Why I’m Not Catholic

My friend Joe Schmid has converted to Catholicism. So have many other friends of mine. Felled by the unstoppable force of Ethan Muse’s arguments, my most brilliant friends are falling left and right before the steady march of the miracles. And yet I have not converted, and so far, I have no plans to. So why are so many people converting? And why am I not?

The main reason that so many people are converting is all those Catholic miracles. You can peruse Ethan’s Substack for more of them, but Catholicism does seem to have some pretty impressive apparent miracles. St. Padre Pio had stigmata for decades that healed fully at his death, a number of seemingly miraculous healings, and medically inexplicable temperature readings of over 120

At Lourdes, after a girl named Bernadette had a vision as of Mary, where Mary announced “I am the immaculate conception,” there were a spate1 of seemingly medically inexplicable healings. And more abound: eucharistic miracles, Fatima, etc. I’m a lot more skeptical of Fatima, and I totally lack the relevant expertise to investigate Eucharistic miracles, but I’ll admit: I find some of the Catholic miracles spooky, especially Lourdes and Padre Pio.

So why am I not planning on converting? I’m not going to go in the weeds on all the arguments (especially because a lot of the historical stuff is dependent on higher-order evidence and above my paygrade). I’m just going to describe at a high level how I’m thinking about this.

The first big reason: I find the case against Catholicism really strong. The three things that give me the most pause are hell, normative ethics, and Biblical inerrancy.

On hell, Catholics are committed to eternal conscious torment. I find that view just about as implausible as views get. I don’t think it’s remotely plausible that the best world that God could dream up is one where he consigns lots of people to the flames, where the worm dieth not, and the flames of hell cause them to suffer forever.

Now, maybe there’s a way to avoid the claim that people suffer infinitely in hell. Perhaps their suffering decreases in intensity, so that the total quantity is finite. But even aside from infinite suffering, it’s just so implausible that the ultimate state of people would be this—that God can’t think of a better way.

On normative ethics, Catholics are committed to a kind of absolutism about the wrongness of certain classes of acts. These teachings are binding though not infallible. Examples of these include masturbation, fornication, homosexuality, and direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being (this last one is probably infallible). This would require me to believe four separate things that I find very implausible:

1. Deontology, at least in the minimal sense of thinking that certain acts are ruled out even if they have good consequences.

2. The falsehood of various liberal views of sexual ethics.

3. Absolutism about the moral prohibitions.

4. Absolutism even about the prohibitions on sexual ethics.

Rejecting 2 would come at some cost but not insurmountable. Rejecting 1 would be costly as well. I just find deontology so implausible. It suffers from a number of fatal counterexamples. But 3 and 4 are where things get really bad. Risk arguments destroy absolutism about deontology. And if anything is obvious, it’s that if the only way to prevent everyone on earth from being tortured forever was for a loving gay couple to have homosexual sex, then it wouldn’t be wrong for them to do so. I cannot believe—as a purely psychological matter—that such a thing is false. It’s completely absurd. We’re reaching skeptical scenario levels of implausibility here.

Maybe there are some ways around having to affirm these things as a Catholic through some kind of interpretive acrobatics. But at the very least, I think you’ll have to pay a cost.

Now, I realize Catholics have arguments for why I shouldn’t trust my moral intuitions. Our hearts are darkened by sin, and thus we cannot see clearly. But come on, some views are just so implausible that even if you can tell a story about how we might be wrong about them, it can’t possibly be rational to affirm them. If you tell me that the law of non-contradiction is false, even if you tell some debunking story, I’m just way more confident in the law of non-contradiction than your debunking story. And I find it way more obvious that using contraception to prevent infinite torture would be permissible than I find even the law of non-contradiction. It just can’t possibly be wrong.

Then, the last consideration: Catholics are committed to some kind of Biblical inerrancy. Now, the exact details are debatable. Dei Verbum says, in a passage generally agreed to be without error:

In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him (2) they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, (3) they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted. (4)

Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings (5) for the sake of salvation. Therefore “all Scripture is divinely inspired and has its use for teaching the truth and refuting error, for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind” (2 Tim. 3:16-17, Greek text).

I think the Bible is run through with errors about morality, history, genealogy, authorship, and more. I don’t think it’s plausible that the Holy Spirit would assert a lie about the author of Daniel, for example, or a barbaric moral claim. While one or two apparent errors would perhaps be explicable, they are too numerous and serious for Catholicism to remain plausible.

These are the three considerations that move me the most. But then there are some other things. For example, I’m pretty sure that Jesus didn’t declare Peter the Pope. It would be weird if this was among the most important things he ever did, but it’s only mentioned in one highly ambiguous passage in Matthew. Then, the fact that Peter is the Pope doesn’t really come up at any other point in the Gospels, even during major theological disputes. Also, my sense having not looked too carefully at the historical evidence is that there isn’t good evidence for early Popes, and this is granted even by Catholic historians like Eamon Duffy. My sense is that this is also generally agreed upon by secular historians without a dog in the fight.

Similarly, my sense having not looked into it too carefully is that the Church has flip-flopped on some important issues, like whether there’s salvation outside the Church. Unam Sanctam says, “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Admittedly, there’s a complicated debate to be had here, and I could be wrong, but just on its face, it really looks like they flipped. I need to do more reading about this, though.

Similarly, the Marian dogmas seem like they were made up later. We don’t have early evidence for them. The first suggestion that Mary was perpetually a virgin comes in a second century apocryphal text called the protoevangelium of James, where the author was lying about being James. And if Mary was forever a virgin, it’s weird that the Bible refers to Jesus’s brothers without giving any hint that they weren’t biological brothers. The word for brother is adelphoi, and it can occasionally mean broader relatives, and it can refer to step-brothers.

But it would be pretty weird if the New Testament kept talking about Jesus’s step-brothers, using the standard word for brother, without ever clarifying. The word syngenes was a perfectly good word for relatives. Matthew 1:25 says Joseph “but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son,” which implies that they had marital relations afterwards. And various other passages point in a similar direction. The bodily assumption of Mary that Catholics are dogmatically committed to came even later!

I don’t mean to suggest that this is decisive on its own. But it sure seems like a lot of Catholic doctrines are made up later, without outside historical evidence. Combine this with doubts about divine simplicity, general concerns about Christianity, and other weird Catholic doctrine like transubstantiation and Baptismal regeneration, and I find it really hard to believe in Catholicism. The case against strikes me as very strong.

Worse, the case against is cumulative. There are many different kinds of considerations. If the only arguments against were normative, then I might suspect that my moral intuitions are flawed. But when they’re also Biblical, theological, and historical, and when they depend on many different kinds of intuitions, it just seems hard to believe.

In contrast, there is only one argument for Catholicism that moves me at all: the argument from miracles. Now, the miracles are somewhat independent; there are many different types of Catholic miracles. But if it’s possible for clear investigation to turn up one seemingly inexplicable miracle, probably it can turn up a bunch of seemingly inexplicable miracles. If it turns out that there’s a naturalistic explanation of all the Lourdes healings, probably there is one for the Eucharistic miracles too. Some of these miracles strike me as impressive, but if I’m wrong about the impressiveness of the first, probably I’m wrong about the impressiveness of the rest too!

I might just be kind of a dupe when it comes to miracles—underestimating the power of human credulity. Some things that I’m pretty sure aren’t naturally inexplicable but that I was surprised to learn:

1. A bunch of people have thought witches stole their penis. How could you possibly be mistaken about that sort of thing?

2. We have a bunch of testimonies of an obvious con-artist named Sathya Sai Baba doing naturally inexplicable things in broad daylight. People attest that he teleported, read minds, made food appear by magic, bilocated, and had a mysterious odor that could be smelled at a great distance, even by skeptics, just like Padre Pio did. And those aren’t even the only impressive miracles attributed to a Sai Baba!

3. Throughout Iran, a bunch of people said they saw Khomeini’s face in the moon.

4. A bunch of children go into deep trances where they claim to see Mary, move synchronously, don’t blink for many minutes on end, and stop reacting to pain, even in cases where it’s very clearly non-miraculous.

5. Children said that they saw groups of aliens descend from the sky. They didn’t recant (the children, not the aliens. Though I guess the aliens didn’t recant either). We similarly have groups reporting they saw fairies.

6. The Piraha claim to see spirits in broad daylight that outsiders can’t see. In one case, an outsider visiting a tribe saw a skeleton dancing.

7. There are a bunch of examples of people looking at the sun, seeing it spin, seeing it move, seeing it change colors, and witnessing it not being painful to gaze at.

8. We have reports of supernatural healings associated with a Protestant faith healer who makes false prophecies and has visions of rapture theology that led to many conversions. More detail in a footnote.2

9. We have reports of seemingly naturally-inexplicable memories of past lives. Some led people in the direction of Christianity, so it’s not plausible that they’re done by deceptive demons, even given Catholicism.

10. A giant firing squad tried to shoot the Bab, the founding figure of the Bahá'í Faith, and yet they all missed.

In light of these, there are a few different possibilities:

1. Miracles don’t really happen, we’re pretty good at fooling ourselves, and thus we falsely think a bunch of miracles happened that didn’t.

2. Miracles do happen, but God doesn’t care too much about denomination and is even willing to do miracles that lead a bunch of people to false religions. Maybe he’s not too concerned that, say, healing people at Lourdes led people to Catholicism.

3. Miracles do happen, but the only ones with vindicatory implications are Catholic.

4. Miracles do happen but God mostly gives out miracles to Christians pretty indiscriminately. So, for example, he’s happy to let Catholics have major miracles that convert people to Christianity, just like he’s happy to make apparitions of Mary mostly appear atop Coptic Churches, rather than Catholic ones.

I don’t find that the miracle record conclusively favors any of these over the other. If I can be wrong that people won’t think witches stole their penises, that they saw Khomeini’s face in the moon, that they saw a man teleport and read their minds, that they saw a spirit fly in the sky, and so on, why think I can’t be mistaken about Catholic miracles? The difference, in many cases, strikes me as a slight one of degree, not one of kind. I don’t find the miracles attributed to Padre Pio to be on their face much more impressive than the ones attributed to Sai Baba—but we have Sai Baba on video, and it’s pretty clear he’s just doing parlor tricks. Nor do I find Padre Pio’s miracles much more obviously vindicatory than, say, reincarnation miracles.

In addition, the most impressive Catholic miracles don’t seem clearly vindicatory. Lourdes healings and Padre Pio are the most impressive, but it’s not clear they distinctly vindicate Catholicism. Fatima and Eucharistic miracles are the most clearly vindicatory, but it’s very unclear that they’re miraculous (I’m pretty sure Fatima is not, and I’m too scientifically uninformed to evaluate Eucharistic miracles).

So here’s the story at a high-level: aside from miracles, I don’t find the case for Catholicism impressive at all. The miracle evidence is okay, but it’s not much better than the evidence for a bunch of miracles that sit awkwardly with Catholicism. If Catholics explain away those miracles, then theirs are liable to be explained away too. If Catholics grant those miracles are genuine, then probably Catholic miracles can be explained too. And some well-attested apparent miracles just don’t seem at all plausible, like those associated with Sai Baba.

I think I’m pretty good at philosophy. I am demonstrably terrible at investigating miracles. I’ve been wrong over and over again about what bizarre phenomena people will attest to. So when there is a conflict between very obvious philosophical judgments in the world, and contentious miracle claims that are hard to investigate, combined with some other higher-order evidence from history, I go with the philosophical judgments.

What about the other evidence for Catholicism?

Obviously, I can’t discuss it all. I’m not equipped to comment on most of it. Much of the evidence for Catholicism runs through first arguing for the truth of Christianity, and then making sort of complicated arguments for why once one accepts Christianity, they should be Catholic. There are tricky disputes about whether the Catholics’ 73 book canon is more historically plausible than the protestant 66 book canon.

I won’t talk about most of those things. I’m just not informed enough about the history relevant to these complex internecine disputes. I don’t even buy the case for Christianity, so I’m less moved by these kinds of arguments. Instead, I’ll just discuss one main argument that I can see moving a person in favor of Catholicism and explain why it doesn’t move me.

Here’s the basic argument: it makes sense that God would set up a Church on Earth. This would be a specific visible institution in order to resolve disputes. If God cares a great deal about allowing people to have knowledge of the truth, it makes sense that he’d set up an authoritative body with the power to lead and promulgate infallibly. In other religions, there isn’t really a plausible analogue.

For Protestants, there’s no plausible analogue. There’s no clear mechanism for Protestants to resolve scriptural disputes. If one Protestant is in error, aside from just convincing them that they’re wrong—often when the Biblical evidence is radically underdetermined on important matters—there isn’t a clear way to resolve the disagreement.

What about the other groups claiming to be the one true Church? Well, most of them have like twelve members. While the Catholic Church has a reasonable claim to be Catholic (universal) the Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Church of the East do not. Even the Eastern Orthodox churches are ethnically parochial and too fragmented to hold councils or pronounce authoritatively.

I don’t think this is a crazy argument. But it doesn’t move me much.

It’s true that a priori, it isn’t very unlikely that God would set up an institution on Earth. But we must consider the total evidence. It is reasonably surprising that God would set up an earthly institution in a somewhat oblique and unclear way, so that reams of people trying desperately to identify the Church Christ set up are led into error, even after they carefully examine the historical evidence.

It is similarly surprising that the way he’d set up the Church would be by making an ambiguous statement in only one of the Gospels. And there’d be sufficiently little clear historical evidence for the creation of the Church, that it’s at least debatable whether the institution existed in any serious way in the early days of the Church.

It is similarly surprising that this would be an institution that doesn’t clarify that it can speak infallibly until 1870! That major doctrines would go undeclared for enormous expanses of time, with the canon not being definitively declared until the 1500s, and with Marian dogmas not being definitively declared for nearly 2000 years. That it wouldn’t even be clear when it’s speaking infallibly, so that there’s dispute among esteemed Catholic theologians about which doctrines are infallible.

Again, a priori I’m not shocked that God sets up some kind of institution on Earth. But when one considers the full range of facts about the Catholic Church—the scandalous misbehavior of various popes, the lateness of its doctrines, its shaky historical provenance—it becomes much less plausible a priori that God would set up that kind of institution.

Furthermore, the mere fact that it would be good if God set up an institution of a particular sort doesn’t mean its likely that God would. There are many things that could be done that seem good. God doesn’t do most of them. On its face, it would be good to cure malaria; if Jesus didn’t come with a cure for malaria, or do any of countless other good activities, why think that he would set up the papacy with more than negligible odds?

We know that God, if he exists, gives humans lots of freedom to make major errors. He even gave those who penned books of the Bible the latitude to include lines about how glorious it is to dash Babylonian babies against the rocks. So then it is not very surprising that we’d similarly be able to make major theological errors without some definitively corrective institution.

Thus, I don’t think there’s any very strong a priori argument for the papacy. In contrast, it’s very easy to see how an institution like the papacy could have emerged. Many groups throughout history have claimed to be the one true Church. It isn’t that surprising that in one of the groups claiming to be the one true Church, they’d have a single person in a position of unique authority—with the authority to infallibly promulgate doctrine. So even if Catholicism is false, the odds of there being something like the papacy set up aren’t very low.

These are important questions. If Catholicism is true, then non-Catholics are in terrible danger of the fires of eternal torment. It’s worth considering the case carefully. But at the end of the day, I just find it psychologically completely impossible to believe, and I think I should only convert if I really believe that it’s true, rather than wager. At the end of the day, however, if you are a theist, or even if you just think theism is minimally credible, it is worth praying regularly to God to direct you in the direction of doing what’s good and knowing what’s true.