Converging and Convincing Proof of God: From Fragile Life to Eternal Life in God

By Andrew M. Greenwell, Esq.
11/13/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Life appears to have been given to us, sometimes by the most fortuitous circumstances

And we go from one contingent life, yonder to another, yonder to another, yonder, yonder, yonder. And yet we cannot simply go yonder to infinity. An infinity of lives, each of which is possible not to have been or not to be, even if all chained together never get above and beyond their contingency.

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CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - In prior articles of this series, we have written about the "converging and convincing" proofs of God, proofs which are like a cable which, bound together, make it certain, within the bounds of reason alone, that God exists. Reason thus takes us to the threshold of faith, and the assent to God who has revealed himself to us is ultimately not an unreasonable act, although it is something more than a reasonable act since it is a double gift. Faith is a gift spurred by the gift of grace.

We have started with experiences common to men and women-desire, truth, perfection--and then used the illative sense--a broader reason than the mere single-dimensioned reason of the empirical or physical sciences-to come to a reasonable conclusion that God exists.

In prior articles, we started with desire, with truth, and with the experience of perfection. The insights of St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine of Hippo, and St. Anselm of Canterbury were our guides. In this article, we shall focus on life, on being, and our experience that it is contingent. Our guide will be St. Thomas Aquinas.

In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas offers five "proofs of God," the famous Quinque viae. His third proof, the one we shall focus on in this article, is based upon contingency.

The proof starts from our experience regarding life, regarding being. We experience life or being as something that is contingent, that is not necessary, that it is possible not to have been or not to be.

Humans experience life as fragile, tenuous. Life, as G. M. Hopkins puts it in his poem "Binsey Poplars," is like the nature of which it is a part; and it can so easily be felled, felled, and felled.

Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all.

The smallest things can end life, like the prick of eye that makes the eye unable to see, a pin prick can make life not to be. We might recall that Lord Carnarvon--who funded the archeological expeditions of Howard Carter at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and discovered Tutankhamun's tomb--died from the simple act of shaving.

It is possible for life not to be.

Not only is life contingent because it is fragile. It is contingent in the sense that we have done nothing to give it to ourselves. The German philosopher Schleiermacher coined a great word which sums up this experience: We experience ourselves as Sichselbsnichtsogesetzhaben, "not-having-put-oneself-forth," or Irgendwiegewordensein, as "somehow-having-come-to be." As Aidan Nichols puts this phenomenon in his book A Grammar of Consent, life is "non-self-explanatory and non-self-existent."

Life appears to have been given to us, sometimes by the most fortuitous circumstances.

If my mother had not fled to Venezuela to escape the communists taking over Czechoslovakia after WWII, and my father not having decided to leave Oklahoma as a young man to find adventure the oil industry in that foreign land, and had my mother's jeep not gotten stuck in a muddy rut one Saturday after an earlier rain, and my father not helped her, I would not have been here, and this article would never have been written.

All of us have stories like this. How extraordinary that I exist! How extraordinary that anything should exist!

It is possible for life not to have been.

This experience is what started St. Thomas thinking. In the terse words of St. Thomas:

"The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be."

From whence does this fragile, tenuous, contingent life come?

I suppose we could be entirely incurious, and respond, "It just is." But this is to say that there is Nothing behind it all. This is hardly satisfactory. It is intellectually cowardly, and in fact clearly false since it is plain that nothing comes from nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit!

And not only is this sort of philosophy stupid and obtuse: its psychological effect upon us is devastating. Oh, yes, we avoid the God question, but at what price!

If we believe that ...

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1 - 4 of 4 Comments

DLL
6 months ago
Creation is objective not subjective experience,because it is spontaneous and procreative,as that was the intention of the Creator,"to be fruitful and multiply"was the Creators blessing for all humankind. Creation is never ending,as all is continually changing and renewed. Creation is not relative to some set of any ones values regarding it. Time is never limited,as it is
progressive never regressive. History is a subjective event,in that history is never perfectly recorded in our subjective relationship to it,because it is objective as a source of experience. God is a subjective as well as the objective experience for all of humankind. What is constantly happening everywhere at all times is the objective experience and it simply cannot be comprehended by the subjective,limited,singular human experience,because it is a matter of perspective. What is eternal is completely objective,all that is,is going on all of the time,so that time has ultimately is no measure for what is,that is why God introduces himself to humankind as I Am and Jesus says of God that He Is all in all. God is all inclusive of all that was,is or ever will be. God is the complete awareness of every thing,that as mortals we cannot even begin to comprehend. God is not limited to subjective,inductive or deductive conclusions about him,if God was then any mere mortal could be His judge. God is the objective experience,that is why all can come to know him through Faith. Some people use the expression of a total self awareness. That is a impossibility because even we cannot be aware of all that is going on with ourselves physically or mentally,spiritually,whatever,because as individuals,we are too complex for us to even to be able to understand ourselves. We are simply too complex to be judged in some relative way as well. All is created to be unique an experience in itself. Everything is set in motion,it is constantly in motion,immeasurable,as God,Divine intelligence,is love,immeasurable,completely beyond all comprehension. Life is merely a sense of activity beyond a subjective sense only,life is a celebration,all inclusive,as love is the essence of all that is. As Jesus said "Only God is good"! God simply defines all that is. God is all in all. Wow!
Andrew M. Greenwell
6 months ago
@Juneau Alaska: Mike, thanks for your comment. Regarding it, however, I do not think the issue is one of logic, but epistemology (knowledge). St. Thomas was a moderate realist (i.e., the ideas in one's minds corresponded to reality outside), and not an idealist (such as Kant, where the only thing we know is what is in our minds, and we have no assurance it corresponds to external reality). If our subjective knowledge corresponds to objective reality (such as St. Thomas taught), then one is not confronted with the logical problem of going from one realm to another. On the other hand, if you do not believe that there is a correspondence between external reality and our minds (if you are Kantian), then your observation is correct. That's why Kant rejected the proofs of God and relied only one the proof based upon the sense of moral duty (which will be addressed in a future article). Kant rejected them not because they were illogical based upon his critique of human knowledge, which separated the outside world from the world in our minds. It was only the latter, Kant insisted, we know. (I happen to disagree with Kant, and I am more of the advocate of the Thomist moderate realist and/or JPII phenomenological school of epistemology.)
abey
6 months ago
Nothing comes from nothing is different from saying "Out of nothing". Ex Nihilo spiritually understood, is something made from nothing like when He said "Let there be light there was light" to know that this something was not derived out of something spoken in time as was, is & will be ever existent which is called God & this God is life unspoken in time to the word eternal. Science which is derivative called Proof cannot get to it but faith which is not-derivative is to Him which is the difference between the Physical & the Spiritual to which is the meaning of Christ for the Spiritual to lead the Physical contrary to the life today in the reverse is nothing but to an end called Death, where man tries to make a name for himself is nothing but heaping garbage over garbage. So is the reason why God send His Christ.
Juneau Alaska
6 months ago
The problem I have with this article is that it draws heavily on subjective experiences in order to make inductive or deductive conclusions. In logic that is a big no-no.

Mike

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