The Story of My Faith, Intro.

On April 10, 2004, I was received into the Roman Catholic Church. I've tried many times to write out the story of why I converted, but have never been successful at doing so. I think I now know why: I was trying to tell the story of why I became Catholic, but this story cannot be told alone—it's part of the larger story of why I am a follower of Jesus Christ. Because of all the skepticism in the world and because of my interest in philosophy and logic and epistemology, I would like to give a carefully reasoned, step-by-step account of both my initial belief in Jesus and my "conversion" to the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, I can't. Not only did I not keep a journal for most of this time, but I now realize that I didn’t base my decision upon purely rational grounds. In real life, we believe most things more out of "intuition" than by careful reasoning. That is not to say that one's intuitions are not and cannot be supported by rational facts. As the great G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy:

…I am a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.

Also, as Jimmy Akin pointed out in his blog entry of February 26, 2007…

We thus see that there are two ways in which a provable truth can be believed: On the part of those who have thoroughly studied the matter, it can be believed on the basis of having studied the demonstration of the truth. On the part of those who have not thoroughly studied the matter, it can be taken on faith on the word of the experts.

I initially believed in God and the Bible because the "experts" (my parents) told me it was true. We believe many believable and true things using this principle. (See the rest of Jimmy's post for further discussion on believing the experts' word.) And here's another quote by Chesterton:

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion. Now, the non-Christianity of the average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it.

By now I think you might be realizing that the best part of my blog is all the stuff I quote from other people!

I'll write more of my personal story later.