Credo in Deum Patrem

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of the saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

A social group to which I belong recently took in a Catholic mass. Discussing it afterward, one participant preemptively announced she was Catholic, and disavowed the Creed, recited at this as at every mass.

“Most Catholics,” she said, “just say the words, but we don’t believe all that stuff.”

I could not contradict her. She may be right. But this is troubling, since the original point of the Creed was to establish who is a Christian and who is not.

My friend Xerxes, a pillar of the United Church, also dismisses God as depicted in the Creed as a “fairy-tale God.”

They seem to take the claims as self-evidently improbable.

The same notion for years powered the “Jesus seminar.” But the logic of it is obviously wrong on the most fundamental level.

First, it takes no leap of faith to assert that a Supreme Being necessarily exists. This various major philosophers have demonstrated seven ways to Sunday.

A Supreme Being is, by definition, all powerful.

It follows that he is perfectly capable of everything in the Creed. There is nothing improbable about any of it. The only question is, would he want to do these things?

Xerxes dislikes the idea of God as a person, who might then so will. He likes to think of God as a force like gravity, or a kind of network.

But this concept too fails right out of the gate. Surely we can agree that a conscious, self-aware being with intent exists in a more complete sense than something unconscious: that, say, a human is a higher state of being than a rock. It is also hard to be omniscient without being conscious; lacking consciousness, God could not be God. A conscious, self-aware being with intent, is what we call a person.

Now, would he will to do these things, or something like them?

A Supreme Being, as Descartes, for one, demonstrated, must necessarily be good, and all-good. Evil is a flaw, a deficiency.

An all-good being would want to do good to man. He would love us, with a perfect love. Accordingly, he would want to reveal himself to us, and lead us to higher perfection.

And so it ought even to be logically expected that God would appear in history at some point. Obvious enough that it is found in Hinduism as well, in the concept of the avatar. Or, in effect, leaving aside some important theological differences, in Buddhism, in the concept of the Bodhisattva.

The only question then is when and where. 

Was it Jesus, or Krishna, or Kwan Yin, or some other, or someone yet to come?

To help us decide, there are also specific empirical facts asserted in the Creed. Christianity is actually to some extent falsifiable, meeting Popper’s criterion for scientific knowledge. It is not a matter of arbitrary belief.

If, for example, it could be shown that Pontius Pilate was not an authority in Palestine at about the time of Jesus, Christianity would be disproven. If a corpse of Jesus were recovered, or there were credible records of one, Christianity would be disproven.

Conversely, the fact that what historical records we have conform with these facts, tends to make the whole more probable than not. The disappearance of the corpse—something attested implicitly by ancient non-Christian sources, which had every reason to wish to debunk Christianity—being the most important.

The same is obviously not true of fairy tales. The existence of fairies is not logically necessary, and fairy tales make no historic claims.