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John and James did not yet understand the love of Jesus when they wanted “fire from heaven to destroy” the Samaritan village” (cf. Lk 9:56). The approach to our vocations can be different from us and the environment. For a better understanding, we will analyze several expressions that they will reveal to us the deeper meaning of God’s word. One of these expressions that the evangelists Matthew and Luke have in common is the expression ” I will follow you “.

How do you think today’s people of this world would behave if the Lord Jesus came among us and said: “Follow me?” Let’s each answer this question. How would I, what would I do? What would I say to him? K what did God call us to? First of all, he called us to life. I am here and I didn’t have to be. We weren’t and yet we are here. God called us into existence out of nothing. God called us because he wanted us to be here, because he is with us Jesus invites people to follow him willingly and freely where he is, but let’s do it fully . In marriage, in single life, in consecrated life, religious life. The Lord Jesus calls the whole person to follow. That means not only his whole body, but also his mind and heart. He doesn’t want a person who will follow him, but he has some but… I will follow you, but let me do this and that. I will follow you, but I still have to arrange something. Do not be afraid to answer God’s call, even if the cross awaits us. But God will give us the necessary strength to persevere. Therefore, let’s choose the right path. Let us leave the path of darkness and enter the path of light. It is up to each one of us.

A few thoughts about the priest: Many people, including believers, do not understand and do not realize that the vocation to be a priest is a gift from God, that man did not give it to himself, but God gives it. God must call and man – man – must cooperate with this call. It is not possible for someone to become a priest by buying ordination, by forcing someone to accept priestly ordination. The Church punishes and does not allow such and similar attempts. In the same way, the one who enters the seminary does not have to be a priest yet. There, with the help of designated priests, he will find out if he has a vocation, if he cooperates sufficiently with the gift, and if he is ready to receive priestly ordination. For example, someone has to interrupt his stay in the seminary so that after a time when his vocation has matured and he has clarified things, he can return and receive priestly ordination. And they fire another show when they find out that he does not have the signs of a vocation and does not cooperate with the means necessary on the way to the priesthood. Half of those who entered the seminary leave some seminars during their studies and formation.

 Or conversely, can anyone confirm that God does not exist? And if neither one or the other could be done, what about it? Today, we will talk about the introduction to the arguments for and against God’s existence and will try to answer whether and what such debates are significant.

We live in a time when not only the online world is full of various debates and arguments for and against God’s existence.

This topic has fascinated me for a long time, and it is most interesting how people have thought about it in the past and present. This is also indicated by the fact that I only recently heard the atheist Richard Dawkins say that the question of God’s existence is perhaps the most important.

When you look up the frequency of the English phrase “arguments for God,” we find that this phrase began to rise dramatically after 2001, after the attack on the New York Twin Towers.

It reached its peak of use in 2010, related to the onset and zenith of the so-called New atheism (dose 177). Although its use has declined, it has increased slightly in recent years. Anyway, it is a topic not only of cultural and religious interest but also of academic interest.

Many faculties worldwide have courses devoted to the history and philosophy of religion, which are directly related to this. For example, you can enroll in studies on the religious philosophy of David Hume, on God, the cell, and the universe, or on proving God’s existence. 

“If only it were that easy.”

So today’s topic is arguing for and against God’s existence—first, a little personal. When I began to doubt God’s presence sometime in my younger, prettier but less educated age, I decided to ask. I didn’t look as sophisticated as Socrates with my questions, but rather like the Little Prince visiting different planets.

I thought he was going to break his stick over me, if not his guitar, but his answer was probably more surprising to me than my question was to him. He answered, “I wish it were that easy.” After that, he talked a little more and gave me some more specific reasons, but his intellectual modesty was quite apparent to me, and I appreciated that.

What is the goal?

First, I think it is perfect to ask at the beginning what the goal of all arguments for God’s existence should be. Let’s start with the obvious thing – ideas don’t have plans, but people do. And different people may have other projects.

But mostly today, supporters or users of these arguments do not see it as having a particular superpower, which is to convince someone definitively. And that, for these two reasons.

First, these arguments have little logical force in themselves. This is because the strength of their conclusion depends on the truth of the statements on which they are based. This means that they can be questioned, and so often, because of reasonable objections, these statements and the conclusion of the argument will not be sure.

Instead, we will always have fun here and think about probabilities. But that’s okay because our whole life is about choosing between options that are likely to be true. And that’s why these arguments are not detached from ordinary life, but rather our everyday life from these arguments.

Second, these arguments aren’t about instantly converting others to the opposite view because our psychology, philosophy, and life need to be revised. Even if the opinions pointed toward a particular, very probable conclusion, it would be another thing to be convinced by it logically and psychologically and to change our thinking and behavior.

As a recent example, we can take the many arguments about COVID-19 and vaccination. Although clinical studies show precise results, many not only did not accept them but thought and behaved as if these results were exactly the opposite. In other words, we can always find some excuse for not accepting certain conclusions – and it is often that it makes life more comfortable for us or that we will belong to a particular group whose identity we want to adopt.

That is, we all have our preferences and prejudices. And not only our conspiring fellow citizens but also us, and we have to admit it. As Richard Feynman said, it is essential not to be fooled; the easiest person to fool is ourselves.

Another and sometimes overlapping example is precisely conspiracy theories – no matter what good argument we come up with against them, experienced conspirators have built their own, so to speak, immunization strategies, thanks to which they can never be refuted. Not because they are correct but because they do not play fair and move their logical pieces differently than the rules allow.

But it’s not just about conspirators. We do not operate in such a way that we automatically accept the opposite conclusion if some argument points to it. Or perhaps more precisely, it works for less essential things that can be quickly searched on Google.

However, the more critical and deeply embedded our beliefs are in our worldviews, the longer, at least typically, such a conversion will take. And with worldviews, it certainly applies to both sides. So, you cannot expect any instant transformation from the arguments. And if so, what significance can these discussions have?

Benefit of discussion

So, must the goal in such vital debates as the existence of God be a complete worldview conversion? To ask such a question is to answer it. We all know it doesn’t work that way. But that doesn’t mean that discussing essential things in the universe, including God’s existence, doesn’t have its meaning. Their contribution can take many forms.

For the first time, we can learn something new. It can be new knowledge I learned during the debate or a new perspective I have never had before. Or they can be virtues that we can cultivate in this way – we can learn to listen, formulate our arguments, make reactions, not be unnecessarily nervous or angry, represent the arguments of the other side truthfully if not even more strongly, and thus be an example to all listening.

Moreover, a good argument could be made that such knowledge and moral contribution is often much better than convincing someone or winning a debate.

In this sense, even unsuccessful argumentation, which would not lead to any worldview conversion, has a great potential to be successful in these other aspects. If we summarize it in slightly different words – even an overall flawed argument can have a few good observations hidden in it, and those alone can be worth it.

It also improves our argumentative and personal qualities, including knowledge and epistemic humility. Now, let’s start with one fundamental question – whether the question of God’s existence can be solved with the help of science.

Is it a scientific or a philosophical question?

Can science investigate God? This, of course, depends on whether the scientific methods could test God’s existence. And that relies mainly on whether the so-called methodological naturalism – that is, the fact that science should deal only with natural causes – is how science should and can work.

That deserves a separate dose. But opinions on this are also divided – whether among scientists or philosophers, as well as among believers and non-believers. This is not a meaningless question; on the contrary, it is essential, but there are specific problems with it.

I want to take advantage of this question because it’s crucial. However, it does not have only one solution. Some either deny that science can arbitrarily test God and his activities. First, God is not part of this world in the sense that all other physical objects are part of it.

It is not only a physical object but a mind, which is supposed to be (among other things) omniscient and all-loving. And so, even if we could want to test her, it might be against her will and plans. And it could be as laughable from a broader perspective as if ants wanted to start scientifically testing the existence of some superintelligence in the universe.

Others would argue just the opposite – that we see from the nature of our universe that the universe had its Creator. Some believers claim that God’s activity can be seen indirectly in specific biological structures, in the setting of physical constants and the like.

Others, on the other hand, may perceive such empirical observations oppositely – they say that God’s absence can also be seen in tests of the effectiveness of prayer or the well-known objection of why God does not let amputated limbs grow back.

And yet it is true that many can come up with certain domains where God can be tested, so to speak (setting physical constants) but not in others (effectiveness of prayers for healing). But everyone has answers to these objections and counter-objections, and then there is the question of whether such a selective position is consistent.

One of the popular positions, probably since the time of Newton, is that God works through the natural order. This view has existed since at least the Middle Ages and later reformulated from the time of Descartes and Newton that God works through natural laws.

However, it differs in exactly what way, but we will not go into this adventure hole now. But if God is the first cause and works through laws that he will either not break or only very, very exceptionally, how exactly do we test such a view?

I’m not saying there aren’t different, even creative, answers to this; I’m just pointing out that only some positions can be easily tested, even if we had high-quality test tubes ready.

However, many see this question as a philosophical one. Maybe it would be easier for us if we could test God’s existence in our laboratory, but some, or rather, many things seem impossible and perhaps never will be. And that is why many philosophers are divided on many issues.

One, albeit simplistic, view of how science developed is that many of today’s scientific disciplines were first part of philosophy. However, when sufficient progress was made in these branches, the given field separated from this philosophy and thus created a separate discipline – such as geology, biology, physics, and the like.

If so, which discipline has made sufficient progress to give a quantitative or at least qualified answer to whether God exists? However, according to many experts, nothing like that happened, so this question is still part of philosophy. This question is philosophical because there is yet to be a consensus that a specific relevant authority can resolve this dispute.

Imagine we disagree on the result of a particular football match. I claim that it was some result X and you that result Y. We are certainly not both right, but maybe we are both wrong. What to do then?

Now, it’s easy – we check the result with a particular relevant source, such as a short Google search. If we disagree on the speed of light, we’ll also check it similarly – but here’s the point: it’s not the all-knowing Google itself, but the scientific authority and consensus that we can easily find and read on Google.

But what if there is no way to verify something, or when no authority could authoritatively and qualifiedly decide this for us? What if there is no consensus that it can be verified, or when there are arguments whose conclusions come to different or even opposite conclusions?

Such a situation is a reasonable assumption that in such a situation, we will still be talking about philosophy and philosophical reasoning. Although it may seem very improbable to some, we may someday come to a position where the majority of philosophers and scientists will agree that the question of God’s existence is, for example, a question of physics or – since we are probably talking about the distant future – let’s say some scientific discipline that does not yet exist at all.

Arguments that God’s existence has and can be tested by scientific fact exist and are much more sophisticated than it might seem from Dawkins’s above statement. But this is still a statement with its problems and is only generally accepted by some scientists and philosophers.

Today, we discussed that we can be optimistic that all these arguments, even if they are all bad, can be good for something. But I don’t want to say they are good or bad before we look at them more. And all these more concrete arguments for and against God’s existence and his attributes await us in future installments.

There are some things in which we will never measure up to God:
We will never equal God in the work of CREATION: we will never create a Universe out of nothing, nor can we keep it in existence as God does.
We will never equal God in LOVE: None of us will ever love every single person personally and lay down our lives for every single person personally as Jesus did: “Jesus, during his life, his agony, and his passion, knew and loved every one of us individually and gave himself up for each of us: the Son of God ‘loved me and gave himself up for me’ (Gal 2:20)” (CCC 478).
We will never equal God in HOLINESS: we are sinners, we have done evil, and it is only by God’s gift of love and forgiveness that we are allowed to think at all the life of God, which God lives in Himself, received from no one, and has never denied or lost in any way.
But there are things in which we can indeed be like God:
But that in which we can become like Him is not the GOAL and the RESULT, but the SPORT of LIFE:
We can CREATE as best we can, dedicate our whole being to it – and so BE like God!
We can LOVE as best we can, with all our being – and so BE like God!
We can choose HOLINESS as best we can, with all our being – and so BE like God!
This is the secret of deification:
We do not become like God because we CAN DO THE SAME WORKS as God,…
… but because we can DO much lesser works EQUALLY LIKE GOD – and thus BE LIKE GOD, even though we cannot do the great things God has done!
… a threefold vulnerability
FAITH IN GOD AND LOVE OF GOD = vulnerability: I begin to live according to something that does not come from me but from God. I give God power over my life and thus freely give up my previous independence in the name of love. I allow God to intervene in my life, change it, and turn it upside down (cf. St. Francis of Assisi!)…
CIRQUE = vulnerability: I open my life to other people, I give them the possibility to enter our life, we stop hiding from them, pretending… we open ourselves to them, to their lives, to their needs…
CREATORS HIP (“apostolate”) = vulnerability: we open ourselves even to people “outside” to invite them to a relationship and to share their lives with us, even though we know that many of them are evil and many times they will take advantage of this, and it will require sacrifice from us, a willingness to go through the effort, the suffering,…
And yet it is worth it because it is the PAIN OF BIRTH: “When a woman gives birth, she is despondent, for her hour has come. But as soon as she gives birth to a child, she no longer thinks of the pain for the joy that a human being has come into the world. 22 You are sad now, but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice. And your joy no one will take from you. (Joh 16:21-22

Saint Jerome  (347-420) is a Teacher of the Church, a saint, and one of the most outstanding scholars of the Catholic Church. He translated the Holy Scriptures into Latin (Vulgate); this translation of the Bible is still used in the Catholic Church today.

He studied in Rome, worked in Trier, Germany, and later in Venice. From 370 he was a member of a group of ascetic monks, and from age 26, he traveled to the East several times, where he visited various monastic communities.

Saint Jerome had to fight all his life with laziness and partly with his explosive and choleric nature, so regarding inactivity, he was competent in informing how laziness should be highly valued.

After the consecration of St., in 385, Hieronymus temporarily settled in Bethlehem and founded three female and one male monastery. One hundred seventeen Vulgate above of Jerome’s letters have been preserved from his work, but the most important work was the translation of the Holy Scriptures from Greek and Hebrew into Latin (the aforementioned Vulgate, which was later declared an official translation by the Council of Trent 1545-1564).

In 385, he settled in Bethlehem and founded three female and one male monastery. At this time, he also wrote his famous works – 117 letters of Hieronymus have been preserved, of which 19 were addressed to his contemporary St. Augustin; his work On Excellent Men (Church) is also known.

St. Jerome always said procrastination, laziness, and anger must be decisively fought. Like St. Paul, St. Jerome also claimed that laziness is a sin against Love. Laziness is the mother of all evils because it opens the door to temptation, and by not doing what we have, we harm ourselves (we don’t use our talents) and others.

Laziness is the mother of sin. As the Book of Sirach says ( Sir 22, 1-2 ): 1 . They throw a smeared stone at the lazy man, and everyone says he is worthy of contempt. 2 . They throw dung from the oxen at the sloth; whoever touches the throw, everyone shakes their hand.

As the Book of Proverbs says ( Proverbs 21:25 ): 25 . One’s lust kills a lazy person because robots protect his hands, and the Holy Scripture praises a diligent woman ( Prov . 31,27 ) because: 27 . He follows the progress of all the work around the house and does not eat from idle bread.

St. Paul openly says, in his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, that he who does not work should not eat either ( 2 Thess . 3:10-12 ): 10 . After all, even when we were with you, we commanded you this: He who does not want to work, let him not eat either. 11 . For we hear that some among you are living disorderly, doing nothing but chasing after useless things. 12 . Thus, we command and call upon them in the Lord Jesus Christ to work peacefully and thus eat their bread.

In one of his letters, St. Jerome wrote: “ Anyone who is inactive becomes a prey to vain desires. In Egypt, the monks in the monasteries had a rule that they would not accept anyone unwilling to work. Work is necessary to support the body, especially the soul. ” If we are busy doing good, then we are less susceptible to bad temptations, ” states another of his thoughts, St. Hieronymus.

Like St. Jerome, other saints encourage a determined fight against laziness. 9 points can help us in the battle against laziness:

1. Setting clear and realistic goals and priorities. _ St. Augustine of Hippie urges us to set accurate daily, weekly, annual, and lifelong dreams. We must try to fulfill as many of these goals as possible.

2. In the fight against laziness, proceed with successive steps. St. Francis of Assisi recommends dividing each task into smaller, partial units and solving them gradually.

3. Stay disciplined. Holy Mother Teresa of Calcutta states that if we want the lamp to burn continuously, we must pour oil into it. We must not neglect our duties; we must fulfill them with discipline.

4. Let’s be persistent and patient. In the fight against temptations and laziness, there is no need to give up if we partially fail. Saint Francis de Sales encourages us not to be discouraged even when we die. You don’t have to give up and keep going until you reach your goal.

5. Don’t get distracted. Saint John Paul II. states that if we are delighted within ourselves, we will not succeed. If we eliminate distractions within ourselves, our effectiveness will increase substantially.

6. Do not overload yourself unnecessarily. St. Augustine says that if we take too much work on our shoulders, our work will not be productive. It’s better to do one thing right than ten things wrong.

7. Generosity to others. St. Teresa of Avila says that perfect love is carried in the sign of love for neighbors, while our person is relegated to the background. When we think less about ourselves and more about our loved ones, it moves us to action and overcomes our spiritual laziness.

8. Work with love. As Saint Francis de Sales says, carrying out all activities with love in the heart is necessary. We don’t have to worry about the future if we are driven by love. Love is also a potent weapon against fear; the fear of failure is often the root of procrastination. A day not spent motivated by love is a day wasted.

9. Rest is not laziness. Rest does not mean that we do nothing; we engage in activities that require less effort. As Saint Josemaria Escrivá de Balaguer says, we should not confuse well-deserved rest with laziness. A well-deserved rest is a time when we can recharge our energy to continue with the next activity.