Who is God? Part II

                There’s nothing like a clear autumn day to get you thinking about God.  So, with a hammock beneath me, a clear, blue sky above me, and the rustle of a gentle breeze through fallen leaves in my ears, I began to quietly contemplate how I would continue to summarize the talk I gave 2 weeks ago on God.  You can find my first attempt (dealing with the existence of God) here if you missed it.  In this installment, I’ll talk about the nature of God.

                Jews, Christians and Muslims (and probably many other religions) believe in one God.  Speaking through the prophet Isaiah, God reveals that “I am God; there is no other.”  Catholics profess our faith in one God in the Nicene Creed:  “I believe in one God, the Father almighty,” and many Christian faiths make similar professions.  The existence of one God makes sense if you believe that the word “god” refers to a transcendent being that is the source and summit of all things.  With that belief, you can’t have competing gods – a god of the sun, a god of the sea, etc.  Having one god for this and one god for that necessarily means that no one god is the source and summit of all.  Each god would necessarily be incomplete and, therefore, imperfect.

 We also believe that God is one in nature, substance and essence.[1]  The great Jewish prayer says, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one.”  (Deut.6:4)  God, therefore, is unitary; God is unique.  As the second century Christian author Tertullian said, “If God is not one, He is not God.”  Why is that?  Well, God is by nature perfectly simple – the source and summit of all things can’t be made up of competing parts.  God cannot contradict himself.  If he did, he wouldn't be perfect.  So when we speak of God’s justice, God’s love, God’s wrath or God’s mercy, we’re speaking about the same thing – in God.  In God, these qualities can’t contradict each other.  So for those who struggle with how God can forgive people who commit horrible crimes, remember that God’s justice, God’s mercy, God’s love and any other quality of God that you can think of are one and the same thing in God.

God’s simplicity also helps us understand that God is the fullness of being.  “What God’s simplicity entails, in a word, is that the divine is not any sort of being, any particular instance of being, but is rather the sheer act of existing itself.  God is not this or that; God simply is.”[2]  God told us as much when he revealed his name to Moses:  In the Book of Exodus, after God asks Moses to deliver his people from slavery in Egypt, Moses asks God for his name so Moses can tell the Israelites who sent him to them.  God responded with the word “YHWH,” which means, “I am who am,” or “I will be who will be.”  (Exodus 3: 13-15)  The divine name, therefore, expresses God’s fundamental nature as BEING, past, present, future, eternal.  God is “the fullness of Being and every perfection, without origin and without end.”[3]

Now we have to ask ourselves what it means for God to be eternal – without origin and without end.  Well, eternity is the ever present now.  There is no time in eternity.  That means there is no past and no future.  It’s just now.  Because God is being itself, God is equally present to the past, the present and the future.  In other words, the past, the present and the future are one in God.  And because God is timeless, i.e., eternal, God cannot change.  Change involves going from one state to another.  Change, therefore, necessarily involves time.  But God is timeless.  And for that matter, what would God change into?  God is perfect.  The only place you can go to from perfect is imperfect.  As I mentioned above, if God were imperfect, he wouldn’t be God.  God’s immutability is why he is always faithful:  “The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”  (Romans 11:29)  God cannot contradict himself; God cannot change.

          Your head maybe spinning as mine is trying to contemplate the nature of God.  Well, that’s because God is beyond our comprehension.  As Saint Anselm of Canterbury put it, God is that which nothing greater can be thought.”  I’m told that there are some 600 names for God in the Bible:  the Almighty, Creator, Savior, Father, Abba, to name a few.  Yet, no one name can capture God.  And while all creatures bear a resemblance to God, no one creature, nor all creatures taken together for that matter, could ever come close to revealing all that is God.  “Whatever you can say or think or assert concerning God falls infinitely short of who God actually is.  Indeed, the best and finally the only response to the divine power is silence, the silence of awe and reverence and hope.”[4]  Lying in a hammock on a beautiful autumn day is perfect for doing just that.

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[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church 200.  The Christian belief in a Trinitarian God – one God in three persons – does not contradict a belief in one God.  The Trinity, however, will have to be the topic of a future posting.

[2] Fr. Robert Barron, Thomas Aquinas, Spiritual Master (New York, Crossroads Publishing Company, 2008) at 78.

[3] CCC 213.

[4] Barron at 61.

Who is God?

         

          Several people have asked me how my talk on God went the other day, and some asked that I post the talk on my blog.  I generally speak from notes (not a prepared text) when I give talks, so I didn't have anything to post.  As you can imagine, God is also a pretty big topic, so I thought I would start with this posting on the existence of God, and possibly continue in future postings. 

One of the many things that convinces me that God exists is the fact that every culture has developed a concept of God.  Of course, that doesn't mean that every person believes in God, but the fact that every culture, ancient and modern, has expressed some understanding of a divine being that transcends us speaks volumes to me.  This fact shouldn't be surprising if we accept that humans are both physical and spiritual beings.  Now, before I get a ton of comments from people who are “spiritual but not religious,” let me clarify that spirituality is different from religion.  When I speak of spirituality, I’m talking about our sense of connectedness with each other, with the world around us and with God.  Religion, on the other hand, is a group’s thoughts and teachings that interpret spiritual experiences.  We, therefore, can be spiritual but not religious (though I don’t recommend it).  As spiritual beings, we are drawn to the transcendent – that which is beyond us.  As the Catholic Church teaches, the desire for God is written on our hearts, and God never ceases drawing us to him.[1]  That’s why every culture has developed a concept of God.

So how can we know that God exists?  Well, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, developed 5 proofs for the existence of God that are pretty convincing to me.  While the 5 proofs are well worth the read, I’d like to share some simple explanations that touch in certain ways on Thomas’ proofs.  First, for the believer and non-believer alike, the desire for God is expressed in our ongoing quest for truth, beauty, love and perfection.  Where did our understanding and desire for truth, beauty, love and perfection come from?  Against what standard do we base our judgment of what is true or beautiful?  How do we know we are in love?  We have never seen perfection, so why do we strive for it?  Well, God is truth, beauty, love and perfection.  And although God transcends us, God also envelops us and dwells within us.  As one person put it, helping someone find God is like helping a fish find water.  So we understand and seek truth, beauty, love and perfection because we are spiritually connected to and permeated by the source of all truth, beauty, love and perfection – God.

 

Second, all people have a conscience – a sense of right and wrong.  Some people exercise it more than others, but we all have it nonetheless.  We've all had that nagging feeling of the right (or wrong) course of action to take in a particular circumstance.  We've all felt guilty when we've done something wrong, and we've all experienced a sense of conviction and purpose when we do something good.  Where does our understanding of right and wrong, good and evil, come from?  To some extent, one could argue that it comes from our parents, from the society we live in or even from what we learned in kindergarten.  But what is the ultimate origin of society's understanding of right and wrong?  And why do we still feel guilty for bad acts even when no one is looking – when there is no chance that we’ll be caught?  It’s because “the good” also transcends us.  It envelops us and permeates our very beings.  That inner voice we hear guiding us to do good ain't Jiminy Cricket; it’s God.  “For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God.  His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary.  There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.”[2]

          The last argument I’ll put forth for the existence of God is that I simply cannot believe that the universe is an accident.  We know that nothing comes from nothing; so there must be a first cause.  It doesn't matter whether it happened as described in the Book of Genesis, if it was a Big Bang or a “god particle.”  Something created the universe from nothing, and did a pretty amazing job of it.  There’s an incredible order and beauty to the cosmos that caused people as diverse as Plato and Einstein to believe in an intelligent designer of the universe.  That intelligent designer is God.  And nothing that science has ever discovered contradicts the notion that a transcendent, unchanging and all powerful being created the universe.  As Albert Einstein once said, “There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle.”  For me, everything is a miracle, so I am convinced that God exists.

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[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church (“CCC”) 27.

[2] CCC 1776.