Transcription
That's the great question: how do we know there's a God? Why do we believe in God at all? That's the foundation for the whole spiritual life.
The great theologians and spiritual teachers have used different approaches to this question over the centuries. One of my favorites is the approach that begins with desire. We human beings desire the truth; our minds seek the truth, and we get it sometimes.
But no matter how much truth we get out of this world, it's never enough. The mind remains unsatisfied. We seek the good, and we find it in a lot of ways in this world. But no matter how many goods we attain, we're never really satisfied.
We seek justice in all kinds of ways, and we achieve it sometimes to a remarkable degree. Think of our own time: the civil rights movement, the end to apartheid, the breakdown of the Soviet Union. All those were wonderful things, the attainment of justice.
But no matter how much justice we attain, we never have enough. There's something in us, this desire for the good, the true, the just, that pushes us beyond this world. This approach is called the argument from desire.
You can't desire what you don't know. Therefore, if we're desiring something that transcends anything in this world, in some way we must already know it. Therefore, we do know the truth itself. We do know the good itself. We do know justice itself, and that's who God is.
God is not one of the true things in the world, but God is the truth itself, which has seized the mind of any scientist, any philosopher, any seeker after the truth. God is not one more good thing in the world, but God is goodness itself, which has seized anybody when he's living the moral life or seeking the ethically good.
God is not one more just thing in the world, but God is justice itself, which has seized the will of the lawyer or the judge or anyone seeking justice. The Bible talks about the primacy of God. When you're seeking God, the most important thing to realize is you've already been found by God.
Remember the Russian cosmonauts went up into space, and they kind of sarcastically radioed back to Earth, "Well, we're up in the heavens, and we haven't found God." Of course, any biblical person would know you'll never find God that way. Of course not; you don't find God anywhere in the cosmos he's made.
But God is the creative source of all that exists in the cosmos. So that's one approach to God, beginning with our own deep desire.
Here's a second approach, and it comes from our present pope, who wrote a great book in 1968 called "Introduction to Christianity." In that book, he formulates this argument, and what I like about it is it shows the link between religion and science because very often those two are seen as enemies.
He says, "At their depth, religion and science come together." Here's why: What does every scientist assume? Whether you're a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a psychologist, whatever you are, you assume that being is intelligible. That means that the world can be known.
Look, even the name psychology designates logos, word. The scientist goes out to meet a world that's imbued with meaning. Well, how do you explain that? How do you explain the universality of the meaningfulness of the world?
Ratzinger said it's because it's been thought into being. In other words, the world is not just dumbly there; rather, the world is filled with logos. It's filled with reason, with mind. Which is why when we understand the truth, we say we recognize it.
He says, "Right, you recognize it; you think it again because it's already been thought into being by God." So he argues from the objective intelligibility of the world to the existence of a great intelligence which has thought the world into being.
Here's a third approach the philosophers and theologians have used. It's called the argument from contingency. It's a fancy way of saying that the world as we know it exists but doesn't have to exist.
You and I are here, but we don't have to be here. There's nothing necessary about our being, and it's true: the world we know is fleeting; it's passing. Therefore, we have to go outside the world to God, God who does exist through himself and who therefore grounds and creates the whole of the world that we know.
Relatedly, Dorothy Day, when she was in the process of coming to the church, was going through a process of conversion. She had a child, and one day when she was on the porch of her house, holding her child, she said, "I felt a gratitude that was so enormous that I knew it would correspond to nothing in this world."
There was nobody in this world she could possibly thank that would correspond to the gratitude she was feeling. That's it. That's exactly it. What she was sensing was God.
This world, myself, my child—none of it has to be here, yet it's here, and the proper response is thank you to the person who made you.