God exist

 

The abundance of references to Jesus found in ancient texts of Christian, Jewish and Roman authors has lead to a broad consensus among scholars of antiquity on the real existence of the man Jesus. But what about the claim that Jesus was not only man but also God?

 

Many people are willing to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher but do not believe that He is God. If you reduce Jesus to an archetype (of a person perfectly pleasing to God) by stripping away His divinity, then it doesn't really matter if He really existed. In that case, all that matters would be His teaching, regardless of whether Jesus was real or just some literary figure. But that’s missing the point. It’s exactly because Jesus really existed and because of His divinity that His teaching matters.

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Before I tell you why I believe Jesus is For me to believe in GodIf you believe that believing in God isn't reasonable, that it's unscientific or maybe even dumb to  isn't Here's why I believe that God exists, and why it's and why I believe that Jesus is God:

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It's reasonable to believe in God

 

Before I became Catholic, I believed there was a God but didn't know who that God was and neither had I made any effort to find out. During the first 36 years of my live I didn't pay attention to God at all and never felt compelled to get to know that "greater being" I believed was somewhere out there. It wasn't until 2010 that I finally embarked on a spiritual journey with the objective to find God and discover the purpose of life.

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One of the hurdles I had to overcome was the prevalent notion that believing in God is unreasonable. That it's naive to accept the existence of God on the basis of no evidence. That it's unintelligent and that anything that can't be proven scientifically is nonsense. So how could I, very much a person of reason, believe in God? I obviously wasn't going to throw reason out of the window and, as it turned out, I didn't have to. Reason and believing in God are far from mutually exclusive. In fact, they go very well together. I recommend anyone who thinks otherwise to have a look at the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was an Italian priest, philosopher, Doctor of the Church and one of the smartest people to have graced the earth. He determined all kinds of things about God, purely on the basis of reason alone. In his major work, the Summa Theologica, widely considered as the highest achievement of medieval systematic theology, Aquinas presents his five "proofs" of God's existence known as the Quinque Viae (the "Five Ways"):

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• ​The Unmoved Mover. Aquinas' first way involves the evidence of motion, with "motion" meaning the transition from potential reality to actual reality. Nothing that is here and now in a state of potentiality can move into a state of actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. In other words: nothing moves without a prior mover. Something or somebody had to make the first move. That somebody is God, the Unmoved Mover (or: the unactualised actualiser).

• The First Cause. The second way involves the notion of efficient cause. For the series of causes and effects that we see in the world to make sense, it must have a beginning. God, the First Cause, therefore exists.

• The Necessary Being. The third way notes that every existing thing does not owe its existence to itself. Therefore, if all things are contingent, there could not have been anything as at one time all these could be non-existent. To account for all existence, there must be a Necessary Being: God.

• The Absolute Being. The fourth way shows that there exist gradations in things. For example: more noble and less noble, more true or less true. The existence of such gradations implies the existence of an Absolute Being as a datum for all these relative gradations.

• The Grand Designer. The fifth way argues that the behaviour of things in the world implies a Grand Designer or architect: God.

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No reasonable scientist can argue that these proofs are unreasonable. Take the fifth proof and consider the stability of math, the universal constants and the fundamental interactions. One plus one doesn’t just suddenly equal three, yet there’s no natural explanation for why these immaterial truths remain stable. If one plus one were to generate a random result, math or science would never have existed and neither would any of the technology we have today. All of reality would be a series of random and inexplicable events. Science requires intelligibility, which in turn requires an Intelligent Creator or Grand Designer. To quote Einstein: "In the laws of nature, a mind so superior is revealed that in comparison, our minds are as something worthless". That is the humble attitude we should have towards God.

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Einstein:

 

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

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The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

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But, on the other hand, every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.

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In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.

 

It is hard to sneak a look at God’s cards. But that he would choose to play dice with the world … is something I cannot believe for a single moment. 

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The God rejected by the likes of Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins is also rejected by Aquinas and the wealth of Catholic history. Atheists often define God as superstitious explanation for the realities our less sophisticated ancestors couldn't explain. For that reason, God is dismissed as made irrelevant by science. But the God Aquinas talks about (and the God I believe in) isn't just an answer for what we don't understand. God is the explanation behind what we do in fact understand. God is the grounding of science beyond science itself, and the very meaning of all existence and truth.

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God is not the supreme being and neither is God one being among many in the cosmos. That's why science, which seeks after events, objects and phenomena within the empirically observable universe, cannot adjudicate the existence of what lies outside of its proper purview. It's simply not possible to scientifically prove that God exists like we can prove, say, the existence of the Higgs boson. God is the sheer act of being itself whose love, power and goodness infinitely surpass our puny capacity to understand. However, even though we cannot fathom God, we can get to know more about Him by turning to the person through whom God revealed Himself: Jesus.

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Lunatic, Liar or Lord

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If you agree it's reasonable that God exists, then let's see if it's reasonable to accept that Jesus is God. Another theologian, a certain C.S. Lewis, has a persuasive argument when it comes to reasoning for the divinity of Jesus by arguing that the only alternatives were that he was either evil or deluded. This is what he says:

 

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

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Lunatic, Liar or Lord

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It took two years before I realised that Jesus was God, and before I was able to see that, it took even longer before I realised time for me to understand that there is in fact a God. Not just one God among many (a believe shared by polytheistic religions such as Hinduism and Taoism) but one God: the one and only.

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When I was Let's first have a look. I was doubting. Does God really exist? Is he for real?

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The Holy Trinity such a difficult concept. You want dream that up and then try to convince people it's true. It's a mystery introduced by Jesus. It's impossible to understand. If you think you understand God then that's not God (Aquinas).

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I found the notion that a big bang that happened some 14 billion years ago, and the "random" events that followed it, could – simply by chance – have created an entire universe, a little bit too simplistic. I'm not suggesting there wasn't a big bang but one has got to wonder what caused it in the first place. It surely must have been one heck of a precisely coordinated event to result in what we see around us today.

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