An experience is a happening I am conscious of. William James suggests that religious experiences are ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive. The worth of experiences has to do with how they are understood, and understanding often has to do with explanation. How can one recognize the significance or genuineness of a religious experience?

"Reason" is used in a number of ways: support or basis, inference, experience, empirically verifiable, or human intelligence proceeding without divine grace or revelation. Thomas Aquinas proposes that people may know through reason or through faith. The First Vatican Council rejected both faith without reason and reason without faith, both fideism and rationalism. John Paul II continued that approach in his encyclical, Faith and Reason.

The cosmological argument takes reasoning steps from a contingent existing fact to a sufficient explainer of that fact, namely a necessary being (that cannot be otherwise than existing). Challenges to the argument include the notion of contingency, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, no infinite regress in explanation, understanding causation, and necessary being as God.

"Faith-ing" is a newly created word, parallel to believing. Uses of these terms include: believing that some statement is true; believing in or trusting; and believing someone giving testimony (i.e. accepting someone's word). Whereas some opinions and beliefs must proceed from evidence, the faith by which Christians are saved includes and is shaped by love and allegiance.

An Augustinian theodicy understands evil as a defect, a lack, a disorder. Moral evil began with the first human beings and spills over into non-moral consequences of human malice. Evil continues in judgment, heaven, and hell. An Irenaean theodicy (after Saint Irenaeus) proposes a negative theodicy: A permanent hedonistic paradise would provide no occasions for virtues such as courage, patience, loyalty. A theodicy of divine goodness in the face of...

The last segment of the series addresses hope. Hope is not knowledge. Applied to Catholicism, hope for sustainability faces the future of the physical cosmos and the embodied future of each of us. It seeks understanding beyond the superficial. It looks for bodily resurrection, beyond what we take as historical. It considers final conditions, being joined to God with God's people.

We distinguish the form from the function of linguistic use. Language can function to express feeling, for instance. Meanwhile, literal meaning may be culturally shaped; metaphor extends or carries beyond or over. For God, there is a positive phase of meaning, a negative phase of meaning, and a superabundant or eminent phase of meaning. Apophatic theology keeps to silence or indirection about God, while kataphatic theology uses words to speak about...

The logical form of the argument against God from the existence of evil is this: If God exists and is correctly described as omnipotent, omnibeneficient, and omniscient, then there is or would be no evil. But there is evil. Therefore God does not exist as described. How can one account for this apparent impasse?