Paths to access the mystery of God: a well disposed mind and heartThe psalmist aptly expresses the universal experience of the amazement before the greatness of the cosmos, which leads us to think of its creator: "The heavens proclaim the glory of God, the firmament proclaims the work of his hands." (Ps 19:1). It is the amazement before the sublime, sacred grandeur that we glimpse in the experience of contact with the beauty of the world. The contemplative gaze leads us to marvel at the precision, order and harmony of nature, in which we can find the imprint of the Creator, the "author of beauty" (Wis 13:3).
This sapiential access to God is proper to human intelligence, and appears in the great cultural and religious traditions of humanity. In the Bible, both the books of the Old and New Testaments explain that God, as Creator, is cognizable to reason The human being as the cause of the universe, and that when this does not happen, it is due to ignorance or moral perversion, whether personal or social and cultural (cf. Wis 13:1-9; Rom 1:18-25).
It is essential to take into account an intellectual requirement in order to understand these ways of accessing the origin of the world: it is necessary to reason philosophically, from the metaphysical logic of causality. In order to do so, it is necessary to overcome the irrational fallacies of the skepticism and of the relativismwhich lead to dehumanization and, in the end, to nihilistic chaos. Likewise, reductionism must be avoided. positivistThe idea of the "scientific and experimental-scientific" is a foolish and arrogant disdain for all knowledge that is not sensory or scientific-experimental. And even more unfounded is the exaltation of the emotivismthat submits reason to the ups and downs of moods.
A summary of the rational philosophical argumentation on the existence and essence of God in the history of thought is constituted by the famous five ways of access to the knowledge of God formulated with scholastic precision by St. Thomas Aquinas (cf. Summa theologicapart one, questions 2-26): they come to discover God as uncaused cause, immobile motor, necessary being, perfection in sum, ultimate end. The living and true God is understood as the supreme being that brings itself into existence; the origin and ultimate basis of all that exists; the creator of being from nothingness; the one who is the designer intelligence of the cosmos; the great artist, the ingenious author of the masterpiece that is the cosmos; the address and the goal of the universe, of history, and of all human life; the being simple and perfect personal, immutable and eternal, infinitely wise, good, just and merciful, powerful and provident.
In short, this knowledge of God as the reason for all that exists is a constant in the history of peoples and constitutes a universal personal experience that takes shape in multiple and varied manifestations of religiosity, even if these contain many limitations. For, when one reasons adequately, one comes to know the mystery of the personal God as the supreme Being who is the foundation of all reality.
