This blog is to be a public outlet. I have been Catholic my whole life, and having received rudimentary training for the first 18 years of my life, I started going deeper. Upon going deeper, what I discovered was amazing. The deeper you went, I had assumed, the more murky and reliant on unfounded faith it must be. But I was so wrong. When you looked deeper, it supported the rudimentary training in a way I had only seen in one other subject that I enjoy thoroughly. Math. We were all taught as children that the circumference of a circle is 2*pi*radius, while the area is pi*radius squared. Do you know why? Well, its what your teacher told you. One day, I asked my teacher why, and though she didn't know, she knew it worked and that people had figured it out a long time ago. Such child-like acceptance. I excelled in Math and I thought it interesting how it worked. And then one day, in Calculus 3, we discussed how the integral of the circumference of a circle is its area. The two were related! Using that circle, if you made a sphere, the volume of that sphere was the integral of the area. Using the same principle for the easier to understand equation, they found something even cooler. 1D became 2D which became 3D. Did I fully understand why? Not really, not fully anyway. But I began to discover in higher mathematics, that the basics we had learned could be explained. But as children, our teacher couldn't explain to us integrals. I was 19 before that made sense. So is the Church. As children, we are taught (half the time due to lack of properly trained teachers) things that the teachers themselves didn't fully understand. But by looking throughout history, someone spent their life trying to figure this out. It is just as foolish to throw away the principles given to us by thinkers like Aquinas and John of the Cross as it would be to ditch Eulers Method or Laplace Transforms. Just because you, personally, may not fully understand why they work, that doesn't make them not true.
Having received a degree in Electrical Engineering, it is more understandable why I would love such a subject. I will use math as an analogy of the Church often, for just as Math is the study and utilization of numbers, progressing and learning with great mathematicians thru history, the Church has 2000 years of study and trial and error and utilization of God's presence/will, progressing and learning with the help of great theologians. I will try to explain math concepts that not everyone would understand, but there is no harm in learning something new.
In summary, this blog will be my attempt to assuage all those people who have learned the equation for the circumference of a circle, but don't know why it is what it is. There is a great chance that I won't be able to fully satisfy some's hunger, but I will assuredly do my best. I started by polling some friends of mine and I received from the 13 distinct topics. Even though these 13 don't cover an iota of the vast realm of Catholicism, its a great place to start. Let's journey and learn together.
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