Evil causes so much frustration, disappointment, confusion, sadness, anger, suffering, hurt, pain, ruin, and death that it tempts some to think there must not be a God. God ceaselessly calls each of us, and calling back to him for deliverance is how to respond to moral and physical evil. Denying him is against reason and is a road to nowhere.

Beginnings surround us. Babies are born, plants are sprouting, minerals are forming, and stars are being born. All of these come from other things—from parents, seeds, magma, and dust. We observe where those things come from, their antecedents, their antecedents antecedents, and so forth. The search for beginnings discovers fewer causes, not more; many different things trace back to fewer causes, and these to even fewer causes.

Reason tells us that there is a singular first cause to all things. The cause of everything must come from nothing and always exist. This is what “everyone calls God” (St. Thomas Aquinas). Reason knows with certainty that God must exist, even though it cannot prove that he exists.

What do we know about the cause of everything that came from nothing and has always existed? We can name aspects based on what we see in the world. ‘Will,’ because the world exists, and ‘intellect,’ because the world has order. We can add ‘truth’ because the world is real, ‘beauty’ because the world pleases us, and ‘goodness’ because the world makes us happy. We could continue pondering creation and using its perfections to name God, but our knowledge would always be incomplete without receiving the Creator’s self-knowledge.

The most complete knowledge about the Creator is that given by his self-revelation. Through words and deeds, God revealed himself to our first parents, Noah, Abraham and his descendants. Through those stages of revelation, we learned that God is “He who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love and fidelity, One and no other (Ex 3:14, Ex 34:6, Mk 12:29).”

Finally, while remaining all he is, God assumed what he was not—humanity—to visit us, fulfill all his promises to us, and complete his revelation.

To arbitrarily deny salvation history and its witnesses is to deny God’s existence. To accept salvation history and God’s revelation that he is abounding in love but deny that God loves us is to call God a liar.

God exists and doesn’t lie. He revealed himself because we needed to know ourselves, to know our state of being separated from him, and to know his lovingly good plan to save us in Christ. God is I AM, Almighty, and always bringing good from evil.

“What made you establish man in so great a dignity? Certainly the incalculable love by which you have looked on your creature in yourself! You are taken with love for her; for by love indeed you created her, by love you have given her a being capable of tasting your eternal Good.”

St. Catherine of Siena

“What is it that is about to be created, that enjoys such honor? It is man—that great and wonderful living creature, more precious in the eyes of God than all other creatures! For him the heavens and the earth, the sea and all the rest of creation exist. God attached so much importance to his salvation that he did not spare his own Son for the sake of man. Nor does he ever cease to work, trying every possible means, until he has raised man up to himself and made him sit at his right hand.”

St. John Chrysostom