"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."
--Saint Thomas Aquinas

Since today is the feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a few words of wisdom from him are in order. In school, St Thomas was often teased by his peers, who though him to be dumb--they called him "the dumb ox"--yet ironically he was one of the greatest thinkers ever to live. To return bring the irony full circle, let me note that everybody thought I was a smart person in school, and now I will add my own thoughts, which will be considerably less enlightening than those of St Thomas.

I have said before that faith is like a pair of glasses--it really does alter one's perception of the world. Things which were once muddled can become clear, and things which were lost in the blur become visible. Gaining (or losing) one's faith really does change how one views the world. The change is rarely overnight--it's often gradual--but such things have happened before. Sometimes the change is not so much in what we see, but how we interpret it.

Many--not necessarily all--atheists with whom I have interacted have given me a bit of a laundry list of complaints about both God and the Church. God can't exist because of evolution, or because science does not need God and cannot observe Him; or God can't exist because of the problem of evil, of suffering, of Theodicy; or finally, God cannot exist because His followers have done and maybe still are doing bad things. These are all statements, indeed questions, posed by the nonbeliever to challenge the believer's faith, posed as if a refutation, posed as if novel and unique.

Having faith does not mean ignoring these issues, but rather looking at them in a different light. The true Christian does not, in the end, eschew science. To be Catholic does not mean to reject the theory of evolution, or a heliocentric model of the solar system, or even to argue against Hawking's wave function for the universe. Evolution in itself is not an argument against the existence of God: perhaps He really did design the universe to act as a clock for the purposes of "everyday" occurrences, so that He only had to create life and it would biologically evolve from bacteria to beasts, and from there to mammals and then to man, with only a few subtle changes here or there (e.g. "breathing" life--a soul--into man). Nor was the heliocentric model, for there were passionate clerics on both sides of that debate. Similarly, Hawking's wave theory--if true--does not eliminate the possibility of God, regardless of the wishes of a few atheistically inclined scientists.

Nor does being a Christian mean that one must wear rose-tinted goggles as regards the tragedy of suffering or the horrors of evil. These are things which have been known and honestly addressed by Christians since the beginnings of the Church, and were indeed acknowledged before the Church was formed (see the book of Job). To be a Christian does not mean to ignore suffering, or to pretend that it does not exist. Rather, it means to accept suffering, to know that there is more there than the topical pain against which many an orator has railed. That we suffer is unfortunate, but it results not from God's design, but from the corruption of that design, the misuse of the freedoms granted to man and angel.

More than this, it means that our suffering has meaning, that it does not simply go for nothing. With Job we lament, and we stand with the atheists in crying out in our pain. Even the pagan philosopher Aristotle noted that "Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind." It is recognizable to a non-Christian that suffering can produce beauty, but we do not stop there, for suffering is not even the last chapter for the Christian. We look to Our Lord's life and see His suffering, and see also the suffering of Our Lady. We realize that we may join our suffering to theirs, we see that God Himself was willing to descend into the very depths of human misery in order to offer us a way out. We see in Christ's glorious resurrection and ascension--not to mention in the assumption and crowning of Our Lady--that something better awaits us, that every tear will be wiped away (Revelation 21:4) and that this life, our vale of tears, will be "as a single night in a bad inn."

Lastly, there is the charge that God cannot exist because His followers themselves are the cause of much of the world's evil. It is surely true that there have been a great many sinners in the Church. There are also a great many outside the Church. It is not the disease of sin which the Church provides to the world, but rather the cure. For the believer knows that all men commit sin-save only Christ and His Mother--mankind is fallen. The Church has not so much a magic pill to cure man of sin as a rehabilitation program. Rehabilitation takes time and effort on the part of the patient, not only the doctor. Yet, the existence of a great many saints throughout the ages is all the proof the believer needs that the Church is a force for good and not only evil. The existence of evil men long predates the Church, indeed, the existence of good men too. But the Church alone has the task of making evil men become good, of taking sinners and helping them to become saints.

It is here that I return to St Thomas. The person of faith is free to agree or disagree with my thoughts on these matters. These explanations may satisfy him, in which case he remembers them and passes them along as he sees fit; or he may find them to be useless, in which case he discards them and thinks nothing more of it, offering at most a bit of friendly advice and a prayer. The atheist must find them to be woefully inadequate, or else must question his premises, lest he find that his argument against God's existence is the subjective cry: "There is no God, because I don't want there to be a God!" For that is the poorest argument against God's existence in a reality which rarely conforms to an individual's desires. Honesty requires such a man to ask himself why he so wants to avoid God.