Is anyone there?

01The question

A desire you did not choose

Maybe you have felt it too. Looking up at a night sky. Sitting beside a hospital bed. That quiet question: is anyone there?

You do not need to believe anything to ask it. And the Church does not treat it as a silly question.

The Catechism begins exactly here: “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God.” And God “never ceases to draw man to himself.”¹

People everywhere, in every age, have expressed this search in prayers, sacrifices, rituals and meditations, so widely that we may call the human being a religious being.⁶

“That they should seek God, if haply they may feel after him or find him, although he be not far from every one of us.”

But a desire is not a proof. Can you actually think your way to God?

02The evidence

Clues in the world, and in you

The Church says yes: God “can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.”²

It is careful about the word “proof.” It means not laboratory proof, but “converging and convincing arguments” that can lead to real certainty.⁸

<b>The clues in the world:</b> things move, change and come into being; the universe has order and beauty. Following those clues, a person can come to know God as the origin and the goal of everything.⁹

“For by the greatness of the beauty, and of the creature, the creator of them may be seen, so as to be known thereby.”

<b>The clues in you:</b> your hunger for truth and beauty, your sense of right and wrong, your freedom, your conscience, your longing for something infinite: all of these make us ask about God.¹¹

Which raises the obvious objection. Has science not settled all this?

03The objection

Faith and science

The Church’s answer is direct: “there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason.” The same God gave us both, and “truth” cannot contradict truth.¹²

Honest scientific research, done well and respecting moral limits, can never truly conflict with faith.¹² That is why the Church welcomes conversation with philosophy and science, and with unbelievers and atheists.¹³

So if reason can get us this far, why does anyone need more than reason?

04The turn

Why reason is not the whole story

The Catechism is honest: people find it hard to come to know God by reason alone.¹⁴

Reason can tell you that someone is there. But to know him as a friend, God chose to reveal himself, and to give us the grace to welcome what he reveals.¹⁵

Back in Athens, Paul told the crowd that the God they did not know had made himself known. When he got to the Resurrection, some laughed. Others said, “We will hear thee again.”

And a few believed, among them a man named Dionysius and a woman named Damaris.¹⁶

About three centuries later, a seeker found words for that restless feeling. People still quote them.

05The ending

A restless heart

St Augustine began his most famous book with a prayer that the Catechism still quotes. “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”¹⁷

Searching for God takes an honest mind, a good will, “an upright heart”, and other people who help us look. And even when we forget him, God never stops calling us to seek him.¹⁷

If someone is there, the next question is obvious. Who is he?