Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith Book

I'm an atheist, daughter to two devout Catholics. My parents fear for my soul and my mother asked me to read this. Since I don't believe in the divinity of the Bible, I couldn't get through parts 2 and 3 other than the very final Chapter. Those sections are like reading fan commentary about the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, or many of the other topics of passionate leisure discourse. If you haven't gotten lost in the mystery, you don't get anything out of it.

I thought it was a very poor piece of work. Scott Hahn did not provide any unique additions to the already poor arguments for faith. He did not do any non-religious source research for any of his assertions. This is important because he claims it's emperically verifiable. "[T]he cosmos seems to have been designed so that it might be perceived by humankind." In actuality, most are based on downright myths.

Much like Mere Christianity, he appealed to the emotion of the faithful. But unlike CS Lewis, he appears to actually believe he has a substantive argument for faith based on empirical evidence. Most were laughable attempts based on arguments previously made by men smarter than he, which weren't successful either.

For example, is his argument that atheism is a new concept (p31). Actually Buddhism is an atheist belief system. The majority of Buddhists do not believe in a diety. There are some small sects that believe that Buddha was a diety, but most do not. Buddhism dates back to between 6th and 4th century BCE.

This book confirmed to me that religion is the opium of the people. It doesn't take much for a religious book to inspire the faithful. Anything that makes us think we are better in the eyes of our gods. No need to think critically when the writer is clearly inspired by our god. If it makes us feel righteous, it must be divinely inspired.


As a side note: I get very angry about the faithfulls' attempts to alter the definition of law. They mention the law of gravity and believe then can then take 'law' in a scientific context and apply it to morality as a law that god gave them.

A law, in science, started out as a hypothesis published to the world after significant experimentation and work. It then progresses to a theory and later to a law as thousands of scientists perform experiments designed to DISPROVE the hypothesis/theory. After centuries of experiments testing Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, we are unable to disprove it within it's boundaries of applicability. This means that we can safely conclude that Newton's law of universal gravitation is not disobeyable which makes it a LAW. Unlike believers' 'natural law,' you can't choose to break these laws. They aren't punishable, because they aren't even breakable. Really try to comprehend that. And stop trying to hijack and mutilate the terms of science to serve your recruitment needs.