Does God Exist?: An Answer for Today

Front Cover
Doubleday, 1980 - Religion - 839 pages
Does God exist? The question implies another: Who is God? This book is meant to give an answer to both questions and to give reasons for this answer. Does God exist? Yes or no? Many are at a loss between belief and unbelief; they are undecided, skeptical. They are doubtful about their belief, but they are also doubtful about their doubting. There are still others who are proud of their doubting. Yet there remains a longing for certainty. Certainty? Whether Christians or Jews, believers in God or atheists, the discussion today runs right across old denominations and new ideologies - but the longing for certainty is unquenched. Does God exist? We are putting all our cards on the table here. The answer will be "Yes, God exists", As human beings in the twentieth century, we certainly can reasonably believe in God - even more so in the Christian God - and perhaps even more easily today than a few decades or centuries ago. For, after so many crises, it is surprising how much has been clarified and how many difficulties in regard to belief in God have melted into the Light that no darkness has overcome.

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Contents

The ideal of mathematical certainty
3
The fundamental certainty of reason
11
Neither freethinking nor Augustinism
19
Copyright

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About the author (1980)

Hans Kung is Swiss and was born into a middle-class family. He studied in Rome for seven years, obtaining his licentiate in philosophy and theology from the Gregorian University there, and then receiving his doctorate in theology from the Catholic Institute in Paris. Since 1960 he has been a professor at Tubingen University, where he taught dogmatic and ecumenical theology until his permission to teach Catholic theology was removed as a consequence of statements judged to be contrary to official doctrine. Since 1980 he has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan, and occasionally in Europe as well. His difficulties with the church began with the publication The Church (1967) and became very hot with the publication of Infallible? An Inquiry (1971). More recently, his On Being Christian (1977) has raised the question of whether his theology is not simply rational Protestant theology of the turn of the century. Official inquiries were held, statements were exchanged between Kung and the Conference of German Bishops, and the Rome-based Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but no agreement was to be had. Kung continues to declare himself a loyal member of the Roman Catholic church and seems unlikely to leave its priesthood or to be excommunicated.

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