The Value Of Christian Study

This is, more or less, the text of a talk I gave on a men's retreat two weeks ago. I gave it from an outline and not from the text, so this doesn't perfectly capture the talk, but it's pretty close. If any of it seems forced or stilted, then you can just assume that my golden oratory was much better in person.

Cicero? Ha! He was an amateur.

Err, well, something like that.

Enjoy.

Introduction

My father's third career was that of an artist. He was a painter. He studied painting for over 20 years and got very good at it. When he and I would look at art together, he would see things at a much deeper level than I did. I saw a picture of a French countryside and he saw what the painter was trying to achieve in terms of mood and style and thought.

Studying art made him better at all kinds of things. He was able to see colors and patterns and composition in everything. If studying art gives you those kinds of skills across fields outside of art, imagine what studying God, the Creator of the Universe does for you.

The first thing you need to realize is that God exists and He is alive right now. He created the Universe, he began life and he has a purpose. Those are articles of faith, but they are also the best hypotheses that science has to offer right now as we will see in a few minutes.

When you study God and your faith you are studying a living Person. You are developing a deeper relationship with a Person who exists right now and is already part of your life. All of the things we've heard up to now and all of the things we are going to hear in the remaining talks are better the more you study. Just like my father looking at art after he had studied for decades, studying God will make everything deeper, richer and better.

The people who are giving the other talks on this weekend have studied quite a bit. Their relationship with God is much deeper, their love for him is much stronger. My objective in this talk is to motivate you to study after you get leave this retreat because it's going to make all of the other things you do in life much more rewarding.

Study should be part of any Christian's life. For most people, it’s also the most boring. Not for me. This is my sweet spot. I’m a theoretical mathematician by training and a scientist and engineer by profession.

Rather than hand out worksheets or write equations on a board, I’m going to tell you the story of my recent metanoia. A metanoia is a conversion of your mind and heart. It is a profound change in your life that comes from knowing yourself in relationship with God. Metanoias come from study.

My Search

My story starts 3 years ago when my then 22-year-old daughter came to me and told me she was actually a man. This was at the start of the trans mania and I was caught completely by surprise. I was totally unprepared and didn’t understand what was happening.

My metanoia came from 3 years of study, trying to understand just what had happened. I pursued Truth in a culture gone mad.

The Yachtsman

In his book, Orthodoxy, G K Chesterton talks about a book he wanted to write, but never would. It’s about a British yachtsman who set out to explore the South Pacific. He sailed away from Brighton and, being a poor navigator, ended up visiting many different places, but went in a circle and landed back in Brighton. Thinking it was Polynesia, he landed carrying the British flag, pistols in his belt and speaking to the natives in sign language. The British citizens in Brighton all had a good laugh at him. He was embarrassed and happy at the same time. His exploration led him back home, but with a much greater appreciation for home.

I started by trying to learn the biology of transgenderism and whether or not it was true. I also researched the ways in which this social contagion is spreading, primarily among young girls. I ended up getting to know my savior. 

I went in search of something very important to me and I ended up learning more about God and returning to my Catholic faith with a much deeper relationship with God.

Science And Religion

Science is not certainty. Science is the process of selecting between a set of guesses that explain what we see. If you want to displace a current theory, like the law of gravity, you’ve got to provide a better explanation. You can’t just say, “I don’t like the Law of Gravity!”

Faith and science do not conflict. In the 1200s, St. Thomas Aquinas established that God does not create contradictions, therefore if established science and theology conflict, theology must change. As Catholics we have all the science there is. It’s part of our faith. When atheists say, “We have science,” we can reply, “We do, too” and go back to watching college football.

God Created The World

Several decades ago, a physicist named Fred Hoyle was studying the origins of the Universe. He was the one who came up with the name, "the Big Bang." As a child, Fred’s parents forced him to go to church and he hated it. A confirmed atheist, he vowed that he would never do anything that supported religion.

One of the things Fred researched was the expansion of the universe. That’s governed by gravity and gravity is governed by a number that is called the gravitational constant. The gravitational constant came into being at the time of the Big Bang. It could have been anything. If gravity was slightly stronger, then the Universe would have collapsed back in on itself after the Big Bang. No stars, no life. If it had been slightly weaker, then the Universe would have expanded without stars or planets forming. No life. The constant is exactly what it needs to be in order for stars, planets and life to exist. There’s no reason for that.

The odds of it being perfect like it is are greater than winning the lottery 100 times in a row.

After more than a decade of research, Fred Hoyle said that the only reasonable conclusion was that the Universe was designed. There are lots and lots of things out there like the Gravitational Constant that also point to a designed Universe.

If you don’t agree, then you need to explain the gravitational constant and many other things. In the meantime, according to science, I’ve got the winning hand. I’m holding a full house, queens over tens and you’ve got a pair of eights. I’ll bet the mortgage on that every time.

Metanoia: Scientific Atheists Aren’t Arguing Against God, They’re Arguing Against Sin

My conversations with atheists have taught me that they’re not arguing against God, they’re arguing against sin. Back in my days as a scientist, it didn’t matter to me at all what your religion was. Your belief or unbelief in God had no effect on digital signal processing or whatever it was I was researching.

A belief in objective morality, on the other hand, has a great deal of effect on me. Who wants to hear that porn and booze are sins? I don’t want to change my behaviors. I like those very much. If you threaten to take them away from me through evangelization or cultural change, it threatens my consumption of those pleasures.

They’re fighting for hedonism, not crusading against the Sky Fairy.

God Created Life

We have no working guesses as to how life began. We can’t even create a small strand of DNA in perfect laboratory conditions. DNA is useless without the machinery of the cell around it and we are nowhere near figuring out how that got going. 

Cell walls, cell nuclei, DNA, you need all of those things and more, all at once, in the right sizes and configurations to get life. For example, a cell wall does you no good until you’ve got everything else as well. We don’t even have a guess about that right now and we’ve been working on it for decades. Evolution doesn’t start until life exists. 

Does it take faith to say God created life? Of course it does. It could still be wrong, but as of right now, it’s the best position and there’s no indication of anything else coming on the horizon.

So our best guess, then, is that God created the Universe and God created life.

Metanoia - Going To Mass

I now see that God exists and I believe it with the same level of belief that I have in the law of gravity. He is not some abstract concept that the priest talks about on Sunday, He is real and He is in my life all the time.

Logically, the Universe had to be created on purpose. No one would go to all this trouble for nothing. What, was God looking at his watch and saying, “Archangel Gabriel, the LSU - Texas Tech game is still 3 hours off. Let’s make a Universe. I’m bored.” 

It takes faith to say all of that, but it makes sense.

God created the Universe, He created life, life led to you and it was done with a purpose. It stands to reason that you have a part to play in that purpose. You are the one creature, as we learned in a previous talk, that has an intellect and the ability to understand what He created.

After my study, Mass is now an acknowledgement of my relationship with God. Dude purposefully created reality and then began life so that it would result in me. You’re dang right I’m on my knees. 

Once I realized this, it changed the way I saw things everywhere. I used to wonder why we spent so much on stained glass windows. That money could have been given to the poor. I don't think that way any more. Stained glass windows are the embodiment of an artist worshiping in his own way. It was his acknowledgement of Creation, his way of appreciating it. 

God's Purpose

Here’s something else I learned as I tried to piece together what was going on in our crazy culture. Do we have a purpose?

If you were the leader of an infantry unit, when you yelled, “Charge!” would you want your men to stand up and run around in random directions? No, you’d point in the right direction. If God created all of this with a purpose, it stands to reason that he would let us know what it was. That’s the revealed word of God. The Bible.

What about the Bible? How about those weird stories like Jonah and the Whale? 

Around the year 200, a Christian thinker named Origen said that not everything in the Bible was meant literally. It speaks deeper truths and that’s the important part.

Your grocery list is fact, but it says nothing about life. Shakespeare’s plays are fiction, but they speak deep truths. That’s what art tries to do, get at the deeper truths of life.

Jonah is the story of a man who blows off God and runs away from what he is asked to do.

The Question Of Jonah

God asks Jonah to go to Nineveh and tell the residents that they’re all horked up. Jonah blows him off and takes a ship to Tarshish. A storm comes up and the sailors throw Jonah overboard where he gets swallowed by a sea animal.

The story of Jonah asks the question, “What happens when I don’t do what God asks of me?” Well, his life fell apart. Kind of like your life falls apart when you drink too much. When you yell at your wife. When you consume porn. When you’re a girl who thinks she can become a boy. Through study, you see that God is telling you, “Don’t do that.” You do it and, like Jonah, your life falls apart.

The Bible is God speaking deep truths to us. Study is how you learn more about God by finding those deeper truths. You have a purpose and the revealed word helps you find it. It’s why you study - you want to learn more about the God who created the world, began life and guided it to end up in you.

Jonah isn’t about a whale eating a man, it’s a story about you not fulfilling God’s plan for you. Was the whale real? Who cares? Was King Lear real? Who cares? That’s not the point or the purpose of the story.

What Does The Trans Mania Teach Us?

Let’s get back to what started me down this recent road. My study led me to The Genesis of Gender by Abigail Favale. Mixed with some ideas from Andrew Klavan, we get this as a good summary of what transgenderism means.

There is no creator, and so we are free to create ourselves. The body is meat with no intrinsic meaning. We give it whatever meaning we want, using knives and chemicals to shape and form it as we choose. We do not receive meaning from God, we impose it. .. we wield language to conjure the reality we want.

This is Harry Potter territory. 

Do we get to define reality? If you want to say that, then you need to give me explanations for all of the things we’ve covered so far - the origin of the Universe, the beginning of life, the meaning of life. Yours have to be better than mine. You can’t just bang your spoon on your high chair and scream that you’re the other sex. That’s what we face now.

Jonah Revisited

That’s what’s really happening. This is Jonah and the Whale all over again. The new story goes something like this:

“You need to go through puberty with grace and courage. That’s the price of the world I created for you.”

“Forget that! You can’t tell me what to do! I’m actually a dude and I’m going to take testosterone shots!”

And then life goes off the rails, just like Jonah’s.

That’s all this is. It’s a refusal to study, it’s a denial of reality. We refuse to bend our lives to the will of God.

Reality isn't enough for these people. they demand the ability to reshape it as well.

My study led me to this. Like Chesterton’s yachtsman, I couldn’t have ended anywhere else, so long as I was listening to what God was trying to tell me. He was trying to make Himself known to me through study.

Metanoia - Prayer

Study makes my prayer deeper and more personal. I pray in the morning and ask God what it is He wants me to do today. The more I study, the more clearly I hear Him and the more confident I feel about what I’m doing.

Am I doing the right thing? Maybe. But at least I feel like I’m getting closer to what He wants.

I love my morning prayer time. I don’t miss, not ever. Through study, I’ve come to realize that my life has meaning and that meaning is fulfilled through serving God. I still do all the things I love - cook, entertain, work on cars, watch SEC football, but the main direction of my life is His direction. I know it is because of study.

Back To My Daughter

I haven’t heard from my daughter in months. Sometimes you fail. Knowing God helps you deal with that. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells the parable of the sower. A farmer sows seeds and some fall on rocky ground and die while others fall in good soil and thrive.

Each one of those seeds represents a person. In the parable, some of those seed-people suffer and die.

Sometimes you succeed. Maybe she will be the Prodigal Daughter. I don’t know, but I do know that God and my Catholic community, a community created and motivated by the desire to serve God, are with me on this journey.

How And What To Study

Absolutely first on the list is to read one of the Gospels all the way through. I’d recommend Mark or Matthew. They’re short and you could get through one of them in an evening. You get readings in Mass, but until you read one of the Gospels from beginning to end, you don’t really get the full picture. 

When you read one of the gospels all the way through, you see things a different way, you see the narrative arc of Jesus' life. You can't miss the messages He is giving you. When you read one of the gospels all the way through, you become much less susceptible to people who try to use Jesus' words to manipulate you.

"Jesus was a socialist!" some will say. "Oh, shut up," would be your knowledgeable reply.

"Jesus said, 'Don't judge,' but what he really meant was don't judge unrighteously," others will say. "Get lost," works well here.

In conversations this weekend, I’ve heard plenty of you ask about the best ways to evangelize. My only other book recommendation is Greg Koukl’s Tactics. Greg’s thesis is that if you get into an argument with the person, you’ve lost. You don’t have to convince them in one conversation, you just want to nudge them down the path to God. It’s a terrific book for evangelization.

In addition to that, my gift to you was to assemble 25 talks and put them on a thumb drive for you and the team. Some are funny, some are serious, some are deep and some are practical. I wanted to give you a sampling of the kinds of things that are out there if you search for them on social media.

What To Replace

I know I’m asking you to do something you probably aren’t doing already, but I’m sure you can find the time. In the car, listen to a book, radio station or podcast instead of the sports talk or news. Let’s face it, neither the sports or news is going to change all that much throughout the week. Turn off the TV half an hour earlier and use that time to read or watch or listen to something more productive.

Stop listening to people who don’t believe in God. If you want the world explained to you, why go to someone who doesn’t understand science? Science indicates God exists, He created the Universe, He created life and has a purpose for you. If you deny all that, you are starting with an inaccurate foundation.

How much credence would you give someone who thought the Earth was flat? They might be an authority on some other subject, but whatever they said would have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Conclusion

When I started exploring transgenderism, I had no idea where pulling those threads would lead me. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my effort to learn more about the world God created would lead me to being closer to Him and having a better idea about my purpose.

Study always does.