How Certain Is Your Faith?

The Fr. Mike Schmitz Catholic Podcast

Ascension

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.9 • 7.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2020

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is your faith certain enough to stand up against the doubts and different ideas out there?

Fr. Mike shares insight about certainty from Dr. Montague Brown, professor of philosophy at St. Anselm College, New Hampshire. Dr. Brown says certainty is intellectual belief based off the evidence. It’s not blind belief. Someone with certainty is not going to change their mind without new objective evidence. Many times people change their mind not because of new evidence, but just because of new people in their lives. They’ve simply been exposed to new behavior. This happens to students in college quite often.

Christianity is evidential. It hinges upon an indisputable event, the life and death of Jesus.

If you’re from a small town, you may think the way you were raised is just part of your small town’s way of thinking, and that a well-known university in a big city must have a broader, more enlightened way of thinking. But really, the university is just as subject to its way of thinking as the small town is. The culture of a university is just as insulated as that of a small town.

Don’t get so caught up in the culture around you that you give in to new ideas without evidence—whether that culture is a university, a new workplace, new friends, new family, or a new city. Let your faith always be backed up by the evidence. Fr. Mike is certain in his belief that Christianity will then always come out on top.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay team, here we go.
0:11.0	I'm Spothermage Mitz and this is a center presence. It almost always happens that when someone takes off, it goes off to college, right?
0:16.4	They, or maybe they just graduate high school, they get sent out into the world,
0:20.0	but they go to the workforce or they go to the military or they go to college. One of the things that
0:25.7	oftentimes happen, they come back with different ideas. They come back with maybe even a different beliefs, maybe a whole different sense of
0:33.8	what they believe is right and wrong, what they believe is true or false. And people think, well that's gonna happen because why?
0:39.4	Because they were in a small bubble. Maybe it came from a small town and it's just like, oh, it's very insulated here.
0:45.6	It's just this bubble, this particular environment, everyone just believes this. And now you live in a big city.
0:51.1	Now you live on a college campus. Now you live in these places where there's all these ideas.
0:56.2	And you might look back and say, wow, you are so certain when you're in high school or so certain about maybe not just high school college
1:03.8	life kind of thing, but maybe just at one point in your life,
1:07.5	there's someone who is so certain and then that certainty is gone.
1:11.8	I want to look at this, this idea of being certain or even the idea of why someone would change their mind about something.
1:18.2	Because you might say, oh, you were so certain that kind of idea, right? As if that's an insult. Actually, certainty is a virtue.
1:24.8	Certainty is a good thing, but the right kind of certainty. It can be a blind certainty,
1:29.1	but there also can be what I want to call this good certainty, this intellectual certainty.
1:33.8	So what is certainty as I'm presenting it? Actually, Dr. Mathew Brown, he's a professor out in New Hampshire.
1:39.2	He wrote about this. He said, certainty is the intellectual belief based off of the evidence.
1:48.5	Intellectual belief and this intellectual conviction based off of the evidence.
1:53.0	And that's what certainty would be, right? The good kind of certainty.
1:56.2	I'm not blind belief, but I looked at the objective evidence and I came to a conclusion based off of the evidence.
2:03.7	So someone who is certain is in the good way, is not going to change their mind without new objective evidence.
	...

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