4. Faith

4. Faith's Foundation Discovering and knowing the one true God Compendium 36-43 Dt 6:4 "Hear, O Israel!* The LORD is our God, the LORD alone!" (Shema prayer) 1. "I believe in One God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible." This is the most fundamental key to our faith. 2. Without God, creation and humanity lose their dignity and nihilism abounds. Without God, life is a meaningless survival of the fittest and even that only briefly. Without God the world is a dark, violent, cruel, sad and stark place. 3. Faith does not destroy reason but enables it to look more competently beyond itself. 4. God revealed his name to Moses as "I Am Who Am" this indicates that he has always existed and will always exist beyond the universe and history. 5. God is unconditional, joyful and everlasting Love. 6. We can know the existence of God by reflecting on the beauty and order of creation and the urgings of our conscience to do good and avoid evil and our insatiable desire for perfect love and fulfillment. 7. If we do not believe in something greater than we are, we can never be greater than we are. 8. St Anselm’s definition of “God” is “that which there can be no greater than” (the greatest) Christopher Hitchens' book “God Is Not Great" only proves that believers are sinners and often severe hypocrites, which is why Jesus came: to save sinners. We hope and pray Christopher is now at peace with his savior, Jesus Christ, his namesake. 9. Science accepts truth by empirical data or by definition. By definition God is the One, all knowing, all powerful, all beautiful, all perfect, all loving, unconditioned, irreplaceable, First Cause, creator of all that is visible and invisible. By definition God is Truth: the Way, the Truth and the Life. 10. St. Thomas Aquinas gives proof of the necessity of a First Cause as do the greatest philosophers of antiquity. Only those committed to a godless agenda say otherwise and they have no empirical evidence to substantiate disbelief only prejudice. 11. Three leading cosmologists, Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary. (A beginning). Wild conjecture regarding the possibility of alternate universes are without an iota of empirical evidence. This debunks Stephen Hawking's unsupported and unexplained statement that because gravity exists there is no first cause and the cosmos and earth are just a random accident without intelligent design and therefore without meaning or purpose. Stephen Hawking has often had to admit to wrong theories and we pray he will have the grace to admit his declared atheism is also wrong as is his support for euthanasia. 12. Physical science can only inquire about the physical universe we know. God transcends the physical universe and is therefore not within the competence of physical science or the scientific method. To deny or dismiss God is to dismiss transcendence and limits us to our physical senses. Love, hope, goodness, virtue, joy, generosity, kindness, gentleness, modesty, faithfulness, chastity, are all transcendent values that disappear without God 13. The rate of expansion of our universe indicates that it began about 16 billion years ago. 14. A common oxymoron is posed as the riddle: can God create something too heavy for God to lift. This is no more intelligible than a square circle. God cannot contradict himself, that is the only thing God cannot do. 15. The energy and enthusiasm that atheists dedicate to denying God is suspect. Only a person with a serpentine motive or a guilty conscience would be obsessed with the impossible task of proving that something doesn't exist. There are many things we cannot see but believe in such as intelligence and electricity. Scientific theories require belief in their assumptions and are sometimes debunked by new evidence. Miracles defy science quite often and those who deny miracles are closed minded to the truth.