Does God really exist

[JamesWong]

thank you. I feel peace in mind by reading yours.

 

[Eric_Hyom]

Jesus believed in the Father, and he knew in advance how he would have to suffer.

 

[Vonsalza]

I am a practicing Catholic and I believe in God. But sometimes I cannot help myself wondering that God really exists.

Congratulations. This makes you a “rational” person. It’s perfectly normal in the walk of faith to have feelings of doubt.

I try to think in traditional Catholic way. But at the same time, I cannot help myself… why? why? why?

Such things are unknowable. As such, it’s a sub-optimal use of your time to worry yourself with “why”.

I am not going to loose my faith in God but I want to get stronger feeling.

Then more fully immerse yourself with your Catholic community and worry about what you can do, rather than ponder over questions you’ll never have an answer to.

 

[c1949]

I haven’t read the other comments. Perhaps it is trite, at a painful time like this, but we don’t understand God’s ways. As it says in the book of Job, if we accept the good from God, should we not also accept the bad?

I’ve heard that there are at least 250,000 deaths in the world each day, from all the causes you can imagine. Visualize all the pain suffered by those who passed away, as well as by the survivors. If nothing else, it tests us to keep our faith in the Lord.

We are told not to test the Lord. Questioning God’s existence is your right, but it is not advised in scripture. Do you test God’s existence when every single thing goes wrong? Do you view God as your slave, or as your master? The Bible spends most of its time, coming and going, to explain the death of Jesus Christ, and to tell us that it was foretold and had a purpose. Perhaps it’s not the time to make such judgments about God when the pain of the loss of someone is so intense.

To the contrary, we should be grateful for each moment of our life and that of others. We don’t know what is coming at us, around the corner (so to speak) and we should always be ready to meet our Creator, blessed be his holy Name.

 

[stephenSTOSS1]

We were not created to suffer … period. When our First Parents disobeyed God, they set in motion consequences that could not be undone. The following article will answer most of your questions. Evil exists =/= God does not.
St. Hildegard of Bingen was taught by God the five reason he will take someone’s life. While I can’t remember them all, I do remember that they were the kind of reasons that one would expect from an infinitely Good God.

 

[curious_cath]

It suggests deism (a demiurge who creates but then sits back) instead of theism (God who creates and conserves all creation from moment to moment). Catholics believe in theism.

It was not my intention to say that. I did not suggest deism, as of course, God is not a demiurge. God is a Creator God who cares about His creation all the time, through the Ten Commandments and our Savior, while He refuses to micromanage it.

1. God cares about His creation, that is why He gave us the Ten Commandments. Sometimes we feel this is too little of a guidance in the complexities of our world. But it is not true. On the contrary, it is not too little, but it is too much! The Ten Commandments is the richest source of life we can have. We fail it over and over again when we sin. It is evidence that the Ten Commandments is actually much more than we can care for.
2. God cares for us through the sacrifice of His only begotten Son. In fact, Jesus is God and He is present in our every day life through His Spirit. It is up to us if we let ourselves and our world to be led by the Spirit. It is our undeniable responsibility that we must take on ourselves with its full weight. Jesus is also bodily present in the Holy Eucharist. This is how much God loves us that He extends all His 3 persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit for the care of us, for the care of our world. It is so much more than being a demiurge!
3. God is sharing life with us. He gave us life to live and live it fully. It is in our free will to build the world around us. God won’t interfere or micromanage that because it is not His business. He did a lot for us, actually, the greatest possible thing to send and sacrifice His Son! We often dismiss Jesus as something apart from God, while he is actually the Second Person of the Holy Trinity! What else can we demand from God that would supersede His own voluntary death on the cross?!

All we need to do is to shed a false image of God that we created for our own convenience. Demanding that God should match our own expectations is idolatry because it is God who created us and it is not us who are supposed to create a God for our own convenience. Idolatry is sin and we fall into this sin whenever we want God to make correction rather than taking our own initiative, following the teaching of our Lord and submitting ourselves to the guidance of His Spirit, to make corrections ourselves.

 

[Wesrock]

Well said.

My intent wasn’t to pick on you personally, but it looked like the OP was having trouble reconciling what you wrote before with what he’s learned elsewhere, so I spoke up.