces and steps and taking each one by one.

The fact that this book is so carefully outlined, however, will count against it in some peoples minds. There will be some readers and reviewers who will accuse us of black-and-white thinking simply because we argue logically about religion. They will trot out epithets like narrow, simplistic, cut and dried and rationalistic because they mistakenly assume that (1) religion must be irrational and (2) to write clearly is to ignore mystery.

About Reason

They probably pick up this latter assumption from reading twentieth-century philosophy. Philosophy in our century is seldom both clear and profound, both respectful of reason and respectful of mystery at the same time, as medieval philosophy was. Throughout this century the English Channel has divided two philosophical styles more deeply than did the Iron Curtain. We find clarity at the expense of profundity in most of the English analytical tradition, and profundity without clarity in most of the continental existential and phenomenological tradition. Our intent here is to bridge the channel by bridging the ages; to return to the medieval enterprise of arguing rationally about the great mysteries; to turn back a clock that is keeping bad time.

Restoring the Older Notion of Reason

To make this restoration possible, another restoration is necessary: a restoration of the older, larger notion of reason itself. This means essentially two things:

seeing our subjective, psychological, human processes of reasoning as participations in and reflections of an objective rational order, a logos , a Reason with a capital R; and