Father Augustine Clark – The Fundamentals of Faith

Talk 1: The Existence of God.

This is the fourth time I’ve given Lent talks here at Annunciation. In 2022 I spoke about the Eucharist, in 2023 it was the Gospels, and 2024 Morality, particularly issues in Medical Ethics. Last year I missed because I was giving a retreat in another parish, but I’m glad to be here again and I will speak on each Wednesday in March at 11:15. You’ll remember that in the past many Florida parishes had an annual Parish Mission. Religious orders like the Passionists, or Redemptorists or Franciscans would send trained priests from up North to cover the weekend Masses, to hear confessions, and to give three or four talks. Of course, it was hardly a great sacrifice for them to come down here in the winter! Now, with the shortage of priests, Parish Missions have almost disappeared, but I know Father Matthew is very keen that this parish should still offer education and inspiration.

Lent has traditionally been a time not only for fasting, prayer and almsgiving, but also for instruction. In the first centuries of the Church catechumens who were preparing for baptism at Easter received an intense preparation during Lent, in particular having the mysteries of the Creed and the Our Father explained to them. The catechetical talks of great saints like Ambrose, Augustine and John Chrysostom have survived, and we suspect that not only the catechumens heard them but those who were already baptized would go along to get a refresher course in the basics of their faith. Sadly, modern Catholics are not as well instructed as they used to be. Some of you had the guidance of religious brothers and nuns who took you through the old Baltimore Catechism with the help of an occasional beating if needs be; but Catholics raised in the seventies, eighties and nineties are not so sure what they believe. Even so, modern people still have enquiring minds, and I’ve always felt that they deserve to have the opportunity to learn more. I intend to speak for about twenty-five minutes, half an hour at the most, and then we’ll have a few minutes for questions if you have any – and if I can answer them.

This year of 2026, an important year for America as we celebrate 250 years of existence, follows on from one of the regular Jubilee Years which the Church keeps every twenty-five years. I went to Rome for the first time in the Holy Year of 1975 and saw Pope Paul VI; I was 24 at that time and three years later I became a Catholic. Pope Francis chose to center the latest Holy Year around the virtue of hope because human beings are distinctive in being able to look towards the future; and that means they simply cannot live without hope. We saw that during the year when Covid was at its worst; even in the most difficult days, when schools and churches and businesses were closed, when people were dying and we had very little understanding of the virus, we still hoped that it would end; and some of you, or your parents, may have come through even more difficult times, like war and tyranny, when, in spite of suffering, you never lost hope that peace and freedom could come. And yet, in the present age, many people have almost lost hope. As Pope Francis pointed out: “Often we come across people who are discouraged, pessimistic and cynical about the future, as if nothing could possibly bring them happiness”. Tragically, they have become hopeless. But Saint Paul is insistent that we Christians are not like those “who have no hope” (1 Th 4:13); rather, our “hope does not disappoint” (Rm 5:5), does not let us down, because it is founded on our belief in God. We Christians must live as Pilgrims of Hope, and, as Saint Peter has said, that means that you should “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope” (1 Pet 3:15).

What is the reason for your hope? Why are you, as I imagine most of you are, believers rather than atheists? Well, these talks are designed to help you think, to help you use the gift of intelligence, by confronting you with the most basic of religious questions, and today the question of the existence of God. It was actually Pope John Paul II who asked Catholics to concentrate on the person of God the Father in 1999, the last year before the Holy Year of 2000 and the third millennium. He spoke then of a crisis of civilisation in which the western world had become highly developed from the material point of view but was “inwardly impoverished by its tendency to forget God or to keep him at a distance” (TMA, 52). And before that, in 1998, the Pope had issued an encyclical called Faith and Reason, challenging people to use their minds to discover the meaning of life. Personally, I’ve always been interested in this area which we call the Philosophy of Religion and I used to teach college-level classes in it. Back then, some of the students would try to provoke me and say “Father, if you die and then find out that there is no God, you’re going to look like a complete idiot”. They were well aware that the life of a priest entails certain sacrifices. But I’d always reply that if you are a betting man, it makes sense to presume that God exists. If he does exist, and you have been a believer, it might do you some good before the throne of judgement. If he doesn’t exist, you will never know and will certainly have nothing to lose when you die. (You can look up “Pascal’s Wager” for a similar argument).

Now, the fact that all of you are here leads me to believe that you are betting people as well and think you’re onto a winner, even if it’s no longer the favourite. So do not be afraid to ask why you believe in God. Part of your answer, surely, will be to do with Jesus Christ, the unique revelation of the Father. But to acknowledge him as Son of God we need to have some idea of God already if we are not going to put the cart before the horse. That’s why Pope John Paul in his encyclical pointed to the most fundamental questions: Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? He wanted people to take on the task of pursuing the truth, instead of settling for superficial and easy answers.

If you don’t want to recognise the possibility of a God, you can simply refuse to ask the big questions. That was the position of the distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell – although I would suggest it is an unworthy position for a philosopher, or anyone who is interested in the truth. In 1948 Bertrand Russell had a famous debate on the B.B.C. radio (the equivalent of N.P.R. here, although I don’t think they would put on a debate as entertainment these days). He was matched up against a Jesuit writer and thinker, Father Frederick Copleston, and they were meant to discuss the most basic of all questions “Why are we here?” Russell said there is no point in asking for an explanation of our existence and the existence of the universe. He said “You’re looking for something which can’t be got, and which one ought not to expect to get”, and he concluded “The universe is just there, and that’s all”. I think that’s a cop out, an evasion. We do want to know why the universe is there. Nothing is “just there”. The tendency to ask “Why?” is one of the most basic human instincts.  It’s what makes children so annoying; and they soon learn that the answer “Because Mummy says so” is not wholly satisfying.

The question “Why?” is an important one and it can be asked at various different levels, as has been pointed out by the Dominican philosopher Father Brian Davies.

He says, imagine you wake up in the morning and find a puddle outside your bedroom door. You want to know why it’s there. Most of us are satisfied with finding out the immediate cause: the roof is leaking, or someone has dropped a glass of water, or the dog is responsible. Scientists may go on to ask a deeper “why?” question: why is there a flat sheet of water rather than a block or pile of it? They will be interested in temperature and pressure and surface tension. In other words, they are investigating the physics and chemistry of puddles. But there is a deeper level yet, which too many people ignore. Why is there a puddle at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? And that “why?” question, if it’s asked honestly, leads us inevitably to God. St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in about 1250, put it this way. Nothing in this world is necessary, even we ourselves. The world may have been a little different without us, but contrary to our beliefs none of us are essential; all of us are might-not-have-beens. Just like us, the world, planet earth, is not an essential part of the universe. And, said St. Thomas, even the universe itself is not essential: it might never have existed. So why is there something rather than nothing? The fact that the universe does exist starts us questioning, and our reason leads us to the conclusion that there must be one being which is necessary, which is not a might have been, and that we call God.

That’s why so much modern scientific writing about the universe is frustrating and, I think, dishonest. Scientists are pretty much agreed that the universe had a beginning, that is, the moment when time and space and all we know started off – they call it the Big Bang. Modern measurements place this moment at approximately 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe. Scientists are more and more confident about describing the moments immediately after the Big Bang. And I mean immediately after: they reckon to have got down to one ten million trillionth of a second from the beginning. But when you ask them what happened at the very beginning, they get all vague. “In the beginning” they will say “there was nothing – no time, space, matter, or energy. And then there was a quantum fluctuation or a quark shift from which the universe sprang”. They end up inventing language because they’re trying to disguise the fact that what they are saying isn’t reasonable. First they tell you there was nothing and then suddenly there is something. That doesn’t make sense: you can’t get anything from nothing. Either there is nothing or there is something, and if there’s something then that needs explaining. I want to know why the quantum started fluctuating – why the Big Bang exploded in the first place! At that moment the scientist is silent. But the believer can point to God.

What I’m saying is that things don’t happen without a cause. You may know the story about the atheist speaker addressing a crowd (at Hyde Park Corner). He was just telling his audience that the universe had got going on its own and there was no need for God, when his speech was interrupted by a rotten tomato. “Who threw that?” he demanded angrily. A cheeky voice from the back of the crowd replied “No-one threw it – it threw itself”. As I said, we don’t believe that things just happen. For me, then, the start of the universe, the fact that we are here at all, gives me reason to believe that there is a God. It is easier to believe that God created something out of nothing than to believe that nothing created something out of nothing.

But the sheer existence of the universe, the origin of the universe, is not the only reason for believing in God. In addition to its beginning, there are aspects of the development of the universe which suggest that there is someone in charge. In the 18^th century, as scientists discovered the laws of physics, the workings of the planetary system, and the mysteries of the human body, they described God as an engineer who had designed a great machine. That’s rather an impersonal image but it is true that the universe demonstrates order at every level, from the galaxies to the atoms in a grain of salt. Listen to the famous physicist Stephen Hawking (1942-2018): “If the density of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been greater by one part in a thousand billion, the universe would have re-collapsed after ten years. On the other hand, if the density of the universe at that time had been less by the same amount, the universe would have been essentially empty. …How was it that the initial density of the universe was chosen so carefully? Maybe there is some reason why the universe should have precisely the critical density?” “Maybe there is some reason…” he wrote. Stephen Hawking called himself an atheist but his own theory and his own words seem to point in the direction of a creator God who guides the universe.

That’s why Catholics don’t get upset about the theory of evolution. We can see there has been development over the ages. Human beings have evolved, like many other species, but surely there has been some guidance behind that process. I suppose it could be pure chance that things have turned out right. If you throw a pack of cards on the floor enough times they will come out in order eventually, and it may just be that we happen to be on the winning planet. But our world is orderly day after day, year after year, and every year that passes makes it less likely that the order in it can be put down to chance. As an Indian scientist has said: “The chances that life just occurred on earth are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747”. To believe in chance is not reasonable. To believe in a creator God, who has made the universe and cares for its development, makes much more sense.

Pope Saint John Paul II was himself a philosopher and he encouraged all of us not to be afraid of the ultimate questions, to look at our world and see its deeper meaning. He wrote that we should “accept the world as a gift, discovering in all things the reflection of the Creator and seeing in every person his living image”. It may be that we humans now have the capacity to destroy the world, but if you stop and look there is beauty and order at every level of existence – and naturalists and other scientists are constantly discovering more. We didn’t make that order. It’s a sign of intelligent design, a reflection of the love of God.