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Faith and Reason II

Man’s desire for God

  • CCC 27: The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for:

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. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.

Knowing God’s Existence

  • CCC 31: Created in God's image and called to know and love him, 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.
  • CCC 32: 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.
  • CCC 33: 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. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the "seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material", can have its origin only in God.
  • CCC 34: The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man 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"
    • Argument from Contingency
  • Invites us to meditate on God’s creation and on our interior souls as a way to encounter God.

God’s Existence and the Divine Name

CCC 40: Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.

CCC 41 All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures — their truth, their goodness, their beauty all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures' perfections as our starting point, "for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator".

CCC 42 God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God — "the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable" — with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

  • Nevertheless, human expression really attains to God himself.

Exodus 3:13-16: I AM who I AM

  • God is the subsistent act of to-be itself. His essence is identical to his existence.
  • What does the burning bush scene reveal about God and his relation to creation?
  • Transcendence and Immanence: What is it?
    • CCC 300 God is infinitely greater than all his works: "You have set your glory above the heavens." Indeed, God's "greatness is unsearchable". But because he is the free and sovereign Creator, the first cause of all that exists, God is present to his creatures' inmost being: "In him we live and move and have our being." In the words of St. Augustine, God is "higher than my highest and more inward than my innermost self".
    • Practice of the presence of God

Genesis 1

  1. All of creation is made of Heaven (spirit) and Earth (matter).
  2. Creation is good. It is a gift from God made free from His own initiation of love.
  3. The human person is the only creature willed for its own sake, made in the image and likeness of God, and is meant to lead creation in giving praise to God

4 kinds of laws

  • Eternal Law: God’s eternal wisdom.
  • Natural Law: Man’s participation in the Eternal Law.
  • Human Law: Laws for governing.
  • Divine Law: Revelation/Scriptures. Meant to aid natural and human law.

Genesis 1 rejects the following errors

  • Pantheism, Deism, Paganism, Atheism, Dualism/Manicheanism, Gnosticism, Materialism

Summary:

  • Man has a natural desire for God, to know and love him.
  • Man has a capacity to know that God exists with certainty → through the created world and through his interior self, made in God’s image.
  • God is the act of Being itself. He is not in the world, he is the source of being and creator of all things visible and invisible. “I AM who I AM”
  • Genesis 1 reveals that all creation is made of heaven and earth, it is good, and man is the meant to lead creation in praise to God.
  • Genesis 1 portrays God’s eternal wisdom as giving creation its natural order and law.