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.

When Pope John Paul II wrote his encyclical Faith and Reason in 1998 one of the fundamental questions he asked Christians to examine was Why is there evil? It’s a distressing question, but one which we can hardly avoid. In Lent we are preparing for the joy of Easter but we know that first we will come to Good Friday and witness the awful suffering and cruel death of an innocent man. The problem of evil is a question which torments the believer above all. Why does our loving God permit evil in his world, the world which he made and declared to be good? Isn’t God in some way responsible?

It is traditional in philosophical discussion to see the problem of evil as a trial. God is the accused. How can we defend him? How can we win for him a not guilty verdict? You probably know that lawyers are meant to defend their clients whether they are innocent or not – and if you are a lawyer, apparently it’s not a good idea to actually ask your client whether he or she committed the crime. But let’s face it. God is not an easy client. The evidence against him looks pretty bad.

First, let us be clear, a crime has been committed. Some religious groups suggest that evil is a product of the mind, that it has no objective reality, that you can wish it away. That is not the belief of Christianity or Judaism. The Bible is full of the reality of evil, and the world is no better now. No wonder people sometimes say that they’ve given up watching the T.V. news. Philosophers have traditionally distinguished between two kinds of evil: moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil involves the things humans choose to do: murder, rape, theft, the unjust crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth nearly 2000 years ago, ethnic cleansing, torture and the wars which continue at this very moment. These things are certainly not the will of God, but they happen because God has left us the freedom to choose between right and wrong. Most of the time we accept that wrong choices are a fair price to pay for freedom; we acknowledge that we humans are guilty of these crimes, not God. But even this generally accepted defence of God, which we call the Free Will Defence, seems less convincing when faced by horrors on the scale of the Jewish Holocaust. However, moral evil is not the whole story; there is also natural evil, the sufferings which cannot be blamed on the misuse of free-will: earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and disease. Those horrors, too, happen every day. Who is responsible?

The evidence looks so bleak for our client because God was on the scene of the crime. In the first talk we said that God is not only the creator of the world but is responsible for it now. Is he, then, responsible for the volcano and the lightning, for cancer and the AIDS virus? For a time, Christians seemed to have found a way to get God out of this problem. In the 18^th century a modified form of Christian belief called Deism was very popular. It was a theory that God had created the world like the designer of a complex machine, and then he set it running. It was not his fault if screws came loose and mistakes showed up at a later stage. God was seen as an absentee landlord with no responsibility for what goes on in the house he has rented out. But Deism is not the same as Theism, the orthodox belief of mainstream Christianity: we do not believe in an absent God. For us God is present and active in our world, which is the scene of the crime.

There is the further problem that we believe our God to be omnipotent, powerful in every way. Christians do not believe in a cosmic struggle between two separate and equal powers, or believe that God is limited. That would get him off the hook, but it would also mean admitting that God is not God.

Finally, and this is the most distressing part of the problem of evil, we believe that God is loving. How can we explain his lack of action to save us from suffering?

So, to take on the role of the public prosecutor, let me present you, the jury, with a swift recap of the evidence. Multiple crimes have been committed. God was at the scene of the crime, and sometimes appears to have been the only person present. He apparently had the power to stop the crime happening. And yet he acted with total indifference. St. Augustine, who did not shy away from the problem, has stated the case well:

Either God cannot abolish evil or He will not.
If he cannot then He is not all-powerful.
If he will not then He is not all-good.

Yes, even to the great philosopher saints like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, God looks guilty. More poignantly he looks guilty to the mother whose child is ill, to the earthquake victims who have lost their home, to the widower, the widow and the orphan. What, then, can we say in defence of God?  How can we answer Pope John Paul’s question Why is there evil? – and in particular explain the natural evil which does not depend on human choice. St. Augustine, having stated the problem, changed his prosecutor’s robes to take on the case for the defence. His plea on behalf of God has lasted a long time, although I think you will find it unsatisfactory these days. First of all, Augustine is very insistent that God did not create anything evil. As the Book of Genesis says, everything is good. So Augustine explains that evil is not a something (made by God) but a nothing, a lack of goodness. You will get the idea if you think of light. Light is something. You can shine a flashlight into a dark place and it takes the darkness away. But darkness is not something. It’s simply a lack of light. If you open a box, the darkness doesn’t spill out and make the room more gloomy. In other words, darkness is not something, it is a no-thing, and the same is true of evil: pain, disease, earthquakes and spots on your nose are all places where goodness is missing. But, we are bound to ask, how are these blots on the landscape possible, why is the original goodness missing? Augustine at this point brings in the free will defence; and we have to remember he was writing in about 400 AD and believed literally in the Bible. So he says the original perfection of the world began to go wrong when some of the angels – notably Lucifer – and then the first humans deliberately chose to do evil. Natural evil followed from this moral evil because humans were neglecting to look after the earth and also because God sent natural evils as the punishment for evil deeds. “All evil”, Augustine says, “is sin or the punishment of sin”. That kind of teaching has had a long-term effect on human thought, so that people ask themselves when tragedy strikes “What have I done to deserve this”? Certainly it was assumed in the Middle Ages that sickness was a punishment for sin, and if good people became ill local gossip began to suggest that they must have committed some secret sin. The point is that Augustine defends the creator by putting the whole blame on his creatures. God walks free. What is more, lest any unhappy memories of evil should survive, Augustine insisted that at the end of time all sinners will be banished to hell. Augustine seems to think of God as an accountant balancing the books: somehow a strong punishment cancels out the evil that was done; as he says: “The penalty of sin corrects the dishonour of sin”, as if a sound beating will repair the window a careless boy has broken. As I said, this explanation does not convince us quite as much as it might have convinced people in the past.

If we take the role of the prosecutor again, we will want to ask some questions of St. Augustine’s client. First, why did the angels, perfect creatures in a perfect world, choose to do wrong? Even Augustine puzzled over this, and his conclusion was that some of them had got less grace than others. But surely that places the responsibility with God again. Also, we can question Augustine’s insistence that all natural evil is a consequence of moral evil. You can see a connection sometimes: when people choose to smoke or drink excessively and then become sick. But sadly good people also suffer. In fact several writers pointed out the weakness of this kind of explanation after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. People who were in church at the time got crushed to death, while those drinking in the squares were fine: it didn’t seem to add up. And, of course, geologists were soon able to point out that there were floods and earthquakes around long before humans appeared on earth, so the link between bad human choices and divine, natural punishments was dubious.

I think St. Augustine can be said to have earned his advocate’s fee, but the jury is still out. Perhaps God is guilty for the evil in the world after all. That’s why I feel it is necessary to call in another defence lawyer, St. Irenaeus. More ancient than St. Augustine (he was writing around 200 A.D.) Irenaeus was a subtle thinker and his plea in defence of God has been revived by a number of philosophers in recent years. First, he did not believe that we were created perfect and have then fallen; rather he thought that we start from imperfection and then, painfully and gradually, need to develop. Obviously this fits in well with the theory of evolution. God gives us space for growth, a bit like a good parent who gives their child more and more freedom. Inevitably humans misuse their freedom and make mistakes, but we can learn from our mistakes and God never gives up on us. Moral evil is thus our responsibility but God is interested in what is going on. And for Irenaeus God is directly responsible for natural evil, for disease and disaster. He has put it there as a kind of assault course, to bring out the best in us, to call out from us great acts of heroism and charity. There is a recognition here that in a totally protected and comfortable world there would not be much human development. Many of you know the truth of that as parents. Sometimes you think you’d like to keep your children in cotton wool, never to let them out of the house. But deep down you know you have to expose them to physical, intellectual and emotional challenges to help them eventually become adults. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose whole career was spent helping the terminally ill, wrote: “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen”. With the grace of God, the ugly things in life can bring forth beauty. So here is a totally different defence of God. He permits evil, even to a certain extent causes it, so that we will grow up and become more complete human beings.

Now you may feel that even Irenaeus cannot get his client off scot-free. Most of us will recognise that challenge does lead to growth, but some people are crushed and diminished by their sufferings. Hasn’t God made the assault course too tough? Irenaeus insists that all is not lost. God can complete the work of maturing beyond this life, and all who turn to him for help will eventually be with him in heaven.

These philosophical explanations of evil may be able to satisfy our reason. But they don’t help much in the moment of suffering, when we face illness or have lost a loved one. As a Catholic Chaplain in local hospitals, called in day after day for emergencies, I gave the last rites to people at the end of long and fulfilling lives but also to young people who had barely lived and whose deaths brought lasting sadness to their families. That was not a time to bring out the arguments I’ve talked about with you today. The philosopher cannot touch the suffering heart, because there still seems to be too great a distance between the omnipotent God and us who feel the pain here below. I’m reminded of the visit of Pope Francis to the Philippines in 2015. On January 18, at an audience for university students in Manila, Pope Francis heard a short presentation from two street children. They talked about the poverty, abuse and crime they’d seen in their short lives; and at the end the twelve-year-old girl asked “Why does God allow this kind of suffering, even when kids are not to blame?”; and she broke down in tears. The Pope embraced her, sharing her anguish, and he abandoned his official speech to try to respond to her question. He pointed to the way Jesus ministered to his people. He did not meet people’s needs in a worldly way; he didn’t just stop for a few moments to hand out money or material things. Rather, the Pope said, Christ took the time to listen and to sympathize with his people. “Jesus in the Gospel cried,” Pope Francis said. “He cried for his dead friend, he cried in his heart for the family that had lost its child…he was moved to tears, to compassion, when he saw the crowds without a shepherd.” It is only when we learn to cry with the suffering, he explained, that we can begin to understand: “Let us learn how to weep, as this little girl has shown us today. Let us not forget this lesson”.

In times of anguish the only comfort is our faith that Jesus and his people, the Church, suffer alongside us. We believe that in Jesus God knew suffering, felt rejection, pain and death. On the cross he even knew that feeling which may come to most of us at some time, the feeling of being abandoned by God: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – that is the cry of the suffering. Even so, it is also the cry of faith. When we question God, when we accuse him, we are still acknowledging him, and out of our despair and lack of understanding trust may emerge, as it did for Jesus: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” he said at the end. In times of trouble, that may be all we can say. It is enough.

For me, one of the strangest times in the year is the daytime, the morning and afternoon, of Holy Saturday. There is no daily Mass. Christ is in the tomb and the disciples have run away. Although I am a priest, on this day of waiting I have to live as if God is dead. So let us, just this once as we approach that strange day before Easter, allow the atheists out to play. Let us listen to them trying to explain to us not just that God is dead, but that he has never existed at all. Of course I’m taking a risk in doing this. If you are convinced, you’ll be writing to the Bishop straight after my talk and asking for your Catholic Appeal money back.

We are theists, and Theism is belief in God. Atheism is the opposite: the conviction, based on reasoned argument, that there is no God, that this world is all there is. It is actually quite rare because most people have not really pursued reasoned argument in either direction. When pressed, most people will admit they simply don’t know; we call them agnostics. The atheist’s task is not an easy one because religion is still very popular, especially in the developing world where the population is still growing. A friend of mine was the Papal Nuncio in Sri Lanka. He told me that one of the main problems they had on feast days when a big public Mass was celebrated was that everyone wanted Holy Communion – not just Catholics, but Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists as well. The people just love any kind of religion. In America we know that since the pandemic there has been a decline in religious practice, but surveys report that most people – over 80% – still believe in God. So the atheist has to explain where this sense of God comes from. There are two main approaches. Some suggest the idea of God is a mild form of madness, largely favoured by people of inadequate mind. The other approach is that religion is a cunning way of getting people to behave themselves, a way of getting them to accept the rules and restraints which a successful society needs.

We will look at both these types of atheism, but first I want to introduce you to the Granddaddy of all atheists, Ludwig Feuerbach. He lived from 1804 to 1872 and his portrait shows the kind of man you would imagine a German philosopher to be – a self-important air, massive beard, and a thoughtful, slightly bad-tempered, frown. Rather strangely his major work became known in England because it was translated by the lady novelist Mary Ann Evans, better known to us as George Eliot. Feuerbach was convinced that the idea of God was a human invention. His thought can be summed up in two sentences. First, “What man is in need of he makes his God”. By this he meant that we tend to be frightened of life, and so we need the comforting thought that life has a purpose, that there is someone in control. The consequence is that our imagination creates a God figure who will look after us and make us happy. That is why the idea of God has sprung up all over the world: people everywhere are needy and want reassurance. But Feuerbach went on to explain why people have different visions of God. He wrote “What man wishes to be he makes his God”. We imagine this God to be a perfect version of everything we would like to be – perfectly good, perfectly intelligent, perfectly loving. In other words, we project all the best human qualities onto this imaginary superhuman being beyond this world. The different gods of different religions will have a lot in common, but Feuerbach pointed out that you will also get a certain amount of local variation because different cultures will not have the same ideas about what is most noble in humanity. Thus in the Mediterranean world, where they know what life is about, they had a god of wine, Bacchus. The ancient Germanic tribes, who valued the virtues of a strong warrior, had violent warrior gods like Thor and Odin. And in India, where an elephant used to be man’s best friend, not surprisingly you get an elephant god, Ganesh. In that sense religion is comforting, gives people a common identity, and is pretty harmless. However, Feuerbach thought that this projection of good values onto an outside being had left humans with a lack of self-esteem, feeling weak and sinful, and so he declared it was time to get rid of the imaginary God and discover our own true value.

Feuerbach was an important influence on the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who worked in Vienna and then at the end of his life in London, after being expelled by the Nazis. Freud also saw religion as a comfort, a variant of the obsessional behaviour which is quite common when people are feeling stress. You know the kind of thing: people go and check the gas or electricity is switched off three or four times before leaving the house, even though they really know they’ve done it already. In the same way, Freud thought people prayed or performed religious rituals to give them a sense of controlling the world. In addition, Freud developed an amazing story to explain why God is so often thought of as a Father figure. Remember, he was writing at a time when people were discovering the first human remains – Neanderthal man and so on. Freud imagined the very first human group, which he called the “primal horde”. In this group there was one dominant male. The sons respected this alpha male because he offered protection, but as they grew up they became more and more frustrated because he kept all the females for himself. Finally, the sons rebelled, killed their father and ate him. The trouble was they immediately felt guilty about what they had done, and every time they wanted to hurt someone, or eat another human being, or have sex, the guilt came flooding back. And because the Father was gone, he became an image in their minds – a God. Freud thought that all humanity had inherited this guilt from the primal crime, so even now we have mixed feelings about God. We need him but we fear him, and we feel guilty if we follow our own instincts and act disobediently. Freud himself was Jewish and he thought his fellow Jews had a particular tendency to be guilt-ridden. So he looked in the Old Testament for an explanation. He noted that the official story claims that Moses died before the children of Israel reached the Promised Land. Freud said that the truth is that the Israelites, fed up with forty years of being bossed around, killed Moses. However, this reawakened the memory of the primal father-killing in their subconscious minds; they were then overwhelmed with guilt; and they became even more religious. Freud’s answer was that we should get rid of the Father figure, grow up, feel free and let it all hang out. In fact Freud was very much behind the spirit of the 1960’s – although I see that there are some representatives of the flower power generation who are now sitting like respectable citizens in the midst of the congregation.

Freud’s theory is, of course, pretty preposterous and it was based on no kind of scientific research. First of all, his view of the world is totally male-dominated. His early history of humanity barely mentions women. When he wrote about God as a protecting figure he says we imagine him this way because we remember our fathers bending over the cradle and smiling down at us; my memory tells me that it was much more likely to be a mother who took an interest in us at the cradle stage, with father keeping a safe distance. As for his attempts at history, his description of early humanity is a complete fabrication: there is no evidence that a primal horde ever existed in the way Freud described, or that Moses was murdered.

For me, at least, Freud’s psychological argument fails to prove that God does not exist. I do not accept that God is a creation of the mind, with no reality outside ourselves. Yet I can see why Freud has convinced some people. The thought of God is a comfort and doubtless people often turn to God for the wrong reasons, coming to church in times of trouble but forgetting about God when all is going well. Similarly, religious behaviour can sometimes be neurotic, but that does not mean religion always stops us from growing up. Rather, I think, it challenges us, making us less selfish and more fully human. Feuerbach was right, too, that our image of God is influenced by our culture. But again, that does not mean we have invented him. Inevitably we can only work within the limitations of our own human minds. Thus recently Jesus has been portrayed as a revolutionary, totally at the other end of the scale from the royal image of him which was popular in the early Middle Ages; but the fact that our view of him changes has no bearing on his existence.

Freud was not the only philosopher to be influenced by Feuerbach. Another disciple was Karl Marx, who used Feuerbach’s ideas to develop a sociological argument against the existence of God. Marx was intrigued by the thought that the idea of God gives us a sense of security. He’d seen vast factories in Germany and the cotton mills in Manchester and he knew that life was hell for the workers. Why didn’t they struggle to make life better for themselves? Why didn’t they revolt against the factory owners? Marx thought that the answer lay in religion. That’s the origin of his famous phrase “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed…it is the opium of the people”. Religion, like opium, could take away the pain of the working life by promising the workers a better life in heaven – “pie in the sky”. But also like a drug, religion made them weak and so unable or unwilling to do anything to change their situation. Marx noted that the ruling classes used religion to keep the workers in their place. Certainly in Russia the priests were closely linked to the aristocracy, but even in Britain and in the famous company town of Pullman, Chicago, factory owners paid for churches in the hope that the workers would learn the lessons of humility, docility and obedience. The famous English hymn “All things bright and beautiful”, which was published in 1848, mainly praises God for the beauty of the world, but it also contains these words:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

Marx accused the rulers and factory owners of brainwashing the workers by such teaching to make sure the revolution would never come. Conversely Engels, Marx’s disciple, said that once the people have freed themselves “by taking possession of all means of production”, they would no longer need the comforting illusion of God and so religion would simply die out.

Again, I think we have to recognize that Marx’s theory has a certain amount of truth in it. Religion can be used as a way of control. Any teacher of Religious Education knows that they can quieten down an unruly class by saying “And now let’s say a prayer”. But the fact that people misuse religion does not mean that God does not exist. God and religion are not identical. Marx thought that priests and ministers would always support the regime they lived under. And at times that may have been true. There may have even been the occasional Catholic Bishop who has not refused dinner at the tables of the great, but none of them, I hope, are mere lap-dogs. In fact the social teaching of the Catholic Church in the context of modern, industrial society goes back to Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. The Pope told employers “not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character…to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers – that is truly shameful and inhuman”. For Marx and other atheist sociologists, close to God would mean close to society; but a more common experience is that close to God means living at a certain distance from society: think of monks, nuns and hermits, but think also of those many holy people who have been actively critical of the societies they live in, from the prophets of the Old Testament, to the religious leaders who supported Martin Luther King in his struggle for justice, to missionaries in South America today. Also, when sociologists describe religion as the creation of society, they overlook the fact that the great world faiths have started with inspired individuals rather than with a community. Moses, Mohammed and Jesus all went against the grain of the society of their times. Finally, you will recall that the communists expected religion to die out when the workers were free. But that did not happen, even when Stalin tried to help the process along by killing thousands of priests and tearing down churches. In spite of propaganda, bribes and bullying religion did not vanish. Perhaps, then, religion is not the creation of society but of God.

Well, your friends may be surprised when they ask you what you’ve been doing this morning and you tell them you’ve been listening to arguments for atheism. But, as I said, although what they claim contains glimmers of truth, they fall a long way short of proving that God does not exist. I hope you have been able to see through them and will not be spending every future Sunday on the golf course instead of in church. Feuerbach, Marx and Freud thought they were writing God’s obituary; but I suspect that God may still be around for quite a time.

This year’s Lent talks have been in the area which is called Philosophy of Religion. Over the course of three talks so far, we have heard the thoughts of some of the great philosophers on the fundamental questions of life: St. Thomas Aquinas on the existence of God, St. Irenaeus and St. Augustine trying to explain the problem of evil, Freud and Marx insisting that God is an illusion which we can do without. They were all writing in the Christian era, but questions about God are much older – going back to Greek philosophers and beyond them to the writers of the Old Testament. The fact is that God is fascinating and elusive, we can’t quite pin him down. To a certain extent we are all agnostics, unable to find a 100% proof of the existence of God which would satisfy everyone around us or even ourselves.

Wouldn’t it be nice then if we could have some experience of God which would leave us absolutely certain, something which would bypass the ways of reason? Many people must have felt that they would like to have some kind of experience like the disciples presumably had on the day of the resurrection. Surely then any doubts they had had were dispersed. We know from the Gospels that they often failed to understand Jesus while he was teaching and preaching; then on Good Friday and through Holy Saturday they would have been in despair. But on Easter Sunday, they must have felt certain that Jesus was the Son of God. He was alive, he ate with them, and they knew it was him because they could see his wounds.

All through history people have been blessed with direct experiences of God. There may be, I guess there must be, people here even now who have had some experience of God which has completely changed their lives. I have not been blessed by that kind of thing but I am fascinated by accounts of them. Take for example the testimony of Blaise Pascal. He was a mathematician, living in the first half of the 17^th century in France, and one of the most brilliant men of his age. He was a Catholic and in theory he knew there must be a God, but the idea had no meaning for him. Then one night in 1654 he had an extraordinary vision. We only know about it because he wrote it down on a scrap of parchment which was then sewn into his coat. It was found by chance after his death. This is what he wrote:

“This year of grace 1654,

Monday, November 23rd.

From about half past ten at night, to

about half after midnight.

Fire.

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,

not of the philosophers and the wise.

Certainty, certainty. Feeling, joy, peace.

God of Jesus Christ.

This is life eternal: that they may know you

the only true God and him whom you have sent, Jesus Christ,

Jesus Christ,

Jesus Christ.

I have separated myself from him;

I have fled, renounced, crucified him.

May I never be separated from him again”.

We don’t really know what happened to Pascal. He says that the experience went on for two hours, and his words can only be a pale reflection of the reality, although one can feel the power in them. He never told his friends about it – as I said the scrap of parchment was only found after his death – but we know that he was different after this vision. His contemporaries record that the dry and cynical philosopher became a man of deep feeling and charity.

A less dramatic experience was had by the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, but it had equally dramatic results. Wesley was a run of the mill Anglican clergyman. Between 1735 and 1737 he had been on a missionary journey to the English colony of Georgia; he felt he had not been much appreciated by the owners of the cotton plantations, perhaps because of his sermons against the slave trade and gin drinking. He returned to London deeply depressed, feeling he was a failure. One Wednesday evening he had promised to attend a meeting of a religious society, and he went along out of a sense of duty and expecting to be bored. This is what he recorded in his journal for that day, Wednesday 24th. May, 1738:

“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a prayer meeting, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for my salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine”.

“I felt my heart strangely warmed” – such a small thing, but for Wesley it was the beginning of a new life. For him, as for Pascal, the Jesus of the pages of the Bible had come alive. He dedicated the rest of his long life to telling people about Jesus Christ, travelling an average of 8,000 miles on horseback every year and preaching in the open air all through the country to people of all classes. He was irresistible. It was as if people could feel that he had seen God.

What are we to make of these experiences? Well, as I said in the previous talk, Freud and his followers would say that such people are slightly mad; they’re not hitting on all six cylinders or, as we would say in England, they are one or two sandwiches short of a picnic. I guess you could try your own personal survey to see whether religious people are mad. Next time you’re in church, take a look around at the people who are there with you. Or take a long hard look at the people who are here today. Ask yourself, are they as sane as the next man? I regret that the results may not be as conclusive on the side of sanity as we might hope! But seriously, I don’t think great religious experiences can be put down to madness – especially when a life of openness and love is their fruit.

Of course, some scholars will try to explain away anything. I can remember a lot of books coming out during the 1960s trying to explain every miracle in the Bible in a rational way, including the ones which are the origin of the Jewish and Christian faiths – the crossing of the Red Sea and the resurrection, the key events which are always remembered at the Easter Vigil. The scholars in such books claimed that when the Israelites got to the Red Sea, they arrived at a particularly shallow place. That day it was low tide, and the wind was blowing from the north, so they were able to paddle across. By the time the Egyptians got there the wind had changed, the tide was coming in, and they got stuck. Of course that’s possible, but the truth is that no-one at this distance of time can prove exactly what happened. And for the Israelites, anyway, however it happened, the fact is they escaped and that must have seemed miraculous enough. As for the resurrection, the rationalists see it as a classic case of the wish-fulfilment which Freud first talked about. The disciples were sad because the man they had set all their hopes on was dead. Yet they still had a vivid memory of him. And so their minds conveniently filled the gap. They began to feel that he was alive after all, that somehow he was with them, and that they need not worry. Does this rationalist explanation stand up? Again, they are not able to provide any new evidence from 2000 years ago, but there is quite a lot to be said in favour of the reality of the experience: it is worth noting that the earliest accounts in the gospels show that the disciples were amazed and a little frightened at the resurrection, it seems to have been well beyond their expectations; also there are details such as Jesus eating or rebuking them which simply don’t tie in with the suggestion that he was a friendly ghost conjured up by their minds. What is more, those disciples later on were prepared to die for their faith and they met their deaths, like generations of martyrs since, with courage and calm. People don’t give their lives like that for a hallucination. That test is very important – what was the effect of the experience after the event?

The disciples, St. Paul, Pascal, Wesley: how fortunate they were to have experiences that left them with no doubts about the reality of God. They did not need philosophical arguments. They had direct knowledge. But the fact that some people are believers and some are not, and the fact that many people are unsure, means that there is at the heart of the world an ambiguity. We see it in the Bible. Some people saw the miracles of Jesus and believed in him, but we know the scribes and Pharisees saw the same evidence and were left cold. In the same way some scientists will look into a microscope and see the hand of God in the beauty and patterns of matter, some will see chance. The good thief knew who Jesus was, even as others mocked the broken body of another dying man.

Some people simply have faith, the ability to see God even in those places where most people cannot see anything good or holy. For example, even in the middle of the Holocaust, some Jews continued to believe, as these words scratched on a cellar wall in Cologne testify:

“I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.

I believe in love even when not feeling it.

I believe in God even when he is silent”.

Such faith is tremendous, worth more than gold, but we are bound to ask “Why is God silent”? Why doesn’t God take away the ambiguity? Why doesn’t He show himself to all of us, like He has to some, and clear up all our doubts?

My reply is to thank God that He does not show himself. The fact that He does not is a sign of his great tenderness towards us, his love for us as individuals, and his respect for our freedom. If God showed himself, we would all be forced to believe in God, to love him, and even to behave ourselves at last. But God does not compel belief and love. Instead he approaches us indirectly, giving hints of himself which those of us who want to are able to see, but which we are also free to ignore. Pascal himself puzzled over this and put it this way:

“It was not right for God, even in Jesus, to appear in a manner obviously divine and completely capable of convincing all men. But it was also not right that he should come in so hidden a manner that he could not be known by those who sincerely seek him. He so regulates the knowledge of himself that he has given signs of himself visible to those who seek him, and not to those who do not want to seek him. There is enough light for those who desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition”.

God does not force us to believe in him. He leaves us free to respond or not. But this freedom does not take away our responsibility. “There is enough light for those who desire to see”, and that means we have to be prepared to look. Remember where Lent is taking us: the culmination of all our preparation is the Easter Vigil. For most of the early part of that celebration we are sitting in the in the dark listening to the words of scripture; and we can say that in each reading there are pinpricks of light to guide us: the creation, the exodus, the words of the prophets, the resurrection. That is an image of our lives, often in the dark but not without hints of the presence of God if only we will look. And in the darkness you will not be alone, but among other Christians, other seekers, who are making what Pope Saint John Paul called “the journey into wisdom”.

I am very aware I have given you a hard time in these talks. When you come to hear a priest talk, you probably expect to find certainty in this ambiguous world. But the fact that we do not know everything does not mean we are failures. We should not be ashamed to be seekers. In fact St. Benedict says the first mark of a promising novice for the monastic life is whether “he truly seeks God”. Even people like priests and monks do not know everything; rather, they feel the search for the truth of God is so worthwhile that they are prepared to dedicate a lifetime to it; and Pope Francis described all of us in the Holy Year of 2025 as “Pilgrims of Hope”: pilgrims – that is, people on a journey of exploration, not yet at the end. As I said at the beginning, some believers are blessed with a deep experience of God. But Jesus reassured his disciples after the resurrection that there are blessings too for those who are still in the dark but keep on seeking: “Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe”.