The always mysterious “proof” of God’s existence is the challenge issued perpetually by the atheist. Inquisitive Catholic minds may be comforted by a Church Doctor’s quinquae viae, yet our hearts yearn further for an answer that helps us know God’s presence like we know the love of our friends and family. We yearn for something deeper than a proof: we yearn for a relationship that reveals God, and we find most often that it is the relationship with God that we come to cherish in our faith lives.
While his recent, globally published interview of Pope Francis is still rippling across the globe, the Pope wrote the previous week to the secular, left-leaning Italian paper La Reppublica about the Church and her relationship with non-believers. In particular, he wrote to the paper’s atheist editor, Eugenio Scalfari. Pope Francis believes that our need to love others and build relationships with all people as a Church comes from our very love of God, proving that He exists.
Fearful enough is the overwhelming amount of people who cannot believe that God exists. What should alarm us more is a growing group within the atheist community of those who abhor the idea of God, a group called “anti-theists”, who, if they wree to be convinced of the existence of a completely benevolent eternal Creator, they would hate him nevertheless. To speak of a loving God like Christopher Hitchens did when he once associated God’s omnipotence with the authoritarian police state of North Korea, represents a disturbing mental aberration and disconnect with relationships and the concept of love. As Hitchens states, Christians have “all of your work still ahead of you” to bringing him to conversion even if one proves God’s existence to him scientifically. If we could verify God’s existence as absolute truth while correcting the mental aberration that resists infinite and perfect love all in one act, we would be wielding the greatest power of conversion that God himself can give us.
Francis first stirred great media controversy when he gave atheists the one admittance that a Catholic would fear to give any unbeliever – the permission of conscience.
Given that – and this is fundamental – God’s mercy has no limits if he who asks for mercy does so in contrition and with a sincere heart, the issue for those who do not believe in God is in obeying their own conscience. In fact, listening and obeying it, means deciding about what is perceived to be good or to be evil. The goodness or the wickedness of our behavior depends on this decision.
Pope Francis, backed up by the Catechism, believes we must respect the ability or inability of faith in God as a a gift from Him, and it would be far worse for someone who is not able to truly believe in God to offend theists and God by feigning faith. For Francis, the atheist should be far closer to someone experiencing “spiritual dryness” than someone who seeks to destroy the Church, though differences remain between them. People should retort that the atheist needs to develop his or her relationship with God in order to see the belief and – within the pages of this secular newspaper, answering the genuine concerns of an atheist – the pope says just that.
To start, I would not speak about, not even for those who believe, an “absolute” truth, in the sense that absolute is something detached, something lacking any relationship. Now, the truth is a relationship! This is so true that each of us sees the truth and expresses it, starting from oneself: from one’s history and culture, from the situation in which one lives, etc. This does not mean that the truth is variable and subjective. It means that it is given to us only as a way and a life. Was it not Jesus himself who said: “I am the way, the truth, the life”? In other words, the truth is one with love, it requires humbleness and the willingness to be sought, listened to and expressed. Therefore we must understand the terms well and perhaps, in order to avoid the oversimplification of absolute contraposition, reformulate the question.
The Pope admonishes scientific rationality as the sole path to understanding God, and sees the experience of God’s love as the true pillar of belief.. Ours is a living, breathing relationship with Christ. We adore Christ through the Eucharist, spread his living word, and carry out His love. The atheist needs less debate and more relationship. This isn’t to make some outrageous stereotype that atheists are all lonely people who don’t know the meaning of relationship. It is far from it, for some of my atheist friends have been the most loyal and kindhearted friends I have known. We must point to such examples of love as the evidence and proof of God in their lives. Logic and reason work for understanding truth in its rational, absolute sense, but Francis directs us away from that calling. An atheist tells you that God is not real? Buy him a drink, and learn more about his family, his interests, and his deepest needs as a human being. Or – as Pope Francis does – answer his questions, not with distant scorn, but with caring and openness to further discussion. The most important paragraph of Francis’s long letter may have been the closing one:
Dear Dr. Scalfari, here I end these reflections of mine, prompted by what you wanted to tell and ask me. Please accept this as a tentative and temporary reply, but sincere and hopeful, together with the invitation that I made to walk a part of the path together. Believe me, in spite of its slowness, the infidelity, the mistakes and the sins that may have and may still be committed by those who compose the Church, it has no other sense and aim if not to live and witness Jesus: He has been sent by Abbà “to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (Luke 4: 18-19).
With brotherly love,
Francesco
Pope Francis avoids the encyclical style in this op-ed letter. He intends to be writing to one person only, and that is the editor, Dr. Scalfari. He seeks, with brotherly love, to build a friendship with a man who probably has a good idea of friendship already. The Pope, however, will build this friendship with one major quality that is inescapable for the socialist unbeliever Scalfari: that the pope, with every word, action, and deed of unconditional love, will point Scalfari to Christ and to the beliefs of the Church. This will be done in such a way that Scalfari will be unable to ignore the joy and love the Church can bring, even if his conscience may forever bar him from confessing openly a belief in God.
Pope Francis didn’t write some rational, impersonal proof of God’s existence. We are shown, like a great story, the growth of a relationship that has every potential for conversion. Let us write such stories with all people who disagree with the Church – atheists, gay rights activists, pro-choice activists, and many others – and prove God and the Church’s humble righteousness in ways far more beautiful than the philosophers ever have.
Note: This was written before Brandon Vogt posted his great article on this site on a very direct proof for God’s existence. Let the love of God and the logical rationality for His existence work together like a pair of lungs to prove His existence.
