This is a review of the book Wisdom shall enter by Leo Trese, Imprimatur 1957, published by the Fides Publishers Association Chicago in the USA and by Geoffrey Chapman, Ltd. In London. It is an apologetics book on the Catholic faith which I think is apropos for the start of the church year, indeed the genesis of the church – Christmas. As stated in the title the following is an excerpt of a basic argument for the existence of God:
“We are awakened in the middle of the night, by the noise of a lamp being knocked over down stairs, what is our first thought? “Theres’s someone in the house!” is our immediate (and perhaps frightened) reaction. Then, while we hold our breath and listen anxiously for further noise, our mind searches anxiously for some other explanation. Did I leave a window, open, so that the wind might have knocked the lamp over? Could it be the cat prowling around? Did one of the children wake up and go downstairs for something?
Now why is it that we feel we must find a reason for a crash of the lamp? Why not just say, “Nothing knocked the lamp over; it just happened, that’s all.” And turn over and go to sleep again? The reason why we have to find and answer for the noise is that we are sensible people; we have a mind that thinks, and we know that nothing happens unless something causes it to happen. That is so plain, that ist hardly seems worth mentioning. “Whatever happens must have been caused by something else”; or as it is put, a little more technically. “Every effect must have a proportionate cause.”
That is plain, we would say, as the nose on our face. Yet there are so-called atheists who will deny it is so. “We haven’t seen everything yet” they will say, “Just because our experience up to now shows that every effect must have a cause, doesn’t mean there couldn’t be exceptions. Maybe in a billion billion cases, whatever happens will be caused by something else which happened first; and then maybe the quadrillionth time, something will happen without anybody or anything causing it to happen. We just haven’t got all the facts yet.”
It sounds stupid, doesn’t it? And yet the atheist, in self-defense, has to deny the evidence of his own senses; he has to deny what is called the Principle of Causality – the fact that every effect has a cause. He has to deny it, because on this principle is based one of the main arguments for the existence of God. There are many different ways of putting the argument, but it runs something like this:
From nothing, nothing comes. If you’ve got nothing when you get through. No flour and eggs and sugar: then no cake; no acorn: then no oak tree; no parents: then no child. So, unless there did exist a Being Who is eternal (that is, Who never had to begin existing, because his existence is of His very nature) a Being Who is infinitely powerful (that is, He can make something out of nothing), then there just wouldn’t be any world, there wouldn’t be any trees or animals, there wouldn’t be any you or me. Because, unless there existed and eternal and infinitely powerful Being, who would have started things off? An oak tree grows from and acorn, and the acorn grew on an oak tree. Gut who made the first oak tree? The child is born of his parents, and they in turn of their parents. Bus who made the first man and woman? And if the evolutionist says that it all began with a formless mass of atoms out there in empty space, we say, “Alright, but where did the formless mass of atoms com from?” No, it had to start with Someone, with Someone Who from all eternity, enjoyed independent existence. And that Someone is precisely He Whom we call God.
He is an all-wise God, too, as well as being eternal and all-powerful. We know that, because we see so many evidences of His Intelligence in the world about us. Whenever we see that something has been planned, we know that there has been a planner-someone who did the planning; and planning of course means intelligence. When Robinson Crusoe saw the imprint of a foot in the sand, he knew that there was someone else on the island besides himself. And when we see evidence of planning, we know that there has been a mind behind it. If a friend were to how us his new television set, and when we asked where bought it, if he were to answer, “I didn’t buy it; I just shook up a box of junk in the basement; and when I dumped it out on the floor, the stuff just happened to come together in the form of a TV set”; unless we were very sure he was joking, we’d reach for our hat and leave before he got violent. We know that a complicated thing like a TV set doesn’t “just happen.”
Neither did such a marvelous thing as the human eye ‘just happen”-the eye, intricate arrangement of nerves and muscles and lens and retina – a miniature camera that science cannot duplicate. Neither did the mystery of seed-and-soil “just happen”- the tiny brown speck which, dropped into the groung, transforms the minerals of the soil into starch and proteins and sugar fro nan’s food. Neither did the other million miracles of creation “just happen”; not unless we want to renounce forever all the rules of evidence.”
The above quote is to give some clue to the cogent argumentative style of Father Trese. This book covers from the existence of God, through Jesus Christ and the creation of the Roman Catholic Church and defends it as the logical true and only religion for all of mankind.
Traditional Thomistic Catholic 