Suspend Disbelief: Ten Thousand Difficulties Do Not Make One Doubt

Yesterday, my day off, I watched most of The Recruit (having to avert my eyes for a few suggestive scenes), toward the end of which Al Pacino tells an anecdote about a priest who goes and confesses to the pope that he no longer believes.  The pope's advice: "fake it."

Hollywood anti-Catholicism strikes again!  Fake it?  Which pope would give that advice?  Certainly no pope in the past two hundred years!  The insinuation is that the Truth does not exist and that God does not exist and that religion is an human invention and that religious leaders are humbugs.  Karl Marx is the one who popularized this fundamental Enlightenment bias against belief.

Pope Benedict XVI, in fact, has given very in depth answers to the problem of disbelief.  His answer?  Disbelief is also a belief, but the consequences are devastating for man and for humanity.  It is better to believe, or at least want to believe,...in goodness, truth, beauty: God.

Wanting God is sufficient.  Wanting to believe is already believing.  Your desire for God is faith!  Jesus Christ never harmed anyone!  He only came to help.  In Him, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.  Without Him you lose everything.

Below are the Holy Father's own words (from a lecture which took place April 1, when he received the St. Benedict Award for the promotion of life and the family in Europe, just weeks before his Papal election) recommending to all non-believers to live as if God were self-evident in contrast to the Enlightenment's advice to live as if God did not exist (which has brought so much disaster to the world, e.g. through the false ideologies of totalitarian systems and moral relativism).  Without God the only law is the law of the jungle: survival of the fittest: might is right!  Without God the Truth and the Good would be determined by men: by the strongest, the wealthiest, the most clever, the most popular.

"As if God existed"

But at this point, in my capacity as believer, I would like to make a proposal to the secularists. At the time of the Enlightenment there was an attempt to understand and define the essential moral norms, saying that they would be valid "etsi Deus non daretur," even in the case that God did not exist. In the opposition of the confessions and in the pending crisis of the image of God, an attempt was made to keep the essential values of morality outside the contradictions and to seek for them an evidence that would render them independent of the many divisions and uncertainties of the different philosophies and confessions. In this way, they wanted to ensure the basis of coexistence and, in general, the foundations of humanity. At that time, it was thought to be possible, as the great deep convictions created by Christianity to a large extent remained. But this is no longer the case.

The search for such a reassuring certainty, which could remain uncontested beyond all differences, failed. Not even the truly grandiose effort of Kant was able to create the necessary shared certainty. Kant had denied that God could be known in the realm of pure reason, but at the same time he had represented God, freedom and immortality as postulates of practical reason, without which, coherently, for him no moral behavior was possible.

Does not today's situation of the world make us think perhaps that he might have been right? I would like to express it in a different way: The attempt, carried to the extreme, to manage human affairs disdaining God completely leads us increasingly to the edge of the abyss, to man's ever greater isolation from reality. We must reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even one who does not succeed in finding the way of accepting God, should, nevertheless, seek to live and to direct his life "veluti si Deus daretur," as if God existed. This is the advice Pascal gave to his friends who did not believe. In this way, no one is limited in his freedom, but all our affairs find the support and criterion of which they are in urgent need.

Above all, that of which we are in need at this moment in history are men who, through an enlightened and lived faith, render God credible in this world. The negative testimony of Christians who speak about God and live against him, has darkened God's image and opened the door to disbelief. We need men who have their gaze directed to God, to understand true humanity. We need men whose intellects are enlightened by the light of God, and whose hearts God opens, so that their intellects can speak to the intellects of others, and so that their hearts are able to open up to the hearts of others.


Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman clarifies the matter of religious certainty vis-a-vis any human certitude.  From the Fifth Chapter of his Apologia.

I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive {239} of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as any one; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

Every priest, of course, knows that his faith is first of all a treasure which he did not invent himself but received and to which he is responsible.  Jesus Christ is the faith of the priest and every priest must present Him and defend Him and introduce Him to the world.  It is not my faith first of all but the sacred Depositum Fidei of Holy Mother Church with which I, unworthy sinner though I be, have been entrusted.

Furthermore, the Al Pacino anecdote betrays another modern error, viz. that honesty consists in saying how you feel.  No.  Honesty is directly linked to goodness and truth.  Real honesty and integrity is to stand for the truth and for goodness even when you don't fully understand or feel it.  What is often required is a bit of intellectual and emotional modesty.  Do not give way to all of your crazy thoughts or impulses.  Control yourself!  That is a basic point of the penny catechism.