The Facts of Life Series: Knowledge
When it comes to God, knowing is everything. Just tell someone you believe in God and wait. The more direct people will ask you just how you know God exists. The more cautious or respectful may not be so direct, but their facial expression will ask the same question. “How do you know God exists?”
For that is typically the visceral and intuitive response of almost everyone, when you tell them you believe in God. And, spoken or unspoken, it is a fair question to ask. For beliefs of such a profound and foundational nature, of such a timeless and timely import require pretty definitive evidence.
And, beliefs of such a scale implicitly encompass a crucial cognitive sequence inherent to sound thinking that makes evidence precede belief. That evidence can be scientific or rational, moral or aesthetic, even intuitive or visceral. In rare cases, it can be mystical, even epiphanic. But, every belief should rest on some form of evidence, some range and reach of objective evidence.
Otherwise, belief is just a matter of personal preference, a raw matter of each person’s decision making, their deliberate will, their personal commitment regardless of the breadth and depth of supporting evidence. For those who just believe, belief is not a function of evidence, but a matter of will.
Yet, not all people have the same need for evidence, nor are they open to different types of evidence evenhandedly and appropriately, regardless of the inherent explanatory power of the evidence. So, there is a more idiosyncratic element regarding what constitutes evidence and how such evidence is weighed. But, evidence must be part of any belief and certainly it must be part of any belief in God.
This why the Church has always offered a ready defense of the sum and substance of the faith and has encouraged and exhorted the faithful to do the same. For evangelism is a matter of persuasion, particularly in modern times. For ours is a time for us to preach the Gospel. And, it is a time that requires and necessitates us to use words and sound argumentation, despite St. Francis’ exhortation to the contrary.
For our culture is no longer the Christendom of the past, the Christendom of St. Francis’ day. It is unapologetically secular and morally and philosophically relativistic. So, being prepared to explain and defend the faith, your personal faith, is crucial in our time of secular certainty and rampant relativism. And, you must be well versed in the assumptions and beliefs that comprise our modern secular culture, just as you should know the flaws and faults of that philosophy.
Nowadays, when it comes to questions of the existence of God and the nature of God, our modern world’s approach to knowing creates serious problems for effective and enduring evangelism because our culture’s default position about knowing emphasizes science to the exclusion of all other possible means for proving the reality of God. Nowadays, science is the only way to prove anything, including the existence of God as just such a real reality.
The prominence of science as the universally accepted and sole path to truth is now a cultural given. This is why belief in God is often seen as a function of psychological need or dysfunction. Believing in God is for the weak-minded or weak-willed; those who are not mentally strong enough or emotionally stable enough to stare at any empty, silent universe without purpose or truth and not flinch or retreat behind the comfort of a religious delusion.
Yet, what constitutes real evidence of God’s existence and nature? In the modern world, science is the only real and recognized evidence. Only physically demonstrated, empirically determined, rigorously replicated scientific evidence meets the cultural standard of truth and validity. And, as most people in our modern world believe, scientific evidence for God just isn’t there. Or, if there is evidence for the possibility of some kind of supreme or divine being, it just isn’t very definitive in a scientific sense.
Oddly, contemporary science now tells a different tale. Now, modern science is amassing more evidence for the existence of some kind of “creator” prior to the existence of the cosmos, some kind of “order-er” to explain the improbable fine tuning of the universe and the existence and intricacies of organic life and some kind of “intervenor” to explain the absence of intervening mutations and abrupt changes and prolific and complex evidence which seem to arise without clearly linked physical causality.
Many of current science’s findings defy our cultural default position that science precludes the existence and activity of God. Surprisingly, over the last few decades, scientific research now includes the existence of a “god” as a viable hypothesis for the observable and deductive findings of contemporary science, particularly in physics and cosmology, in genetics and paleontology.
But, outside of empirical science, are there other ways to prove the existence of God? And, why have these ways fallen from favor, becoming dubious methods riddled with doubt and disregard in our modern culture? They have become so, because of a widespread, implicit belief that unless something is physical and observable with our senses alone, it must be only a matter of perception or philosophy, an irrational belief, an emotional hope, a personal perception without any real correspondence with factual reality.
Probably, the most significantly disregarded source for knowing the truth about God arising from our modern emphasis on science as the sole source of knowledge of reality is what was known in centuries past as “natural theology.” “Natural theology” was the search for rational evidence for the existence of God using reason alone, without any appeal to revelational sources, such as Scripture, mystical events, epiphanies or Church dogma and without any appeal to science as we now understand it.
“Natural theology” entails the use of rational deduction applied to observable aspects of reality that prove the “necessary” existence of God and the “necessary” aspects of God’s nature. In this context the word “necessary” means an integral fact of reality, something that must actually exist of necessity. While such a rational deductive process is often ignored and dismissed in areas such as modern philosophy, it is used all the time in such scientific inquiry for it is the basis of mathematics. Such rational deduction is routinely used to prove facts in the field of mathematics, as our memory of high school geometry and its many deductive proofs remind us. Such deduction also serves regularly in scientific research and in the many applied sciences.
Such deductive proofs about the possibility of God began with Aristotle and was advanced and refined by Aquinas and other Catholic apologists over the centuries. They all used reason to prove the existence and the nature of God without appealing to revelation or to science per se.
To demonstrate briefly deduction’s capacity, let’s look at a couple of a simple, but profound, examples of deductive proofs for the existence of God. Both begin with a simple observation about reality’s nature and deductively prove the absolute necessity for the existence of God.
For instance, when we observe the physical reality, we know every effect must be preceded by a prior cause. Intuitively and deductively, we know, when we observe something, the observed reality could not cause itself. Every observed effect must come from some prior cause. As we trace this chain of causes and effects back in time, we must ultimately come to an “uncaused causer,” sooner or later.
We know there must be a first reality, a first cause, that was, itself, uncaused. This “uncaused causer” is absolutely “necessary,” which means this being is a requisite reality to the physical, observable universe existence, even though it is not physical itself. This first cause is a deductive proof, a proof grounded in the rigor of reason, the same reason that is used in properly conducting scientific research and applying its findings. The same reason that forms the basis of mathematics.
And, this necessary being, this “uncaused causer,” we call God. So, when we look back in time, we see the inevitable reality of the “uncaused causer”- an uncaused being who caused all subsequent effects to exist.
Another simple, yet profound, deductive proof is evident when we look at the movement from potential capacities to actualized realities in the practical world. This movement from potentiality to actuality is a common phenomenon we see every day. But, when we look down in time, moment-by-moment, at the most fundamental, foundational level, there must exist a fully actualized being to ground and originate the movement from potential to actual.
This “unmoved mover” is as necessary as the “uncaused causer.” Just as the “uncaused causer” is necessary for the origin of everything at the beginning of time, so too the “unmoved mover” is necessary for the continued dynamism down in time in each and every passing moment of time. This proof of movement is why the Church states that God holds everything that exists in its moment-by-moment existence.
Natural theology and reason, particularly deductive reason, enables us to prove the existence of God beyond a shadow of doubt and with absolute certainty. Science, too, now strongly indicates the same conclusion. Yet, there are other more subtle and intangible ways of proving God’s existence and His very nature. We can find such intangible evidence in human consciousness and mental activity, in our moral principles and sensitivities, just as we can see them in our sense of beauty, our sense of purpose, our sense of proper priority.
Yet, probably the most common, yet irrefutable, evidence for God is found in all the many manifestations of relational love. How does love’s existence and our experience of it prove God’s existence? It does so rather simply.
If God does not exist, then all there is to existence is matter, energy, time and space. And, that makes love a mere sensation. Love is nothing more than an illusion, a sensation generated by our neural activity, with no more reality than any illusion we can imagine or feel.
But, for love to be real, there must be an intangible cause of our consciousness and the complex harmony of our many human facets that is love, its experience and its essence. For love to be real, God must exist.
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This article is the fifth part in an extended series on the “The Facts of Life” by F. X. Cronin. You can start with part one by clicking here and see previous entries by clicking here.
We also recommend Mr. Cronin’s latest book, The World According to God: The Whole Truth About Life and Living. It is available from your favorite bookstore and through Sophia Institute Press.
