THE GOD - QUESTION

A GOOD QUESTION.

We humans seem to have the God-question on our minds since the very dawn of inteligence. It was on the mind of ancient people who discovered powerful deities in the crash of thunder and lightning, in the roar of the ocean, and in the awesome flight of the eagle.
The Egyptian pharaohs struggled with the question of divinity as they prepared elaborate tombs for their burial.
It was a question that was on Abraham's mind as he tried to fathom why he was called to be the father of a new people of God; and no doubt a concern for Mosses as he  wrestled with his call to lead the people to freedom.
It was of such deep concern to Socrates (+ 400 B.C) that he was willing to forfeit his own life in order to challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the gods.
Aristotle  (+322 B.C.) wrestled with this ultimate question as he attempted to reason to the need for a first cause and an unmoved mover of the world.
Serious questions about God's apparent abscence at a time of need came to Job in his desolation and to 12 years old Jesus in the Temple  and as he suffered on the cross.
In medieval times the ingenious theologian Anselm of Canterbury (+ 1109) decided that God was the greatest thought that one could think.
Later, the brilliant Thomas Aquinas (+1274) set out to offer reasonable "proofs" that God exists. Yet when Aquinas had completed his masterful summary of the Christian tradition, he looked upon it all as so much straw compared to a unique personal experience that he had of God.
In more recent times, Albert Einstein (+1955) wrestled with the problem of God as he attempted to measure the universe, concluding that such a complex and magnificent world could not have come about through "a roll of the dice".
A contemporary astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking, still struggles to understand the mind that seems to be involved in the design of this vast universe (Brennan R. Hill, God, Jesus, Church and Sacraments).

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