God Probably Does Exist

Does God Exist?

Fr Anthony Percy, theological scholar and Rector of the Seminary of the Good Shepherd at Homebush took a poster from a London Bus as the subject of his address at the first Forum of Faith at the University of Technology, Sydney.
 
The posters on the British buses announced that “There’s Probably No God. Now stop worrying and Enjoying Life.” 
 
Fr Anthony countered with an even better line which proclaimed: “God Probably Does Exist. So I will stop Worrying and I will certainly Enjoy My Life.”
 
The address by Fr Anthony attracted students across the UTS campus and marked the first of many regular Forums of Faith planned by the newly-formed UTS Chaplaincy.
 
The next forum will be held on May 21 at UTS when the subject will be “Why be Catholic?” The keynote speaker for this forum is Peter Holmes, Manager of Studies at the Catholic Adult Education Centre at the University of Notre Dame and all are welcome.
 
For more information about the UTS Chaplaincy, its weekly Mass on campus, weekly Bible Studies and John Paul II resource centre, check out the Catholic Student Handbook 2009, UTS or go on line to www.utscathc.org.
 
For the full address that Fr Anthony delivered at last week’s Forum of Faith at UTS See below: 

God Probably Does Exist

By Fr Anthony Percy
Rector, Seminary of the Good Shepherd, Homebush
 
In the United Kingdom recently, there have been more than a few posters on buses reading, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” To which I guess any reasonable person would respond, “But there might be a God. So I won’t worry and I will certainly enjoy my life.”  

Reason

Paschal (17th Century French Mathematician) once said that there are three types of people:
 
Those how have sought God and found Him – and these are reasonable and happy people.  Those who have sought God and have not yet found Him – and these are reasonable but unhappy people. Those who neither seek God nor find Him – and these are both unhappy and unreasonable.
 
It’s a good idea to be reasonable. It’s a good idea to be happy. Certainly, everyone wants to be happy, but we don’t always agree how best to attain it. To be reasonable is a very important human trait or characteristic or disposition. It’s not always easy to be reasonable. Emotion can take over. So too can human hurt – wounds of the heart I mean.

It was the human heart and not the human mind that John Henry Newman thought was the root cause of unbelief. That is worth a good deal of thought. For I suspect that the root cause of a lot of modern day atheism lies at this level. People are wounded – often quite deeply – and frequently they don’t realize it. Or so it appears to me in my life as a Catholic priest.
 
Nevertheless, it is still a good idea to be reasonable. Reason is our ability to either deny or affirm. I am either standing here before you, or I am not. If you say that I am not, then most people, mind you not all, would say that you have lost your marbles. 
 
So, given this gift we call reason, which marks us out quite distinctively from the rest of the visible creation, it is a fairly good idea to enquire whether God exists or not. Let’s go back to Paschal. He is famous for “Paschal’s Wager.”  
 
Paschal, enamoured with Maths as he was, constructed this line of thinking. “Either God is, or he is not. If we were to wager the existence of God, how would we stand? What are the odds of being right? The odds are fifty – fifty. But what are the consequences of being wrong? This second question is far more crucial. If wrong, then the consequence is eternal damnation. The consequences far outweigh the odds!” 
 
Clearly, therefore, it is a good and reasonable thing to search out, with genuine interest and desire, whether God exists. Certainly it will have consequences for the afterlife, but also for my life now. If God exists; if Christ is his Son; if Christianity is plausible and believable, then God wants us to have life and to have it to the full (John 10,10). Belief is about the future, certainly, but it is certainly about now. 
 
A person who believes in God is called a “theist.” The Greek word for God is “Theos.”  Hence we get the words theology and theological understanding. A person who does not believe in God is called an “atheist.” That is, someone who is literally “against” God. That is what the word means. An “agnostic” – again from the Greek language – is someone who does not know whether God exists. And that reminds me of a clever joke. “What does an agnostic, dyslectic, insomniac do? They stay awake all night wondering whether there is a dog!”
 
Atheism cannot be dismissed lightly, if for no other reason than the fact that there is an ‘atheist’ in each one of us. Remember the exclamation of the father of the epileptic boy in the Gospels? The apostles tried to expel the “spirit of dumbness” but couldn’t. Jesus steps in, has a go at them (apostles) for their lack of faith. He then turns to the father, asks a pertinent question and then stirs the desire of the father for the healing by saying, “everything is possible for anyone who has faith.” The father reveals at once both his belief and unbelief, “I do have faith,” he says, “help the little faith I have.” (Mark 9, 14- 29) 
 
Most of us are like this. We are believers but have pockets of unbelief stashed away in our hearts. Belief can be difficult, almost impossible for some. And yet it is unreasonable to be an unbeliever. Let me explain. 

Reason & Death

I am dying. And so are you. I will die. And so will you. Nothing is more certain. No one can stop it. What do we make of it? Well, you either believe that death is the end – the complete end. Or, you believe that death is not the end, but a beginning. Death is a passage or a passing over to a new kind of life. In this case, you would believe that there is life beyond the grave. 
 
So, if you believe that death is the end, then that is that. There is nothing more to life than death, since death has the last say. At some point you come into existence. You live your life for a few years – maybe eighty or ninety if you are lucky – and then it is terminated. You die. You no longer are. You simply disappear back to nothing. In other words, death is death. The only thing that would remain is the memory that others have of you – if you’re lucky.
 
If you believe this, then you are an atheist – someone who does not believe in God, someone who does not believe that God created the world with a purpose. It all happened by chance or it just happened and it will all just go away. Life is a mirage. It has no meaning. That is what it means to be an atheist.
 
It is, as you can see, a radical position, and you would want to have some very sound reasons for believing it. For while we can recognize that we are reasonable animals through our use of reason – what we are doing right now in this dialogue – ultimately an atheist has to say, “there is no reason, no purpose to any of our activity because it is moving towards nothingness.”
 
Just stop for a moment and think this through. An atheist – a person who does not believe in life after death – takes a radical philosophical position. For what he or she is saying – if they stop and think about it – is quite disturbing.
 
Essentially he or she would be thinking: “There was a time when I was not. I did not exist at all. Now I exist. I live my life. But then I die. I will no longer exist.” In other words, “I was not, I am, I will not be.”
 
Does this make any sense on a philosophical level? That is, does it make any sense if I think about it reasonably? The answer must surely be no. Why? Because it is simply absurd to think that life is a preparation for death! That life is an antechamber.  

Think about this, “I was not, I am, I will not be.” So, I have life, so that I may die. I have something, so that I will have nothing. This is simply ridiculous. Why not just be nothing and be done with it? Why have life at all? Why would there be life if it is preceded by nothing and is succeeded by nothing? In fact, if there was nothing, and will be nothing, then there should be nothing! But there is something. So, life must be a preparation for something, not nothing. That makes infinite more sense.
 
On the other hand, if you are a believer – of some sorts – then you believe that death is not the end. That beyond death there is life. The believer does not know a lot of detail about life after death, but he or she is fairly convinced that “life is changed, not ended.”
 
Believing in life after death does not mean that believers trivialise death. On the contrary, death is a very difficult thing – particularly when it comes unexpectedly to the unsuspecting. Death will be difficult for all of us, no matter how much faith we have. Why? Because we fear death – at least in some way. Death is not something with which we are familiar. We haven’t died before and we will only die once. The unknown tends to produce fear.
 
Christ has promised us that he has gone ahead to prepare a place for us. That is true. But there is still a lot we don’t know about death and life beyond it. We have not had the experience of death. We have not had the experience of a life different to the one we now have.
 
The Bible is rather candid about all of this. In the Old Testament the prophet Isaiah tells us:
 
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined.

And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 25, 6-8)

Death brings sorrow and hence “tears.” The prophet is right – death is difficult and painful as we watch it unfold. Death disturbs.
 
But then he also describes death as a “covering” or “veil.” That makes sense, too. For a veil covers something. We know there is something there, but we can’t quite see it clearly. We can’t quite “get a hold on it.” In other words, as believers we believe in life after death, but death casts a shadow or veil over the matter. We can’t quite “see” what is beyond death.
 
And now the promise: God “will swallow up death forever” and he “will wipe away tears from all faces.” Death will not have the last say, as it so often appears to have. 

So death is real, but so is the promise of life beyond death. “I was not, I am, I will be.” Life is not a preparation for death. Something is not a preparation for nothing. Beyond life – and death – there is another life. 

Reason & Death & Resurrection

Enter Christ Crucified and Risen. The early Church Fathers twigged to what Christ was up to immediately. This is how they expressed it:
 
By his death, Christ put death to death.
 
Death, according to Christian teaching, is the “legacy” or “price” for sin – the original sin. Christ came to destroy it and destroy it he did. His death puts death to death.
 
Up until the time of Christ, death was always considered a riddle. But now with Christ’s death it is a mystery. Both riddle and mystery have common elements: the unknown, the difficult and painful, the puzzling and cryptic, certainly the obscure.  However, Christian mystery reaches beyond these categories for those who move within and possess the act of faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. It is this faith that embraces both Christ and the self. For the mystery makes present those sacred actions that are brought to fruition in history. In other words, the believer is included – intimately – by Christ in his saving action, in his sacred dying and rising.  
 
St. Paul tells us that his death is absolutely and entirely unique, since it was not a natural death per se, but a death to sin. He took upon himself my sins and literally put them to death. He took my death and put it to death.

For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God. (2Cor 5, 21)

Christ dies and then he rises in a glorious human body to a new resurrected state. Thus his resurrection is not a resuscitation, as say with Lazarus (Cf. John 11). He comes back to life. Christ does that but much more.
 
In his dying and rising Christ truly becomes the greatest philosopher of all time. Philosophy is about thinking things through, but it is also a way of life. That is how the ancient philosophers thought of themselves. And so Christ answers the truly great question of life – the meaning of life and death. He does this with his words and with his actions.
 
Because of what Christ has done for us  - putting death to death and revealing a fundamentally new life of love – the life of a Christian is marvellous. He or she lives with light and security. To be sure, a Christian’s life can and often is surrounded by darkness and shadows, but the light still shines. A Christian’s life can and often is uncertain, but nevertheless secure. He or she knows where they have come from, where they are, where they are going and who is going with them. 
 
For this reason I, and many millions the world over, can respond to the recent advertisements on those UK buses with, ‘There is a God. I won’t worry and I will certainly enjoy my life.” 

(taken from xt3.com :)