Can We Know With Certainty the Existence Of God?

A simple challenge for those who seek the truth

I was listening to Day 5 of Fr. Mike Schmitz’s podcast “The Catechism in a Year” when I encountered a sentence I have never heard before.

Here is the sentence from Paragraph 36 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.”

Wow! Just how awesome is that?

The Catechism never said that knowing God is possible or even probable. It said that we can know God with certainty!

At a time when many people think it’s impossible, and at an age when many even think it’s foolish to believe in God, this truth is proclaimed to the world.

The same Catechism also tells us the many ways by which we may know God:

31 Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him…
32 The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe…
33 The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. the soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material”, can have its origin only in God.

Our faith then is not one based on superstition or mere imagination. It is a faith that is grounded on truth and reason.

Here is an excerpt from Pope Benedict XVI’s Spiritual Testament:

“What I said before to my countrymen, I now say to all those in the Church who have been entrusted to my service: Stand firm in the faith! Do not let yourselves be confused! It often seems that science — the natural sciences on the one hand and historical research (especially exegesis of Sacred Scripture) on the other — are able to offer irrefutable results at odds with the Catholic faith. I have experienced the transformations of the natural sciences since long ago and have been able to see how, on the contrary, apparent certainties against the faith have vanished, proving to be not science, but philosophical interpretations only apparently pertaining to science… I saw and see how out of the tangle of assumptions the reasonableness of faith emerged and emerges again. Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth and the life — and the Church, with all its insufficiencies, is truly His body.”

Here is what Pope John Paul II said in his encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) on September 14, 1998:

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

Let those who honestly seek what is true have this hope that God has given us many ways by which to know Him. We are not left to forever wonder and doubt. We can know God with certainty, and we can start by observing the beauty, order and majesty of the world God has made!

“For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse.” — Romans 1:20, WEBBE

“By natural reason man can know God with certainty, on the basis of his works.” — CCC 50

Is it really possible to love a God we cannot even see? Can we really love Him as we love another Person? A Person who can listen to us and respond to us? A Person who can know us far more intimately than any human being ever can. Read more about “To Love an Invisible God — click here.