Again, I appreciate the thoroughness and your relatively respectful tone. Obviously, we disagree. You’re responding mainly by reciting Catholic doctrine. I’m aware that Catholics have answers to all possible criticisms of the Christian creed. That doesn’t mean the answers are any good.
Clearly, they’re good enough for conservative Christians, especially for those who’ve been indoctrinated into the religion from a young age. Western secularists, too, are indoctrinated into neoliberalism, consumerism, egoism, and so forth while we’re children so we, too, take for granted much that’s questionable. And we cling to our presuppositions, whether we’re Christians or atheistic philosophers.
The Christians and atheists I admire most are humbled by an epiphany. I can tell from your writing style that you aim to write like a systematic theologian, as though Catholics have all the answers and nothing to fear from reason (from science, philosophy, or secular progress). But what’s revealing to me is the anecdote that Aquinas, who wrote an immense amount of such intricate theology eventually saw it all as so much “straw” compared to his religious experience, or to what we might think of as a peak state of consciousness, which Christians would interpret as a theophany.
Of course, if you trust in Catholic dogma, you’ll have an answer to everything that makes sense to you, because Catholics have been apologizing for centuries. Catholics excel at casuistry. Note, for instance, your insinuation at the start of your last comment, that I’m “inquiring” into Catholicism. That was a little word game on your part, a subtle positioning of yourself as an authority who’s just tutoring a child. You’re belittling the extent of the historic conflict in question. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age does the opposite, although I’ve recently criticized that book (link below).
I notice that you take the same approach in your response to humanistic criticisms of the Hell doctrine, in your "The Just Certitude of Hell." You just recite Christian dogma, without showing that you've given the matter much personal thought.
From an educated outsider’s perspective, Christian doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity are so obviously self-contradictory and preposterous that these doctrines can only function as shibboleths, as I argue in the second article linked below. What makes these doctrines theological rather than empirical or merely logical is that they’re absurd, which means believing in them is an act of faith, and that’s to say, in turn, that the belief is a demonstration of fealty to the group.
It’s like the Hollywood adage about newbie policemen: the police force must have dirt on them; thus, the newbies are forced to plant evidence or otherwise break the law, so that all the police will be on the same side. The threat of blackmail hangs over all their heads. Likewise, joining a religion affords you certain social advantages, but you must pay your dues as an initiate, which means you must prove your commitment to the cause and to the clan by implicitly violating your personal sense of what’s right and true. The more absurd and obviously contradictory the core doctrines, the greater the act of faith needed to pass the test of initiation. As George Orwell said in 1984, you must come to believe, for instance, that two plus two make five.
I’m not going to belabor this or debate with you at length here. These days I prefer to write articles. If you respond at length in article form and you write it with the same level of seriousness, I’d likely respond in article form, and maybe we could have a worthwhile, hopefully focussed discussion that way.
Here I’d just point out that the atheist’s best path is to come to understand, say, the Incarnation and Trinity doctrines, and to point out the evident incoherence by way of deconstructing Christianity. The Incarnation doctrine obviously combines Jewish monotheism with Greco-Roman polytheism. Jesus was fully God and fully a mortal man. The polytheists had no trouble thinking gods could take mortal form and could even copulate with humans and produce heroic or monstrous offspring. But the Christian sense of divinity was derived also from Judaism, and Jews implicitly satirized all forms of idolatry (of concretizations of the divine) by holding God to be transcendent and thus, as far as we can tell, nowhere at all (see the third and fourth links).
I’m sure that with sufficient dedication to casuistry, the Catholic theologian can spin an obfuscating narrative that marries the manifestly opposite perspectives of Judaism and Roman paganism. Remember that Jews fought a losing war against Rome, and split from Christianity too, having regarded the Incarnation doctrine as blasphemous. So again, the existence of that Christian spin doesn’t make it sound or convincing to outsiders.
