RonRolheiser,OMI

How Do We Know God Exists?

December 1, 2025

A A A

Recently I was listening to a religious talk show on the radio when a caller asked: How do we know that God exists? A good question.

The radio host answered by saying that we know it through faith. That’s not a bad answer, except what needs to be teased out is how we know this through faith.

First, what does it mean to know something? If we believe that to know something means to be able to somehow picture it, understand it, and imagine its existence, then this side of eternity, we can never know God. Why?

Because God is ineffable. That’s the first and non-negotiable truth we need to accept about God and it means that God, by definition, is beyond our imagination. God is infinite and the infinite can never be circumscribed or captured in a concept. Try imagining the highest number to which it is possible to count. God’s nature and existence can never be conceptualized or imagined. But it can be known.

Knowing isn’t always in the head, something we can explicate, own in a picture, and give words to. Sometimes, particularly with things touching the deepest mysteries in life, we know beyond our head and our heart. This knowing is in our gut, something felt as a moral imperative, a nudge, a call, an obligation, a voice which tells us what we must do to stay true. It’s there we know God, beyond any imaginative, intellectual, or even affective grasp.

The revealed truths about God in scripture, in Christian tradition, and in the witness of the lives of martyrs and saints, simply give expression to something we already know, as the mystics put it, in a dark way.

So, how might we prove the existence of God?

I wrote my doctoral thesis on exactly that question. In that thesis, I take up the classical proofs for the existence of God as we see these articulated in Western philosophy. For example, Thomas Aquinas tried to prove God’s existence in five separate arguments.

Here’s one of those arguments: Imagine walking down a road and seeing a stone and asking yourself, how did it get there? Given the brute reality of a stone, you can simply answer, it’s always been there. However, imagine walking down a road and seeing a clock still keeping time. Can you still say, it’s always been there? No, it can’t always have been there because it has an intelligent design that someone must have built into it and it is ticking away the hours, which means it cannot have been there forever.

Aquinas then asks us to apply this to our own existence and to the universe. Creation has an incredibly intelligent design and, as we know from contemporary physics, has not always existed. Something or someone with intelligence has given us and the universe a historical beginning and an intelligent design. Who?

How much weight does an argument like this carry? There was once a famous debate on BBC radio in England between Frederick Copleston, a renowned Christian philosopher, and Bertrand Russell, a brilliant agnostic thinker. After all the give and take in their debate, they agreed, as atheist and believer, on this one thing: If the world makes sense then God exists. As an atheist, Russell agreed to that, but then went on to say that ultimately the world doesn’t make sense.

Most thinking atheists accept that the world doesn’t’ make sense; but then, like Albert Camus, struggle with the question, how can it not make sense? If there isn’t a God then how can we say that is better to help a child than to abuse a child? If there isn’t a God, how can we ground rationality and morality?

At the end of my thesis, I concluded that existence of God cannot be proven through a rational argument, a logical syllogism, or a mathematical equation, albeit all of those can give some compelling hints regarding God’s existence.

However, God is not found at the end of an argument, a syllogism, or an equation. God’s existence, life, and love are known (they are experienced) inside a certain way of living.

Simply put, if we live in a certain way, in the way all religions worthy of the name (not least Christianity) invite us to live, namely, with compassion, selflessness, forgiveness, generosity, patience, long-suffering, fidelity, and gratitude, then we will know God’s existence by participation in God’s very life – and whether or not we have an imaginative sense of God’s existence is of no importance.

Why do I believe in God? Not because I’m particularly persuaded by proofs from great philosophical minds like Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, Leibnitz, or Hartshorne. I find their proofs intellectually intriguing but existentially less persuasive.

I believe in God because I sense God’s presence at a gut level, as a silent voice, as a call, an invitation, a moral imperative which, whenever listened to and obeyed, brings community, love, peace, and purpose.

That’s the real proof for the existence of God.

Speaking Truth in Parables

November 24, 2025

A A A

Jesus was once asked why he spoke in parables. His answer is more than a little curious: I speak in parables . . . lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn again, and I should heal them.

At first glance, it would seem that Jesus is being deliberately vague so that people would not understand the truth—and so could remain ignorant and obstinate.

The opposite is true. His studied imprecision is a gentleness, a deep compassion that recognizes that because people’s lives are complex, the truth should only be spoken in a certain way. How?

It is not enough just to have the truth. Truth can set us free, but it can also freeze hearts further if it is presented carelessly. Here’s a poignant example:

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates once published a book called Them. Although a novel, the book is based on the life of real person, a young woman whom Oates once taught in a college classroom and to whom she gave a failing grade.

Sometime after she had given this young woman a failing grade, Oates received a letter from her. The woman shared much of her own story, which was very checkered and painful. She had come from a bad home, been abused as a young girl, and had spent a number of years trying to deal with her wounded self through mindless and anonymous sex.

At the time she wrote this letter, she was trying to pull herself out of both her past and her destructive patterns of coping. In her letter she complained bitterly that she was not helped much by the class she took from Oates. Here, with a few slight redactions, is an extended quote from her letter:

“You once said in one of your classes: ‘Literature gives form to life.’ I remember you saying that very clearly. And now I want to ask you something: ‘What is form? And why is that better than the way life happens by itself?’

I hate all that, all those lies, so many words in all those books. What form is there to the way things happen? I wanted to run up to you after class and ask you that question, cry it out at you, shout it into your face because your words were wrong! You were wrong!

And yet I envy you. I have envied you since I first saw you. You and others like you. Your easy way with words and people. The way you can talk to others, like friends.

One day before class I saw you walking into the building with another teacher, the two of you, well-dressed, talking, smiling, like that was no accomplishment whatsoever. And another time I saw you driving away from school in a blue car.

And I hate you for that. For that and for your books and for your words, and for your knowing so much about what never happened in any perfect form.

I even see your picture in the newspapers sometimes. You, with all your knowledge, while I have lived my life already, turned myself inside out and got nothing out of it. I have lived my life and there is no form to it. No shape.

I could tell you about life. I and people like me. All of us people who lie alone at night and squirm with a hatred we cannot get straight, into a shape. All of us women who give themselves to men without knowing why, all of us who walk fast with hate, like pain, in our bowels, terrified. What do you know about that?

Like the woman I am sitting across from right now in the library as I write this letter. She is fat, heavy, thick cream-colored fat-marbled old legs, cracked with varicose veins. People like her and me know things you don’t know, you teachers and writers of books.

We are the ones who wait around libraries when it is time to leave and sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen. We are the ones who make crazy plans for marriage, but have no one to marry. We are the ones who look around slowly when we get off the bus; but don’t know what we are looking for.

We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long hours sunk in our own bodies; thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for someone to come and to give form to so much pain. And what do you know about that?”

Yes, what do we know about that, we teachers, preachers, and writers of books? Her letter tells us why Jesus spoke in parables.

The truth can set us free. Indeed, it can give form to life. But can also be spoken unthinkingly, without heart, and then it serves mostly to rub our own inadequacy and shame into our face.

We need to speak our truth in parables. Truth is not something we can play with, fast and easy.

What Makes Us Family – Biology or Faith?

November 17, 2025

A A A

In one sense, we might say that Christianity invented religion in that before Christianity, communities of faith were mostly ethnically and tribally based. Jesus defined a family of faith differently, telling us that it is not the womb you were born out of, but the womb that you were reborn from that defines your family. For Jesus, real family is not grounded in biology, ethnicity, or nationality. It is grounded in faith.

Where does Jesus teach this? It is almost everywhere present as a motif underlying his teaching. However, it is made explicit a number of times in how he defines his relationship to his own mother and her place and status within the faith community.

There are several instances in the Gospel where Jesus seems to distance himself from his own mother. For instance, in one incident someone comes up to him and says, “your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” But Jesus replies, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Then pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here is my mother and my brothers.”

In another instance, he is addressing a crowd when a woman cries out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” Only to have Jesus say, “blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”

That exchange might be recast this way. A woman in the crowd is especially moved by Jesus and shouts: “You must have had a wonderful mother!” Jesus’ answer: “Yes, she was wonderful, more wonderful than you think. All mothers are wonderful in their biology. But my mother was even more wonderful in her faith!”

These incidents can be confusing at first glance because it can seem like Jesus is distancing himself from his own mother. He is not. Instead, he is redefining his relationship to his mother in a way that gives her a different (and more exalted) status: Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it. The Gospels make it clear that Mary was in fact the first person who did this. Her faith in saying “let it be done to me according to your word” is what made her more special than her biology.

In the Gospels, Mary has a special status within the apostolic community not first of all because she was the biological mother of Jesus, but because she was the first one to truly hear the word of God and keep it. Her faith, more than her biology, gave her special status.

Moreover, with these responses Jesus is fundamentally redefining what constitutes true family, that is, faith more than biology determines who is your mother and who are your brothers and sisters. Real family is not determined by biology, but by faith. For Christians, it is not the womb you were born out of, but the womb that you were reborn from that defines your family. True family no longer has its base in ethnicity, biology, tribe, or nation. None of these makes us brothers and sisters in the truest sense of the word family.

There are far-reaching challenges flowing from this, challenges we perennially tend to ignore. Simply put, we perennially resist defining family that widely. Instead, our propensity is to forever identify the family of faith with our own biological, ethnic, national, denominational, or ideological family, thus making God our own tribal, national, denominational, or ideological God. This gives us not only a false notion of family but also a false notion of God. In a phrase borrowed from Nikos Kazantzakis, when we do this, the bosom of God becomes a ghetto.

“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters?” Who is my real family?

In answering this, faith must ultimately override references to biological family, ethnicity, nationality, denominational, or ideological affinity. Those who are hearing the word of God and are keeping it are “mother, brother, and sister” to us.

Jesus’ redefinition of what constitutes family is, I believe, a much-needed challenge for us today as increasingly we are separating ourselves from each other through ideological, national, and ethnic differences and are defining family very differently than Jesus did. Identifying the family of faith with biological, ethnic, national, denominational, or ideological family is what underlies the concept of Christian nationalism and other kinds of tribalism which try to cloak themselves with Jesus and the Gospel. Those notions, however sincere, are misguided and in significant ways antithetical to Jesus and the Gospel. In Christ, as scripture assures us, we are all baptized into one body, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, and we were all given one Spirit to drink. In the family of faith there is no Johnson or Rolheiser, American or Mexican, British or French, white or colored, liberal or conservative. Our real family, our family in Christ, transcends all of that – and not withstanding a healthy loyalty to biological family, denomination, and nation, asks each of us to also transcend that.

Back to Top

Searching for Something?

Recent Columns

View more >