Proofs for the
Existence of God
I wrote last week about the epidemic
of relativism that is plaguing our Western society, and especially our youth,
and I noted the importance of demonstrating to relativists that objective truth
does exist. This is an issue I’ve been
faced with on multiple occasions, and it is particularly important to me. Unfortunately, my experience has not made me
an expert, so consider my following discussion as one among many, and please
seek out the work of people far more capable on this subject than myself.
Once the issue of objective truth has
been established, people may be able to examine the question of God’s
existence. There are a lot of great
resources for us here. Father Robert
Spitzer, the head of the Magis Institute,
is a physicist who has done extensive studies and published multiple books as
well as a new film, Cosmic Origins,
that demonstrate how physics can be used to prove the existence of God. It is quite heady, but may appeal to a
segment of our agnostic friends and family.
Michael Behe, the author of Darwin’s Black Box, has also done some
very interesting work that will appeal to the scientific-minded, and is easy to
follow. Dr. Benjamin Wiker has also
done important work in this area, including publishing a book with Scott Hahn
called Answering the New Atheism. Patrick Madrid and Ken Hensley’s book The Godless Delusion, as well as Edward
Feser’s The Last Superstition are
also good ones. All of these can be
found on the sidebar. And Father Mitch
Pacwa has done many debates with atheists, many of which can be found online.
These are all useful tools to be used
with our friends and family who may have fallen into the trap of scientism, and
only recognize truth that can be discerned using the scientific method. The problem is, that is a heresy. The scientific method is only one way of arriving
at truth, and it is often limited. I
have enjoyed many of the above-mentioned books, but my one complaint is that,
from my point of view, they concede too much to the Darwinist in an attempt to
argue on their opponents’ playing field.
The idea may be that if they can find enough common ground
scientifically, they can demonstrate the glaring weaknesses in atheistic
neo-Darwinism, its unreasonableness and scientific unsustainability, and lead
people to the conclusions that the evidence would naturally point to.
As someone who finds much more of
evolutionism unsupported, and at least unproven, scientifically, sometimes I
feel these books give too much ground.
However, for people who have been bred on these theories, they do an
excellent job showing that they necessarily point to the existence of God. The conclusions should be easy for an honest
evolutionist to accept without shattering his entire frame of reference. Since the Church gives us freedom as far as
what we believe in these scientific matters, I think the above-mentioned
resources are invaluable tools to have at our disposal.
I personally prefer a more
philosophical approach along the lines of Thomas Aquinas’s five proofs for the
existence of God. Specifically I try to
lead young people to examine the argument from contingency.
The entire material universe around us
is contingent on something for its existence.
All matter is contingent. And Dr.
Spitzer’s work does a great job, citing countless studies in physics that show
without question that the universe had a beginning.
Nothing can create itself.
To create anything, I must first exist.
I can not create anything if I don’t already exist. Nothing can. Therefore, nothing can create itself. That means everything is contingent on
something else for its existence.
Tracing our own existence, we can follow this line of
contingency back. I depended on my
parents for my physical existence. My
parents depended on my grandparents, who depended on my great grandparents, and
so on. But what about the first instance
of life? Try as they might, still no one
has been able to bring life from unliving matter.
And what about the first matter, the beginning of the universe? The material order is also contingent. There must have been something (Someone) that
started off the chain of being, that was not contingent on anything else for
its own existence. There must have been
an uncaused cause for the universe.
There must have been a Creator that did not need to be created, an
eternal being that was pure “being,” with no potentiality. This, of course, is who we call God. Even a cursory examination of the order in
creation demonstrates that this Being must be intelligent. Using another of Thomas Aquinas’s proofs, we
can come to the knowledge that He must be a perfected Intelligence, in fact.
It makes sense, then, that when God appeared to Moses in the
burning bush, he called himself, “I am that I am.” He simply exists. Pure Being.
No contingency.
It takes no religious affiliation to come to the above
conclusions. Ancient Greek philosophers
did so. The God who spoke to Moses
simply identified Himself as that eternal, uncaused Being. A little further philosophical examination can
lead one to the conclusion that there must be only one God as well, but I will
not get into all of that now.
The next question, then, once people come to acknowledge the
existence of God, is, Who is He? And
specifically, who is Jesus, the one man in the history of the world, who ever
claimed to be that God?
