Does God Really Exist?

"Atheism ... rejects any and every claim that God or the divine exists...

"(N)o primitive people is unqualifiedly atheistic, since among all primitive peoples there is some kind of an idea of a worship of a divine reality. Even the high religions of Asia that do not acknowledge a personal absolute (Buddhism, Taoism) are not atheistic, as is often mistakenly claimed. By reason of its conception of the world as numinous, classical antiquity likewise did not have any atheists in the sense describe above.

Atheism is a Post-christian Phenomenon: Judeo-Christian revelation affirmed the transcendence of a creating God and he immanence of a created cosmos.

"Atheism in the proper sense, which denies everything divine, became possible only in the modern age. It presupposes Christianity and to that extent is a post-Christian phenomenon. The biblical faith in creation had broken with the numinous conception of the world that was current in antiquity and had effected a denuminization of reality by distinguishing clearly and unambiguously between God the creator and the world as his creation. In so doing, the Bible thought of the world in worldly terms and God in divine terms and of the two as qualitatively distinct in infinite degree. Only when God had been conceived as radically God was it possible also to deny him in a radical way. Only when the transcendence of God had been taken seriously did it become possible to experience the immanence of the world, and only after the world had been acknowledged simply as world could it become the object of objectifying scientific study and technical transfor- mation. The way was being prepared for this kind of autonomous understanding of the world as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the autonomy of the world, based as it was on the idea of creation, remained part of a total context that was theonomous; in fact, the autonomy itself was given a theonomous justification. On the other hand, the very emancipation of autonomy from its theonomous context and reference and thus the presupposition for the rise of modern atheism had theological causes. These were provided by late medieval nominalism. Nominalism carried the idea of God's omnipotence and freedom to an extreme, turning him into an absolutist deity who acts in an arbitrary manner;" ("The God Of Jesus Christ," Crossroad, 1986, pp. 16-17).

The reaction against an arbitrary God not creating nor acting through the Logos - intelligibly - but deceptively stimulates the rebellion of a non-theonomous autonomy of the subject characterized by the cartesian cogito "I think, therefore I am." The classic profile of the modern period begins in the presumption of non intelligibility of the world where the subject gives "names" to reality which do not correspond to anything real. The subject, then, is exalted replacing God as the source of meaning. This continues through the Enlightenment to Marxism where God is seen to be the alienation of the meaning of man and hence obliging renunciation in the name of humanity and being declared "dead" (Nietzsche). The "shape" of replacing God by the subject is a new immanentist trinity: the belief if progress, absolutized scientific-technical civilization and political messianism. Ratzinger remarks that "(t)he remarkable thing about this strange trinity is ... that this structure now replaces the concept of God and necessarily excludes it, since it takes its place. This systematic exclusion of the divine from the shaping of history and human life, referring to the definitiveness of scientific insight, is perhaps the genuinely new, and at the same time the truly threatening, element in that strange product of Europe that we call Marxism. I now assert that this same combination, in weaker forms, is active in the life of the Western world even outside Marxist thinking (he is talking of West- ern/American capitalism here). If it were to succeed in establishing itself definitively, this would ... be the end of what could make Europe a positive force in the world." (Turning Point For Europe? Ignatius, 1994, p. 125).

1. The World is God. He who accepts the evidence of the World accepts God. There is no Atheism.

2. The revelation of Creation splits the created world from the Creator. Both are accesssible to reason: By perception and reasoning, by experience of being the image of God.

3. If perception is reduced to only the sensible and measurable, Atheism enters for the first time. The Modern period--since God is not sensible and measureable.

YOUR QUESTION ULTIMATELY CONCERNS Pascal's distinction between the Absolute--that is, the God of the philosophers (the rationalist libertins--and the God of Jesus Christ; and, prior to Him, the God of the Patriarchs--from Abraham to Moses. Only the God of Jesus Christ is the living God. As has also been stated in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum (no. 3), the first God mentioned above--the God of the philosophers--is the fruit of human thought, of human speculation, and capable of saying something valid about God. In the end, all rationalist arguments follow the path indicated in the Book of Wisdom and the Letter to the Romans--passing from the visible world to the invisible Absolute.

Aristotle and Plato follow this same path, but in a different manner. The Christian tradition before Thomas Aquinas, and therefore also Augustine, was tied to Plato, from whom it nonetheless rightfully wanted to distance itself. For Christians, the philosophical Absolute, considered as the First Being or Supreme Good, did not have great meaning. Why engage in philosophical speculations about God, they asked themselves, if the living God has spoken, not only by way of the Prophets but also through His own Son? The theology of the Fathers, especially in the East, broke away more and more from Plato and from philosophers in general. Philosophy itself, in the Fathers, ends up in theology (as in the case, for example, in modern times, of Vladimir Soloviev).

Saint Thomas, however, did not abandon the philosophers' approach. He began his Summa Theologica with the question "An Deus sit?"--"Does God exist?" (cf. 1, q.2, a.3). You ask the same question. This question has proven to be very useful. Not only did it create theodicy, but this question has reverberated throughout a highly developed Western civilization. Even if today, unfortunately, the Summa Theologica has been somewhat neglected, its initial question persists and continues to resound throughout our civilization.

AS PERSON CONTRACTS INTO SELFISHNESS, REASON CONTRACTS INTO RATIONALISM, THEN TO POSITIVISM, THEN TO NIHILISM.

(as christian faith as gift of self evaporates in a society, reason loses its sense of mystery and decays into nihilism).

The reason that the question of God is not just a subject concerning the intellect is the vulnerability of the intellect to the moral, and therefore, ontological state of the person. That is, if there is a contraction of the person into self, a state of selfishness, then reason tends to contract with that moral contraction moving from a sense of mystery, to a rationalism, to positivism and finally to nihilism. Ratzinger says: "This restriction of reason has the result that we are left in almost total darkness regarding some essential dimensions of life. The meaning of man, the bases of ethics, the question of God cannot be subjected to rational experience, verified by mathematical formulae. And so they are left to subjective sensibility alone." (How do you feel about it - today??)

The analysis of this within faith is the following: Man was created in the image of God with relational dimensions as has God. He was in a divinized state as image which consisted in obedience to the divine commands to subdue the earth, multiply and not eat the forbidden fruit. Disobeying that moral command severed the relation to God and hence damaged the ontological status as image. Man contracted from relation to autonomous individual and the real understanding he had of God was by way of experiencing himself as God's image. This was an experiential understanding he had of himself which was subjective and real. It was not idealist subjectivism but a realist experience of himself as "I" imaging the triple "I" of the Deity. It was an experience of the unfathomable mystery of God in himself within which he conceptualized about himself and exterior reality and was able to conceptually communicate with God and the woman.

"As a result of that mysterious original sin," says John Paul II, "committed at the prompting of Satan, the one who is a 'liar and the father of lies' (Jn. 8, 44), man is constantly tempted to turn his gaze away from the living and true God in order to direct it towards idols (cf. 1 Thes. 1, 9), exchanging 'the truth about God for a lie' (Rom 1, 25). Man's capacity to know the truth is also darkened, and his will to submit to it is weakened. Thus, giving himself over to relativism and skepticism (cf. Jn. 18, 38), he goes off in search of an illusory freedom apart from truth itself." (Veritatis Splendor #1).

There has been a systole and diastole of approximation to the original state of imaging God whereby reason is able to contemplate the fullness of reality as mystery. The systole is the development of relation throughout the Old Testament by faith and obedience to God and the commandments. The complete restoration is understood to be in Jesus Christ who is God himself who has taken the fallen humanity of the man Jesus and obeyed with it to death on the Cross, thus restorying the original perversion of the human will, the proof of which is the resurrection from the dead.

But that identification with Christ has had its highpoints (first 1300 years) and its diastole (lowpoint)- particularly with regard to a lived faith during the last several centuries. The failure to live the faith is the explanation for the progressive passage from mystery, to rationalism, to positivism, to nihilism. That is, as the personalist/relational dimension of the human person diminishes, the object of reason - the subject himself - diminishes. Thus, one literally grasps less of reality. In another context, Ratzinger remarks: "But ethics does not provide its own rational foundation. Even the ethics of the Enlightenment which still holds our states together lives on the after-effects of Christianity, which provided it with the foundations of its rationality and it internal cohesion. When the Christian foundations are removed completely nothings holds together any more...

"What is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational, just as the state that aims at being perfect becomes tyrannical. Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason. The connection between the state and its Christian foundations is imperative precisely if it is to remain the state and be pluralist. " (A Christian Orientation in a Pluralist Society, in Church, Ecumenism and Politics. Crossroad, 1988, pp. 217-218).

POSITIVISM: ("Crossing..." p. 33)

Is man truly capable of knowing something beyond what he sees with his eys or hears with his ears? Does some kind of knowledge other than the strictly empirical exist? Is the human capacity for reason completely subiect to the senses and internally directed by the laws of mathematics, which have been shown to be particularly useful in the rational ordering of phenomena and for guiding technical progress?

If we put ourselves in the positivist perspective, concepts such as God or the soul simply lose meaning. In terms of sensory experience, in fact, nothing corresponds to God or the soul.

. [Handwritten note to the former:], a very weak experience of reality that can crash and is crashing into Nihilism:

The real untruth of the world view of which drugs and terrorism are symptoms consists in the reduction of the world to fats and in the narrowing-down of reason to perception of what is quantitative. That which is most specific to man is shoved aside into the subjective realm and thus lacks reality. The "aboli- tion of man", which results from the attribution of absoluteness to one single mode of knowledge, at the same time clearly falsifies this world view. Man exists, and anyone who, on the strength of his own theory, has to pull man down into the sphere of a machine that is "seen through" and can be assembled lives in a construction of perception that misses pre- cisely what is essential.

J. Ratzinger: "Turning Point for Europe" Ignatius 1994, p. 35

[Wavy arrow from previous paragraph pointing to]
RECOVERY OF THE ESSENTIAL
("`Proof': Is it Still Valid?" Crossing..., p. 33-36)

The Experience of: [right arrow] THE EXPANSION OF THE {Faith }
SELF AS GIFT--{Prayer} act
{Work }

Cognitive realism, both so-called naive realism and critical realism, agrees that "nihil est in intellectu, quod prius non fuerit in sensu" ("nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses"). Nevertheless, the limits of these "senses" are not exclusively sen- sory. We know, in fact, that man not only knows colors, tones, and forms; he also knows objects globally--for example, not only all the parts that com- prise the object "man" but also man in himself (yes, man as a person). He knows, therefore, extrasensory truths, or, in other words, the transempirical. In addition, it is not possible to affirm that when something is transempirical it ceases to be empirical.

It is therefore possible to speak from a solid foundation about human experience, moral experience, or religious experience. And if it is possible to speak of such experiences, it is difficult to deny that, in the realm of human experience, one also finds good and evil, truth and beauty, and God. God Himself certainly is not an object of human empiricism; the Sacred Scripture, in its own way, emphasizes this: "No one has ever seen God" (cf. Jn 1:18). If God is a knowable object--as both the Book of Wisdom and the Letter to the Romans teach--He is such on the basis of man's expe- rience both of the visible world and of his interior world. This is the point of departure for Immanuel Kant's study of ethical experience in which he aban- dons the old approach found in the writings of the Bible and of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Man recognizes himself as an ethical being, capable of acting according to criteria of good and evil, and not only those of profit and pleasure.He also recognizes himself as a religious being, capable of putting himself in contact with God. Prayer--of which we talked earlier--is in a certain sense the first venfication of such a reality.

And we find ourselves by now very close to Saint Thomas, but the path passes not so much through being and existence as through people and their meeting each other, through the "I" and the "Thou." This is a fundamental dimension of man's existence, which is always a coexistence.

POINT: "Only the God of Jesus Christ is the Living God" [therefore] since "I and the Father are One" (Jn 10, 30)

"Philip, he who sees me, sees the Father" (Jn 14, 9)

[arrow from `Living God' to]

QUESTION: How does one know a person?

Thesis 3: Since the center of the person of Jesus is prayer, it is essential to paracipate in his prayer if we are to know and understand him.

Let us begin here with a general matter of epistemology. By nature, knowledge depends on a certain similarity between the knower and the known. The old axiom is that like is known by like. In matters of the mina and where persons are concerned, this means that knowledge caiis for a certain degree of empathy, by which we enter, so to speak, into the person or in- tellectual reality concerned, become one with him or it, and thus become able to understand (intellegere = ab int legere).

We can illustrate this with a couple of examples. Philosophy can only be acquired if we philosophize, if we carry through the process of philosophical thought; mathematics can only be appropriated if we think math- ematically; medicine can only be learned in the practice of healing, never merely by means of books and reflection. Similarly, religion can only be understood through religion --an undisputed axiom in more reccnt philosophy of religion. The fundamental act of religion is prayer which in the Christian religion acquires a very specific character, it is the act of self-surrender by which we enter the Body of Christ. Thus it is an act of love. As love, in and with the Body of Christ, it is always both love of God and love of neighbor, knowing and fulfilling itself as love for the members of this Body.

In Thesis 1 we saw that prayer was the central act of the person of Jesus and, indeed, that this person is constituted by the act of prayer, of unbroken communi- cation with the one he calls "Father". If this is the case, it is; only possible really to understand this person by entering into this act of prayer; by participating in it. This is suggested by Jesus' saying that no one can come to him unless the Father draws him (Jn 6:44). Where there is no Father, there is no Son. Where there is no relationship with God, there can be no understanding of him who, in his innermost self, is nothing but relation- ship with God, the Father--although one can doubtless establish plenty of details about him. Therefore a participation in the mind of Jesus, i.e., in his prayer, which (as wc have seen) is an act of love, of self-giving and self-expropriation to men, is not some kind of pious supplement to reading the Gospels, adding nothing to knowledge of him or even being an obstacle to the rigorous purity of critical knowing. On the contrary, it is the basic precondition if real understanding, in the sense of modern hermeneutics--i.e., the entering-in to the same time and the same meaning-- is to take place.

The New Testament continually reveals this state of affairs and thus provides the foundation for a theological epistemology. Here is simply one example: when Ananias was sent to Paul to receive him into the Church, he was reluctant and suspicious of Paul; the reason given to him was this: go to hilll "for he is praying" (Acts 9:11) prayer, Paul is moving toward the moment when he will be freed from blindness and will begin to see, not only exteriorly, but interiorly as well. The person who prays begins to see; praying and seeing go together because-- Richard of St. Victor says--"Love is the faculty of seeing". Real advances in Christology, therefore, can never come merely as the result of the theology of the schools, and that includes the modern theology as we find it in critical exegesis, in the history of doctrine and in an anithropology oriented toward the human sciences, etc. All this is important, as important as schools are. But it is insufficient. It must be complemented by the theology of the saints, which is theology from experience. All real progress in theological understanding has its origin in the eye of love and in its faculty of beholding.

Of what? Of the call "to cross the threshold of ... " following Jesus Christ so closely that you become one and the same thing with Him. "Do not be afraid of God who became a man! It was precisely this that Peter said at Caesarea Philippi: 'You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God' (Mt. 16,16). Indirectly He affirmed: You are the Son of God who became a man. Peter was not afraid to say it, even if these words did not come from him. They came from the Father. 'No one knows the Son except the Father; ...(cf. Mt. 11, 27).

"Peter was not afraid of God who had become a man. He was afraid, instead, for the Son of God as a man. Peter could not accept that He would be whipped and crowned with thorns and finally crucified. Peter could not accept that. He was afraid. And for this Christ severely reproached him, but He did not reject him" (p. 7).

Returning to p. 222: "Peoples and nations of the entire world need to hear these words. Their conscience needs to grow in the certainty that Someone exists who holds in His hands the destiny of this passing world; Someone who holds the keys to death and the netherworld (cf. Rev. 1, 18); Someone who is the Alpha and the Omega of human history (cf. Rev. 22,13) - be it the individual or collective history. And this Someone is Love (cf. I Jn. 4, 8,16) - Love that became man, Love crucified and risen, Love unceasingly present among men. It is Eucharistic Love. It is the infinite source of communion. He alone can give the ultimate assurance when He says 'Be not afraid!'

Crossing of the threshold seems to mean bursting out of being retained within the individualism of the self. It means stepping out of oneself to serve the others... To do that, one experiences being Christ and therefore is able to say: "Father!" He is the God of Jesus Christ.