My substack feed is filled with mildly autistic young men talking about miracles, largely because some guy named Joe Schmid converted to Catholicism, and his stated reasons for doing so largely revolved around the evidence for Catholic miracles.
That’s a 10.5 hour video that I will never watch.
Most of the discussion on substack has centered around whether or not there is enough evidence to believe in these miracles, and if so whether they provide evidence for the Catholic God, God in general, or whatever.
I want to briefly make a different point. If those miracles are real, and if they do provide evidence for Catholicism’s version of God, then God sucks. Hard.
Catholics believe in heaven, hell, and purgatory. The eternal fate of your soul rests upon whether or not you have died in a state of grace:
Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven—through a purification or immediately,—or immediate and everlasting damnation. (from here)
Let me give an example of someone who should receive eternal damnation according to current church doctrine. Some guy—let’s call him Jimbo— grew up Catholic, was baptized, received communion, was educated on Catholic doctrine, has adhered to the prescribed fasts and abstinence, and has supported the church financially to the best of his ability.
But sometime in his 30s, Jimbo gets really into drinking beer and watching football on Sundays. He knows that skipping mass to drink beer is a grave matter according to Catholic doctrine, but he chooses to do it anyways. Pre-gaming before Sunday football is just too awesome to miss out on, and he’s too drunk by the end of the day to hit up the evening mass. He knows this is a serious matter according to the church, but he just doesn’t care. Beer and football have lured him into a life of unrepentant sin.
According to Catholic doctrine, if Jimbo dies without repentance, he meets all the qualifications for getting roasted, forever and ever. Maybe Jimbo deserves it. But I’d be willing to bet that Jimbo would be a lot more likely to go to mass on Sunday if the best evidence that Joe Schmid could come up with for Catholicism wasn’t a handful of highly contested miracles that largely occurred before digital cameras were commonplace.
But let’s just say Joe Schmid is right, and that Padre Pio and other Catholic miracles like the Fatima sun miracle represent genuine, legitimate evidence for the truth of Catholic doctrine. Remember that these supposed miracles are considered among the best pieces of evidence for God, not only by Joe Schmid but by plenty of other online theists, including Ethan Muse, Bentham’s Bulldog, and Caleb Jackson.
I don’t even care to argue with them about the evidence. It’s just that if they are right, then I am on team Satan. That God sucks, and if you were to prove his existence to me I’d be ready to join the forces of Satan and storm the pearly gates.
Catholics believe that God is all-powerful. God can pretty much do whatever he wants, including putting weird holes in Italian friars, making the sun change colors and dance around the sky, or changing bread and wine into visible flesh and blood.
This means that God chooses not to perform any of the above miracles when a high-definition camera is pointed at the subjects, or to allow such miracles to be reproduced in a lab environment, or to write “Catholicism is True!” with synchronized doves in the air above New York City, or whatever. He also chooses not to miraculously intervene while his own priests are molesting children.
A predictable response is that God would never provide irrefutable evidence for his existence because that would violate free will, or free choice, or something equally dumb like that1. But of course, that’s not true! Irrefutable proof of God’s existence wouldn’t preclude people from making a choice about what to do. It would just provide them with better, more reliable information when making that choice.2
Do faith, love, and all other Catholic virtues require ignorance and uncertainty?
Supposedly, God must provide only very uncertain, noisy, and incomplete evidence for his existence so that we can all be kind of confused about it, and argue with each other, and so on, because that’s what free will is, or something.
Poor Jimbo has to suffer eternal torment because God wants to play peek-a-boo.
I’ll pass. I’ll take my chances with the eternal lake of fire rather than hanging out with that jerk for eternity, thank you very much.
None of the people I mentioned above are dumb, and believing in the Catholic God doesn’t make you dumb. But arguments for divine hiddenness are obvious post-hoc justifications for the fact that the supposedly all-powerful God of the universe is so… hidden. And those arguments are dumb.
There are other proposed explanations for divine hiddenness that I don’t care to talk about here. None are very convincing.