Desire

While the heart does not reason like the mind, it does convey interesting proofs.

It is seen, for example, that no one is ever absolutely, finally happy.  Indeed, we often think that one more possession, one more accomplishment, one more relationship, and then we will be happy.  It comes to pass; still we long for more.

Why is this?  Do fish seek happiness in this way, perpetually and without final satisfaction?  Why should we, if we are only another kind of animal, find ourselves seeking happiness voraciously, even enshrining the search for it into law?

If there is no ultimate answer for us, to satisfy this innate and universal desire, where does the desire come from?  Read a book – the characters are permitted to live happily ever after, satisfying their desire.  Play a game – there is an object, a way to win, satisfying the desire of the players.  

The heart, it is said, has a God-sized hole in it.  St. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless, until they rest in You.”  C.S. Lewis said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the only explanation is that I was made for another world.”

This is the proof of the heart, with which we are to love the Lord our God:  That our hearts desire endless satisfaction, that they are parched and thirsting for want of a drink which only “being itself” could quench.  Indeed, if we love anything else without loving Him, we will never be finally satisfied.

Gratitude

Say you are stranded, and you do not have enough money for a taxi – not in cash and not in the bank.  Someone offers you a ride and brings you to your destination.  You cannot repay her, and she wouldn’t accept it anyway.

We do the math, and see that you are in debt to her:  You have received more from her than you were able to give her.  With the calculation complete, the mind is through.  Yet a sense of gratitude remains.

What, then, feels gratitude?  The heart.

Considering who God is, we see that He had no need ever to create us, and yet here we are.  We owe our creation to Him.

Moreover:  He sustains us at every moment.  We persist because He is thinking of us, is breathing life into us, even as I write and you read these words.  We are indebted to Him at every moment.

What is it, O man, that depends on your every breath, on your mere thinking of it?  Who lives and who dies when you cease to think of them?  Who is it that inhales when you exhale?

It’s not simply that we are short of funds; we could not, even in principle, repay God.  He made us; the converse is impossible.  He sustains us in existence; there is not one thing we could do to alter, add to, or threaten His existence.  

The cynic fights this, complains perhaps that existence is not always such a blessing.  One notices that he is still here, else we would not hear his complaint.  To be alive is greater than death, and any appearance to the contrary is a matter of psychology.  The opposite of existence is not negative, but no thing.

In other words, if we did not exist, we would be owed nothing, anyway.  Somehow, we have something.  It is the heart which allows us to feel gratitude for this.

The Fear of the Lord

Not only fidelity, but wonder and awe resonate with the heart.

Consider:  Thunder and lightning are phenomena transmitted to the mind through the body.  Yet what are they, but light and sound?

Ask your heart, then – why do you tremble?  If you have ever had a bolt of lightning pierce the air around you so that it was simultaneous with the thunder; when you heard it roar above you, why then did you tremble?  

The cynic says, “Because it is a danger to my life,” and this is true.  But he thinks the answer stops there, short and thin.  He has answered a multiple choice question when we are looking for an essay.

Why does your life matter to you?  What is that primal drive to survive?  Why you, and your particular life?

In brief – we will have to be all too brief – when the lightning raises the hair on your arms and the thunder goes off like an explosion above you, you instantaneously recognize a force greater than you.  Impossibly greater, and unpredictable besides.  What creature does not fear them?  They warrant the word “awesome.”

There is no mind behind lightning, though.  It is a force driven by and subject to natural laws and forces.  Lightning does not strike even one inch askance from where Nature directs it.  Thunder is precisely as loud as she commands, no more or less.  

The power of God, though, is more terrible still.  With a word He could not only strike where He wills, or smite whatever He wishes; it is far worse than that.  That is the work of a minor god.  We are reckoning with the Almighty.

With a word, He could destroy planets, simply annihilate them as they fly across the night sky.  The least utterance and all the Universe would be in flames and extinguished; He could do it without any physical destruction, simply cease to think of us, and all would be lost.

The very memory of it, the notion of your existence or mine, tossed aside like a word that didn’t rhyme.  

And yet, as it is, you live.  Think soberly, brother:  You live.

If we tremble before the thunder and the lightning, what then should we do before God?

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that [Jesus] answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?”  Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

– Mark 12:28-30

Heart

I confess, my friend, that I would rather begin with the mind.  As the question – let us say, the doubt – of God’s existence first entered my mind, it afflicted my heart.  And it was by way of the mind that my heart was rescued.  I want to spring to the mind, and everything else can be a footnote.

Yet this saying of Jesus struck me.  To form my treatise on the words of Jesus himself as he gave the greatest commandment – it is all too fitting.  First, see:  The commandment is to love.  To love comes most naturally to the heart – even the unbelievers accept this.

Second, you once expressed disdain for the idea that anyone should love God above all, even above his own children.  But I hear these words of the Lord and they are solid as stone, capable of burying a man and of elevating him.  Let us see, then, what we can build upon them.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.   -Blaise Pascal

Indeed, I am too quick to brush past the heart.  

Think of your son and your daughters, for instance.  Now imagine a superintelligence, who knows reason and not the heart.  This mind presses upon you an argument which you cannot answer, which utterly compels you to abandon your children.  

It would not only be permissible to do so, for any reason at all; the argument actually demonstrates that it is the best possible action, that you must abandon your children, for their greater good.

The question is not, “Would you?”  The question is, “Would your heart object?”

Yes.  Yes, and the heart would rather be pulled up by its roots than consent to such an act.  Likewise say the martyrs.

A humble aim

I cannot bring a mind to certainty.  Even if you wanted to know one certain thing, upon which everything else could be built, which was actually undeniable – well, I would tell you that the fact of your questioning proves your existence, a la Descartes.  But doubt would linger – for your existence, to me, is still not certain in this ironclad way.

Therefore, I do not aim to bring your mind to certainty about God.  If your mind should be open to it, then you may reckon with the certainty of your beliefs.  Perhaps God will come to your aid.

Now, there have been thinkers who, if given a few simple premises, could draw for you ironclad conclusions.  Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas after him, concluded that something like God must exist, based on a few such premises and logic.  

To understand that, though, requires some study; the very claim is so shocking to modern minds that one would indeed require a kind of acclimation to their thoughts, their assumptions, and the rigor of their thinking.  It says something about our age that such rationality would seem novel, even exotic.

Here again, my aim is humbler.  Aquinas may come and advise us, but we are children playing at the game he mastered.  Where he was careful, we will inevitably be sloppy.  Where he was subtle, we will be rather clumsy.

And yet, it is not for nothing.  Such ideas really can take shape, and color, and even life in a conversation like ours.  The child, laughing, says something a psychologist might explain; but we prefer the laughter.

I aim for the laughter, for the dim glow of a far-off glory.

Introduction

Now – after years of glancing past the subject, and after a thousand banalities, and after as many or more moments of good humor and respectful discourse, deep resonance, and shaded awe of what virtue the other is capable of – let us finally talk of God.

I have been at this a while, my friend, but I am not an expert.  In no time, you can find someone better prepared to speak about God.  But we are friends, and so there is a kind of leniency, a courteous respect, for whatever it is I may have to say.

I will work quickly.  In some parallel way, I may appreciate time as well as a naturalist, who thinks this time – birth to death – is all he has.  I do not, but I do appreciate that it is all the time we have to come to grips with what is real and true.  It is further true, and we almost agree, that beyond that time, no one really knows what happens.

What shall I say?  I have the floor, like one looking for his seat who is unaware that he has entered the theater from stage right.  The subject is only that which, if it is true, is the most important truth in the world.  If it is false, then nothing is important, for the Universe, and every single piece and particle within it ends adrift in a vast dead sea.  Somehow, though I deny the totality of it, the naturalist mythology has a haunting allure to it.  Everything will finish in the pattern from which it started – in almost exact homogeneity.  And everything will also be different – where the original homogeneity was in a state of unimaginable potency, bursting forth from infinite density and inconceivable heat, it finishes fully exhausted, and perfectly cold and still.  Nothing will move.  Not one thing will move.

But we needn’t be held captive by that paralyzing climax.  That great winter of the Universe may come to pass, but it will (I believe) ultimately pass.  I would not curse God if He let the Universe at least reach that point, then to resurrect it.  That pattern has been established.

Let us dance then, or duel, or engage however you like.  Let’s be better than ahead of our time – let us transcend time, for a spell.  Yes, let there be a kind of magic in our conversation, which lifts it out of the mundane, out of our real and lamentable troubles, out of our frustration at falling short of true liberation, true joy.  For one may escape a trouble, only to have another beset him; and one may gain the whole world, but eventually he dies.

Now and here, then, let us enjoy the blaze of the human spirit, as it does what no other animal can.  And like a blaze, it is both primordial and everlasting – the fire precedes us and it will outlast us.  In that hypnotizing glow, let us see something of the ineffable mysteries which we now consider.

This series comes from a treatise I drafted for a skeptical friend.  Its aims are more or less the same as the “Existence of God” series, but I’ve tried to sharpen up the writing, the content, and the overall structure of the presentation.  I’m sure it will go through yet another iteration if I permitted to live that long.

Foreword

In the following pages are laid out – what I think are – the compelling arguments for the existence of God.

These pages are hard-fought.  When I was a freshman in college, I was confronted by an atheist who was at least shrewder than I, if not also smarter.  When he asked for my arguments for the existence of God, I didn’t have any.  There had never been a need.

But integrity demanded, then as now, that if belief in God was irrational and unfounded, I would have to give it up.  And I could further sense, and later came to understand, that all the meaning and significance in the world hung upon this question.  That is, I realized I had to answer the question, and that I had everything to lose if it turned out I had been wrong.

I had much to learn, at any rate!  Not long after the challenge had been issued, I encountered the five ways of St. Thomas Aquinas, who started from the senses and reasoned his way to the existence of God.  But I did not understand them, and while encouraged, I was still lost.

Fifteen years later and I would finally make my way back to Aquinas with sufficient understanding.  Not a word of his has changed, but now I am positively gripped by his arguments.  They are logically powerful and lead inescapably to the existence of God.

In the meantime, I encountered many other arguments for the existence of God, and reflected at length on the question and its manifold implications.  Naturally, I also encountered arguments against the existence of God, and critiques of arguments for His existence.  Though I was sometimes at a loss, not sure which argument had a greater claim to the evidence and not sure how to handle one objection or another, God’s existence gradually looked more and more sure.

What follows, then, I loosely call “proofs” for the existence of God.  Some are formal, logical proofs; others are arguments which are simply meant to point to God, even if they do not lead inescapably to Him.  To include only the former could be a bit dull; only the latter would be unsatisfying.

It is most challenging to face a paradigm shift.  It is painful, disturbing, exhausting, humiliating – or worse.  Very few people are disposed to make a transition like this readily.  I understand that, and do not expect you come out of this a theist.

Rather, as we set out, let me simply ask for your heart and your mind to be open, your soul and strength to be listening in.  Be skeptical, sure, but be skeptical on both sides.  Some say the problem of evil proves that God does not exist; I would counter that God must exist, or there would be no problem of evil!  You see what I mean.  

Indeed, for the duration of this little book, let God’s existence be an open question.  See what you find.

Hail Mary!

Hail, full of grace!

Hail, sweet purity!  Hail, perfect humility!  Hail, she who has seen what no man has seen!

The Lord is with you.

His messenger has visited you.  Sent off from heights unfathomable, to the dust of our pale blue dot.  Beautiful daughter of God, he sends his messenger to speak to you and comfort you.

You, and no other.

You are afraid.  Though not, perhaps, how we fallen might be afraid.

When we are visited by an angel, it is like a thunderbolt.  We are afraid because of our bodily vulnerability, and because we are mired in darkness.  We are far from the land where angelic radiance dwells.  It is too much for us, cataclysmic.  We simply brace ourselves.

You, Mother, are not troubled by the darkness.  You are immaculately kept.  Therefore, the fear we see reported must be of another kind, and I will boldly venture a guess.

You knew, in a way we cannot possibly know, what Gabriel meant.  You saw the empty throne.  You realized the King was coming.

Mary, anyone now reading skimmed over that, too quickly.  They noted it as a point of Christian doctrine, and filtered it through their faith or lack of faith, and now are irritated that I have bothered to say so.

Well, we have heard it said, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God.”

If that is so, then you have seen Him most clearly.  And you will know that God becoming man is like man becoming a cartoon.  It is not merely humbling; it is an utter depravity.

See how impossible it is for us to even conceive of a way to condescend like this!  There is nothing like it!  You may as well cover a mountain with a handkerchief – to propose it is to stretch the human mind until it frays.  How much less can we understand God doing it?

But you, Mary…you understood like no one has.

Mary, we can scarcely appreciate your moment in time.  Women were expected to be virgins and preserved until marriage as a matter of course.  And if they were found with child…

But you are holy.  You, dear Mother, did not even ask about this.  Gabriel said you would bear a child and you did not express the least concern that you should be castigated, gossiped about, calumniated, and abandoned.  It simply did not enter the conversation.

You are truly full of grace, to the brim, and spilling over.

Rather, you appealed to nature!  You appealed to God’s own laws, which all men know, even to the present age:  “How should this happen, if I have had no relations with a man?”

That’s when Gabriel spoke just a little slower, in the cadence of awe.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

The foolishness we hear is for some to gainsay the virgin birth.  To what effect?  What is their great rebuttal?

It is mere incredulity!  As if theirs was the height of understanding…and theirs the kingdom, and the glory, and so on.  Let us cast our pearls elsewhere.

Indeed, this is likely the most unremarkable thing about Gabriel’s message.  God, incapable of a virgin birth?  What fool casts his shadow so shamelessly?

No, what is remarkable is this…

“Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.”

The ground is still shaking from the moment Gabriel announced this.  It is almost a reassurance to you, that you heard him correctly.

God Almighty, Existence itself, will dwell within your womb.

God Almighty, indeed!  What is this?  All Power and Majesty!  …in a baby.

Cynics, nonbelievers – even ye faithful – you are not hearing this correctly unless you have a shiver down your back, and a shock in your heart.  You really have no conception at all of the Immaculate unless your vision has just gone a little blurry.

Everything beautiful, everything majestic and worthy and glorious and good – goddamn, atheists, listen to yourselves talk about Nature! – is made weak, dumb, and eminently vulnerable.  It is the poverty every human being has known.

Yet not even a king can slay him.

I beg your pardon, Mother.  I have been wrangling with these atheists for years now.  They are so close, but make their singular virtues – skepticism, discrimination – into idols.  They do not expect the Lord to answer them, and more’s the pity.

Because, as you know, He has.

He has entered that very fabric which they decry as unjust and incompatible with Him.  They cry, “How can God allow it?”  And God answers, “I have come, and suffered it.”

Every word after is so much intellectual vomit.

Our angel finishes by declaring another impossibility:  Elizabeth, thought barren, is carrying a son who will go ahead of your Son, and prepare the way for Him.  Then you utter the words par excellence of the female genius:

“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.  Be it done unto me according to thy word.”

At bottom, Mother, I am a humble man.  I cannot respond to this; you were actually perfect, and I am deeply flawed.  You are Immaculate; I am empty.  I can only finish what faith has started…

Holy Mary, Mother of God

Pray for us sinners

Now and at the hour of our death,

Amen.

How do I so often forget, Lord, that I am a child of the Most High?

I am caught up in the world, ensnared by anxieties – why am I so miserable?  How is it that your light does not always break through?

I have seen pictures of your country, in my dreams.  It is a brilliant place, and the lights never go out.  I would make for it now if you let me.

It is selfish, though, and unbecoming.  Indeed, when my vision is so narrow that I cannot see beyond myself, the light cannot break in.  They are all but shut.

When it expands, though, and is agile among my children and family, and my friends and neighbors, then the light comes in.  More than I can stand without bowing a little, and shielding them.

What a great irony!

It must be so while tied to my nature, fallen.  I groan for freedom.

With the onset of the Syrian refugee crisis, I’ve had the chance to talk to three liberals in three days about the subject.  Catholics, of course, are neither liberal nor conservative, but Orthodox.  Contemporary American political divisions will pass away, and Catholicism will live on.*

Nevertheless, each one was liberal – don’t worry ladies, I won’t share your names! – and each one was a lady.  (While I do think liberalism is more suited to the female genius, the statement of their sex is neither here nor there).

What really stood out to me was that each one attributed an irrational fear or hatred to those who disagreed with their position.  That is, an -ism or a -phobia.

Indeed, each chose their own flavor:  Racism, Islamophobia, and Xenophobia.

Now, I think this is an issue on which reasonable people can disagree.  On balance, I think integrating refugees into a foreign country and creating a safe zone near their own country is just about six of one, half-dozen of the other.  I’m inclined toward the latter.  (Feel free to disagree).

In my conversations, though, that was beside the point.  I wasn’t trying to convince them of my policy decision.  I was trying to convince them that the mere fact of disagreement did not indicate an irrational fear or hatred of anything.

Now the Right has its own problems, but the Left uses these terms in order to shut down conversation, not to foster it, and certainly not to persuade.  The goal is to coerce via social pressure.  (“You don’t want to be irrational, do you?  You certainly don’t want to be made a pariah…”)  But if you look around, that social pressure is losing steam.

That was my leading point to them.  If you keep this up, sooner or later, the response will be “I don’t care.”  Often enough, it already is.

Person A:  But that’s racist!

Person B:  I don’t care.

Once “racism” or any of the others enters the conversation, Person B realizes he cannot successfully defend himself against the charge.  There is literally nothing he can say to get himself acquitted.  (Again – prove. me. wrong).  That is why this strategy has worked so well for the Left.  But as I say, it’s not working as well anymore, and the other side is quickly learning to simply ignore them.**

So in each conversation, I challenged my interlocutor to define her term.  Then, carefully, I set out to challenge the notion that irrationality was to blame for all opposing views.

For example:  Is it always irrational for a nation with sufficient wealth to refuse to help the Syrian refugees in any way?

Or:  If the Right is proposing a religious test rather than a race test, doesn’t that eliminate “racism” as a motivation?  You should at least ridicule them accurately!

(Argument ad absurdum is not only a fallacy, but establishes the ground rules of a debate).

If you’re a Liberal, that’s fine.  But this stuff is getting old.  What’s worse:  You’re making yourself irrelevant, even to President Obama.

Come make an argument, not an accusation.

*It strikes me that even my secular friends will acknowledge this is as true.

**Often enough, being called an “-ist” or a “-phobe” is seen as a badge of honor.