Deep Dives with Fr Sean: the Super Catholic Catechesis Podcast Fr Sean OBrien

We dive into this pretty dang deeply!

Big Conclusions:
--The received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receivers.
--All knowledge comes through the senses (unless infused by God)
--True knowledge is the real assent, higher than any notional assent.

Natural Law is great!

God's eternal law, that is, His wise plan of order and beauty for the universe, was placed into created beings by ordering them through tendency and inclination towards their proper end. The eternal law is placed into the nature of the being itself. The human being can participate in this rationally, and this is what we call the natural law.

We dive into this (after a problem with uploading).

This is a look at the structure of the human person, and while it's longer than I anticipated, I believe it is super important. I use the 4 causes of Aritotle to get into this:

The efficient cause: A human sperm and a human egg got our bodies started, but it needed an eternal influence to cause our immortal souls to start. Therefore, we must conclude that God infused the soul at the moment of conception.

The material cause: That's our body!

The formal cause: The soul is the form of the body, it organizes our material elements to be what it is: of human nature. We talked about the powers of the soul, the will, the intellect, the passions, etc.

The final cause: That's next time!

I love these kinds of teaching! Seeing how the Old Testament conceals the New Testament, which reveals the full purpose of the Old, and then to see how it is lifted up in our experience of the Resurrected Lord in the liturgy and in our life! This is pretty simple, but I believe profound in its simplicity.

We dive into the topic today, recognizing that with a proper understanding of causality in different ways helps to prepare the way for any argument for God's existence.

Newman's argument flows from conscience? Where does law come from? Where does that interior command to do the good and avoid evil come from? To whom are we accountable with the experience of responsibility? Well, it is most reasonable to propose there is a Lawgiver who commands us towards the good and holds us responsible. Him we call God.

Thomas Aquinas has his five ways:
1) Based on motion or change
2) Based on efficient causality
3) Based on contingency of all beings
4) Based on our experience of perfections in the world
5) Based on complex design in the universe

You might like this one--it was easy to include many examples!

Remeber, the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Everything must be its own sufficent reason for its existence or it must find it in another. Or, everything must either have a cause or be its own cause.

The types of causes:
Material cause
Formal Cause
Efficient Cause
Final Cause