In Saint Augustine’s Confessions, the Doctor of Grace reflects on how he was not able to understand the teachings of the Christian faith because he could not “conceive of any substance but such as [he] saw with [his] own eyes.” Augustine believed nothing existed but the material and lacked the categories in his thinking to conceive of something that was spirit and not matter. Before he could come to believe in the Christian faith, he had to overcome this barrier, and so prepare his mind to be able to receive the seed of faith.
The function of apologetics is exactly that. Before we can freely consider what Christianity teaches, we have to be able to see how it could be true. To attempt to hold faith and trust in God without this is like trying to climb a staircase to the third story of a building without first entering the front door. Conversely, many people who end up losing faith do so because they find themselves on the third floor of a building about the foundation of which they are unsure. Removing barriers to faith and shoring up that foundation, then, is the good fruit of the ministry of apologetics. Browbeating people with arguments when they are not willing to hear them is not. It is really unfortunate that apologetics can sometimes get a reputation (occasionally deserved) for such abrasiveness.
Before a question can be addressed, the person asking it has to be ready to hear the answer. Oftentimes, people phrase their statements as questions, but are not actually looking for an answer. When I was a teenager and losing faith in religion, I remember asking the question, “Why does God allow people to go to hell if He loves them?” Many possible answers exist for this question, yet I cannot recall hearing any of them, or seeking them out. The reason being that I was not asking the question in search of an answer, but rather making a statement to justify my non-belief, phrased in the form of a question. For these kinds of faux questions, there is no good answer, and apologetics will not be able to help the questioner. It may, however, still be of benefit to those who hear the question and are open to an answer—and may even help the questioner at some point in the future when they are open to an answer.
With the eyes and heart of someone who has returned to faith, I now reflect back on the questions I asked when I was losing it. Even though I was not truly seeking an answer at the time, years later, God opened my heart to earnestly seek understanding. The things I once saw as insurmountable barriers to believing in God became surmountable. My hope is that by reflecting on some of the questions I had, anyone who is searching and troubled by the barriers I faced will come to see, like I did, that they can be overcome, and that Christian faith is indeed reasonable.
Question One: Why does God allow people to go to hell if He loves them?
I remember phrasing the question in this manner: “If I had a child and they were walking towards an open fire, I would pull them back and stop them, yet God allows people to walk right into hell. How can He really love them if He does that?” This question is powerful emotionally because it deals with highly charged topics. Nobody wants to think someone they knew and loved could be in hell, and so the very idea of hell, when considered in a personal rather than abstract sense, is hard to deal with.
What I would tell my past self who asked this question is: your question is full of assumptions and disanalogies. Fully developed people are not like toddlers who stumble towards a fire unknowingly, and God actually does a whole lot to prevent people from going to hell. What God stops short of is forcing our wills to do what He wants, in the manner of a puppeteer pulling the strings of a conscious puppet who does not want to move.
Even people who never hear the Gospel can have hope for salvation in their ignorance, as Saint Paul writes in Romans 2:12-16:
All who sin outside the law will also perish without reference to it, and all who sin under the law will be judged in accordance with it. For it is not those who hear the law who are just in the sight of God; rather, those who observe the law will be justified. For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even defend them on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge people’s hidden works through Christ Jesus.
So, nobody stumbles into hell unknowingly while God sits apathetically. The other part of the question asks what it means to say God loves us, if He allows bad things to happen to us, even eternally. When reflecting on the origin and nature of evil, Augustine says:
And I inquired what iniquity was, and ascertained it not to be a substance, but a perversion of the will, bent aside from You, O God, the Supreme Substance, towards these lower things, and casting out its bowels, and swelling outwardly.
Confessions 7.16
That is, evil does not exist in and of itself, but is rather the result of the act of a will’s rejection of God. In this light, we can understand hell more clearly. If God is unwilling to force our wills, then some people will choose to not be with God, and hell is the result of that choice. It is where you go to be without God—in the degree to which that is possible—and so all of the things that are in God’s nature are lacking there, such as goodness, peace, joy, and love. God’s love for us means that He allows us, with our free wills, to make decisions, even ones that are bad for us.
Question Two: Why should I believe in an invisible God?
Naturalism is a belief that everything that exists is natural—that everything, can be perceived and studied by the scientific method. Setting the visibility of God to the senses as a prerequisite for belief takes naturalism as an assumption. Yet, why should we believe all that exists is perceptible to the senses?
Many of the best arguments for the existence of God take place not in a scientific mindset but in a philosophical one. By the definition, God is beyond all nature and cannot be perceived in that way. Yet, the very fact that nature exists is evidence for God existing. As Paul writes in Romans 1:20a:
Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.
It is not simply a convenient way to get out of “proving” God exists to say that He is invisible. It is essential to the concept of a monotheistic God that God cannot be subject to creation, but rather as creator is supreme above it. After all, if God had a physical body we could see, then He would be limited. For a material thing to exist, it must have places it is and places it is not; a body has boundaries. Christians have always held that God is infinite, not limited, and this is not a position taken in response to criticism about the invisibility of God, but an essential tenet of the faith.
So, why believe in God, when He cannot be perceived? Because existence itself requires an explanation. Even if the universe has existed forever, it would still require an explanation, an answer to the fundamental question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The explanation for the existence of everything natural (that is, material, physical, etc.) cannot be another thing that is natural (material, physical). Such an explanation creates an infinite loop. The cause of everything natural must be itself outside of nature.
This subject is far too vast to be addressed briefly, so I will leave you with the encouragement to read about the philosophical reason to believe God exists. Some possible sources could be the Five Ways of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Kalam Cosmological argument, or the arguments provided by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.
Question Three: Why are there so many different religions/denominations if God is real?
This question really asks two different things with two separate answers.
As for the different denominations within Christianity, if we look to the beginning of the faith, there were not multiple denominations but only one Church. It was human action that caused schisms in the Church and led to the multitude of different Christian churches. At the beginning of the Church’s history, councils such as Chalcedon, which sought to address heresies arising in the Church, ended up with schism between those who held to the council’s conclusions and those who refused. It was not God Himself who created Christianity with different denominations, but schisms brought on by people who accepted or rejected the direction the Church was going in her councils and teachings.
As for different religions, I think a compelling answer for this is found in the makeup of human nature. People naturally have a desire for God. When they do not have revelation from God directly, their natural desires lead them to seek God on their own. Sometimes this takes the form of deism, sometimes the desire for God creates other systems of belief without a central deity, or with multiple. In any case, it is the fundamental human longing for God that leads to a multiplicity of religions when humans try to fill their own need.
Another question related to this is, “Why doesn’t God set everyone straight?” After all, God could speak directly to everyone on Earth and tell them “The correct religion is ‘X’, and the correct denomination is ‘Y’.” Yet, God does not choose to intervene in this way, but rather permits the multiplicity of religion and Christian denomination. As 1 Corinthians 14:33 instructs us, God is not the author of confusion, but of truth.
We cannot say this multiplicity is because God does not care or because there is no correct answer, as truth is essential to God’s nature. Where there is disagreement about a matter of truth, both people cannot be right. Jesus cannot simultaneously be God and not be God; we cannot both reincarnate after death and go to Heaven. As truth is essential to God, knowing truth is important, and being wrong forever is not a good thing.
This is not to say that only those who are right about God will be saved and everyone else will certainly not be, as written in Lumen Gentium 16:
Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life. Whatever good or truth is found amongst them is looked upon by the Church as a preparation for the Gospel.
To return to the question, why does God not set everyone straight and reveal who is correct? In truth, many people do not really want to know the truth, and do not seek it. As Paul writes in Romans 1:20-23:
Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened. While claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes.
There are those who genuinely seek and cannot find due to a lack of available information. However, most of the time, there is a lack of seeking. For many people, faith is not a priority as they go about their busy lives. An earnest search would reveal the truth for them and change their lives, but that first step is hard to take, and many people do not take it. As written in Lumen Gentium 14:
[But] often men, deceived by the Evil One, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, serving the creature rather than the Creator. Or some there are who, living and dying in this world without God, are exposed to final despair. Wherefore to promote the glory of God and procure the salvation of all of these, and mindful of the command of the Lord, “Preach the Gospel to every creature”, the Church fosters the missions with care and attention.
Question Four: If God is real then why does He not answer prayers?
My first response to this is, “How do you know He doesn’t?”
The Gospels talk about prayer frequently, and it takes a mature understanding and reading to make sense of all they have to say about it. Luke 18 begins with a passage about the necessity to be persistent in prayer:
Then he told them a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary. He said, “There was a judge in a certain town who neither feared God nor respected any human being. And a widow in that town used to come to him and say, ‘Render a just decision for me against my adversary.’ For a long time the judge was unwilling, but eventually he thought, ‘While it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being, because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.’
Lk 18:1-5
This passage informs us that we should not understand prayer as a simple “I ask for ‘X’ and I receive it instantly”. If that was the case, what need would there be for persistence? We cannot then conclude God does not answer prayer on the basis that we prayed for something and did not instantly receive it.
But what about when we pray for something and do not receive it at all? Say, if you pray for healing for a sick person, then they die?
In times like this we have to remember that we are not all knowing, and God’s plan is better than ours could possibly be. This life is temporary, and we do not have the ability to see behind the veil. A loved one dies to us despite our prayers for them to live, and they go to life eternal, better than life on Earth ever could be. If all our petitions were answered, we would be living in a much worse world, because God’s goodness would be constrained by our wills. Augustine reflects:
And what was it, O Lord, that she, with such an abundance of tears, was asking of You, but that You would not permit me to sail? But You, mysteriously counselling and hearing the real purpose of her desire, granted not what she then asked, in order to make me what she was ever asking.
Confessions 5.8
Augustine’s mother Saint Monica wanted him to stay with her in Africa, in order that he might eventually become a Christian and not be corrupted in Rome. However, God desired to bring about Augustine’s conversion through Saint Ambrose in Milan. In order to address Monica’s real longing, God did not grant her wish at the time she prayed Augustine would stay, but brought about her deeper desire.
Prayer is foremost communion with God, not a button to press when we want something, and then to cry foul when we do not get it. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says in paragraph 2559:
“Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God.” But when we pray, do we speak from the height of our pride and will, or “out of the depths” of a humble and contrite heart? He who humbles himself will be exalted; humility is the foundation of prayer, Only when we humbly acknowledge that “we do not know how to pray as we ought,” are we ready to receive freely the gift of prayer. “Man is a beggar before God.”
Editorial Note: This article concludes with Part Two which was posted on November 18.
Connor P. Fitzmaurice
Connor P. Fitzmaurice is an Augustinian novice, an amateur writer, and a chess player. He is an adult convert to the Catholic faith, and he is passionate in his desire to share that faith with others.
