Bud Miller

Over a hundred years ago, a university student found himself seated on a train next to an older man who seemed to be a well-to-do peasant. And the man was praying the Rosary, and fondling the beads iii his fingers. The university student turned to the old man and asked if he still believed in such outdated things. "I most certainly do," said the man, "do you not?" The student laughed sarcastically out loud and said, "I certainly do not believe in such foolish things. Take my advice. Throw those beads out the window, and learn what science has to say about such things." "Science," said the old man, "I don’t understand this science; perhaps you can help me understand," as some tears welled up in his eyes. The student, seeing that the old man was moved by this conversation, and not wanting to hurt his feelings any further, said, "I’ll tell you what; give me your address and I’ll send you some literature on the matter." The old man slowly fumbled in his coat and pulled out his calling card. Upon reading it, the university student bowed his head and became very silent. On the card he read, "Louis Pasteur, Director of the Institute of Scientific Research, Paris."

We have two men studying the same discipline: science. One sees the results of the test tubes, and formulas, and equations, and compounds, and experiments, and determines that there is no God. The other, examining the same results, determines that there has to be a God, and, in fact, sees God’s grandeur all around him.

Iii a more current true story, Lee Strobel, an award journalist with the Chicago Tribune and a spiritual skeptic until 1981, wrote the following: "My friends and I were celebrating at an Italian restaurant across the street from the University of Missouri. I was set to graduate in a few days, and I had just accepted a job offer: a 3- month internship at the Chicago Tribune, with a promise that if I performed well, I’d get a permanent job as a reporter. At one point during the meal, somewhere between the breadsticks and the Neapolitan ice cream, my best friend, Ersin, made an offhand remark about how my internship was certainly a great gift from God. His comment startled me. During the four years I’d known Ersin, I don’t think we’d ever talked about religion. ‘Wait a minute, let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘Are you telling me that someone as intelligent as you - valedictorian, science whiz, and all that - that you actually believe that God exists? I always figured you were beyond that.’ It was clear that Ersin was equally surprised. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ he said. ‘Are you saying there isn’t a God? Are you telling me that someone as intelligent as you doesn’t believe in God? You’ve got to be kidding?’ We were both genuinely astonished. I couldn’t believe that a sharp person like Ersin had actually bought into a fairy tale like the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator of the universe. Hadn’t he learned anything at college? If you could freeze frame my attitude toward God, Lee Strobel says, that would be it: Intelligent people didn’t believe in him. All it took was a quick look at the evidence to know that Christianity was nothing but superstition and wishful thinking. But to be honest, that’s all I had ever really given the evidence: a quick look. And I was happy to keep it that way for years - until one day, my life took a strange turn, pushing me into an all-out investigation into the facts surrounding the case for Christianity."¹

We will look further at Lee Strobel’s findings in the second tape, focusing on Jesus Christ. This present tape’s focus is very specific: is it reasonable to believe that there is a God? Louis Pasteur and the college student were both university educated, and Lee Strobel and his friend Ersin were both university educated. But two of them concluded that the universe is explainable without any type of God, and two of them concluded that the universe had to have been created by a being that they called "God." Who are the reasonable ones?

Let’s get more personal now. You’re sitting there at work, minding your own business, when the conversation around you takes a turn. There’s this shift in tone and everyone gets just a little bit more intense. Some people scoot forward and put their chins in their hands. Others tilt their chairs back, stare at the ceiling, and tap thoughtfully on their nose ring. And it hits you. They’re talking about God. "Hey," someone says. Suddenly they’re all looking at you. "What?" you ask. "Don’t you go to Church?’ Oh, that’s why they’re looking at you. "Uh well...." "So you believe in God, right?" "Well... .1 guess... .sure." That should shut them up, but no. The fiends aren’t satisfied. "Why?" "Why what?" you ask. "Why do you believe in God?" Okay, here goes, 10 years of CCD, a jillion Sundays in church, and thousands of minutes spent listening to people talking about God, ripe and ready to be used in this exciting world of heady, exhilarating, adult philosophical discussions. Why do you believe in God? Are your co workers ready? Can they handle what you’re about to say? "Uh.. . .I dunno. . .I just do... .I guess." Awesome. John the Baptist, watch out.

Well, they weren’t stunned into reverent silence. They just kept on peppering you with unanswerable questions about proofs and fossils and how could a good God let people suffer? They quote a science teacher they had in college who taught about a self-starting universe, and about the Big Bang, and you realize that, while you firmly believe in God, explaining it in a reasonable way may take some thought and preparation.

First off, you are not the only person in the world who has wondered about God. The guy you work with his elbow in the jello is not the first person who’s tried to figure out how God could allow suffering. You’re not the only person in the history of Christianity to have a heart-stopping moment of existential cosmic panic in which you think, "What if it’s all made up after all? What if it’s not true?"

In the almost 2000 years since Christianity began, and even long before that, there have actually been people who have thought long and hard about faith. They’ve grappled with the very same questions and fundamental choices we have: Light or darkness? Meaning or chaos? God or nothing at all?

And some of them came up with answers. What we’re going to do on this tape is share some of those interesting, well-pondered, and actually very useful answers about God’s existence and nature. For surprise, surprise.. .not a single question an atheist or agnostic friend poses to you is new. There’s not one of your New Age friend’s fuzzy ideas about spirituality that hasn’t been tried sometime before.

In poll after poll, over 90% of the population states a belief in God. Why? Why do so many people pray? Why do people naturally petition God in times of crisis, and even ask others for prayers, even if they are not a "practicing believer?" Why did so many people go back to Church, if even for just a few weeks, after September 11th? Why are there so many churches and places of worship? Why is the Bible consistently one of the number one best sellers year after year? How do we account for this? Why are there so many religions? Why do we even ask questions about a divine being we call God?

"I believe in God": this first affirmation of the Apostles Creed is also the most fundamental. The whole Creed speaks of God and when it also speaks of man and of the world it does so in relation to God. The other articles of the Creed all depend on this first affirmation.²

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that the desire for God is written in the human heart, because we are created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw us to himself. Only in God will we find the truth and happiness we never stop searching for (CCC 27). The Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et spes says it this way:

"The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence.³

In many ways, throughout history down to the present day, men and women have given expression to their quest for God in their religious beliefs and behavior: in their prayers, sacrifices, rituals, meditations, and so forth. These forms of religious expression, despite the ambiguities they often bring with them, are so universal that one may well call man a religious being.⁴

Well, if any or all of this is true, which I believe it is, it may begin to explain why the polls conclude what they conclude. It seems that one of the reasons why we pray, and read holy texts, and believe in God in such high percentages is because we are made to do so. The hypothesis here is this: It seems that the reason faith is so prevalent, at least intellectually, if not in practice, is because our Creator, whom we call God, made us with an innate or inborn desire to seek him. It’s as if we have an invisible magnet within our souls that is attracted to, or pulled in the direction of, God. We were made with a homing beacon, if you will.

Father George Duggan, a New Zealand-born theologian, educator and author, in a book, Beyond Reasonable Doubt writes that throughout history, humanity has accepted that the visible universe depends on a being or beings distinct from itself. Acknowledging the existence of an invisible world on which this visible world depends, men and women have endeavored to make contact with it by various kinds of social worship: prayers, incantations, sacrifices. In every city of the ancient world, there were temples, and in our own day we are still building churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Even in states where atheism is the official creed, inculcated in the school and diffused by intensive propaganda, religion survives. We may well take it as a well-established anthropological fact that religion is a permanent feature of human life.⁵

So, before we even get into the arguments for the reasonableness of the existence of God and objections to the contrary, it seems safe to say that, for most people, and for every culture, it’s almost like they can’t help but be religious beings. This claim will be important to recall later on when we address the issue of world religions.

This religious or spiritual awareness, however, is not necessarily universal. Vatican Council H, held in the 1960’s, said that this "intimate and vital bond of man to God" can be forgotten, overlooked, or even explicitly rejected by man.⁶ We don’t have to be religious. The Catechism states that such attitudes that lead some people to deny this pull toward God can have different causes: revolt against evil in the world; religious ignorance or indifference; the cares and riches of this world; the scandal of bad example on the part of believers; currents of thought hostile to religion; finally, that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call. Do you know anyone who seems to fit this bill? Do you know people who seem to have turned off their homing device that leads them God-ward because of their experience of evil, or their lack of exposure to religion, or their materialism, or scandals they’ve witnessed, or the stories and secular philosophies they were told, or their life of sin? The Catechism says that these and other reasons can lead people to stop seeking what their hearts or souls long for, and thus they learn to seek other things in God’s place, often with much futility.

Although we can forget God or reject him, the Catholic faith teaches that God never ceases to call every person to seek him, so as to find life and happiness. But this is important for us to hear: This search for God demands of us every effort of intellect, a sound will, an upright heart, as well as the witness of others who teach us to seek God.⁷ Quoting from the Confessions of St. Augustine, who was a great and influential Catholic bishop and theologian from Africa, who lived about 1500 years ago in the late fourth century and early fifth century, we read,

"Despite everything, man, though but a small part of your creation, wants to praise you. You yourself encourage him to delight in your praise, for you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you."⁸

Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the Catechism states that the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of "converging and convincing arguments," which allow us to attain certainty about the truth.

These "ways" of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world and the human person. When looking at the world, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin of the universe. About 1950 years ago, St. Paul wrote of the Gentiles, in Romans 1:19-20, "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made."

When looking at the human person, we see his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness and joy, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul, which we conclude can have its origin only in God.

Thus, in different ways, by looking at the world and ourselves, we can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality "that everyone calls ‘God."⁹ Our faculties make us capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. In fact, Vatican Council 1 in the 1870’s, and Vatican Council H in the 1960’s said that the Church "holds and teaches that God can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason."¹⁰

So, with the help of Bishop James Griffin, the Bishop of Columbus Ohio, let’s summarize our thoughts up to this point:

(1) The consideration of faith starts out by pointing out that the desire for God is written on the human heart. As St. Augustine put it so well, "Our hearts were made for you, 0 Lord, and they will never rest until they rest in you." The attraction to God and faith in a Deity of some kind has been shown to be universal: it’s both ancient and modern, and studies even show that there has never been a culture that did not express some sort of religious ritual and belief This supports our hypothesis that to be human is to seek and be drawn to God.

(2) The Catholic Church teaches that it is not only natural for men and women to seek God, but to even develop friendship with him. But the Church teaches that people can ignore, misunderstand, forget, or even positively reject this vital relationship with God. Thus, because of free will, we are not forced to seek a relationship with God.

(3) The Church teaches that God’s existence can be known with certainty from created things by the means of the natural light of human reason."¹¹

How about a cliff note version of Part One: The Catholic Church believes that all men and women seek God and desire Him because God made us this way. But, because of freewill, and other conditions of life, we do have the ability to say "No" to the God-ward direction. And God has also given us the ability to know of His existence and certain things about Him through reason.

Okay, so, by using our little brains, the Catholic Church teaches that we can discover or show the reasonableness of the existence of God. Now, in order to continue, we need to take a slight detour from our God-talk and answer something absolutely vital to our present reflection as well as for future topics. We need to ask the question: What is TRUTH? Have you ever heard people say the following statements? "What’s true for you may not be true for me." "All opinions are equally valuable and deserve respect." "It doesn’t matter what god you believe in, as long as you believe in something." "All religions are equally true."

Sound familiar? Probably. Sound reasonable? If you take a second look at the inevitable conclusions of these views: nothing’s true, but everything’s true, and it’s all just a matter of opinion anyway" - the whole thing pretty much collapses into absurdity. People who hold these opinions are simply lazy thinkers, or better, non-thinkers. I am not saying they are bad people. What I am saying is that they have not thought through their opinions. Holding them is an easy way out of making a decision, but they are irrational.

So, what is TRUTH? The philosopher Plato defined truth as "that which is." Pointing to a cat and calling it a rock is not true, because a cat is not a rock. Saying it is raining when it is not is a lie, not truth. There are a couple of words that will come in handy when we try to tease all this apart. The first word is "objective." To talk about "objective reality" or "objective truth" is to describe things as they are, in and of themselves, without our opinions shading our description. The opposite of "objective" is "subjective." A subjective view on a matter incorporates our opinions.¹² Or, put another way, objective truth is accessible to all thinkers and is universally applicable, not dependent on an individual’s perspective. If it is objectively true, we do not need to seek for more evidence. To know the truth is to know with certainty that something exists or what something is.¹³

An example. When you eat supper, you probably sit on an object with a back, a seat, and four legs. You sit on a chair. That’s truth, and it’s objective. It’s not a table. (At least you shouldn’t be sitting on the table when you’re eating dinner, and if you are, you should be ashamed of yourself). Back to our example. You sit on a chair. It is not a bedspread. It is not a mushroom, or a mound of seaweed. You sit on a chair. Picture the chair at your dining room table. That’s objective truth or reality. The chair. It has "chair-ness." It could be a different color, or made of different fabric, or even made of a different kind of wood, but it would still be a chair, it itself. Now, you may be very impressed with the chair in your dining room and think it’s the most beautiful piece of furniture you’ve ever seen. The color, the texture, the material - it’s gorgeous. Now, your mother-in-law looks at it and claims that it is the ugliest, most hideous chair she’s ever seen, and that you really have bizarre taste. OKAY. Objectively, what we’re talking about is a chair. That is the truth, independent of our opinions or feelings. Subjectively, you think it’s lovely, and your mother-in-law hates it. That’s the realm of life in which our perceptions of value and beauty vary. We can more accurately call them preferences, rather than different points of truth. Vanilla or chocolate? Objectively, it’s ice cream. Subjectively, I prefer chocolate. I would prefer that chocolate was an essential food group, and that it was among the foods found in the recommended daily allowance charts. If it was, I’d be meeting at least that recommended daily allowance. The truth is, it’s not there, at least not yet. One earring or six? Objectively, we’re talking about earrings. Subjectively, I prefer six. Republican or Democrat? Subjectively, there is no right answer, though I do have a preference, and that preference has changed a few times over the years.

It’s a common way to weasel out of discussions about religion, God, and morality - to say that what anyone and everyone believes is equally true. Then we can retreat into our little shells, believe what we want, and not worry about what other people believe, and surely not ever, ever judge them. Because nothing’s false anyway, so how can you judge? If you are pointing to a chair, and someone says it’s a garage door, please judge them, and get them help.

The truth is: TRUTH exists. There is such a thing as objective truth, your atheist friends also really do believe that there is such a thing as truth, and the existence of God falls into that category, not in the same realm as ever-controversial preferences about ice cream flavors.

At a basic level, when it comes down to the realm of things and events, people really believe in objective truth. They know that the National Football League exists, and that dogs bark. They know that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president of the United States, and not the lead singer of Nirvana. They know that 2+2=4, and that New York City is bigger than Boston. It is objectively true that if they drive a gasoline-powered car, and they run out of gas, independent of their personal feelings or wishes or opinions, the car will eventually stop, 100% of the time. If your skeptical friend can agree to examples like this, he or she believes in objective truth. There are things that are true, independent of our personal opinions. These examples are not up to negotiation or discussion. They’re just, well, true.

As you can see, to believe that there is no objective truth is to hold a pretty absurd world view. So, what’s the point of all these examples? It’s to help dismantle a basic premise that attempts to undercut what we have to share about God by claiming that there’s no truth anyway, and therefore, no God for everyone. The reality is that almost all people believe in objective truth. They believe that the world is round, and that it’s always wrong to abuse children, and that it would not be a smart thing to try to fly off a tall building because of the truth of gravity. We all live out of the concept of truth. Everyone can agree that the existence of things isn’t dependent upon our opinions or perceptions. Mosquitoes exist whether we want them to or not. Their existence is independent of my opinion of them. My opinion doesn’t effect in the least whether flies exist. They exist, in reality, independent of what you or I believe. It is the same with God. God either exists or doesn’t exist, independent of our preferences or opinions.

Let’s be brutally logical here. The fact is, either a thing exists or it doesn’t. It is simply not possible that God both exists and doesn’t exist. You either went to work today or you didn’t. This tape or CD you are listening to either exists or it doesn’t. It can’t be either, and it can’t be both. And the answer is independent of your personal preference or opinion.

So it is with God. Either God exists, created the universe, and continues to sustain it, or there is no God, anywhere, of any sort. The universe can’t be both created by God and not created by God. It can’t be neither, and it can’t be both. So, to the one who says, "you have your truth, and I have my truth", assuming that one of the positions is grounded in "that which is," if the "truths" are opposites, one of us is wrong. Period. And no political correctness here. Stop pretending that, for the sake of harmony, "let’s just say we’re both right." Only lazy thinkers, at best, or morons, at worst, will insist on living in the "we’re all right" world of contradictions. This truth will be important when we get into discussions of different religions and theological claims in upcoming tapes.

So, we’ve inched our way towards accepting that maybe, when we talk about what is and isn’t, we can, indeed, talk about God. There are a lot of obstacles on the way: our limited perceptions, our subjective personal desires about who and what we would like God to be, different ways people experience reality, and that other little problem - it’s easy to say this audio cassette or CD exists because we can see and feel it. And listen to it. But God?

How can we talk about this Being that we can’t see? "If God exists, show me." Before we get to that, let’s summarize where we’ve recently been.

* Truth is what’s real Truth is "that which is."

* The same thing cannot be both true and false. Either a thing is or it isn’t. God included.

* Opinions about preferences differ. But it’s absurd to say that an opinion that something exists is just as "valid" as an opinion that the same thing doesn’t exist.

* Lots of people try to say that all truth is relative or subjective or personal opinion, but no one lives that way. Most of the time, when we cop out on truth, we have a reason: we don’t want to live by it.

Now, let’s get into the good stuff. Let’s look at several objections that people have to the existence of God and see what we can say about them.

‘Prove it! Prove to me that God exists." Well, you might say, "Can you prove that He doesn’t?" Not a bad response. But not very convincing. Let’s tackle the objection head-on.

When most people make this objection, what they’re looking for is scientific proof - that which can be shown and proved by the senses. The problem: God isn’t accessible to the senses. You can’t hear or see God the same way you can hear or see another person.

Pope John Paul II expresses the problem this way: He asks, "Is man truly capable of knowing something beyond what he sees with his eyes or hears with his ears? Does some kind of knowledge other than the strictly scientific exist? Is the human capacity for reason completely subject to the senses and internally directed by the laws of mathematics? The fact is, "In terms of sensory experience," (that which we can experience through our senses), "nothing corresponds to God or the soul."¹⁴

The question may be asked, "Well, since you can’t show me God, how do you know he exists?" Well, does love exist? Prove it. You can’t. No one has ever seen or touched love. You’ve experienced the effects of love, you may have personally felt it, but that’s not love itself, in its essence. But even if you can’t prove its existence or precisely define it, you still know that love is real. Same thing with hatred, anger, and peace of mind.

The point is, the world is filled with things that are true and real. Only some of them can never come close to being "proven" scientifically.

"Proof’ is a concept that’s best applied to what’s measurable and sensible. We call that the empirical world. Even in that world, the validity of "proof" is much disputed. There are lots of hotly debated questions and "proofs" in the scientific world. What causes a certain disease? How did the universe start? How did life develop on earth?

So, "proof’ is not the be-all and end-all of knowledge. When it comes to God, and you ask the question "show me," I have to say, "I can’t." God is one of those very important things in life- like love - that can’t be subjected to the tools of science. God isn’t the kind of subject we can put under a microscope. An interesting question at this point: What’s the "proof’ that scientific "proof’ is the only way of determining whether something exists? It’s an assumption, and an unproven one at that, that scientific proof is the only way of determining whether something is true or exists. If it’s true that it takes scientific proof for something to exist and be real, then there is no such thing as love, or hatred, or anger, or happiness. It can’t be proved by science.

So, scientific proof is not the only way of showing that’s something’s true. God, Himself, is beyond scientific proof But we also don’t have to embrace a blind, unthinking, unreasoning faith either. We may not be able to prove that God exists in the same way we can prove what chromosome carries the gene for eye color, or how long it takes light to get here from Alpha Centauri, but we can use our minds to discern evidence in the world around us that points to the existence of God. Like any artist, he’s left his fingerprints on His creation.¹⁵

The various arguments by which our intellect proves the existence of God may be divided into two groups:

(1) those which come from contemplating the visible world; and (2) those which are derived from the consideration of the human soul. ¹⁶

We’ll explore the first group of arguments first, focusing on the visible world. The first thing that strikes us when contemplating the universe is its wonderful orderliness and purposeful arrangement. The universe is a most marvelous work of art, which must have been planned and executed by a wise and mighty Master. This is called the Teleological Argument, coming from the Greek word telos, meaning purpose or end.

Let’s create a scenario. You are fifteen years old. It’s Saturday morning. You get out of bed and, because it is sunny, you regrettably go outside to the garage to get the lawnmower to begin to mow the lawn. You look down and see something strange. Spelled out in rocks is a message that says, "Have fun, dork!" What’s your first thought? Is it, "My goodness, how odd that somehow in the middle of the night, the earth jostled these rocks in a random way that just happened to spell out this message?" No, you’d probably ask, "Who did this?" Then plot how you are going to get your little evil sister back.

Even when you were young, when you were confronted with an orderly pattern, you did not walk by and say, "What a lovely coincidental arrangement" of paint, words, bricks, or whatever. The orderly arrangement clearly indicates an arranger. To put it in the most classical terms: There is no design without a designer. It just doesn’t happen. Ever. Now, think of the world around you - orderly and predictable seasons, an animal kingdom that unerringly follows instinct generation after generation, a human body of intricate and precise workings, the laws of physics that keeps it all from flying right out into space. Can anyone who is being intellectually honest really and truly say that this all came about by complete chance? Some dolt might say, "Well, it could have." It could have? If a camera couldn’t happen by chance, how could the human eye? Have you ever seen someone throw paint up in the air and watch it come down on the canvas in a realistic landscape? If you blindly dumped random amounts of flower, baking powder, sugar, and chocolate in a bowl and let it sit in the sun, would you ever end up with brownies? Quite simply, in reality, in truth, remember, concerning "that which is," does order ever emerge from chance or chaos? If you think it could, give me three examples. Okay, just two? How about one? Just one?

"Well, what about the Big Bang? There’s chaos, and then there’s order. There’s an example right?" First, the Big Bang is only a theory, but even if it happened, it was obviously not an ordinary explosion. If a factory explodes, do the remnants emerge from the blast artfully and symmetrically arranged? No. Little bangs result in inert piles or randomly scattered shards of metal and glass. If the Big Bang occurred, it was a unique kind of explosion. Do we dare say - designed - to result in order in ways that no other explosions do?

We are all familiar with the ideas conveyed by the words order and plan. Wherever there is order, there is plan. Our reason tells us that wherever there is order and plan, an intelligent being has been or is at work. This is true of the simplest household utensil as well as the most complicated industrial machinery. Minucius Felix, a Catholic layman, and a Roman citizen, in his work Oclavius, written between 218-235 AD, writes, "If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he was himself much superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth, believe that there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beautiful than the stars themselves and the various parts of the whole world."¹⁷

When you look at a fork, or a complex printing press, your mind doesn’t say, "what a fascinating, coincidental, non-intentional product of random nature." The fork and the printing press are the results of an intelligent designer who had a certain purpose in mind, and set out to create machinery and tools and raw materials to develop "the fork," or the printing press. So, so far, we shouldn’t be wrestling too much with the fact that where there is order and plan, an intelligent being has been or is at work. And the more complicated the plan, the greater is the intelligence that it supposes, because every effect must have a proportionate cause. In other words, the plan exists first in the mind of the artist or the engineer, who then communicates it, or impresses it upon, the raw materials.

You do not get a 4-pronged stainless-steel fork without an intelligent being first having the desire to create a 4-pronged stainless steel fork, and then going about the steps to create it. You don’t get the internet without, first, a very intelligent computer geek conceiving the idea and going about the steps to create the technology necessary for the internet to exist. Because I don’t have the slightest clue as to how the internet works doesn’t mean I can’t derive the benefits of e-mail and a small number of other things I know how to do. My ignorance or lack of understanding doesn’t affect the existence of the internet at all. And I certainly would not use the internet, all the while saying to myself, "what an amazing, coincidental, accidental, un-planned, non-intentional, product of random nature" that allows me to send a note to someone 3000 miles away in the matter of seconds.

This necessary connection between order and plan, between design and designer, is the basis of the teleological argument for the existence of God. We have only to look around us to see that the universe is full of natural works of art which in beauty, variety, grandeur, and perfection far surpass the highest achievements of human craftsmanship. From these facts, we can draw only one conclusion: the universe is the work of a Supreme Intelligence, a Master-Artist, whom we call God.¹⁸

The facts on which our argument rests are countless. Every new discovery in the field of the natural sciences - in astronomy, in physics and mechanics, in chemistry and biology, in botany and zoology - furnishes us with new wonders of Divine workmanship. The laws of nature are nothing but the order existing among things and perceived by the mind of man. We don’t create the laws of nature; all we can do is discover them.

Believe it or not, the Teleological Argument has been challenged by unbelievers since the days of the Greek philosopher Epicurus and the Latin poet Lucretius. Epicurus (who died in 270 BC), attributed the order and purpose everywhere observable in the universe to the accidental coming together of atoms; in other words, he made Blind Chance the Designer of the universe. Cicero, the great Roman philosopher and orator, answered him: "If anyone supposes that this most beautiful and glorious world was made by the accidental coming together of atoms, I do not understand why he should not suppose that the Annals of Enmus might be produced by pouring out on the earth the letters of the alphabet in countless profusion."

The same example might be made of any of William Shakespeare’s plays. The argument goes that if you sit a bunch of monkeys in front of computers, and teach them to randomly strike the keys, that, over an infinite period of time, a monkey could produce MacBeth. The French philosopher Diderot thought that this was possible. He maintained that if letters were emptied out a sufficient number of times, the letters might at last so fall as to give the text of the Homer’s Iliad. Of course such an idea is absurd. The reality is, order cannot result from disorder. Where there is order and plan, whether in the Iliad of Homer or in the movements of the heavenly bodies in space, that order must have a sufficient reason; and blind chance is not such a sufficient reason. The atoms of Epicurus could whirl around in space for billions of years without ever producing an oak tree, much less a human eye or ear or heart.¹⁹

Blind Chance, discredited for centuries by all thinking men and women as a possible Organizer of the universe, was raised on the throne once more by Charles Darwin and his school. Darwin contended that what we regard as standing proofs of the creative skill of a Supreme Intelligence could be accounted for by the sole operation of physical causes. "Inconceivably long periods of time," "Natural Selection," "Survival of the Fittest," "Struggle for Life," were the magic phrases invented to support his theory. According to this theory, nature’s causes operate blindly: "there is not in them any inherent determination guiding them in one direction rather than another." Thus, we see that Darwinism harks back to the Blind Chance of Epicurus; and we may add that most of Darwin’s theories are as dead today in scientific circles as the old Greek philosopher’s theory of the "accidental coming together of atoms." And the fact is, Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest, doesn’t explain the origin of species or the universe, nor the origin of an else. "Only a madman," writes Dr. A.V. Hill, a Nobel prize man in medicine, in his book Living Machinery "would attribute a telephone system to laws of chance and the principles of Natural Selection, and only ignorance or fanaticism could attribute a living cell to the same laws of chance and the principles of Natural Selection."²⁰

Another way of explaining the existence of God that anyone can understand is the concept of cause and effect, and is also called the Cosmological Argument, coming from the Greek word kosmos, meaning world. Here goes: Nothing causes itself to exist. Nothing creates itself. Everything that exists has a cause. Ultimately going back and back and back through time, you must, logically speaking, arrive at the point at which there is a First Cause, something that doesn’t need to be caused itself but that gets everything else started. This first cause we call God.

It is a fact, held by all men and women of science without exception, that there was a time when there was no life on earth. Geology points to epochs in the formation of the earth when life was impossible and when no sign of it is to be found. Since life did not and could not exist on the earth, it must have originally either sprung from lifeless matter or been put there by someone. The first alternative has long since been abandoned by science. Every living thing comes from a living parent, every-life cell from another life-cell. This is one of the most conclusive results of modern research, thanks to our friends like Louis Pasteur. Remember him. He was the guy praying the rosary at the beginning of this tape. So-called spontaneous generation - that is, the production of life from lifeless matter - is a figment of the imagination. Hence, there remains only the second alternative, that is, that life is the result of a special act of creation, that there is a Giver of life, who is Life itself, the Living God.²¹

Consider existence in itself. The existence of everything on earth is dependent on something else. The plastic spoon you ate your ice cream with last night exists because people made machines to shape the plastic into spoons. The plastic exists because petroleum lies under the ground. The petroleum exists because fossils rotted and made a mucky, putrid mess. Fossils exist because dinosaurs smoked cigarettes, or got pelted with a comet, which ever explanation you prefer. The dinosaurs and comets exist because.. .Do you see where this goes? The existence of every single thing is dependent. Nothing causes itself to exist. Once again, moving backward, we can see that in order for us to be even here thinking about this stuff, there has to be a being - something - the existence of which isn’t dependent on anything else. Nothing happens without a cause. A beginning from nothing cannot be an adequate answer. Nothing explains nothing. Nothing causes itself to exist. This First Cause, again, we call God.²²

None of this says, at this point, anything about God as a being who loves and cares. But this is what it does: It helps us look at the world and see how that world reveals the logical possibility - some might say necessity - of a being greater than ourselves that isn’t itself bound by the laws of nature that got everything we see started. It shows us that belief in God is a perfectly reasonable answer to the perfectly reasonable question, "How?"

To summarize our thoughts on this first objection, "I don’t believe in God because no one can prove he exists." When we find order and plan and arrangement, in the real world, we always assume that some intelligent individual was behind it. When you go into a restaurant and see the tables with placemats, and napkins and silverware and a glasses all neatly arranged, you do not experience startled confusion wondering how all this took place so neatly. So it goes with creation and the universe. It is not unreasonable to conclude that an intelligent being had a hand in it when looking at the physical world around us. Also, we argued that nothing creates itself. Nothing living gives birth to itself. Everything that we see around us has a cause outside of itself. If there was no eternal First Cause that caused everything else we see in the universe, then nothing could have been created. We do know that nothing physical in our universe caused itself In fact, science is quite confident that our universe had a distinct beginning. Given the above reflections, it is not unreasonable to attribute this beginning to an eternal, intelligent being, whom we call God. Has science ever come up with a better explanation that contradicts our claims?

Let’s look at a second objection, continuing our reflections on science.

Getting out of the world of theory and philosophy, and entering the world of verifiable science, we can ask this question: Does modern scientific knowledge make God irrelevant? Some people assume that religion and science are mortal enemies. In truth, this is not the case at all. In fact, scores of scientists over the centuries lived an active faith life and scientific life. Copernicus, who formulated the theory that the earth revolved around the sun, worked as an administrator in the Catholic Church in Poland. Kepler, who discovered the planet’s elliptical motion and formulated Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion, said that scientists, above all, "should be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God." Blaise Pascal, one of the great early mathematicians, wrote a deeply devout Catholic book of spiritual reflections called the Pensees. Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity and the three laws of motion, also wrote books reflecting his strong faith in Christ. Oregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was an Augustinian monk. Geor Lemaitre, who worked out the theory of the Big Bang origins of the universe in the 1920’s, was a Catholic pnest.²³

And faith-filled scientists are not a thing of the past. You might be surprised to know that, in science, one of the hottest debates right now is the question of God. Scientific discoveries of the past few decades have not, in any way, closed God out of the picture - in fact, the opposite is true. Despite the writings of a small handful of scientists like Stephen Hawking or the late Carl Sagan, the unanswered questions in cosmology and evolution are leading many scientists to take the possibility of God quite seriously. Or, at least, they are not too quick to write off that possibility as naive.

While God may not be available for scientific investigation, the universe is. The vast majority of astrophysicists accept the theory that the universe began at a particular moment in space and time. Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, summarizes the overwhelming scientific consensus, "Now the three lines of evidence - the motions of the galaxies, the laws of then no dynamics, and the life story of the stars - pointed to one conclusion: all indicated that the universe had a distinct beginning. Remember, nothing happens without a cause, and, nothing creates itself. So, it’s reasonable to ask: what or Who is the cause, and remember: this what or who must be eternal? Nothing produces nothing.

The astronomer, Edwin Hubble, has shown that the universe is expanding, which meant that it had to have a beginning to expand from. (Sounds like the "First Cause" theory). Did you know that if the forces binding atoms were 5% weaker than they presently are, hydrogen would be the only stable element in the universe - and life wouldn’t exist. If those same forces were 2% weaker than they presently are, hydrogen would not be stable and no hydrogen- containing compounds could form, like water. Put another way: Even the most minor tinkering with the value of the fundamental forces of physics - gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear strong force, or the nuclear weak force - would have resulted in an unrecognizable universe. There’s a whole discussion going on right now about these matters, under the heading of the "Anthropic Theory." All these seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common - these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life. Did this happen by chance? What are the odds? Is such specific fine-tuning an accident, or is it purposeful? Don’t those numbers indicate that Someone knew exactly what He was doing? To quote Isaac Newton, "The existence of a Being endowed with intelligence and wisdom is a necessary inference from a study of celestial mechanics."²⁴

What we are proposing is the possibility that the beginning of the universe, of all creation, is the work of an eternal, intelligent, personal Being. This Personal Being would have created the universe and eventually humankind by a sheer act of will. This position is most clearly stated in the Book of Revelation, "For you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being" (Revelation 4:11b). Starting from a personal, creative, intelligent being, all the big questions can be adequately answered. To be "created" implies a reason or purpose for that creation, and an ability to create. Meaning for our life would be a real possibility. This theory would also explain our complex personalities and aspirations.

How about this important objection:

This objection is one of the most important and consistent challenges, not only to the existence of God, but to everything we say God is: loving, powerful, and the One in charge. The problem of evil is the most serious problem in the world. It is also the most serious objection to the existence of God.

When Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote his great Summa Theologiae, he could find only two serious objections to the existence of God, even though he tried to list at least three objections to every one of the thousands of theses he tried to prove in that great work. One of the two objections is the apparent ability of natural science to explain everything in our experience without God (a theme we touched on in our reflections); and the other is the problem of evil.

It’s pretty simple, really. You say that God is all-powerful and all-good. Then why do innocent people suffer? Why babies with leukemia? Why deformities? Why young moms dying from a stroke leaving behind uncomprehending families? Why the Holocaust? Why plane and automobile crashes? Why September 11th? Probably more people have abandoned their faith because of the problem of evil than for any other reason. It is certainly the greatest test of faith, the greatest temptation to unbelief. And it’s not just an intellectual objection (like some of the objections we’ve already visited). We feel it. We live it.

How in the world can we ever pretend a loving God exists in the face of such horrors? Where do we get the nerve? It’s not an easy question. There is no simple, pat answer, and there never has been one. So, what is there left to say? Does all of our faith, our conviction about God’s existence, presence and mercy fall down flat and empty in the face of the darkness of suffering? If an all-good, all-wise, all-loving, and all-powerful God is running the show, why does he seem to be doing such a miserable job of it? Why do bad things happen to good people? The philosophical question posed by evil is that either God is not all-powerful to stop evil, or, if he is, he doesn’t care or love us enough to do it.

When we talk to people who reject God because of some evil that occurred, it is more like talking to a divorcee than a scientific skeptic. The reason for unbelief is a seemingly unfaithful lover, not an inadequate hypothesis. The unbeliever’s problem is not a soft head but a hard heart.

First off, we’re not the first to ask this question. The question of God and suffering is as old as all rational thought. It’s millennia old. Philosophers even have a name for it - theodicy, which is a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil. Ever since human beings have discerned the Caring, Powerful Presence that lies beyond visible reality, they’ve immediately been moved to ask, "I know You’re there - why does it seem sometimes that You’re not? Why are you allowing my child to suffer? Why don’t you make it rain? Why is it raining so much? Why does evil seem to have so much power?"

An interesting reflection on this issue of evil and suffering can be found in Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for faith. In the first chapter he tells us of an interview he had with Dr. Peter Kreeft, who teaches philosophy at Boston College. Below is a general summary of some of the things they talked about.²⁵

From the Christian point of view, first, God doesn’t cause evil. Genesis tells us that God created a good, harmonious world. Sin and the resultant suffering was introduced by human choices. As mysterious as it might seem, even physical suffering is related to this sinful disharmony, and none of it - the hurt, the pain, or the evil we cause one another - is what God wants. When confronted with sickness and suffering, Jesus healed. He fixed. He makes it clear that God’s will is for our wholeness and healing.

So, God doesn’t cause evil, doesn’t want it, and is always near, offering us the good news of what will bring us peace, if we only listen.

Second, who suffers and why are mysteries. If I had a great answer to this one, I’d be the hottest attraction on all the talk shows. Read the Book of Job in the Bible. It’s an amazing and profound work of poetry and story about one who wrestles with the meaning of suffering. At one point, Job asks God, "Why!?" God answers him. The words of God flow like a tremendous river of poetry, taking in the whole of his works and mysterious, divine purposes, which are, the point is, far beyond the power of any human being to comprehend: "Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding?" (Job 38:4).

It may seem harsh, and even like a divine blow-off, but it’s not. Go read it yourself and see. The (literally) inspired writer of Job is making the point that every single attempt to explain questions of theodicy comes back to: It’s a mystery. Suffering is not God’s doing, but since the world belongs to Him, God permits it and allows it and he weaves it into His purpose.

The origin of much of the world’s evil is not the Creator, but the creature’s freely choosing sin and selfishness. Here we are distinguishing between moral evil (done by human beings) and physical or natural evils (e.g., fires or floods or earthquakes). Take away all human sin and selfishness and we would come close to heaven on earth. Regarding human evil and questions of why there is murder, rape, theft, drunk driving accidents, beatings, child abuse, and so on, another thing that God has done is give human beings free will. In a way, it seems that it is a gift and a curse. We are not forced to act justly and righteously. Studies have even shown that 8 in 10 famines are man made: decisions that leaders have made to cause and sustain this human suffering, and would be easily reversed if selfishness and sin were not in the picture. The risk of that freedom is the ability to make choices for evil. But if our freedom couldn’t go in that direction, it wouldn’t be real, and we wouldn’t be free, and we wouldn’t be human either. We are the only creatures on earth with this gift. The choice to love isn’t of much value at all when it’s not really a choice. To constantly interfere with our exercise of our freedom would render us less than human. Free will is a choice that can bring much joy and happiness and good. It can also bring the opposite.

From the Christian perspective, God’s solution to the problem of evil is his Son, Jesus Christ. The Father’s love sent His Son to die for us to defeat the power of evil in human nature: that’s the heart of the Christian story. We do not worship a deistic God, an absentee landlord who ignores his slum; we worship a garbage man God who came right down into our worst garbage to clean it up. How do we get God off the hook for allowing evil? God is not off the hook; God is the hook. That’s the point of the crucifix. These last thoughts are the initial sentences for a whole other topic and reflection, and can’t be expanded here. But, the Christian believes, if you want to get a glimpse of what is up to, look to Jesus. (Another real topic of discussion for a future tape or CD concerning sin and evil is the real existence of Satan. He actually exists. But because he is a created being, and we’re talking about the existence of the Creator Himself, this discussion will be for another time. But, after listening to a few of these tapes or CDs, you’ll begin to see how each of these topics flow into the other and help form a more coherent picture of reality).

There still is the philosophical problem about the existence of evil and suffering. Is it not logically contradictory to say an all-powerful and all-knowing God tolerates so much evil when he could eradicate it? Why do bad things happen to good people?

First, who’s to say we are good people? The best people are the ones who are most reluctant to call themselves good people. Sinners think they are saints, but saints know they are sinners.

Second, and most importantly, though admittedly unsatisfactorily, who’s to say we have to know all God’s reasons? Who ever promised us all the answers (at least in this life)? Animals can’t understand much about us; why should we be able to understand everything about God? The obvious point of the Book of Job is that we just don’t know all that God is up to (except that, for the Christian, we have quite a few leads because of Jesus). What a hard lesson to learn: Lesson One, that we are ignorant, that we are infants! Socrates was declared as one of the wisest men in the world because he understood that he did not have wisdom, and that was true wisdom for man. Faith is to trust in the infallible, all-seeing God when we hear from his word but do not see from our reason or experience. We cannot know all God’s reasons, and we need to accept that.

God does let us know a lot. He has lifted the curtain on the problem of evil with Christ. There, the greatest evil that ever happened, both the greatest spiritual evil and the greatest physical evil, both the greatest sin (the killing of the Son of God) and the greatest suffering (perfect love hated and crucified), is revealed as the wise and loving plan to bring about the greatest good, the salvation of the world from Sin and suffering eternally. There, the greatest injustice of all time is integrated into the plan of salvation. Love finds a way. Love is very tricky. But Love needs to be trusted.

Let’s cover one more important objection in the time we have remaining. Perhaps you have heard it said that, "I don’t believe in God or take God seriously because people have so many different ideas about him." This is a tough one because it is true. People do have wildly different ideas about God. Just look at all the different religions of the world. Why are there so many different religions?

As we said at the beginning, throughout history, human beings have never failed to sense a "more" to human life. It’s right up there with the instinct to survive and reproduce - every culture, past and present, leaves evidence of the attention paid to that "more." They’ve left totems, talismans, and sacrificial altars; they’ve left cathedrals and golden statues of Buddha. Despite the claim that we live in a secular age, it’s a plain fact that we still acknowledge and try to connect with the "more" - from Christian youth groups to ancient monasteries still in use, we know it’s there. We still seek and we, as humans, still hunger to name and know the "more."²⁶

And the truth is, over the centuries, people have come up with radically different ideas to describe this "more" we call God. Animists in ancient cultures, as well as some modern New Agers, hold that God resides in the earth and its creatures. Polytheists believe in many gods with different powers. Popular Hinduism is the one remaining world religion that’s still polytheistic in its outlook. Monists believe that the "more" is all reality, and that our existence is all just an illusion. Hindus believe this too, and Buddha taught this in a radical way. Monotheists believe that there is one God, responsible for creation, accessible to it, but still at root separate from it. Muslims, Jews and Christians are monotheists. But even among monotheists, there are differences. Christians believe that Jesus is God, and that God is a Trinity - three persons in one God. Jews and Muslims obviously do not believe this.

So, basically, what a mess! All these different, contradictory ideas about God. What are we to do? We have reached an interesting point here - there are plenty of good reasons to believe that God exists, and we accept that it could be challenging to learn about him, but just what are we going to make of the diversity of views about what, exactly, is true about God?

To start, we need to go back once again to the issue of knowledge. Consider a topic that’s not quite as big as God, but still controversial. If you’ve studied American History, you know that historians have different theories about the causes of the American Civil War. Why can’t they just come to an agreement about what got this terrible event underway? Two basic reasons: First, different historians have various intellectual and ideological biases that affect how they see their work. Second, not any one of them, or even all of them together, have complete access to and understanding of the entire experience of the origins of the Civil War, which, if you want to get down to it, goes way back before 1861 and, if you want to get cosmic about it, even further back to the first sin committed by the first person, anyway.²⁷

So, the fact is that human knowledge has constraints. We never have complete information about anything. But, does this mean that there wasn’t a cause to the Civil War? No. Just because we can’t fully grasp or describe it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a cause, or, in this case, a set of occurrences and influences that brought that particular event to birth. We can’t ever give a complete accounting of it, but there was indeed a cause, or a number of causes.

Take another example. Think of someone in your family, a parent, a sibling, a grandparent. Let’s take your Aunt Gladys. Does everyone else in your family see Aunt Gladys in the exact way, or describe her in the exact same terms? No. Would she be described in exactly the same terms by everyone who ever knew her? No. But does this mean that your Aunt Gladys doesn’t exist? If we have different experiences and descriptions of her, that’s not her fault. It’s ours. She exists. Our individual limits make it impossible to see her as she is, and they also make it inevitable that we’ll see her differently.

Now, back to God. Yes, there are a multitude of different views of God. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no truth at the heart of our various limited perceptions. Our cultures, our sins, our measly brains affect what we’ll be able to see and say about God. You see, the objection - "I don’t believe in God because people have so many ideas about him" - is the result of our limitations and problems. It’s not a valid objection about his existence in itself.

So, we’re limited in what we can know and say, but that doesn’t mean the thing we’re trying to talk about doesn’t exist. But does it make the opposite true? Does it mean that anything we say about God is true? If God is really amazingly beyond our perceptions and definitions, does that mean that ANY definition is Okay?

Some lazy thinkers will want to say so. Because it’s easy and it postpones the unpleasant necessity of thinking logically about what we’re saying. Just because there are lots of different opinions about the origins of the Civil War, that doesn’t mean that we can say that it was caused by the Muslim invasion of the Holy Land. You think Aunt Gladys is a gem, and I think she is a pain in the butt, but no one can say that she is a Tibetan monk. So it goes with God. God may be infinite and God may be spirit. But that doesn’t mean that God is anything we want him to be.

First off, it’s illogical. There’s no middle ground. You are either eating pizza or you are not. You can’t be doing both at the same time. God simply cannot be both the one who told ancient Aztecs to murder thousands of children in sacrifice and the one who says, "You shall not kill." The "More" who shapes life cannot be both the state of extinction of apparent individuality (as Buddhists believe) and the Cause of being who creates individual, unique immortal souls to live on earth and then dwell with him forever (as Catholic Christians believe).²⁸

So, how in the world can we know anything about God? First, realize that lots of other people have thought about this, too.

But there’s something else. We’ve reached an interesting point here. It’s called the end of the line. We may have concluded that is quite reasonable to believe that God exists. It’s quite logical that He does. It’s straining logic to believe He doesn’t. We may have concluded that the existence of different ideas about God doesn’t mean that anything at all is true about God. But, what else is true? Where else can we go? Not very much further. Philosophy and ideas have brought us a long way from total denial of God. We’ve seen that there is a lot we can know about God from reason and nature. We can see that God is the "more" for which every human being who’s ever lived yearns. We’ve shown that the existence of God doesn’t contradict reason, or what science tells us about life. We can even say a few things about this God, based on what we see around us. That God is spirit and ultimate cause of all that is. God causes and creates with purpose, intention, and design.

But that’s about it. You are perfectly free to admit that human reason, which while able to know about the existence of God, is so clouded by smallness, weakness, and sin that it can take us no further. So, what’s next?

You see, the reason we have so many religions and ideas about God is because God created us with a homing device of some kind to be drawn to him. All people are. All people seek that mysterious "More," that being we call "God." We are restless in our search. Why? Because we were made to be restless until we rest in God. With no other specific information about God, people throughout history took the little they knew and experienced and gathered with other people to try to put words to their experiences. They ritualized their prayers and thoughts, and, when enough people shared these same ritual experiences and passed them on to others, and identified with the same spiritual texts and spiritual leaders, different religions and faiths can be identified. That doesn’t mean that what they wrote about God and believed about God was completely accurate, or even remotely accurate about God. Remember, truth is "that which is." Some thoughts and beliefs might be more accurate about God as God really is, and others believe things which, in reality, in truth, in that which really is, is not true at all, and may be even way off. But that’s not necessarily their fault. They took what they thought they knew and, as the saying goes, they ran with it. They took the limited knowledge they had, the spiritual experiences of the community, the teachings of their spiritual leaders, and their beliefs took form. Then they passed these beliefs down to their children. If people over the ages in Asia were doing this, and South America, and Australia, and North America, and Europe, all before the invention of the internet to compare people’s thoughts and reasonings and statements, we shouldn’t be surprised that we have a plethora of ideas about this divine Creator we call God. In a way, it’s God’s fault. God created us to seek him; he created us to long for him; he created us with an ability through prayer and other means, to experience him. But he didn’t sit down directly with us and tell us about himself and what he is really like and what he really thinks.

Oh, wait. Actually, he did. Christians believe that God wanted to tell us about Himself, personally. Christians believe that we can say a whole bunch more things about God because God personally told us. God doesn’t leave us with nothing more than the beauty of the cell, the wonder of the stars, or our own vague yearnings for truth, beauty and life. He’s given us answers to so much more. So, to the question, "what’s next?" He has a name. Jesus. Tune in next month when we will see if this Jesus of Nazareth can give us any insights into the mystery of God. Fm willing to bet that he can.

29 John Paul II, Celebrate 2000! Reflections on Jesus, The Holy Spirit, and the Father, p.21.