“God's existence is not merely an object of rational knowledge, but also an object of supernatural faith.”

Throughout history, man has attempted to reason out the existence of God - to build a ladder to the belief of God's existence via the intellect - and thereby rest assured that they are doing something right. Through reasoning about planting and harvest, people learned that God would die and be resurrected, just as the plants that sustain life die and are resurrected in planting. This reasoning leads to a belief in the god Quetzalcoatl and all the other dieing and rising deities. Through reasoning about where the world gets its life (mom and dad create baby) and where the world gets its light (the sun, moon, and stars), mankind discovered that God is triune. This leads to a belief in Trimurti for the Hindus, and all the other triune deities. Through reasoning about creation's origin, and that it must have come out of nothing or been around forever, people reasoned gods would have a virgin birth. This leads to Osiris et alii having virgin births.

The closer these myths are to Christianity, the more firm our faith in Christianity can become. This paradoxical statement is true because we as Christians are reasonable people. God made the world, and He left his fingerprints upon it. By those fingerprints we can come to know God exists (see the first dogma), so these other religions are true in so far as they have discovered the fingerprints of God stamped upon the natural world. The novice potter leaves her fingerprints upon the clay by mistake, but when God touches the moist earth, He leaves His fingerprints out of love, to give even more of Himself to creation.

These earlier myths I have mentioned have one glaring flaw to all Christians – these myths aren't Christianity!

We can reason to certain knowledge that God exists, but we cannot reason out perfectly the details of God's plan. People knew for hundreds of years before Jesus that God would come to set things right in the world, and He'd do it by dying and rising just as the the crops foretold, but this was insufficient knowledge. We know it is insufficient because we slew God anyway, even knowing He would appear!

The absence of the details, the potholes in the road of knowledge, where filled in by Christ's preaching. We can always deepen our knowledge of God (such as when we reason that if Mary gave Christ to the world, and Christ provides all our grace, then Mary is the door to all our grace), but we can never pave new roads to access new knowledge of God. There is nothing left out of the homily God gives. If I say anything new in this Blog it is wrong in as much as it is new. If I offer true insight it is true insofar as it taps into that great river of Truth flowing back through the office the disciples held (namely, through our Bishops and Pope), all the way back to Jesus.

Therefore Christ is the summit of our faith since he was revealed partially in creation and revealed actually in time of King Herod and Pontius Pilate, to bring fullness of truth to us. Only with faith in what Jesus the Christ taught can we have the full story of who our Creator is. Our reason alone only brings us to the certainty of God, which is only partway there. After all, even the Adversary is certain God exists.

Further Reading: Paul's speech to the Athenians (Acts 17:22-34)