Part One: The Profession of Faith, Section One: I Believe – We Believe
I. The Desire for God
- God’s love holds us in existence through his love; loved us into existence. This means us individually, uniquely, and on purpose and not simply generalized or tolerated
For if man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love, continues to hold him in existence.
Vatican Council II
- This relationship is not forced upon man, rather is engaged by freewill; it can be “forgotten, overlooked, or…rejected.”
- Therefore, fulfillment of this desire demands effort of intellect, will, character, witness of others
II. Ways of coming to know God
Man can come to know God through the world and through the human person
These ways provide “proof of existence” where proof is not scientific in meaning, but rather “converging and convincing arguements
- The world is beautiful and this beauty and our ability to appreciate it professions
- Everything is that exists is contingent; it doesn’t have to exist. Ergo, this points to a necessity of being that all else is contingent on. This is God.
- The need to know is embedded in the human being and the capacity points to the existence of God
- God reveals himself through grace
III. The Knowledge of God According to the Church
We can know God through our natural human reason. This reason is endowed in man as he is created in the image of God.
This reason is, however, hampered by original sin. This is where reason works with revelation as man is capable of reasoning himself into incorrect truths. is good but hampered by original sin need for revelation
IV. How can we speak about God?
We can have confidence in speaking of God as we are from God while also understanding that God is “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, and the ungraspable.”
Our knowledge of God is limited; however, we have knowledge of his creation. Through this knowledge, the language of God becomes accessible to man, even as the similarities illuminate the differences.
Natural science and faith work together to answer questions.
- Natural science asks “what and how”
- Faith asks “who and why”
Good science and good faith does not contradict
Objective truth does not change with subjective experiences (or subjective truth)
In Brief
From the Catechism
44 Man is by nature and vocation a religious being. Coming from God, going toward God, man lives a fully human life only if he freely lives by his bond with God.
45 Man is made to live in communion with God in whom he finds happiness: “When I am completely united to you, there will be no more sorrow or trials; entirely full of you, my life will be complete” (St. Augustine, Conf. 10, 28, 39: PL 32, 795).
46 When he listens to the message of creation and to the voice of conscience, man can arrive at certainty about the existence of God, the cause and the end of everything.
47 The Church teaches that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty from his works, by the natural light of human reason (cf. Vatican Council I, can. 2 # 1: DS 3026),
48 We really can name God, starting from the manifold perfections of his creatures, which are likenesses of the infinitely perfect God, even if our limited language cannot exhaust the mystery.
49 “Without the Creator, the creature vanishes” (Gaudium et spes 36). This is the reason why believers know that the love of Christ urges them to bring the light of the living God to those who do not know him or who reject him.
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