How to Do Apologetics. Patrick Madrid
along the way. This book is my attempt to crystalize as best I can what I’ve come to see as the broader outline of apologetics as such — its structure, components, and primary methodologies — at least as I’ve experienced them. I’m eager to acknowledge with gratitude that everything I learned as an apologist I learned from countless greater minds and nobler souls than mine. As a fledgling “defender of the Faith,” sitting at the feet of the true masters of apologetics — the Fathers, the medieval doctors, the Counter-Reformation apologists, and all those who explained and defended the Catholic Faith in each subsequent generation down to my own, I truly came to understand the meaning of the old adage, that the only reason we can see as far as we do is because we sit on the shoulders of giants.
To borrow a line from St. Paul, perhaps the most preeminent Christian apologist ever, “For I have received from them that which also I deliver unto you” (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:23).
My hope in writing this book is to pass along to you something of that great patrimony I have received. To convey it in my own words as shaped by my own experiences in endeavoring to put it into practice for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
Chapter 1
What Is Apologetics and Why Is It Important?
The most riveting scene in the movie A Few Good Men unfolds when a tenacious prosecuting attorney grills Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (played by Jack Nicholson) about his alleged role in a murder. The relentless cross-examination inexorably forces Jessup closer and closer to admitting something he is trying to conceal. Eventually, the prosecutor shouts, “I want the truth!” Jessup cracks under the strain and bellows, “You can’t handle the truth!” and then admits his guilt.
That message, whispered cajolingly — “You can’t handle the truth” — is the subtle, imperceptible subtext of much that modern culture insists is important: mindless entertainment, our mass addiction to gadgets and games, feckless pursuit of pleasure and distraction, surfeiting our bodily appetites for sex, drink, and food. None of these are truth. Worse yet, our tendency to immerse ourselves in futile, worldly amusements prevents us from ever really grappling with the Big Questions of life, such as: “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my life?” and “What happens to me when I die?” As Socrates famously declared, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” How sad that so many people never take the time to examine the things that really matter, stretching forth their minds and hearts toward the truth, toward God. Apologetics is a practical way of using logic and facts to help others lift their eyes from base, inconsequential distractions and gaze upward to contemplate the truth in all its beauty.
Apologetics accomplishes this task by offering those who will listen rational explanations and defense of the truth, the highest and most important of all including the truths that God exists, He loves you, He wants you to be happy, in Jesus Christ He took a human nature to save us from our sins, He died on the cross for our salvation, He promises forgiveness to all who will accept it. He established a Church replete with many treasures, all for us: the Holy Eucharist and the sacraments, the Holy Bible, Apostolic Tradition, and so much more. All of these truths are worth defending because they are life-giving and beautiful. Without knowing them at least to some extent, no human being can be truly free or completely happy.
Truth is the intellect’s most precious possession. It is to the mind what accurate navigational coordinates are to an airline pilot or what a physician’s correct diagnosis is to the patient. A pilot who navigates according to faulty coordinates will not reach his intended destination. A patient who receives an erroneous diagnosis of the pain in his abdomen could very well die if the wrong course of treatment (or no treatment at all) were prescribed. Truth enables us to avoid errors and to arrive at correct conclusions. Knowing and living according to the truth is always important, even in small things, while in serious matters, such as engineering a suspension bridge or calculating how much fuel to load into an airliner flying from Los Angeles to Sydney, the lack of truth can be catastrophic.
Common sense and our own personal experiences tell us that a mind imbued with truth is clearer, broader, brighter, and more vigorous than one in which the truth is not present. That mind, by comparison, is dark, cramped, shallow, and sluggish.
Your mind is designed for knowing truth just as your body is designed for drinking water. The purer and more abundant the water, the healthier your body will be. When water is scarce or dirty, the body gets sick. But while the body can imbibe too much water, the mind can never have too much truth. The human mind is limited, yet it nevertheless has an infinite capacity for truth because God, who is truth personified, is infinite. We must know and embrace truth and be ordered toward it just as the needle on a compass points toward true north, which it will do so long as the compass is free from interference or damage.
Try to imagine how unpleasant and dangerous this world would be if no one cared about truth for its own sake. If no one made an effort to push past mere human opinions and preferences and strive to know the truth about such things as mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry, the world would be a very dangerous place indeed. For example, how could you know whether a bridge is safe enough to drive your car over the one hundred foot deep gorge that it spans? If the engineer who designed that bridge did not know the absolute truth about the math and physics of bridge-building but, instead, based his calculations solely on his own private opinions and preferences, chances are, his handiwork wouldn’t last very long, nor would those who happened to be driving their cars over it one time too many.
Now try to imagine a world in which mathematicians, engineers, physicists, biologists, and the rest did care about and strive for knowing the truth about things but there was no external, objective means for any of them to ever really know if he or she had actually found the truth. In this world, there are no standards against which one’s individual efforts to ascertain the truth could be tested, no way for their conclusions to be verified or disproved, no recourse to an external standard by which calculations, working hypotheses, and theories could be tested and vindicated or disqualified. It’s obvious why no one would want to live in that world either. It’s hardly better than the first.
Now, the third scenario is not hypothetical. It’s the real world in which we find ourselves today. In every scientific discipline, ascertaining the truth about things and valuing truth for its own sake is not simply highly prized but is absolutely demanded, and thus, rigorously and relentlessly pursued across the board. The empirical method has become the primary means of testing the reliability and accuracy of claims by comparing and contrasting them with empirical data. This enables scientists, mathematicians, and so on, to avoid conclusions based on bias rather than objectively verifiable data.1 We can thank God that we actually live in this world. In the world of science, mathematics, accounting, et cetera, discovering and adhering to objective standards of truth are not just important but are rightly regarded as absolutely necessary.
Okay. We all understand that truth is important in math, science, et cetera. No one argues with this. But for some strange reason, many people today seem to take a very unscientific approach to matters of faith and religion. And in my own search for answers to the question, “Why be Catholic?,” I determined early on that merely having a good feeling about the Catholic Church is no substitute for knowing whether or not the teachings of the Catholic Church are true. For me, plausibility is not enough. I need to know whether these teachings are, in fact, the truth. Because if they aren’t, I decided, I want no part of the Catholic Church. In fact, if Catholic teaching is false, or if even some Catholic teachings are false, then, I told myself, I’d hit the door running and never look back.
Over the years, I’ve been challenged by countless Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons with biblical and historical arguments against various truths. Other challenges came from Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other non-Christians, not to mention atheists. Each in his own way and with his own set of objections, challenged my Catholic beliefs using, variously, the Bible, historical events, logical arguments, claims to revelations that were incompatible with the claims of Jesus Christ, science, and the dull yet forceful cudgel of denying God’s existence. More than a few atheists have over the years taken their fair share of whacks