Knowledge of the existence of God

Question 1

What is empiricism?

Answer 1

Empiricism is a way of knowing based on the five senses.

Question 2

How can God be known, according to the Christians?

Answer 2

God is understood to be unavailable to the five senses because God is not physical. For people who believe that the only real knowledge is that which can be discovered through empirical experience, which means that God cannot be known at all, perhaps even does not exist at all and questions about God could be seen as meaningless questions. Christians do not accept that empirical experience and logical reasoning are the only methods of gaining knowledge available to humanity.

Question 3

What did Bonaventura believe about how we can know God?

Answer 3

Bonaventura believed that the human mind has at least 3 different ways of knowing, to which he referred using the analogy of an eye to represent ‘different ways of ‘seeing’.

Question 4

What are the different ways of seeing?

Answer 4

Bonaventura suggested:

• the ‘eye of the flesh’ which is the way of knowing that incorporates sense perception: the empiricism of science. This eye is how we gain knowledge about the physical world.
• the ‘eye of reason’, which is the way of knowing that lets us work out mathematical and philosophical truths through the use of logic
• the ‘eye of contemplation’ which is a way of knowing which allows us to come to a knowledge of God by going beyond the scope of both sense experience and reason and gaining knowledge of God through faith.

Question 5

What is the analogy that Polkinghorne uses to understand the relationship between faith and logic?

Answer 5

Polkinghorne uses the analogy of the binoculars to help understand the relationship between faith and logic.

Question 6

What does Polkinghorne mean in relation to the binoculars, the two lenses?

Answer 6

Polkinghorne means that the two lenses of faith and logic aren’t in conflict with each other, but instead when used together give us a much clearer picture.Both eyes need to work together to give a complete picture in all its dimensions. He argues that it is foolish of some religious people to ignore the discoveries of science, and equally foolish of some scientists to close one eye and refuse to engage with the possibilities of God.

Question 7

What did Robert Boyle say about the Bible and science?

Answer 7

Robert Boyle said that the words of the Bible and the discoveries of science were seen as complementary, each enhancing the other as means by which people could deepen their understanding and knowledge of God. He says that theology is like ‘two great books’, the natural world and the Bible, which were both created by the same ‘author’.

Question 8

What does Aquinas say about knowing God exists?

Answer 8

Aquinas wrote about how we could use our logic (or reason) to work out that God exists. He spoke of the laws in place across the universe and how natural law guided our actions towards God’s creation.

Question 9

What does Richard Swinburne argue about how we can know that God exists?

Answer 9

Richard Swinburne argues that we can conclude that God exists because there are so many signs of order in the universe. Creation was not by chance.

Question 10

What is natural theology?

Answer 10

Natural Theology is the idea that when we look to creation God is revealed to us and this is all the proof that we need for his existence.

Question 11

How is this idea backed up in the psalms?

Answer 11

The idea is expressed clearly in the psalms when it says:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place”

Question 12

What is meant by an innate human sense of the divine?

Answer 12

The Roman philosopher Cicero and others since, have noted that in all cultures people have had a sense that there is an infinite being who is in control of the universe.

Culture often develops religious beliefs which are similar. Perhaps, then, we are all born with a sense for God, a recognition of the existence of this infinite being.

Question 13

What does Genesis 2:7 suggest about our innate sense of the divine?

Answer 13

In Genesis 2:7, God breathes into Adam with his own breath suggesting that there might be a ‘spark’ of divinity in each human life, which could in turn be interpreted to mean that there is something in human beings which is designed to seek and respond to God.

Question 14

What did John Calvin write about our innate sense of the divine?

Answer 14

Calvin wrote that knowledge of God through this inbuilt sense of the divine is so straightforward that it can be gained by anyone ‘even the most unlearned and ignorant people’.

Question 15

What is the ‘sensus divinitas’?

Answer 15

Calvin claimed in his writings known as ‘Institutes’ that we have a ‘sensus divinitas’ which could be translated as as ‘seed of divinity’ or an innate sense of God; he wrote:

‘There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity’

Question 16

What does the sensus divinitas mean for Calvin?

Answer 16

For Calvin, the sensus divinitas means that everyone is aware of God, and so everyone is aware of their sinful nature and the need to live in fear of God’s punishment. Human sin can cloud people’s understanding of God.

Question 17

What does Calvin write about the natural beauty of the universe?

Answer 17

Calvin writes about the natural beauty of the universe as a ‘sort of mirror’ of God. The creation reflects the nature of God in its beauty and orderliness. Calvin is careful to show that God is not nature itself, but that nature is a means by which people can learn something about God.

People can understand God’ s power and eternity, and God’s care for humanity, his justice and mercy, through observing the natural world with their senses and contemplating it with their reason.

Question 18

What is the ‘epistemic distance’ between people and God?

Answer 18

People think that the ‘epistemic distance’ between people and God is attributed to God himself, deliberately making himself obscure to people in order to preserve their free will and allow them to choose whether or not to have a relationship with him.

However, for Calvin, the epistemic distance is created by human beings. God has made it impossible for people to ignore him and his will unless they quite deliberately choose to do so, and if they are unable to recognise God in the world then this is their own fault.

Question 20

What is immediate revelation?

Answer 20

Immediate revelation is God directly revealing his message to someone. For example, giving Moses the 10 commandments or Jesus speaking to the disciples.

Some people may feel that God speaks directly to them.

Question 21

What is mediate revelation?

Answer 21

Mediate revelation is when the message has been given to someone else and then relayed forward e.g Moses telling the people the 10 commandments of Jesus’ disciples preaching his message.

Some Christians would regard the Bible as mediate revelation whereas some would believe it to be immediate (God speaking directly to them).

Question 22

According to Christian teaching how can people gain knowledge through faith?

Answer 22

According to Christian teaching people are able to have knowledge of God through faith because of God’s grace: God gives them the gift of faith, and also sustains this faith and strengthens it through his Holy Spirit.

Question 23

Why is the Acts account interesting?

Answer 23

The Acts account is interesting because St Paul is using natural theology to convince his audience that the true God exists. He reasons with them that the false idols they have created are made from the materials given to us by the one true God. For example, gold, silver or stone.

How can you worship an idol made out of something given to us by a higher power? It doesn’t make sense.

Question 24

Do we have an innate sense of morality? And does this justify how we have knowledge of God?

Answer 24

Yes. Thinkers such as Butler, Newman, and C.S.Lewis claim that we all have feelings of guilt when we do something wrong, even if no one sees us, and we feel satisfied when we know we have done the right thing.

They argue that this ‘inner voice’ of conscience is evidence not only of the existence of God but of a God who makes moral demands of his people and wants them to follow his commandments.

Question 25

What’s the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘revealed’ theology?

Answer 25

A distinction has been made in Christian thought between ‘natural’ and ‘revealed’ theology, where natural theology is about gaining knolwedge of God through the powers of human reason and observation, while revealed theology is about God choosing to reveal himself to humans directly, for example through religious experience and through scripture. Many Christians believe that both of these can gain reliable knowledge of God and that natural theology should be rejected.

Question 26

How does the Church itself continue God’s work?

Answer 26

God chose Israel to be his special nation and kingdom of priests at the time of Moses and Christians believe that the Church exists to continue this role as God’s representative, with a mission to spread the Christian message and to set an example of holiness. The Church is seen as the body of Christ, continuing the work done by Jesus when he lived on the earth; so the Church can reveal God’s working through the Holy Spirit. The Church is seen as an important authority in understanding the teachings of the Bible and showing how they are to be applied in Christian life.

Question 27

How can the Bible reveal God to us?

Answer 27

The Bible is a source through which God can be known. The Bible contains ‘wisdom literature’, in the Psalms, Proverbs and elsewhere. This is understood to be collections of revealed wise insights, passed on through generations, about all kinds of subjects of concern to humanity. Some people point out what they see as inconsistencies in the Bible or factual errors, and argue that the Bible cannot be considered as an infallible source of revealed truth but has to be interpreted and sometimes treated as myth.

Question 28

Can natural theology and revealed theology work together?

Answer 28

For many Christians, natural theology and revealed theology work well together and support each other. Natural theology provides people with a sound and rational basis for faith, and revealed theology supplies the details of that faith. Also, natural theology provides an opportunity for people to share discussion about God, whatever their personal beliefs about what has been revealed; everyone is human and everyone has access to the natural world, and is able to consider and draw conclusions from this.

Question 29

Natural theology and revealed theology cannot work together

Answer 29

For some, however, natural and revealed theology are not seen as mutually supportive, but revealed theology is understood to be the only means by which God can be known and, therefore, only those who believe in that revelation consider themselves to have any knowledge of God.

Question 30

What did Barth believe about if we could know God through reason alone?

Answer 30

Barth believed that it was a form of arrogance to imagine that fallibke human reason could lead people into any knowledge of God. Perhaps the fact that Barth was witnessing the rise of Nazism influenced his views reinforcing his Protestant conviction that human nature was hopelessly flawed and could not be relied upon.

Barth believed that revelation only happens when God decides. People are clearly incapable of working out right and wrong by themselves, and need God’s commandments as revealed in the Bible. We have finite capacities to form concepts and to understand, and we have a sinful nature, so without the help of God we are never going to reach knowledge through our own efforts, we will simply create distorted and misleading ideas about God. Barth also argued that attempts at natural theology are unnecessary as God has revealed himself perfectly and finally in Jesus. There is no need to try and work out God for ourselves when we have already been given the truth.

Barth believed that God was ultimately revealed in Christ and, therefore, for Barth there was no truth to be found in other world religions, except where they happened to be saying the same things as Christianity. Only Christ could break through the barrier of human sin to reveal God, and so any attempt to understand God without Christ was bound to be wrong.

Question 31

Why do defenders of natural theology criticise Barth’s view?

Answer 31

Defenders of natural theology argue that Barth’s view is too extreme. If human reason is given no part to play in the knowledge of God, then people have no way of judging between true and false beliefs. One person might claim that God had disclosed truth to him, and another might make a similar claim, but the two ‘revealed truths’ might be contradictory: how would it be possible to know whether either was right or wrong unless human reason were allowed a role?

It could also be argued that the Bible does suggest that humans can gain natural knowledge of God. If the Bible is revealed by God, and that revelation from God suggests we can learn truths naturally, then perhaps both natural and revealed theology are helpful.

Question 32

What is then one of the problems of natural theology?

Answer 32

One of the problems of natural theology, then, is that human reason is too limited to reach an understanding of God. But a further problem comes from an understanding of the nature of God as being beyond reason - not irrational, but non-rational. Whatever rational justifications can be given for concluding that God must be like this or like that, the difficulty still remains that God is not something that can be grasped and understood through logical reasoning. Arguments for the existence of God based on reason are not able to lesd people to certain knowledge of God.

Question 33

Is faith a sufficient reason for belief in God’s existence?

Answer 33

According to Richard Dawkins, faith does not just provide insufficient reason for belief, but is actually harmful, encouraging people to be lazy in their thinking and avoid trying to reach any kind of certainty. Dawkins is a scientist who is particularly concerned with what he sees as religion’s tendency to avoid dealing with gaps in human knowledge by describing them as a mystery, things which can be dismissed by saying ‘God did it’ and claiming faith is all that is required while evidence is unnecessary.

Question 34

What did Dawkins say about faith?

Answer 34

Faith, for Dawkins, is an insufficient reason for believing anything. In his view it is equivalent to saying ‘I have just decided to believe this on the basis of very little evidence and now that I have decided, I refuse to think about it further’. Dawkins likens beleif in God to beliefs in the tooth fairy or belief that there is a teapot orbiting Mars - these beliefs cannot be conclusively disproved but there is no evidence to support them, and therefore no good reason to commit to them.

Question 35

What did Hume say about faith?

Answer 35

David Hume claimed ‘A wise man… proportions his belief to the evidence’. Hume made this claim in the context of his discussion on miracles; his argument was that rather than allowing faith or superstition or anything else to cloud our judgement, we should look at the evidence before us and decide on that basis what would be appropriate to believe.

Question 36

What do others argue about faith?

Answer 36

Others argue, however, that sufficient reason for believeing something does not have to depend solely on the kind of evidence that is available to sense experience and to rational judgement. These are many aspects of life where we have insufficient empirical or rational evidence on which to base our decisions. We cannot know with any certainty whether we are free to make our own decisions or whether we are entirely determined by external factors; we cannot know whether the world we think we inhabit is ‘real’ or whether it is all illusory.

Question 37

What do most Christians argue about faith?

Answer 37

Most Christians would argue that faith is essential for belief in God, but they might question the idea that it is ‘sufficient’, in other words, they might question the view that faith is all that is necessary. A Christian would argue that faith is not held in a vacuum, but builds on knowledge. The ‘fact’ that we exist at all, that we live in a beautiful and ordered world, that we experience love, that we have moral awareness, that we have a desire to discover truth, would be used by a Christian to underpin faith. Belief in the claims of Christianty, they would argue, is not like belief in a teapot orbiting Mars, because there is no knowledge to support belief in the teapot and yet there is plenty of knowledge which could support belief in God. The knowledge that can be gained through sense experience and reason does not provide conclusive evidence, which is why faith is necessary.

Question 38

What do we base some of our feelings on?

Answer 38

We base some of our feelings on emotion: people buy houses because they ‘feel right’. Some of our beliefs are based on memory, or on intuition. Perhaps faith is also an appropriate basis for taking a position, especially on those questions which cannot be answered through science and logic.

Question 39

What did Augustine say about the Fall and our knolwedge of God?

Answer 39

Augustine argued that Original Sin prevented people from being able to know God because they had become corrupt in their will and could never be holy enough to approach God through their own efforts.

Question 40

What does Aquinas say about knowledge of God?

Answer 40

Other thinkers, however, such Thomas Aquinas, have argued that God gave us the ability to use our senses and our reason for a purpose, as well as giving us revealed knowledge of God, and that both can be used. We should use revealed theology to guide us when we use our reason to work out natural knowledge of God, but both can be used together to complement each other. Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’ of discovering the existence of God through reason have become an important part of Christian arguments for the existence of God.

Question 41

Is natural theology of God the same as revealed knowledge of God?

Answer 41

Natural knowledge of God has been distinguished from revealed knowledge of God in terms of the ways in which people have have arrived at such knowledge. Natural knowledge is reached through reason, and revealed knowledge is reached through faith. Nevertheless, if it is argued (as Aquinas did) that God can reveal truths to us through our reason, and that our reason was given to us that we might learn more about God, then the distinction between the two becomes blurred.

Many Christians would still argue that there is a difference between the kinds of knowledge that can be gained through reason and through revelation. They argue that beliefs about the beginning of the world and the creation of humanity could not have been worked out with reason or known about through sense experience: similarly, beliefs about the nature of Christ, the Trinity of God and life after death had to be revealed and are not available to natural knowledge.

Question 42

Is belief in God’s existence sufficient to put one’s trust in him?

Answer 42

Some people might argue that they believe in God but that their experience of evil and suffering in the world leads them to conclude that God is not to be trusted. They might argue that God seems to have favourites, or that although they believe in God, because some tragic event has happened, they do not want to trust him or have a relationship with him.

It could be argued, however, that those who believe in the likely existence of God, and those who believe there is a God but not one they wish to worship, have misunderstood the nature of God. Anselm expressed the view that God exists necessarily. God is not like a contingent thing, which might or might not exist, where there could be degrees of probability about its existence. There is no ‘might not exist’ about God, because God exists in such a way that ‘might’ and ‘might not’ do not apply. If, therefore, someone believes on the basis of reason that there is probably a God, then that person has missed the point, and is believeing in something contingent rather than in God. Similarly, Anselm might argue, if someone believes in ‘something out there’ but also does not believe that such a being is worthy of worship or is worthy of complete trust, then that person has not understood that God is ‘that than which no greater being can be conceived’ but is instead imagining a much lesser being and then rejecting this fiction instead.

Belief in the existence of God, in a rational way, requires the addition of a ‘leap of faith’ in order to place trust in God; however, if Anselm is right, then if a person understands what God is, belief in God cannot lead anywhere other than trust in him.

Question 43

“Faith is all that is necessary to gain knowledge of God”

Answer 43

• arguments against Dawkins say that faith is enough
• Anselm says putting our trust in God can require a leap of faith
• Innate sense of God. Faith that drives our knowledge.
• According to Christian teaching people are able to have knowledge of God through faith because of God’s grace: God gives them the gift of faith, and alsosustains this faith and strengthens it through his Holy Spirit.

Question 44

“Faith is NOT all that is necessary to gain knowledge of God”

Answer 44

• Richard Dawkins say faith is weak and can’t be backed up
• Christians would say that you need sense experience and reason as well.
• Faith needs knowledge first. Faith builds on knolwedge.
• The Bible can guide us to knowledge of God.
• Hume said ‘A wise man… proportions his belief to the evidence’. You need evidence of faith
• Faith is just a starting point. Everyone’s given God’s grace/ the gift of faith but some people stray away from God so need knowledge and sense experience to build upon it.
• We all have sensus divinitas but we can reject it - Calvin.
• We need all three eyes to gain knowledge of God.
• Bonaventura used the 3 eyes. With the eye of contemplation he said that faith is complementary.
• Polkinghorne used the binoculars to say that faith and religion and science all work together to get a clear image of God.
• We know God exists but don’t want a close relationship with him.