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Apologist Pat Flynn, from the Philosophy for the People podcast, gets down to basics with us to defend the idea that we can, indeed, know things with certainty. This defense of knowledge helps when we are confronted with the argument that no one really knows anything for sure.
Cy Kellett:
How can we even know anything? Pat Flynn is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and Pat Flynn is here with us today to help us settle something that is very unsettled and it probably shouldn’t be unsettled in the modern world, but it is quite unsettled. How do we know anything? And this is important for the apologist, any apologist, but certainly for the Christian apologist, we say certain things are true and that we know them to be true. And we know them with such a certainty that we entrust our lives to these things that we know, for example, God’s revelation, but also moral truths that are derived from philosophy and whatnot. And often the objection to that is not, that’s not true. The objection is, well, nobody can know that for sure, or how could you even know that? So having at least some ability to answer the knowledge question is part of apologetics. So here’s what Pat Flynn had to say about that. Pat Flynn, host of Philosophy for the People and affiliate apologist here at Catholic Answers. Thanks for being with us again.
Pat Flynn:
Cy, it’s always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I won’t ask you whether or not you agree with this, but I have the strong impression that there’s some cultural decline, some societal decline going on around us. And just a little bit, you’ll admit to a little bit just.
Pat Flynn:
Just a little bit, teensy bit.
Cy Kellett:
And it seems to me that as we live through that cultural decline, the job of the Catholic apologist has become more and more basic. That is, it seems like maybe 30 years ago, the job of the Catholic apologist was to defend the Eucharist or defend the perpetual virginity of Mary. And now it seems like more and more, the apologies is being called on to defend basic reality like that some things are real and some things are false, that kind of thing. So-
Pat Flynn:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
I want to confront you with one of those basic questions, because often when we share the faith with young people today, we don’t get, that’s not true. That’s wrong. I disagree with you. It’s how could you even know that? Like that’s your opinion. Sure. You can have that opinion, but there’s no proof of that. So there’s the whole underlying question of knowledge. So I want to go right back to the very basics of that with you, Pat Flynn, and ask you-
Pat Flynn:
Sure.
Cy Kellett:
Can we know anything for sure?
Pat Flynn:
Yes. Yes, we can. How’s that for an answer.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. That was really good. Thank you for being on. Next week, we’ve now maybe we should flesh that out. Pleasure, but that, yeah. I’m glad you can answer it with a yes though. That’s a good start. So let’s flesh that out for folks who, because I think many, many people of goodwill, either a) say I don’t, you can’t know any of that stuff for sure-
Pat Flynn:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
Or B you could probably know scientific stuff for sure, but nothing else you can know for sure.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. So there’s sort of a range of objections that we can can face as apologists. And one is the stronger claim, which you mentioned, you can’t know anything, right? And, well, why is that a problem? Well, if you can’t know anything, then I guess you can’t know any religious claims. You can’t know that God exists. You can’t know that Christ raised from the dead or founded the Catholic church. So we’re kind of just the, I guess the skeptics trying to cut off the apologetic project way down at the root and you’re right. Like, this is strange. It’s strange that the job of an apologist has to really, to just sort of defend basic epistemology, which is a study of knowledge, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Pat Flynn:
So yeah. I mean, let’s just examine that. You can’t know anything. Well, it seems lik, you know the meaning of those terms. Otherwise, your statement is meaningless, right? Or if you can’t know anything is itself a claim to knowledge. How do you know that statement? So I think once you start to dial up the skepticism too much, you quickly enter self-defeat territory where they’re sort of contradicting themselves in the very act of making the assertions that they are against knowledge, right?
Pat Flynn:
Clearly to even know what you’re talking about means minimally, you know the meaning of your terms, which is an instance of knowledge, right? Like you understand what you’re saying, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
You’re communicating and you presume that we’re communicating intelligibly. That all assumes that we are on some basic level knowers. Now, how do we know that? That’s an important question, but most epistemologist, people who study knowledge will say, it’s not a necessary condition of knowledge to know either that you know something or even how you know something. So that’s kind of a fun thing to think about, isn’t it, right? Most epistemologists, the ones I talk to anyways, I’ve got a few I hang out with. It’s good to keep an epistemologist around, Cy, as you know, like a plumber.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, exactly. Like a plumber. Yeah, yeah. In case you get, hold in your knowledge, you need some help.
Pat Flynn:
Right. Yeah. Plug that leak and most of them are going to say, no, it’s definitely right that you don’t have to know either that you know something to have knowledge or even how you know something. I mean, think about even lower animals. We think that the dog knows how to do certain things, but does a dog know that it knows how to do so certain things or even how it knows what it knows? Clearly not. But I think we still want to say no, the dog knows certain things, right, in a doggy way.
Pat Flynn:
So, in many cases it might be good or it might be important in certain cases to say how you know something, but on a basic level, there is pretty wide agreement that whatever else knowledge is, it isn’t totally contingent upon knowing how we know things or even knowing that we know things. And the point I’m making here is on the most basic level, you can’t get away from us being knowers, right? Unless you’re willing just to kind of like sit there and wiggle your finger as Aristotle said. If you’re going to be that skeptical, you can’t even engage in conversation anymore.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. And I suppose some people have to make a conscious choice not to be that skeptical. Most of us don’t however, because we maybe are willing at least to acknowledge some things. I mean, it seems to me that I probably couldn’t give you a good philosophical account of the fact that I’m talking to Pat Flynn right now, but I don’t have any reason to doubt that I’m talking to Pat Flynn right now. I just don’t.
Pat Flynn:
Yes. Yeah. There’s also, when we’re talking about how these skeptical objections are sometimes presented, there’s the really strong form which we just talked about. And I think pretty quickly we see that’s problematic, but there’s slightly weaker forms where people will say, well, you can’t prove it or you can’t prove anything. And that might actually be the case, depending what we mean by proof. But that doesn’t mean that it’s still not an instance of knowledge. Why does knowledge have to equal proof or certainty? That’s something that needs to be justified and argued for. How do you know that knowledge equals certainty rather than a sort of reasonable belief based on the best available evidence? Like Ussai, I probably can’t prove that my wife is not a Russian asset. That is a really hard thing to prove, but would it be reasonable for me to live my life in constant fear that she might be a Russian asset because I can’t prove it.
Pat Flynn:
Most people would say, no, that’s ridiculous, right? It seems like I have good reason to think that she’s not a Russian asset, that she is who she says she is. And I could list out the reasons and evidence. But of course, if you come across somebody clever enough, they could manufacture a conspiracy theory that could kind of range over all that evidence that could cover the same amount of data of why my wife is a Russian asset, but most of us still think that no, that’d be totally unreasonable for me to live my life in a state of fear that just because I haven’t proven it, that my wife could be a Russian asset.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Okay. Okay. So knowledge and proof, not the same thing, even knowledge that I’m knowing is not necessary to know things. Because my dog is doing something when he is going around sniffing everything and he knows how to do that. And apparently he’s looking for some other knowledge by, maybe wants to know what other dogs have been around or I don’t know what he’s doing, but, but he doesn’t know. I can’t say how do you know that to my dog? He doesn’t know that what he’s doing is knowing. So there is a basic level in which knowledge is not contingent on being able to account for knowledge.
Pat Flynn:
Right. Yeah. And I think there are different theories in epistemology too, of kind of like what ultimately secures the conditions of knowledge. I don’t know if they’re necessary to explore now.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Pat Flynn:
But this is sort of where I think actually it might be good to explore that, right, because if you’re going to try and make sense of knowledge and rational belief, it does make sense to ask, well, what sort of world makes sense of beings like us? Like what sort of conditions would minimally have to be in place for there to be knowers like us? And that’s actually a really important question to ask. And I think there’s probably at least two conditions that need to be in place.
Pat Flynn:
One is that the world sort of has a reliable explanatory structure, meaning like things don’t just come into existence from nothing. Because if things come into existence from nothing, then it might seem like I’m sort of related to reality in the right way. It sort of seems like I’m thinking about things because they’re reliably structured in a sort of cause-effect sort of way. And it’s predictable and it’s reliable and all that, but maybe that’s just what it seems like. And really, I believe all those things as a matter of brute fact. I just have this belief that just popped in my head for no reason whatsoever, right? If that’s a live possibility then yeah, it seems like I could never say I have knowledge because whatever else knowledge is supposed to be about, and this is important, knowledge is more than just true belief. It doesn’t make sense to say that somebody has true knowledge. Knowledge includes truth, right? There’s no such thing as false knowledge.
Pat Flynn:
If you have knowledge at all, truth has to be there, but it’s true belief formed in the right sort of way. That’s the key, right? It’s got to have the right sort of mode of justification. And there’s a lot of different theories of exactly what that entails. But minimally, it seems like, yeah, the world has to be a certain way where things can’t just be totally chaotic. Things just can’t spring into existence from nothing, which to my mind means something like the principle of sufficient reason has to be true, if we’re familiar with that, that everything actually has a sort of adequate explanation for why it exists and why it is the way it is, right, and famously, we know that if you kind of follow that principle through it kind of takes you to theism, to God’s existence.
Pat Flynn:
So in a roundabout way, I actually think that a worldview with God makes a lot of sense of how we’re capable of attaining knowledge. And I think it becomes difficult to make sense of how knowledge is possible, the very conditions of knowledge are possible, if God does not exist, if something like the principal sufficient reason is not true.
Pat Flynn:
And then it also seems like we have to be related to the world in the right sort of way, that we have to be set up in the right sort of way. Meaning like we have to have a sort of suite of powers, cognitive powers that are generally aimed at truth and generally pretty good at getting it in the relevant respects. And so that’s going to bring you to questions of what a human being is and origin stories, right? What accounts for our coming into existence, what kind of put us in operation and whatever that origin story is, is that something that we should trust, sort of set us up in a reliable way to secure those conditions of knowledge. And again, I think that’s where one worldview, say theism, can be really helpful whereas another worldview that’s based on sort of totally random accident and evolution that cares more about survival than truth is going to have a lot of difficulty there, if that makes sense, of securing the conditions for knowledge.
Cy Kellett:
So, I guess just historically then the account that you just gave gives a kind of sense to history in that as a society loses faith in God, loses its trust that there is a creator God, it really struggles to explain knowledge at all. It becomes that is to say for the person who says there’s a, God, God made me, God gave me the ability to know. I have senses and I have the faculty of reason because God gave those to me. Then you have a kind of sanguinity about knowledge that the person who says I’m just a random product of…well, how do you know anything? Then that becomes a very serious problem, much more for the person who does not have any faith in God than for the person who does.
Pat Flynn:
I completely agree. And I don’t think it’s just an accident that as religious conviction has declined, skepticism has increased. Now, chicken, egg, we could talk about that, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Pat Flynn:
But no, it’s not surprising, right? If you think that the sort of bottom of reality is a perfect being, a perfect instance of knowledge. We think of God as sort of the unrestricted active understanding, understanding himself, right? I don’t think it’s that difficult to make sense of how other knowers could come online, right, and how we could have the conditions for knowledge. We’re not even talk about whether we have knowledge in a particular instance, just what needs to be there for knowledge to even be possible in the first place, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
Whereas if fundamental reality is just, yeah, it’s mindless. Now we have a big gap that we have to traverse, right? How do we go from the stuff that is unaware, it’s not directed at anything. It’s not about anything to rational thought that’s based on reasons and sight. I don’t see that as a gap that can be coherently traversed.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
I would say if that was the paradigm I lived in, it would be really hard for me to make sense of how knowledge is possible at all. Now of course you could sit there as a skeptic and stomp your foot and say, well, clearly knowledge is possible because it’s actual, we have knowledge.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
And yeah, I don’t disagree with that, but I’m saying one worldview helps to make sense of that. Another worldview really struggles to make sense of that. Or in fact, it’s impossible to make sense of that on a worldview. So, I don’t disagree that we have knowledge. Now the question is given that fact, what worldview should we prefer to illumine-
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Pat Flynn:
This experience for us. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
But, even the theist could very easily have a wrong theory of knowledge. You could say, yeah I know because I trust in knowledge because God’s given me that gift, but then have a theory, for example, just an idealistic theory or a very strict realism, neither of which really actually accounts for knowledge.
Pat Flynn:
Sure.
Cy Kellett:
Is that right? Am I right in saying what I’m saying?
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. So, both sides have to tell a story and then we can talk about different theories of knowledge that, or at least one that I’m attracted to. So the theist does have to tell a story of why we go wrong, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
So, given that God set us up, we have to talk about why we don’t know everything, right, and why there’s disagreement and religious disagreements. So the theist has to tell a story of why we go wrong. Why didn’t a perfect knower create other perfect knowers essentially, right? But that’s really kind of the problem of evil in a specific form when you really think about it. The atheist has to tell a story of how we ever get anything right, right? And I think that latter story is a lot harder to tell than the former story.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Pat Flynn:
I think the theist has a lot of room to talk about how we can go wrong on levels of interpretation. We get a lot of basic everyday things right, but once we start getting into the more abstract notions and philosophy, there’s a lot of different ways you can conceptualize and consider things. It’s actually I don’t think difficult for a theist to tell the story of how we go wrong and how we have religious disagreement if God exists. I think it’s really hard for an atheist to tell a story of how we get anything right, if that makes sense, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
And then, you talked about different theories of knowledge and there’s a lot here. You have sort of internalist camps, which think that we can kind of like dig down to some like incorrigible and indubitable and imutable foundation of knowledge, kind of like Descartes style, right, something that we just cannot doubt. It’s impossible to doubt it. And then from there with sound arguments, we can kind of like build back up into this gigantic wonderful web of knowledge.
Pat Flynn:
Now, most people think that the stronger forms of that don’t really work. If you try that project, you get stuck in skeptical scenarios pretty quickly, but there’s moderated versions of that, like moderate foundationalism and those are interesting. Then there’s externalist theories of knowledge would say that, yeah, we kind of have to look external to us to figure out how we can know things or what secures the conditions of knowledge. So a pretty famous account would be Alvin Plantinga’s reformed epistemology. And he talks about warrant and warrant is just sort of, it’s supposed to be this quality that takes you beyond sort of mere true belief to actual knowledge. And we have warrant.
Pat Flynn:
When do we have warrant? Well, it relates to certain beliefs that he calls properly basic, but it also depends on certain things that are beyond us, for example, that we have a particular design plan. It’s a good design plan that’s generally aimed at truth, by a good designer. That’s key. And that we’re operating according to that design plan in the environment that we’re supposed to be operating in, right? And if that’s the case, then we’re just going to form many beliefs that we’re perfectly warranted in, that we can say we have knowledge of, even if we didn’t argue to those beliefs, right, because of these sort of these different conditions that Alvin Plantinga has outlined. So what would those be? Well, things you’ve already mentioned, Cy. Like, there’s a world beyond my head, for example, right? That my wife is neither a Russian asset nor a cyborg, that she’s got a mind like myself, that I really did have embarrassingly a piece of cheesecake for breakfast, right? I shouldn’t admit that, right? Memory beliefs.
Cy Kellett:
Although that kind of makes you a hero to me a little bit. I just want you to know that yeah.
Pat Flynn:
I paused there for a second, but yeah, no, that’s a reliable memory belief. That is something I know. I definitely had cheesecake for breakfast and Plantinga extends it further. And he says, even this general belief in God is properly basic. So we’re actually warranted. Meaning like we can know that God exists on this basic level if you hold this account of epistemology without arguments. That’s kind of like his cool move, right? He says like, you can be totally justified and say you know that God exists assuming there’s no like knockdown argument against God’s existence, which certainly, I don’t think there is once you just think deeply enough about what sort of has to be in place for the conditions of knowledge, if that makes sense.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So all of this said, I want you to help me then to take this somewhat kind of abstract. Having knowledge about knowledge is a really abstract process. So it takes a lot of abstract thinking to be able to do it, but in the concrete situation then of the person who runs into a skepticism about knowledge as a kind of barrier to talking about things like the existence of God, give me some strategies for getting beyond that barrier. Or is it, do I just have to rely on grace to get beyond that barrier?
Pat Flynn:
Yeah, no, I think there’s some strategies we can use. I mean, it’s always good to ask questions, right? If somebody’s skeptical, you should always just kind of return some questions with some further questions, try and get some clarity, kind of figure out where is that skeptical dial set. And then one good strategy is to maybe highlight some of the costs of their skepticism. I think that’s always good because as you know, Cy, sometimes people have a pretty flexible, skeptical dial, right? Most of the time, people in everyday life, their skeptical dial is pretty low, but then when they enter certain conversations, political conversations and especially religious conversations, that skeptical dial starts turning way up, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Pat Flynn:
And, then I think what you should do is you should see if they’re willing to be consistent with that level of skepticism in their everyday life. And I’ll tell you the level of skepticism that claims that we can’t know anything or that we can know pretty much nothing. That’s going to cut down a lot of things that I think most people don’t want cut down, including science especially, right? Including the authenticity of friendships and relationships and this or that.
Cy Kellett:
Sure. Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
So I think that’s a good strategy to see, figure out where their skeptical dial is set and then see what some of the other costs would be with that, if that makes sense.
Cy Kellett:
Yes, that makes very good sense. So that’s one strategy. Talk about the costs.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. And another is if somebody, because a lot of arguments forgot or philosophical, sometimes people will say, well, it’s philosophy that can’t prove it anything, right? Philosophy is useless nonsense. And it’s only science that can prove things. And I think there’s two things we can say about this. One is that philosophy might not be able to prove a ton of things, but I think you can prove at least some things. And there’s a little trick we can use to show that. So for example, if we just take that claim, that philosophy cannot prove anything. If that claim is true, then it cannot be proven as true, obviously, right? But if that claim is false, then it can also not be proven as true. Now, logic demands it has to be one or the other, right? It has to be true or false. So at that point we can point out that it has just been proven that the claim philosophy cannot prove anything cannot be proven, which is equivalent to philosophy proving something, right? So, that doesn’t do much.
Cy Kellett:
Oh wow! Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
But, it takes down a barrier because we just proved that philosophy can legitimately prove something. In fact, I think that proves it with certainty. That’s a really high, like that’s cool. I think we just did something cool, right? And then you can say, well look, if philosophy isn’t useless and it can prove at least some things, maybe it can prove other things or at least maybe it can give us warrant or justification in other things because not everything has to be proven. So I think moves like that can at least soften people up who take a sort of strong scientism or have a sort of bias against philosophy, which we know we do ultimately need to provide reasons for the existence of God.
Cy Kellett:
So, okay. Those are very, very helpful. So, you might outline the costs. You might actually illustrate that the usefulness of philosophy. I mean the fact that I can only know things, I only trust science that does seem to be that…As a matter of fact, trust the science has become almost a statement of one’s religion nowadays.
Pat Flynn:
It has.
Cy Kellett:
Because it’s hard to know exactly what trust the science means. Like trust the science, because science is always contingent. Does that mean just go with whatever we know today and we’ll figure out tomorrow, tomorrow. I don’t know exactly what it means, but what do I say to the person who says, they’re not suspicious of all knowledge. They just say, I trust the science. You do whatever you want to do, Pat Flynn, but I’m going to trust the science.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. What do we do with scientism? Now it’s important to understand that scientism actually it is an epistemology, it’s a theory of knowledge. And it claims that the only things we can know are the things that are sort of given to us by the hypothetical deductive method, scientific method, right? And, notoriously at this point, it doesn’t meet its own standard. That claim seems to be self-refuting. Because if you, if you claim that we can only know things through the scientific method, that claim itself is not something we can know through the scientific method, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Pat Flynn:
That’s something that has to be supported philosophically. So, that’s obviously a common and quick move, but I think it’s also worth pointing out to people that look science, unlike philosophy, has many unexamined assumptions. The cool thing about philosophy is it’s the only discipline that examines all the assumptions of the different sciences.
Pat Flynn:
This is why we have philosophy of science and examines its own assumptions, examines its own foundation. So science assumes, for example, logic. That’s a philosophical discipline. Mathematics. It assumes cognitive reliability. It assumes that there’s an external world, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Pat Flynn:
It assumes that there’s enduring subjects through change. These are all philosophical considerations. I even want to say it assumes morality, which unfortunately isn’t always upheld in the actual daily practice of science, right? So science assumes that you shouldn’t fabricate data, right? You shouldn’t lie about your test results, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Pat Flynn:
And none of those are foundations or assumptions that science itself can justify. Only philosophy can investigate that. So in a very deep and profound way, science neither can give us as much certainty as other disciplines. Because as you said, science only gives us credences. It gives us a confidence level and a particular hypothesis. Now sometimes that confidence level is extremely high because a theory makes so many powerful and accurate predictions like the theory of general relativity. But we could always encounter some new future data or evidence that contradicts the theory or causes us to modify it, right? So science at best just gives us confidences. Now that’s not to downplay science. I think it is a really powerful and important source of knowledge, but it is a source of knowledge, not the source of knowledge. And it requires philosophy for its own conceptual coherence.
Cy Kellett:
Right. So because if every scientist in the world said that as far as values go, honesty doesn’t matter. Science would cease to function.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. Now somebody might be like a crude utilitarian. It’ll say, well, I don’t really think there’s moral facts, but we should just pretend there are because we want to do good science, but most people don’t want to say that, right? Most people want to say, no, you should just be honest categorically, period.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Pat Flynn:
And as it happens, that leads to better science, right?
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Now I want to take it from a different direction because if there’s just one thing that I would like everyone on earth to know, the one thing I would choose is for them to know that Jesus loves them. And if I say to someone, Jesus loves you. And they say to me, how can you even know that? Help me proceed from there because among all, I would like people to have confidence in knowledge, but more than anything, I would like them to have confidence in the love of God presented to us in Jesus, given to us in Jesus. So, it’s a very specific piece of knowledge-
Pat Flynn:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
That I would like them to have.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. One thing I like to do like this, Cy, if in everyday conversations with people, I like to say here’s a way I think you could know that. And this allows me to present like a brief sketch and then kind of opens an invitation for them to go pursue it further, if that makes sense. Because if you’re dealing with a really skeptical person, right, and trying to prove every step or argue through all the details you’re going to be there all night and it’s not going to be productive. So I like to say here’s what convinced me, which is often true. And here’s a way that I think you could know it and maybe you’ll find this interesting. So, we can take two perspectives here. I think we can take a sort of metaphysical perspective or we can take an historical perspective. Now metaphysics is the study of being, not to be confused with Metamucil. In fact, the latter is a digestive supplement. Now when we’re doing metaphysics-
Cy Kellett:
That’s so helpful. I really appreciate that. When were doing Metamucil-
Pat Flynn:
I know that
Cy Kellett:
When we’re doing Metamucil, we’re more regular. When we’re doing metaphysics, what happens?
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. And there might be instances where you might want to mix the two, but generally they are not the same thing. So here’s one way I think we can know that God loves us. First off, I think you can give arguments to show that God is the ultimate primary cause of everything that exists distinct from himself. And I think that it’s the most fundamental good that we have is existence.
Pat Flynn:
Now, what is love ultimately? Well, love is sort of willing the good of the other as other, right? And we think that the best kind of love is a totally selfless love. It’s a love that just the other person couldn’t earn. You sort of pour yourself out for that person just because they’re so precious and valuable in and of themselves. Whatever else we want to say about being loved all the goods that we have depend upon the most primary fundamental good of existence. Now, where does that come from? Well, it comes from God, right? He literally loves us into existence by creating us. And here’s the cool thing. We could never earn that because we don’t exist before we have it, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Pat Flynn:
So it’s totally gratuitous. Now I didn’t give the details of the argument there, but I think that’s a way if you’re willing to work out the details that you can really know on a deep metaphysical level, that God loves us and he loves us completely unconditionally. And I think that’s marvelous. I think that’s life changing, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right. Yeah. But, you said there’s two ways.
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. And then there’s your typical historical apologetic and what I would say there, again, just giving a general sketch is I think, look, if we can, especially if we already have arguments for the existence of God and we think that God is fundamentally loving for the reasons I just described, and then we have this historical account of a religion that has enough reliability to really show that somebody claimed to be the Messiah, claimed to die for our sins. And then this incredible occurrence happened where people really did testify to his being resurrected from the dead after he died for our sins because he loved us so incredibly much, that fits like a hand in a glove with that philosophical background. And I would invite people to look at the general historical reliability of the gospels, the life of Christ, and not just the historical arguments of what the sort of facts are and the best explanation of those facts.
Pat Flynn:
And I think the best explanation of those facts is that God really did raise Jesus from the dead, but also the existential resonance from it. I think there are certain truths that we can know through a sort of basic resonance. We often call it the ring of truth. And I think when you read about the life of Christ and the love that he shared, I think that there is a deep resonance and ring of truth just in reading and studying the character of Christ. So yeah, maybe you have the metaphysical, the historical, and the sort of existential way of knowing the love of God and love of Christ. And, I think they’re all useful. And to me, they’re also mutually reinforcing.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Well, I have to say Pat, I really appreciate what you presented there, but it’s the way that you presented that is also eye opening to me that here’s one way you might, or here’s two ways you might, so that you do not take on the obligation to yourself of working through every proof. You try to shed enough light so the person wants to investigate for themselves and find out does that make sense or does not, maybe come back with another question later? Something like that?
Pat Flynn:
Yeah. I think that’s really one of the best practical tips I can give. It’s something I’ve learned obviously through trial and error. If you can position something in a more invitational rather than combative way. And for me, since I’m a convert, I often position it in terms of a story and you know, I’ll say very sincerely, Hey, that’s a great question. I thought about that. I struggled with that for a while. Here’s a way I think you can know, and here’s a way that as I went deeper into it eventually convinced me, let me give you the sketch, right? And it takes off a huge burden, right, especially if you’re just at the dinner table, right, and you’ve only got 30 minutes, get people interested, show that there is a way. And then of course, it’s totally legitimate to say, Hey, if you want to talk about this more, I would love to, or here’s a list of books that were helpful to me. And there’s a great website called catholic.com. You might want to check out, et cetera, et cetera.
Cy Kellett:
That’s funny. I was just thinking, check out Philosophy for the People and then that’ll help you. Pat Flynn, I really appreciate it. I feel like you’ve answered Whitney Houston’s immortal question, how will I know?
Pat Flynn:
Oh good.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I feel like you could have been really helpful to Whitney if she had asked it to you and it’s always fun talking with you. Thanks Pat.
Pat Flynn:
Always a joy, Cy. Thank you so much.
Cy Kellett:
There’s so much confusion in our world right now. And we’re afraid to say that real things are real and unreal things are unreal and we’re very morally confused and all that. And at a certain point, you have to have the confidence to say, no, I know this is wrong or no, I know that that’s not real. Or yes, I do believe this, and I have good, solid reason for believing it. And if we can’t do that, we really can’t have a centered Christian life. It requires having some confidence that we are made to know, and we are able to know. We can’t know perfectly and with perfect clarity. The Bible itself teaches us that. Certainly, St. Paul teaches us that, that right now we see as if through a glass that’s all cloudy and dark, but we will see clearly at some point. But even when you can see only cloudy and dark, you can make some things out and some things are worth being sure about, that you can really give yourself to being sure about them.
Cy Kellett:
So I appreciate Pat Flynn. I hope you’ll check out his podcast, Philosophy for the People. It’s a lot of fun. If you like what we do here, please support us. You can do that by going to givecatholic.com, given any amount up to $5 million, no nothing will be accepted over $5 million. Givecatholic.com. Leave a little note that says it’s for Catholic Answers Focus. If you’re watching us on YouTube, we’re growing there little by little we’re growing, but we’re not even six months into our new YouTube channel. So if you would subscribe and hit that little bell, so you’ll be notified when new episodes are available, that will help us grow. Maybe share it with other people as well. And if you listen on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or one of the other podcast services also give us that five star review and subscribe, and that will help us grow the podcast and help you be notified when new episodes are available. That does it. I know we’re done. I just know for certain that we’re done now, see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.
Cy Kellett:
How will I know that he really loves me?