Is there a proof for the existence of divine/supernatural faith?

[Greg]

I think the Resistance departing improved the SSPX a great deal.

[christulsa]

Visited St. Mary's a couple times a few years ago. It's Mayberry with most women wearing long skirts in the streets.  Few nice restaurants.  Real estate has gotten expensive.   Hundreds of people attend each daily Mass which is simulataneously edifying but concerning, with a good number being adult men of working age.   A whole line of kids kneeling in line for confession.  I took the Mrs. to visit John Senior's grave,  and a caravan of cars followed, turning the visit into more of a procession to the grave.   I humored them,  but thought that was strange.   Had some good conversations with trad cashiers and servers, but kept seeing this one lone teenage boy wandering around town wearing a suit, like people were okay with that. Saw a priest in the sidewalk we know, I waved and called his name walking up to him.  He looked confused and started walking away,  until he recognized us and then acted like we were best friends.  Another time we attended their October Christ the King Festival which was fun.  Is what it is.

[Lynne]

I asked 3 Trad Catholics today, two in the UK and one in the USA on his way to work on the LIRR.

They are all 30-40 year Trads my age or some 10 years older so 49-60 years old.  They all estimated between 15 and 20% without any prompting from me.  Pretty consistent.

This includes annulments (which include a legal divorce normally) and separation/abandonment.

Since no meaningful survey has been done and since Traditionalism is a cloudy concept it's impossible to say.  Does someone who married and then became a Trad before getting divorced count?  Do mixed marriages count?  What kinds of annulled marriages count?  Does separation without getting a legal divorce count?

But if the divorce rate really is under 5% then why are those hardline Trads at CathInfo.com forever bitching about feminism.  What problem are they objecting to, and why are Trad men often scared of getting married?

I was lurking a bit on the forum you mentioned above, and I was surprised, saddened to read about immodesty at SSPX chapels.
The thread basically was complaining about how mothers and their daughters dressed immodestly just like in the secular world.
The same thing you would probably see at a Novus Ordo parish. They were complaining about the fact that fathers
are not correcting their daughters and wives. And yes, there is complaining about feminism within Trad circles.

Once when I visited a parish in NYC that had the TLM, I thought it was sad that 2 young ladies were
wearing super short skirts/immodest clothing, but hey they were veiled  I attributed it at the time that it was NYC, after all,
and it was a Novus Ordo parish with the TLM (Novus Ordo Mass at 9:00 AM and the TLM at 10:30 AM or something to that effect)   

But, then I read that you see the same thing in places like Saint Mary's  &  Post Falls   Why, why?

Cathinfo.com is not a good judge of what SSPX chapels are like. It's "the Resistance" so it attracts a lot of SSPX-haters. You have to understand the background of the forums that you go to.

[Kirin]

Is there a proof for the existence of divine/supernatural faith?

faith
fe??/
noun
noun: faith

    1.
    complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
    "this restores one's faith in politicians"
    synonyms:   trust, belief, confidence, conviction, credence, reliance, dependence; More
    optimism, hopefulness, hope, expectation
    "he completely justified his boss's faith in him"
    antonyms:   mistrust
    2.
    strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof.
    "bereaved people who have shown supreme faith"
    synonyms:   religion, church, sect, denomination, persuasion, religious persuasion, religious belief, belief, code of belief, ideology, creed, teach

If there was proof for it, it wouldn't be faith anymore; it would be a fact.

[Daniel]

Kirin - I would add that faith is belief which is based on testimony.

Things believed through faith do have a certain kind of faith-based proof to them, as they all follow from this syllogism:

    Major premise: Person A proposes proposition B.
    Minor premise: Person A is reliable.
    Conclusion: Proposition B is most likely true.

And there is a more specific case of that syllogism, which is this:

    Major premise: Person A proposes proposition B.
    Minor premise: Person A is infallible.
    Conclusion: Proposition B is absolutely true.

(God alone is infallible, so this second syllogism only applies if it is absolutely certain that person A is God or is speaking with divine authority.)


But suppose we take person A to be the Church. And we take proposition B to be the claim that "the Church is infallible". What we get is this:

    Major premise: The Church claims that "the Church is infallible".
    Minor premise: The Church appears to be reliable, generally-speaking.
    Conclusion: The claim that "the Church is infallible" is probably true.

This conclusion follows, but is uncertain. There's still room for error. So this is not sufficient for salvation.

On the other hand, the conclusion following from the second syllogism would be absolutely certain:

    Major premise: The Church claims that "the Church is infallible".
    Minor premise: The Church is infallible.
    Conclusion: The claim that "the Church is infallible" is absolutely true.

Yet the minor premise is problematic. Supposing there is no other way to prove that the minor premise is true, then you end up with an infinite regress.


But what the Church says is that there is a supernatural virtue called "faith", which God gives to his elect, which allows them to know with certainty that the minor premise of that second syllogism is true. The minor premise then becomes sort of a self-evident first principle, which cannot be further proven, but is nonetheless known with certainty to be true. And from that, the conclusion follows, with certainty. (And not just that particular conclusion from that proposition, but all conclusions from all propositions.)


What I was asking about was whether there was any non-faith-based proof for the existence of this sort of "faith" (in the sense of the supernatural virtue which gives axiomatic certainty).

The fact that this proposition is an object of belief does not in itself mean it is unprovable. (Many faith-based claims are provable. For example, I can claim that I "believe" that the proposition "pi is an irrational number" is true. I cannot personally claim that I "know" that pi is irrational, since I myself have never personally looked into the proof. Yet there is a proof. And if I examined the proof, and understood it, I could no longer claim I "believe" that pi is irrational, but that I "know" that it is.)

Yes some faith-based claims are unprovable. (e.g. There's no non-faith-based proof that "there are three persons in God".)

I suppose what I was asking about is whether this claim, that "there is a supernatural virtue called 'faith'...", is something which is provable or unprovable. If provable, what's the proof? But from what the other posters have explained, it's as unprovable (if not more) as trying to prove the existence of eyesight to a blind man.

[james03]

A couple of years ago I spoke with an older gentleman who raised his children attending SSPX chapels. He was in tears saying that every
single one of them had either completely left the Faith, and the one that still attends Church from time to time it is a Novus Ordo parish,
so he felt like a failure

1.  Did the kids have social activities with other kids?
2.  Did the sons play county sports, like baseball?
3.  Did the daughters get to go to classical ballet classes?  Summer art camp offered for free by the county?
4.  Did the boys get a good education to prepare them for a job that supports a large Catholic family, including calculus and computer training?
5.  Did he encourage group type mixed sex activities like swing dancing?
6.  Did he teach them apologetics and explain how faith and reason go together?
7.  Did he allow the kids to drink alcohol and teach them how to drink responsibly?
8.  Did he teach his sons how to flirt with females and not be intimidated by them?
9.  Were prayers reasonable, or did he turn the family rosary into a 1 hour torture session?

I suspect he failed in many areas and the kids fled as soon as they emancipated.  Neo-Jansenism drags souls to hell.

[Greg]

Partly what James said above.  But I have travelled the world and can tell you from personal experience, that in at least the USA, Canada, England, France and Australia the the SSPX is a very different animal.   In some places it has very different demands, mores, customs, expectations, conventions and rules than in other places.

You could be happy as Larry in one location and as miserable as a flat-earther in orbit in another.

[Heinrich]

No one has mentioned Eucharistic miracles as proof.

[christulsa]

I asked 3 Trad Catholics today, two in the UK and one in the USA on his way to work on the LIRR.

They are all 30-40 year Trads my age or some 10 years older so 49-60 years old.  They all estimated between 15 and 20% without any prompting from me.  Pretty consistent.

This includes annulments (which include a legal divorce normally) and separation/abandonment.

Since no meaningful survey has been done and since Traditionalism is a cloudy concept it's impossible to say.  Does someone who married and then became a Trad before getting divorced count?  Do mixed marriages count?  What kinds of annulled marriages count?  Does separation without getting a legal divorce count?

But if the divorce rate really is under 5% then why are those hardline Trads at CathInfo.com forever bitching about feminism.  What problem are they objecting to, and why are Trad men often scared of getting married?

I was lurking a bit on the forum you mentioned above, and I was surprised, saddened to read about immodesty at SSPX chapels.
The thread basically was complaining about how mothers and their daughters dressed immodestly just like in the secular world.
The same thing you would probably see at a Novus Ordo parish. They were complaining about the fact that fathers
are not correcting their daughters and wives. And yes, there is complaining about feminism within Trad circles.

Once when I visited a parish in NYC that had the TLM, I thought it was sad that 2 young ladies were
wearing super short skirts/immodest clothing, but hey they were veiled  I attributed it at the time that it was NYC, after all,
and it was a Novus Ordo parish with the TLM (Novus Ordo Mass at 9:00 AM and the TLM at 10:30 AM or something to that effect)   

But, then I read that you see the same thing in places like Saint Mary's  &  Post Falls   Why, why?

Cathinfo.com is not a good judge of what SSPX chapels are like. It's "the Resistance" so it attracts a lot of SSPX-haters. You have to understand the background of the forums that you go to.

Not quite.  Their resistance views are crazy,  but like Bishop Williamson often points out,  there are some serious cultish problems in many SSPX chapels.   Modesty/chapel veil Nazi police,  for example.  Jansenism is pretty common in the Society,  so don't fall into that Lynne, okay?   I'm sure the sewing circle will say otherwise.

[Miriam_M]

Modesty/chapel veil Nazi police,  for example.  Jansenism is pretty common in the Society,  so don't fall into that Lynne, okay?   I'm sure the sewing circle will say otherwise.

Are the "Nazi police" priests or lay women?

What is your evidence for Jansenism?

Who's in "the sewing circle?"

(Simply straightforward questions, but for the record, I'm all in favor of dress codes for Mass -- any Mass, by the way.  It's just too bad that they're required because the late 20th and early 21st centuries have made immodesty the norm and taste extinct.)

[Xavier]

Fr. Michael Mueller mentions these 10 reasons people lose the Faith.

"Q. How do people come to lose this faith?

A. 1. By want of instruction.
2. By neglect of prayer and other religious duties.
3. By worldliness and a wicked life.
4. By reading bad books.
5. By intercourse with scoffers at religion.
6. By mixed marriages.
7. By becoming members of secret societies.
8. By pride and subtle reasoning on the mysteries of our religion.
9. By want of submission to the Church.
10. By godless education."