Is there a God?

"How do you know God exists?" It is a simple question with both a simple and complicated answer. It is simple for a faithful believer because faith is believing in something or someone you cannot see, or accepting something that cannot be proven as true. Faith doesn't require proof, or you don't need faith to believe in something already proven. Majority of the religious believers regardless of whether they are Christian, Muslim, Jew or Hindu accept the existence of God not due to revelations, but because of their faith. 

But the problem is that people with strong faith are not the ones who question the existence of God. That is being done by either people who has doubts about their faith or people with absolutely no faith in God. Catholic Christianity believes that the existence of a supreme being can be proven with reasoning. Catholicism calls this supreme being "God". Saint Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth century Catholic philosopher and theologian, used human reasoning to demonstrate the existence of a Supreme Power or God. 

Aquinas used used five proofs to demonstrate that there is a God. The first method is called motion. This is not the physical movement from point A to point B, but the movement of from being purely potential to being actual. For example, a piece of rock has the potential to become a beautiful sculpture, but it can become an actual sculpture only if a skilled sculptor begins to chisel it. Were there no sculptor, then the potential sculpture would remain a potential forever. In other words, it takes something actual (in this case the sculptor) to move something from being potential to being actual. Thus Aquinas reasoned that the entire universe was only a potential until somebody, a prime Mover, moved it to an actual universe (Note that he only refers to the sculptor and not to the tools. The tool used by this mover could have been anything, the Big Bang for example). This also means that God or the Prime Mover has no beginning - God was never a potential being, but was always an actual being.

The second proof is called causality and it uses the principle of cause and effect. Almost all of the scientific knowledge has its basis on the principle of causality. This concept is all about connecting the dots; we see an effect and automatically reason it with a causing person, object or event. Aquinas reasoned that every effect has a cause; else, it wouldn't exist. He also reasoned that every effect causes another effect, like a ripple effect. So I am the effect and my parents are the cause; my parents are the effect and my grandparents are the cause; and so on. Therefore, if we work backwards in the same way with the universe itself, then there must be a first cause, the cause of all causes. Again this cause has no beginning or nothing caused it to exist, it was always in existence. 

The third proof is necessity. Aquinas argues that nothing that exists or ever existed in this universe is not an absolute necessity for the existence of the universe itself. If I never existed, then things would have been different, but there would've been other people and events in my place. This means everything is contingent; regardless of how important something or someone might seem, its existence is not necessary for reality to exist. Only the Source of being is necessary - the one Being that keeps everything in existence. Everything is dependent on this Supreme being and all the dependents are contingent. Motion and causality explain the how the universe is created, while necessity show us that someone or something is needed to keep things going even after the creation. 

Gradation is the fourth proof, which simply means there is a hierarchy of being in the universe. At the most fundamental level, there is inanimate matter and energy. Then there is the plant life with three vital activities: nutrition, growth and reproduction. The third level is animal life and they also have sensation along with the three plant activities. Humans come next because they also have the ability to reason, unlike animals. While animals act out of instinct, humans can make choices based on free will and rational intellect. The beings above us are angels and unlike us they are pure spirit. They are not limited by the bodily constraints such as hunger, pain, mobility, and death. The last and highest level of being is divine in nature, the Supreme Being. 

The last proof is governance. Something or someone with intelligence created a universe which operates on intelligent and rational laws and principles. This means, even with all the mayhem we observe in this world and this universe, there is an underlying order to everything. Regardless of whether you believe in Creation or evolution, there is no denying that there is a systematic plan upon which reality operates. Aquinas says that this intelligent being that created these systems and laws to maintain order and to prevent chaos can be called God. 

And that's it. No one ever claimed these five proofs would convert an atheist into a believer overnight. But it is brain-food for those who insist on proof. Here is the bottom line: Human reason is limited; it is not broad enough to reason a Supreme Being who is everywhere, knows everything and can do anything. With reason you can know about God; it takes faith to know God. Rather than contradicting reason, religions go beyond the natural world of human reason, into the supernatural realm of faith. Religions presents this Supreme Being in human terms, thus revealing many of the aspects reasoning alone fail to uncover. If that's the case, naturally the next question is: Why do one have to believe in a Christian God, doesn't all religions point way to this Supreme Being? We will discuss that next.