How can we know God?

"All men by nature desire understanding" –Aristotle

"Prove that God exists. Show Him to me."

Is that person seeking understanding? Perhaps.

The tone of the demand is cynical. The speaker expects that the listener will not be able to prove the existence of God. In doing so, the speaker seeks understanding and verification – not in the presence of God, but in his own misguided belief that God does not exist.

However, at the same time, the person likely is seeking some type of understanding. The problem is that the person expects to be able to know God, if God exists, in the same manner in which he can know anything else that exists in the human world.

The use of the words "show" and "prove" throw a seemingly insurmountable challenge upon the person expected to prove the existence of God. But, there is hope.

"Show" and "prove" are significant words in that they reveal a something inherent in all humans. There are five physical senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. The greatest of these, according to Aristotle in his Metaphysics, is sight: "…of all sensations, seeing makes us know in the highest degree and makes clear many differences in things."

For Aristotle, experience (or physical knowledge) comes from memory, which, in turn, comes from sensations. In short, we know of the existence of things by our senses. How do you know that I have an orange in my hand? You can see it. You can taste it. You can feel it. You can smell it. And, if I drop it, you can hear it. If it looks, tastes, feels, smells, and sounds like an orange (according to what you remember an orange to be), then you declare it is an orange.

Now, consider God, and in using physical senses, be prepared to be disappointed. God cannot be known in the same way that we know an orange. For many people, that means we cannot know God at all, and that means he doesn’t exist. We might as well give up, then. We can’t "show" and "prove," because as living creatures, we must be shown something to have proof of its existence.

Before we give up, however, let’s think about what makes us different than the animals. To know the existence of something, an animal must sense it. Yet, as humans, we often rationally theorize about the existence of things we cannot see.

Oxford scientists Watson and Crick developed a model of DNA before they were able to see it, and scientists believed DNA existed before they had visual confirmation. Scientists long have accepted the idea that all things are made up of tiny particles called atoms, yet this came about without ever laying eyes on an atom. Max Planck should be considered insane by many since he spent much of his scientific life exploring the wonderful world of the electron even though he never saw one.

How could these men make the great scientific discoveries without using their senses? Simple, they did! But, they did not stop at their senses. They were able to deduce the existence of invisible objects by observing and understanding that which was visible.

Aristotle covered this too: "Art [or knowledge of the invisible] comes into being when out of many notions from experience we form one universal belief concerning similar facts." This is how the existence of God must be proven. We can know God, not as we would an orange, but as we know electrons. We can come to an understanding of the existence of God through a rational analysis of our experience, which is formed by our senses.

St. Thomas Aquinas began his discussion of the existence of God by explaining that His existence "is not self-evident to us, but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature–namely by His effects." That is, we can know of His existence by observing what He does, much the same as we can know of the existence of atoms by what they do.

Proceed to Article II: God as the Uncaused Cause: the Alpha