Table Of ContentBECAUSE GOD IS REAL
PETER J. KREEFT
Because God Is Real
Sixteen Questions, One Answer
How to
“be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you”
—1 Peter 3:15
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
Most of Kreeft’s Scripture quotations have been taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Holy
Bible, Second Catholic Edition © 2006. The Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible: the Old
Testament, © 1952; the Apocrypha, © 1957; the New Testament, © 1946; Catholic Edition of the
Old Testament, incorporating the Apocrypha, © 1966; The Catholic Edition of the New Testament, ©
1965, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
United States of America. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph © by Brian Adducci
Cover design by Riz Boncan Marsella
© 2008 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-200-8
Library of Congress Control Number 2007927187
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction
I. Why are questions good?
II. Why do I exist?
III. Why is faith reasonable?
IV. How can you prove that God is real?
V. Why believe the Bible?
VI. Why is Jesus different?
VII. Why be a Catholic?
VIII. Why go to Church?
IX. Why be moral?
X. Why is sex so confusing?
XI. Why do we have families?
XII. Why are there virtues and vices?
XIII. Why pray?
XIV. Why aren’t we happy?
XV. Why is there evil?
XVI. Why must we die?
Conclusion
Introduction
What is this book good for? What is it about?
This book is worthless unless it helps you answer three questions about
yourself:
1. Who am I?
2 . Where did I come from?
3 . Where am I going?
1. All our lives, we keep discovering who we are. None of us comes to
the end of that road in this life. None of us completely knows who we are,
once we stop fooling ourselves.
You are a one-and-only individual that nobody could ever replace.
Nobody who ever lived in the past was exactly like you, and no one who
will ever live in the future will be exactly like you. You have a special job
to do in this world that no one else can ever do. Each day of your life, you
find out a little more about what that job is.
But you also share the same human nature with all other human beings.
Your task on earth is to be you, the one and only you; but it is also to be a
human being, and that task is the same for all of us. You take different
courses in school, but we all take a course called Life. Life’s greatest
tragedy is to pass all your courses but flunk Life.
No one but you and God knows what your individual job in life is. But
the Catholic Church knows a lot about what your task is as a human being,
because the Church is simply the mail carrier for the Gospel, or “good
news”, of Jesus Christ, who gave the human race the final, ultimate answer
to the question of what we are doing here, why we exist, what is the
meaning of life. This book is about that answer.
2 . Who you are depends on where you came from. If you came from
Mars, you are a Martian. If you came merely from apes, then you are
merely an ape. And if God created you in His own image, then you are the
King’s kid, not King Kong’s kid.
3 . Your origin and your nature are the key to your destiny, your purpose
in life. If you are only dust, then your destiny is only dust—“to dust you
shall return”—for you are only a body, not an immortal soul. At the
opposite extreme, if you are a god or goddess, born in Heaven and
somehow lost on earth, then your destiny is to escape the earth and the
mortal body and return home, like E. T. You don’t belong here. The
Christian answer is neither of these. You belong here because God created
you and put you here, but you are a soul as well as a body, and your destiny
is to grow in perfection of both body and soul, both here and in Heaven
after death.
Our modern secular culture tells you the first answer: you are dust, you
are a clever ape. Some New Age type religions tell you the second answer,
that you are not an animal but an angel, a pure spirit. Christianity tells you a
third answer. Which answer you believe makes a difference to everything in
your life, because it’s a different “you”.
~
This book is for three groups of readers. It’s for Catholic Confirmation
classes, for other catechism or religious education classes, and for those
who simply choose to read the book for themselves.
It is also for all ages after Confirmation as well as before. Confirmation
should be the beginning of an ever-maturing religious education, not the
end. The Christian faith is not kid stuff.
This book is for both teenagers and adults. The most basic principle of
writing a book for children of any age is this: If adults can’t enjoy and use
your book, don’t write it. Don’t ever patronize, pander, or pat the little
kiddies on the head. Don’t talk down to them—level with them.
I’m old. I’m not going to pretend I’m “into” the current culture. Anyway,
ten or twenty years from now, the current “in” culture will be just as “out of
it”, just as outdated, as the culture that was “in” when I was a kid.
So I decided to write an adult book that kids could understand too,
instead of a kids’ book. Your parents should read it as well as you.
~
Most textbooks are dull as dishwater, in any subject, even religion. Students
who have to read them aren’t usually very interested in what they say; they
just try to remember enough to please their teacher or pass their test. They
memorize what’s in the book instead of understanding it.
I think that’s a ridiculous waste of energy. For one thing, memorizing
anything takes ten times more time than understanding it. For another thing,
memorizing is always duller than understanding. That’s true if the thing to
be understood is something dull. And it’s even more true when the thing to
be understood is something exciting, like a murder mystery.
Well, the Church’s Gospel, or “good news”, is as exciting as a murder
mystery. For at its heart there is a murder: the murder of God two thousand
years ago in Jerusalem. And this God is the greatest of mysteries: who He is
and why He put us here and why He came here and what His plans are for
us. And all the rest of the story stems from that. The story is literally a
matter of life or death—eternal life or death. If a book about that story isn’t
interesting, then that has to be the fault of the book, not the fault of the
story.
~
A book is like a letter from one author to many readers. The many readers
differ in sex, age, race, beliefs, education, and interests. But the readers do
not differ in one thing: humanity. Human nature is the same in men and
women, in adults and children, in different races, in different cultures. So I
write this to all of you as one human being to another. It doesn’t matter that
I’m an old white male Dutch college professor and surfer and that you may
be a young black female Jamaican high school student and dancer. We’re
both human; we’re both in the same boat. We’re different animals, but
we’re both on Noah’s ark.
~
One other thing: I write not for groups or classes of people but for
individuals. When you read this book, please don’t think, “I’m only one out
of a thousand people reading this book, so I have only one one-thousandth
of the responsibility for understanding it and thinking about it.” Think
