Forum user asks how to convince him to become Catholic

Forum user asks how to convince him to become Catholic

A participant who introduces himself as a newcomer from another planet, with no prior contact with Earth's civilization, poses an awkward question: what arguments would give him a reason to become Catholic? He isn't asking for faith, he's asking for facts. And the answer he mostly receives is an awkward silence or a dodge. Because when you strip religion of its cultural scaffolding and subject it to the test of evidence, the whole edifice wobbles.

The premise, posted on a history forum, is as simple as it is devastating. The supposed extraterrestrial isn't here to mock: he's here to be told why he should accept as revealed truth something that, from the outside, looks like just one more magical tale among the thousands humanity has produced. The most frequent reply isn't an argument, it's a deflection: talk to me about UFOs.

From theology to flying saucers

The thread opens with a direct question and a list of grievances: the scientific backwardness attributed to fifteen centuries of religious dominance in Europe, the supposedly sectarian nature of the institution, the funding of unrelated causes. The interlocutor isn't asking for intellectual charity: he's asking for reasons. And what he finds is a flight toward the UFO phenomenon.

Several participants argue that unidentified flying objects are actually spiritual or interdimensional entities, closer to religion than to science fiction. In other words: to defend the faith, they reach for the paranormal. The logical problem is obvious. If the argument for believing in God is that UFOs exist, and the proof of UFOs is that nobody knows what they are, the reasoning bites its own tail.

Some go further and propose a curious theological thesis: if intelligent aliens exist, God would have had to reveal himself to them too. And if he hasn't, the problem wouldn't lie with the extraterrestrial, but with earthly Christianity. An admission that, coming from a believer, is worth more than a hundred atheist refutations.

The watchmaker argument and chance

The most repeated defense is the design argument. The cell is compared to a mobile phone: nobody believes an iPhone arises on its own in nature, so a cell, being more complex, doesn't either. The problem with the analogy is that it presupposes what it wants to prove: that life is an artifact and not a process.

Others fall back on improbability. Life would be a miracle, not the norm. And they cite believing physicists to back the intuition that the universe is too orderly to be accidental. It's an aesthetic argument, not an empirical one. The universe seeming orderly to our eyes doesn't imply an orderer behind it.

The supposed alien's reply is the sharpest of the whole exchange: when a culture can't explain a phenomenon, it tends to attribute it to a magician. It's the history of humanity summed up in one sentence. And there isn't a single serious counterargument to that observation anywhere in the thread.

The problem of evil and the aesthetic argument

Internal criticism also appears. One participant points out that there are unfulfilled prophecies in the gospels, such as the promise that this generation would not pass before everything came to pass. Two thousand years later, the generation has passed and the everything remains pending. It's a textual problem, not an interpretive one.

Another points to the sarracena incoherence: a teacher who asks not to judge and to forgive one's enemies, yet devotes his ministry to a dialectical war against his religious rivals. The coherence between message and practice is, at the very least, debatable.

And then there's the aesthetic argument, the most honest of all. One participant suggests taking the extraterrestrial to a baroque church, letting him smell the incense, the wax, the old wood, and letting beauty do the work. It's an implicit admission: there's no rational argument, there's an aesthetic experience. Which is all well and good for a tourist, but not for a convert.

The final answer: the threat

When the arguments run out, coercion appears. One participant answers with the purifying fire. Another, with the Inquisition. It's the thread's most sincere confession: if you can't convince, you compel. The history of religious expansion in one line.

The supposed alien sums it up precisely: there is nothing interesting, beneficial or attractive on offer. Only threats and violence. It's a harsh conclusion, but it's the one that trinc from the answers received.

One reasonable doubt does remain, though. Is Catholicism indefensible, or did nobody in that exchange know how to defend it? The question remains open. And it will probably stay open for another two thousand years.