“The ordinary Christian believes in God by a kind of intuition,” opined fictional character Canon Crump in a posthumously published dialogue written by Msgr. Ronald Knox. He “doesn’t argue about the existence of God, any more than the plain man needs to argue about the existence of the house next door.” The ordinary Christian, said Crump, knows that God exists but would have some trouble explaining just why he knows it.
It got me thinking: Why do I believe in God’s existence? I guess I have to say I always have believed in it. The Church teaches that human reason alone is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of God, but I did not come to believe in him through the employment of syllogisms. Not many people do. I sometimes wonder if anybody does.
Thomas Aquinas is known by many people who never have read him for his five proofs of God’s existence. I never have heard of any former atheist who became a theist (let alone a Christian) by studying these proofs. Maybe there have been such people, but they have escaped my attention.
As I understand it, the five proofs usually are used as after-the-fact confirmations of a belief that was established through other means. Once you believe in God’s existence, the proofs re-prove, so to speak, the correctness of your understanding. At least that is said to be the way it works for most people, perhaps because very few are so constituted mentally as to operate in the logical fashion that Thomas himself used.
John Henry Cardinal Newman argued in his Grammar of Assent that we come to believe in something (to assent to its truth) sometimes by strictly syllogistic means but more often through an agglomeration of partial proofs that, when taken together, are enough to bring us certitude. Mathematical proof is good for math problems but is normally not the kind of proof used in other areas, including theology.
When it comes to God’s existence, we might point to any number of things that indicate this truth without any one of them ever quite being sufficient to demonstrate it: the public witness of martyrs, a golden sunset in the Sierra, the orderliness of the stars, the impressive history of the Church, the kindness or longsuffering of believers, the evident factuality of the Gospels, even the problem of evil in the world. The thing that brought Whittaker Chambers across the line that divides unbelief from belief was contemplation of the remarkable structure of his infant daughter’s ear—this beauty could not have been accidental, he realized.
Something similar can be said about the reasons for disbelief. I suspect few non-believers have come to their conclusions through syllogistic reasoning. Instead, they have gathered disparate “facts” that speak to them of the non-existence of God: the personal failings of churchmen, the invisibility of grace, the witticisms of irreligious writers, the “complexity” of the creeds, the bloodiness of biblical history, the apparent all-sufficiency of science. For the atheist such things are proof enough, so long as he does not contemplate a child’s ear.