Taken from the book Világnézeti Válaszok (Answers Regarding Worldviews) by P. Béla Bangha S.J.
Is it certain that there is a God?
If there is logic on earth, if there is reason and rational thought, if there is anything that we call reason, law of thought, legitimate inference, then there is a God, and if there is a God, then his existence is more certain than any other certainty in the world.
It is more natural that there is a God than that there are finite, created beings, for the essence of God is existence, without which He is inconceivable; whereas non-existence is as conceivable as existence in finite beings. God necessarily exists; for other things it is a mystery whether they exist and why they exist.
God is identical with the world; this is modern monism.
This is an old idea of pantheism, and it is not a new and modern invention. Is God identical with the world, and therefore also with the horse, the ox, the donkey? With hay, with straw? With hydrogen and oxygen? Atoms and molecules? Would all these things together give us the infinite meaning, whose splendid creations we encounter in the universe? But, to emphasize just one thing, this world is not one thing, but a thousand million times a thousand million different things, an immense mass of innumerable molecules, atoms and atomic parts! This mass cannot be God, because it is not a unified being, it does not think and will together, it cannot be a unified world planner and world designer. For this reason alone it cannot be the ultimate basis of the amazing unity of the world order. And if all molecules obey a supreme natural law, then the question returns: who created this great, common natural law? Who thought it up and who wrote it into the nature of all the molecules in an immensely dizzying number?
Can the existence of God be proved by reason alone? Without Scripture and revelation?
Of course! We must only logically and consistently apply the principle of sufficient foundation and causality to the greatest facts of the universe and life. True, the so-called philosophical arguments that follow here are for philosophically trained minds only; others are more likely to be captivated by arguments taken from the physical world (see p. 48 ff.).
1. The existence of God is proved above all by the fact of existence itself. The whole vast realm of existence trumpets the existence of God. That there are things, a whole world even, whose existence is contingent, whose existence has nothing to do with its definition. Which, therefore, might never have existed. The situation could have been such that it never existed.
There is no reason why this or that speck, this or that blade of grass or leaf, grain of sand or even man should necessarily exist; why the laws of being and thinking should be shaken if this mosquito had never come into the world, or even if our solar system had never been formed. It depends on small things, and there could be a million more or fewer mosquitoes in the world.
How is it that these things, whose existence is not in their essence exist? In billions and billions? Things whose existence is not a logical necessity? Things that could just as well be non-existent nothingness? Here, someone, some supreme power, has decided whether or not these things should exist at all, whether or not the world should come into being and develop! This is a logical necessity. For nothing can be without a sufficient basis; and here existence itself is such that it is no sufficient basis in itself!
This deeply philosophical argument is perhaps not understood immediately by everyone. For to grasp it fully requires a certain depth of thought and discipline. But whoever is able to enter into this train of thought will find in this one argument the most incontrovertible proof of the existence of God.
2. The existence of God is further proved by the intrinsic essential imperfection of things. The fact that one thing is “this” and another “that” means that one thing represents one degree, kind, or shade of being and the other one another degree, kind, or shade of being. But neither represents the whole of being, the perfection of being. Neither of them can say of itself: I am being itself; I exist because I am a being so absolutely perfect in every direction that my perfection cannot even be lacking in actual and necessary existence. No, one thing embodies only this, the other only that tiny fraction of being. Now, if someone or something does not possess these or those qualities by virtue of its being, who has determined for it what and how much of the perfection of being it should receive and represent? That the one should be this, the other that? That the one should be spirit, the other matter; and if matter, whether living or inanimate? And if living, shall it be plant, animal, man? And if an animal, is it a unicellular organism, or an insect, or a reptile, or a bird, or a mammal? If a plant, whether grass, or grain, or bush, or tree? And what kind of tree?
Each is what its immediate ancestor was, the root from which it sprang; this is true; but it does not solve the question, it only kicks it down the road. Who made there be so many degrees, so many kinds, so wide a range of being in the world at all? If you say chance, you have gone off the path of logical reasoning, because there is no chance. The determiner of the degrees of existence, the dispenser of the vast treasury of existence, can only be a wise and powerful Infinite Being: the Creator.
3. Even this is not all. In this world, things are subject to continuous, regular changes and developments. They pass from one state of perfection to another; they assume the form of one existence and lose that of another. Every movement, every growth, every development, every action, every word and thought is change. But if all things in this world are changing, then all things are necessarily finite and created. Why? Because the uncreated, the infinite being can never change in anything: for it always has everything equally, infinitely and perfectly. Otherwise it would not be an infinite being. That which is of itself is always and necessarily as it is: eternally the same and equally infinitely perfect.
If nature would exist of itself, then the order of nature would also be of itself and unchangeable, for it would belong to the essence of things. But it is not unchangeable, for man can change it a thousand times, though in small ways. So this world is not of itself, but refers to an infinite Being above it.
4. The existence of God is further proved by the diversity of things. That which is a being of itself cannot be many but only one, but in this unity it is absolutely great and perfect. Finite beings are diverse precisely because they are all finite, none of them exhausting the totality of existence. If the world were identical with God, it could consist only of a single atom, or more correctly: not of a single atom but of a single divine being, because the atom itself already means matter, and therefore complexity and spatiality, and thus confinement and imperfection.
Who can say this, when he looks around him and sees the staggering diversity of beings, the millions of heavenly bodies, the many millions of living or inanimate beings on each of them, and in a single grain of dust the infinite multiplicity of atoms, and even within the same atom the billions of electrons, protons and neutrons?
Pantheism is the greatest impossibility precisely because it takes as one what is obviously many; which is not only not one, but an uncountable, immense, maddeningly manifold colourfulness.
These are all philosophical arguments. But can the existence of God be proven on the basis of natural science?
Yes, and again in several ways.
We have already referred to the amazing order of the world. Where does this order come from? It cannot be mere coincidence that two or three hydrogen molecules follow exactly the same physical and chemical laws. Still less can it be mere coincidence that as many hydrogen molecules as there are in the world and in the universe – unspeakable, unimaginable numbers – all obey exactly the same laws, without exception! In the Sun and in Sirius, in the drop of water and in the whole Milky Way, everywhere! Not one of them is exempt from the rule, from the order of a higher, really working, inviolable command and law!
Who made it so that there is a natural law in the world, and even an infinite chain of natural laws? Who has made it so that all beings, whether living or inanimate, whether terrestrial or celestial, must follow this order and obey these natural laws?
Did this order evolve of its own accord? Such a supposition would be the greatest crucifixion, mockery, and throwing into the thrashcan of human reason! “By itself” would mean “by chance”. By chance, that is to say, on a null basis! By chance, not even ten pebbles align in a row, let alone thousands of billions times thousands of billions of pebbles and mountains and suns and atoms and molecules! Where there is an arrangement on such an immense scale, to deny the reason behind the arrangement is to deny reason itself, to give up thinking altogether. […]
Yes, yes, but arranging is not the same as creating! A watchmaker also arranges the parts of the movement, but he does not create the watch.
Correct, the arrangement itself is not necessarily a creation. It is true that even if God were not the creator of the world, but only the arranger, He would already be such a terribly powerful lord that we should bow to the ground before him. He who “arranges” solar systems and milky ways must be a very powerful engineer and arranger after all! But this is not so. The arrangement we have witnessed a thousand times in the universe is not only external. It does not only consist in, for example, the movement, speed or direction of movement of the heavenly bodies, which are all incidental and external to the nature of the heavenly bodies.
In reality, most of the ordering laws of nature concern and determine the innermost essence of things themselves, and then the arranger of necessity is at the same time the essence-giver of things, and therefore their creator! The fact, for example, that we human beings think and will, that we have a spiritual life and cultural, scientific, mediating, aesthetic, etc. instincts: this is not merely an external arrangement, but an inner formation, a determination of our being, an essential determination, and therefore a creation. He who has written these spiritual instincts, these laws, into our essence, can only be the creator of our spirit itself!
God, therefore, is not only the arranger, but also, indeed, the creator.
The world has necessarily evolved from the internal laws of matter.
What is “necessarily”? Where there is “necessity”, there is already some internal law; but where there is a law, there must be a lawgiver: there someone has planned and formed the internal forces and faculties according to which the evolution of matter proceeds. Now, who was this planner, this lawgiver, this organizer, this harmonizer, this wise and powerful initiator of these forces and faculties, if not God? To create a world capable of development, and to endow it with powers capable of development, is a still greater masterpiece than to create a world that never changes, a world that is ready-made.
The world and its order were created by the forces of nature.
It is as if someone were to say: the watch was not made by a watchmaker, but by the forces of the watch; the springs, the wheels and the hands. Napoleon’s battles were not fought by Napoleon, but by the laws of war. The “forces of nature” are only carrying out what a higher intelligence and will have planned and invested in them. The forces of nature act blindly: gravity, attraction, electricity, magnetism, etc. But we are not talking here of forces acting blindly, but of the wonderful order, the purposefulness, the thousand-millionfold harmony, the assembly, the interlocking of these forces, which cannot be explained by reference to mere natural forces. It is not the gravel, the lime and the bricks that build the house, but the architect who designs it and the master builder who builds it.
If this is already evident in a small human work, how much more so in the wonderful, thousand-secret order and purposefulness of creation!
The order of the world, according to Darwin, evolved in such a way that the fittest and strongest of the many clusters of elements and primitive formations always survived, and the rest perished.
This Darwinian idea is worthless, because it really explains nothing; there is no longer any doubt among serious scientists today. For this whole idea is a clever evasion of the manifestly absurd idea that the most wonderful and diverse order could have come into being by sheer chance.
The human body, with its millions of wonders, the eyes, ears, brain, heart, lungs, stomach, blood vessels and blood, the unimaginably delicate and amazing web of muscles and nerves, which science has still only managed to discover in very small parts and imperfectly: all of which could have been formed “by chance”, by the irrational and unplanned confluence of elements? And likewise the billions of wonders of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, the precisely calculated paths, movements, forces, temperatures of the ocean of stars and the terrifyingly mysterious mysteries of the atoms? The wondrous laws, the harmonies, the millionfold aesthetics and expediency of spiritual, moral and social life?
But let us suppose for a moment the impossibility that the elements and primitive formations could indeed, by sheer accident of moving around and of combination, have produced such wonderful, higher beings. Then there are two further questions, first: why is it that only the more perfect, the more expedient, always survives? It is not the case that, where development is left to chance, the better always prevails and the bad, being weak, perishes. On the contrary, the weeds, the imperfect, very often overwhelm the better. – Second question: where have all those half- or one-tenth successful, useless and doomed to destruction, transitional forms gone? We can’t find a trace of them anywhere in the world! Not even among the geological remains and paleological layers of the millennia gone by! Because if they had been destroyed, we should certainly be able to find the remains of their parts, skeletons and decayed remains in all kinds of places, and in enormous numbers. For there should be infinitely more transitional forms than finished and perfect ones. For even if I roll a hundred dice: a thousand, ten thousand times as many other combinations result other than the one I want. How many thousands, how many tens of millions of times should a blind child without the use of reason draw all sorts of sketches on a sheet of paper until at last, “by chance”, a great portrait emerges from his attempts? Thus, in the prehistoric layers of the earth, we should find many millions of transitional forms, e.g. half-man, half-ape, man at the top, ape at the bottom, half-eyed, half-armed freaks, plant, animal or human figures and organs that are a quarter, tenth or ten thousandth part as successful, as many as those that are successful. But this isn’t happening anywhere. Transitional forms, half-successful accidental attempts, are nowhere to be found in nature.
It is amazing how desperate and absurd the assumptions of those who want at all costs to escape from the most natural and most obvious, nay, the only natural and the only obvious solution: God!
Darwin was right to establish the fact of development in nature; but not even he himself did not establish an unlimited and lawless evolution. The truly verifiable development in nature has definite laws and is always initiated by definite forces and possibilities, and these require a planner, a wise and intelligent creator.
Many things, for example in the vast realm of the stars, serve no purpose! Is that order as well?
There is still a great order among the stars, even if we cannot say what purpose this order serves. Even if we do not know exactly what the stars are for, they are of service to us in that they bear witness to the Creator’s great riches and power in a most moving way. When one delves into the mysteries of the starry wonders, one is almost dizzy with the immense power and grandeur that is revealed in creation.
At least the formation of living beings could have taken place by mere evolution, without the intervention of a creator.
At the most, one might say, without direct creative intervention. But God is still necessary, otherwise neither living nor inanimate matter could have come into existence. However, a living being has never yet evolved from an inanimate being under any circumstances. Nor will it ever evolve, for in the living there is a higher principle of life of which inanimate things are utterly devoid. […]
Natural science has shown that higher forms are constantly evolving from lower forms.
Where the innate ability and power to do so is there, that is, where the seeds of development were laid in the individual organism from the beginning, there yes, but not elsewhere and in other directions. Evolution is possible only within a very narrow framework, and natural science knows of no case where, for example, a reptile has evolved into a mammal, or an animal into a human, as the materialist fairy-tale tellers who exaggerate Darwinism claim.
Natural science shows that humans are descended from apes. The resemblance between apes and man is still striking today.
This descent has not yet been demonstrated by any natural science. Natural resemblance does not yet imply descent from one another. God willed that, because we indeed belong to the animal kingdom in body, we should have much the same physique as animals; but this does not mean that we are descended from animals, but only that our bodies belong to the animal kingdom. There is only a taxonomic and morphological or physical similarity between man and ape, but no genealogical relationship (relationship pertaining to descent). Since man has nipples as well, must we say that man was originally a woman? Similarity is not the same as descent from each other!
There are also anomalies in the world that are rather evidence against God than for Him.
Wrong! There are no anomalies, only phenomena, the actual further purpose of which we humans do not yet know. Such are the tonsils or the appendix in the human organism; such are certain insects, reptiles, and wild animals in nature. “What are they for?”, asks the short-sighted man, and does not consider that there are many things which may have a very important role in the universe, without our scanty human knowledge being able to discover at once what that role is.
Besides, the so-called anomalies are so rare, compared to the order we can grasp, that to infer from them against the existence of God would be like someone saying: the cathedral in Cologne was not built by master builders because a tiny niche in one of the towers is out of proportion with the rest of the building! Or as if one were to say: in the “Run of Zalán” [a Hungarian work of literature], in some places, the six-foot lines of verse are replaced by seven-foot lines of verse: the whole poem is therefore not a poetic work, but an accidental, meaningless scribble.
Why did God create the world if he did not need it?
Indeed, God did not create the world because he needed it. But because out of overflowing love he wanted to share his eternal and infinite happiness with others. Therefore he created intelligent beings; the rest he created to serve intelligent beings.
Faith seeks to explain everything by a miracle, but science knows no miracles.
Big mistake! It would be the greatest miracle if one could explain the universe without creation. No science has ever been able to do that. It is not creation that is the miracle, but the world itself is one gigantic miracle, for which creation is the most natural, indeed the only natural and acceptable explanation.
If the existence of God is so clear, how is it that many men do not believe in Him?
In most cases, unbelief is not of the mind but of the heart; men do not want to believe because belief has uncomfortable consequences and establishes strict moral commandments, and so many people avoid the obvious nature of the basic tenets of faith. Not only clear evildoers and reprobates, but often also men of otherwise refined minds and scientifically educated men. Why? Because they, too, are afraid of the obligatory consequences of the faith in God: the duties of submission, humility, and service to God. Or because they are so completely immersed in worldly things: science, politics, acquisition of wealth, entertainment, that they are so to speak “too busy” to deal with God and religion.
Do we have other kinds of arguments for God’s existence?
[…]
The existence of God is further proved by the spiritual life of man. Man has not only a body, which lives and breeds, and not only senses, which are capable of certain sensual cognition, but also a soul, a spirituality. It has a soul which, in its own particular activity, is internally independent of space, of matter and its limitations. For man not only sees, hears, and touches, like the animal, but also thinks and wills: he creates and analyses concepts, creates abstract ideas, deduces, calculates, invents, ponders, searches for reasons, judges, and creates intellectual masterpieces. And on the level of will, in many cases he freely chooses between good and evil, between virtue and vice, between love and hate, between enthusiasm and condemnation, and above all: he feels in himself the voices and reproaches of his conscience. He feels the moral law within himself, the same as all men have felt since the world began.
Where does all this come from? From matter, spirit cannot evolve, the same way as a living being cannot evolve from an inanimate being without creative intervention. Here only a proper Creative Being can explain the facts.
Life and thought are simply the result of natural evolution.
Let us suppose that it is; for all life and all thought develops to a certain extent. But it never develops from nothing, nor from an essentially lower order of being. Development can never be accidental, for there is no chance in nature, but all development always takes place on the basis of certain antecedent forces and according to certain laws of development embedded in things.
That is to say: even so, there must be a Creator, more so than without the law of development. For it requires a far greater creative work for things to develop themselves according to the forces and laws of development embedded in them by the Creator than for them to appear in existence at once in an unchanging completeness.
If the soul could begin, it could end, that is to say: it is not necessarily immortal.
This is a very wrong conclusion. The soul could have begun, indeed it must have begun, otherwise it could not exist today. On the other hand, once it exists, there is no reason for God to end its existence, as we have seen above. Therefore, the fact that something began does not necessarily mean that it must end. Life and existence are not a sausage and not a piece of cloth, so that we must necessarily imagine them as having two ends.
Then why do we say that the material world will end?
It is because there may be a reasonable reason for the material world to cease to exist; namely, on the one hand, that once all energy is transformed into heat and evenly distributed in space, there will be nothing to move matter; on the other hand, that the material world, in its present form, may no longer be needed. Whether or not God will continue to maintain the material world in some form after the final consummation, we humans have no idea at this time. But what may happen to matter cannot be a rule for the events of spiritual beings.
Perhaps we have arguments for God apart from these?
There are the so-called moral arguments for God, namely the argument for God derived from the natural moral law. Every human being has within him the knowledge of the difference between moral right and wrong, and the conviction that this law is binding regardless of any human law, benefit, or harm. This moral law and its binding force can only derive from the fact that the Creator of the moral order has already instilled the moral law into the souls of all of us in creation. Neither this law, nor the common agreement of mankind that this law can only be the work of a supreme Being in us, can be explained otherwise than by God the Creator.
If God is good, why does he inflict so much suffering and pain on his children?
This is undoubtedly a big and difficult question. But it is answered by the principle that suffering has great moral powers. It cleanses, ennobles, disappoints from the world, warns us of our own weakness, our own fallibility and the greatness of God, makes us serious and examine ourselves, makes us aware of the horror of eternal suffering to which he who forgets God exposes himself, and finally gives us an opportunity to atone for our sins.
What have I sinned that God should punish me?
First of all, it is clear from the above that suffering has the character not only of punishment, but also of education and exaltation. Secondly, very few men can say of themselves that they do not have to atone to the sovereignty of the God who was offended. That some men imagine themselves to be perfectly innocent is usually only due to the fact that they have very much dulled their own conscience, and perhaps do not even regard grave sins as a serious matter. “What have I sinned?” he asks with great presumption, and does not remember that he may have neglected his religious duties in many cases, insulted and injured his neighbor in his honor, given occasion to others to sin, or sinned grievously in thought, word, deed against the 6th commandment, etc. And then he is talking about “what has he sinned?”
If God is Just, why does he often allow the innocent and good to suffer and the wicked to rule?
Because God does not want to do ultimate justice among men on this earth, but in the next life. He allows the good to suffer precisely because they gain merits for eternal life, just as Christ Himself, the best and most innocent, also suffered at the hands of the wicked and died in terrible pains on the cross for men. But He often allows the wicked to enjoy the pleasure of their sins, because they can expect more terrible and unimaginable sufferings than any human horror in the next life anyway. God is eternal; He has time to do justice: to exalt and glorify the innocent, and to humble and destroy the wicked.
How can there be a God in heaven if he can tolerate without a word the blatant injustices, murders, blasphemies that go on day after day?
We have already answered this question above. Besides, we can also answer this: God often allows the apparent triumph of evil on earth precisely because He wants to give his followers the opportunity to exercise the highest degree of heroism, to stand their ground as martyrs and confessors of the faith, and thus to follow Christ our Lord perfectly. Let us not forget that the Lord Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the apostles all suffered and were apparently defeated by the wicked. Who can say that their suffering and humiliation did not represent a superior and great triumph?
To the good, the cross and Calvary are the way of resurrection!

This text is in released under the Creative Commons Zero License. The original author died in 1939, therefore the original Hungarian text is in the public domain.