MENTAL GYRATIONS ON WHY WE CANNOT PROVE GOD’S EXISTENCE

When watching the latest movie the film, Wednesday, I had this feeling of wondering why I am filling time watching some bizarre series of stories about Ghouls and Goblins, other than I really like it. Is there more to life? Of course, I told myself, there is. But, despite my mental convictions that God exists and talks with me, I have these rational doubts that sweep in waves over my Faith-belief convictions and daily threaten to knock my center off its precarious perch as The Christ Principle. (Philippians2:5)

When asking or answering any questions about God, my assumption has been, and still is, that we cannot prove God exists using God’s measurements. Paradoxically, the only way to know God is through God’s measurements. So, are we orphans condemned to live out our lives in a foreign land? Quite simply, I don’t have either the capability to know what God’s measurement is (other than my human approximations ((guess)) as to its properties) or the capacity to know if, if I could cram pure energy into our human frame of existence (lifetime of successes and failure as to what it means to be fully human as nature intended). I know that I know, but that means that what I know must be consistent with my human nature. Knowing anything about God must come from within the parameters of my experiences of what it means to be human. This means the languages I must use to discover what and who God is are English, scientific inquiry as I know it, philosophy of people like Erick Fromm, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, and more recently, Steven Hawking, Enrico Fermi, Einstein, Joel Barker, Dr. Scott Hahn, and my personal avatars, Mrs. Murphy and Mr. Denny.

Having said that, each individual approaches the question of who God is with the totality of who they are and are becoming. Each of us has one center of our life, one 100% on the dart board of meaning, that informs everything else because it is that principle that, if we take it away, none of the other values makes sense. I have freely chosen, as I do each day, to place The Christ Principle at my center. Living in the condition of mental and material corruptibility means my center will automatically fall off its perch if I don’t keep it there 24/7. If I am looking at who God is with who I am now, it might seem that God is what each person seeks to attain. That means billions upon billions of ways to look at God. So, how can I prove to myself that a divergent God exists?

An atheist doesn’t have God as any part of their approach to what life means, so, quite logically, they don’t believe. They can’t. They don’t have the assumptions that, let’s say a Catholic has. To make this more complex, all Christians don’t have the same assumptions about who God is because each one relates to God from their unique human experiences. I like the saying: I am not you; you are not me; God is not me, and I, most certainly, am not God. The implications of what I am proposing may not seem much more than talking with a mouthful of marbles, but, I assure you, they are profound. To prove God humans must be God. To prove what it means to be human to the fullest extent that nature intended (Before The Fall), I must at least be human to have the capability and the capacity to make sense of something that doesn’t fit the human paradigm. The problem is, there are so many “I’s” that we each have reason and free will to choose what we think God is. Who God is must be given to humans by God. There is a problem. God sends us messages like SETI sends and receives messages through the language of radio waves, but we may not pick them up and interpret them. God has to tell us. In the Old Testament God spoke through people, events, dreams, intelligent design to move to ever more complex life, and the prophets, but the people were stiffnecked. So, God became human so that humans would have no excuses. Jesus (both divine and human nature) would tell and show people how to communicate with God and to accept adoption as adopted sons and daughters of the Father (we are not God but fully human as our nature intended). Naturally, this good news would not make sense without the assumptions (Faith) that are mightly contradictory to human reasoning and free will. We are called to baptism so that we can die to our false selves over and ever each day. Automatically, we are at odds with the world. We struggle not only with the pull exerted by original sin to acknowledge that Satan is Lord of the earth and we should fall down in worship of the Devil. Remember the three temptations of Christ in the desert? They tempt the humanity of Christ to betray the divinity by offering the false promise of what it means to be fully human.

ACT YOUR NATURE

To answer this to my satisfaction, let me share with you some of my more bizarre thoughts or hypotheses about God that have presented themselves to me in my Lectio Divina sessions.

• There are at least four natures: Divine Nature, Human Nature, Animal Nature, Physical Nature
• The nature of God is unknown to humans, only to God.
• Humans have developed reason and the ability to choose what is good for them, through intelligent progression.
• God is pure energy, composed of pure knowledge, pure love, and pure service.
• God’s nature is 100% of what it should be (whatever that is).
• God wants to share Divine Nature with humans to the extent that humans can reach their full potential as nature intended. To do this humans need a boost from God.
• Humans are asked if they want to be adopted sons and daughters of the Father through Baptism.
• Belief is the assent to the Father that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
• Humans have no power to praise God except through the energy of Eucharist, Penance, Prayer, putting yourself in a position to receive energy from God (as you are capable to receive it) in Cistercian Contemplative practices and charisms (to name only one way).
• Loving others as Christ loved us means dying to the world’s notion of what love is to embrace the cross and carry it daily.
• Heaven on earth begins with Baptism and continues forever.
• Humans must know God through human reasoning and free will. Christ came to show us how to do that without becoming frustrated.
• Humans are given gifts at Baptism, a map (Scriptures and the Writings of Early Church Father and Magisterium in each age), a compass (The Christ Principle or the opportunity to place Christ as your only center), a golden thread with which you can thread through anything that God deems a treasure to take with you to heaven. It includes family, friends, teachers, church members, sunsets and sunrises, the smell of the air on a frosty day, all the times you prayed, went to Mass and the Sacraments, your situations where you had in you the mind of Christ Jesus, the times your Guardian Angel helped you, all the times the Devil tempted you to go against your human nature and you called upon the name of the Lord, all the pets you had in your lifetime, any animals that you helped, all those poor you treated as Christ would have, all the lessons that you learned about how to love others as Christ loved you, plus many more.
• Animals act their nature naturally.
• The physical universe uses the Laws of Physics (as much as we know about them).

My contention is that humans can only mature within their nature, which is one of the reasons Christ had to become human to tell us and show us how to access the way, the truth, and life, life that fulfills our humanity in allowing us to be adopted sons and daughters of the Father and heir to the kingdom of heaven.

The Divine Equation, so named because it comes from God through Christ with the power of the Holy Spirit, gives those who can see with the eyes of Faith informed by reason and hear with the ear of the heart. Don’t spend time trying to prove something humans could not even understand if they could prove it.

Love others as Christ loved you. Relax and slow down. After all, your inheritance begins now on earth where you can store up values that God treasures. Heaven is a place to enjoy all those treasures of the mind and heart.

Allow your heart to feel the heartbeat of Christ as you sit next to him on a park bench in the dead of winter and just be there. Proofs are for the pusillanimous and no sign will be given to you but the sign on Jonah.

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