Are Men Able To Know God

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Does God exist? Everybody at least once in his life has tried to find an answer to that question. Some of the smartest people of human kind spend their whole life looking for an answer. They all had different thoughts, but the all realized that they can only try to find an answer by natural reason. The reason why the answer is so important is the fact that this knowledge has an enormous impact on your everyday life.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that all men are created in God´s image, and that they are called to know and love him. [1] We are not able to truly love God without knowing him. The problem is how to do that. Is there even a possibility to fully understand him? The smartest people who ever lived as for example the great philosopher and theologian Aristotle or Thomas Aquinous tried to find an answer. Their way of challenging it was by using their reason. They found two ways, the physical world and the human person. [2] 

The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world's order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe. [3] 

The men is a very curious individual. He is very open minded and always looking for the truth. On his search he uses his reason. He knows that he also isn´t the first principle or final end. For example let us think where the universe comes from. Why does the universe, why do we exist? An atheist would just say that the universe is eternal. But that can´t be true because that would mean that the universe is infinity. We learn in our math class that an infinite number is self contradicting. This proofs that something as infinity is not able to exist in reality. As a conclusion there always has to be a beginning in existence. We call that God. [4] 

Everybody knows the term Big Bang. But what does it mean? It describes the beginning of the universe from nothing. Every physical rule, even the time and space started there. So there started "existence" from nothing. That means that the universe cannot be eternal but it has to have a beginning. When we think that something came from nothing, it sure doesn´t make any sense. Because what´s the point then of existing? The only explanation why there is not nothing is that there had to be a reason, a plan, a first cause which created the universe. And again to be reasonable we have to think of the first cause as God.

When we follow our reason than this first cause to be able to be the origin has to be something uncaused. It can´t be caused by anything prior because there doesn´t exist something as infinite. With the creation of the universe time and space were created that means that this first cause has also to be timeless, changeless and not material.

The second way to see God behind all his creation is the view on the human person. With 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, man questions himself about God's existence. [5] 

What are morals? It is the ability to say if something is right or wrong. You often hear that people think that God doesn´t exist because of all the evil in the world. How can God as our loving and protecting father let things like for example the Holocaust happen? Everybody knows that the crimes of the Nazi regime were morally wrong. This shows us that we can decide what is good and was is bad. The existence of values which are objective makes it more probable that something like a God exists. Already Friedrich Nietzsche said that if God wouldn´t exist there would be no value or meaning in life. I personally think he was right. We all know deep inside what is wrong and what is right. That means that those values indeed exist. We know that three plus three does not equal four. The same way we know what is morally acceptable and what is not. This shows that there can´t be values without God, so the logical consequence is that God exists.

Conclusion

Men´s reasoning empowers us to know and to understand the personal God. [6] But only with faith it is possible to fully grasp him. God decided on his own that he reveals himself to us and that he had the grace to give us his revelation through faith. [7] Atheists often tend to defend their point of view with reasoning. They think that there cannot be a same basis for faith and reasoning. I hope this paper helps to realize that there is no reason to be faithful without using the reasoning which was given to us by our Lord.