AS Dr Colledge (CL 21/4/13) has stated, recent letters in the Opinion pages have discussed the effectiveness of philosophical arguments concerning God’s existence.
The First Vatican Council (1870) affirmed: “The One True God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty by the light of human reason from things that are made” (Denziger 2004).
Consequently human beings have the capacity to know the one true personal God who made the universe.
The subjective means of obtaining this knowledge is human reason in the condition of fallen nature.
The source of this knowledge is the world, bodily and spiritual, of created things. Such knowledge can be certain and not merely probable.
Both the Old and New testaments teach that a personal God can be known from reflection on nature.
Thus the Israelites were told that through the grandeur and beauty of creatures, we may, by analogy, contemplate their Author (Wisdom 13:5).
St Paul expounds the same theme (Romans 1:20).
In a lecture entitled “The World As I See It” delivered in Amsterdam in 1934, the Jewish scientist Professor Albert Einstein declared that to a scientist “the harmony of natural law reveals the intelligence and superiority that compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection”.
VALENTINE GALLAGHER
Arncliffe, NSW
