On Tuesday of this week we read MATTHEW 11:16-20: 

 

The Lord said, "To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, 'We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.' For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is justified by her children." Then he began to upbraid the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent. 

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About a year ago, I read an article entitled “15 Questions Atheists Have for Christians.” This was a fascinating article, and raised a number of interesting questions about the nature of faith and religion. One of the questions, if perhaps not the most original, was: “Where is the Proof that God exists?” In this Gospel passage, Christ helps us to understand this question. He critiques those who do not follow Him, particularly the Pharisees and Sadducees, those who were well educated in the Law, who should have recognized Him as the Messiah. These experts in the Law were never satisfied. They saw St John the Forerunner, witnessed his asceticism and heard him preach about the coming of Christ, but dismissed him, saying “he has a demon.” When Christ came Himself, showing the love of God for His people, they dismiss Him too, calling Him a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” More than even this, Christ Himself, and His disciples worked different signs, casting out demons, curing the blind and the lame, even raising the dead. Despite all of these things, they still did not believe, and attempted to rationalize by saying things like: “he casts out demons by the prince of demons” (Matthew 9:34). All these proofs mean nothing to the one who is not willing to see. This is expressed beautifully in The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis. Several Narnian creatures decide that they no longer believe in the existence of Aslan, even when Aslan prepares a feast for them, they see it as nothing more than the dung of the animals in a stable, as the old adage says (in John Heywood’s collection of proverbs: “no one is so blind as those who will not see.” 

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What proof would be good enough to satisfy this kind of a question? There are numerous philosophical proofs for the existence of God, for example. These include the Eutaxological argument, the Ontological argument, the Argument from Contingency, the Kalam Cosmological argument, and the Fine-tuning argument. All of these provide rational proofs for God’s existence. Necessarily, these arguments work backward, showing that God exists from the nature of His creation. God, as St John of Damascus says, is “God then is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility.” God, as the Creator, is not bound by the laws of the physical universe, and so His existence or non-existence cannot be measured through the application of these laws. 

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A natural phenomenon is able to be proven by scientific means, a philosophical or mathematical proposition by logical argumentation. God is none of these things, however, God is a person. This means that, ultimately, we want to know God, rather than knowing about God. If we want certainty of God’s existence, we must approach Him as a person. We can learn every fact about someone’s life and background, but not know them. In order to come to know them, to learn of their existence, we must interact with them, speak with them, eat with them, build a relationship with them. This holds true for God as well. Through the participation in the Mysteries of the Church, in prayer, in fasting, we build a relationship with God, and it is this relationship through which God reveals Himself to us, and through which we learn of God’s existence.