GOD is something man cannot see, touch, hear, feel, nor taste, yet isn’t it simply amazing that not a single nation on earth is without religion? Isn’t it simply amazing that every nation on earth has people who believe in some sort of divinity, someone superior than them, someone who one day would call us to account for things we have done on earth?
The Church teaches that God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural light of reason, from created things.
We can know the one true God through our natural reason, and we are able to do this even in our fallen nature. We can know God through his works, though created nature, and we can know him with certainty.
We can also know God from Scripture, from history, from Sacred Tradition, but even someone who has not been in contact with the world such that he has never heard of Scripture, nor history, nor even of Sacred Tradition can still know God through knowledge of God, a knowledge that is innate in us. Note, however, that what is innate in us is not the idea of God as such, but the ability to know his existence easily and with certainty from his works.
There are actually two sides to this: we can know God by the spontaneous use of reason and by the scientific use of reason. An example of how we can know God by the spontaneous use of reason is the observation about how not a single nation on earth is without religion.
An example of how we can know God through the scientific use of reason is by showing how everything in the universe is an “effect” of a “cause,” a “cause” whom we call God. In other words, the spontaneous use of reason allows us to know; the scientific use of reason allows us to know why.
The Church affirms that reason – alone, meaning by itself – can prove that God exists by showing that a “cause” is necessary for the universe of beings. This type of proof we call “a posteriori” because we go from effect to cause.
But some may already be asking: were it so evident, why do a lot of people reject the existence of God?
Well, because in the first place, God’s existence is not evident. We do not see God, he is something who is NOT evident, in other words, something who is not perceptible through our senses. While his existence is true and certain, his existence is not evident, his existence has to be demonstrated, and this can be done through reason.
In other words, our knowledge of God is not direct, but indirect, through a reasoning process.
It does not help that a number of factors intervene. One person, for instance, might have a father who, when the person was young, would beat him black and blue every day. At least one study has shown that children having this horrendous childhood experience often grow up rejecting God, a strong father figure. Another may have absentee parents, and he grew up without a mom and dad, without the very persons God designed to give instruction to the child by word and by example.
Still another may be the victim of sexual abuse from one parent while still a child. (To be continued)