Some never get to the point of raising questions about God, since they seem to experience no religious stirrings nor do they see why they should trouble themselves about religion.
(GS, 19)
In addition to atheism, there has certainly appeared in recent times a phenomenon that we may call religious indifferentism.
It is the attitude of those who dispense with the religious question entirely. This attitude, which is possible, is not likely to last if a person cultivates the most important human values. It is difficult to find reasons to act rightly if one does not have a transcendent sense of life, that is, if one does not consider that one’s own actions have worth before Someone, who is not other people.
It is another matter not to believe in a particular Church or religious confession; not to practice certain religious rites, etc. But in the heart of an upright man there is a relation to a transcendent order, to supreme values, which are above the earthly. It could be expressed in the famous words that the Greek tragedian Sophocles placed on the lips of Antigone:
“And I did not believe that your decrees (this refers to the tyrant Creon) had such force as to allow a single man to leap over the unwritten, immutable laws of the gods: their force is not of today or yesterday, but of always, and no one knows when they first appeared.”
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE
It has been a constant teaching of the Church, and therefore of Christian thinkers, that man can know with certainty the living and true God by the natural light of human reason, through visible things (cf. First Vatican Council)
Indeed, the progress of the sciences does not give the reason why the world exists, what its origin is, who has organized it so admirably, and for what purpose. Some have sought to explain it by chance and coincidence, as if by mixing letters without order or arrangement, or by setting a monkey at the typewriter, the Quixote could result, or by joining musical notes at random Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony could arise.
Thinkers of all times have elaborated more or less simple arguments to reason about the existence of God. Among them all, the so-called —ways— of Saint Thomas Aquinas stand out.
The ways of Saint Thomas start from a fact of experience; they apply the principle that everything that arises must have a proportionate cause; this cause, in turn, must have been caused by another; this series of causes cannot be infinite; therefore a first cause must be admitted, uncaused, which is the one we call God.
The third way considers that (…) in nature we find things that can exist or not exist, for we see beings that come into being and beings that pass away (…) It is impossible for beings of such a condition to have existed always, since that which has the possibility of not being—there was a time when it was not. If all things have the possibility of not being, there was a time when nothing existed. If this is true, then even now nothing would exist, because that which does not exist begins to exist only by virtue of something that already exists (…) and, consequently, there would now be nothing, which is evidently false. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible (able to be and not to be) or contingent, but there must be some being that is necessary in itself, whom we all call God.
(Saint Thomas, Summa Theologica, q. 2)
Today, thanks to the development of the sciences, we find ourselves before an indisputable fact: For thousands of millions of years the universe has been in the making. Before this fact a question arises: Does it make itself, or is it made by another?
The first is impossible and contradictory, explicable only if one resorts to the fallacy of attributing to primordial matter the capacity to create itself, to organize itself, to give itself the life it did not previously have, and—what is even more illogical—to give itself the capacity to think; all of which is absurd. Only the other answer remains: It is made. It is made by a Being who exists before everything.
This, which we reach with our reason, the people of Israel knew with absolute certainty by a divine design. The Bible, their sacred book, began with these words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God existed before the beginning of everything.
Source: Encuentra.com
