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 it 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 to start with, then 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. But who made the first oak tree? The child is born of his parents, and they in turn of their parents. But 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 come 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 ground, transforms the minerals of the soil into starch and proteins and sugar for man’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.
The above argument for the existence of God was made in 1957 by a Roman Catholic priest in this book “Wisdom Shall Enter.” In 1927 an unproven, un-experimentally supported theory called “Big Bang” was put forth for the creation of the universe by a Roman Catholic priest and physicist named Georges Lemaitre. The discovery of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in 1965 experimentally supported the possibility of the “Big Bang” theory for the creation of the universe to be true and help establish the age of the universe, and the start of time, at about 13.77 billion years. The point is that one could just as easily argued that the universe was always here and that man, evolved out of stuff that was always here, created the concept of an all powerful all knowing being that created everything, that is God. But if the universe did have a beginning, when time started, then the more reasonable reality is that God always existed and He created the incredibly sophisticated machine we call the universe which gave rise to man.
But assuming we accept the fact that God exists, what exactly, in the simplest terms, is God? Once again quoting from Appendix I of the book “Wisdom Shall Enter”:
“ Our own idea of God is clear enough. In fact is clear enough for anyone who can put two and two together, and get four. We start out with the idea, gathered from the evidence all around us, that God is the Beginning of everything else, the First Cause of everything that exists, Himself uncaused by any one or anything else. Existence is of the very nature of God; He exists of Himself, and owes His existence to no other. When Moses asked God for a definition of himself, God simply said, “I am Who am!” In other words, nothing else exists at all, in the absolute sense, except God; other things exist only insofar as Bod wills them to exist. They have their cause in God, and have no existence apart from Him – no more than daylight has an existence of its own apart from the sun.
I hope that I may be forgiven if I seem to be getting into the intellectual stratosphere; but I am trying to lead, by a shortcut through the reasoning of philosophy, to the fact that God is an Infinite Being. Since Nothing exists, except it exists in God, there is nothing that can be added to God. Where could it come from? If it isn’t in God in the first place, then it simply isn’t, period. In other words, God has everything; or as the philosophers put it, “God has the plentitude of all being.” And that is exactly what we mean by God being “Infinite,” or “Infinitely perfect.” Anything that we can possibly imagine, is already in God, as its cause: otherwise, we couldn’t even imagine the thing. So God is limitless, infinite, Infinitely perfect.
Reason carries us on another step, and shows us that God must be a spirit. Everybody, every material thing, is composed of parts; that means that someone must put the parts together. A bodily being could not put its own parts together, because the bodily being, the material thing, does not even exist until its parts have ben put together – no more than you can lift yourself by your own bootstraps. So if God were a bodily being, we should ask, “Who put together the parts that compose God?” The answer of course is: no one, since God is the cause of all that exists, and nothing exists outside of God. Since He has no component parts, God is what philosophers call a simple Being, and immaterial Being – and that is exactly what we mean by a spirit.
Since God by his Nature is undivided and indivisible, without parts, we can’t with accuracy talk about God “having” anything – even though I did speak, a few lines above, about Bod “having everything.” But because God is a simple Being, with a perfect oneness, we can rightly only say that he is everything. In other words, God doesn’t have wisdom; he is Wisdom. God doesn’t have power: he is Almighty Power. He doesn’t have mercy and wisdom; He is Mercy and Wisdom.”
This is quote shows why Jesus Christ can say “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6) or “I am the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:17-44). This is also why God can say He is love (1 John 4:8).
This book is one of the best concise Catholic apologetics book I have read, both concise and in my mind clear. It is my opinion that every catholic needs to read this book to help him or her to be able to defend the faith.
Traditional Thomistic Catholic 