God Exists

In order for God to help us in our struggles and sufferings, we must recognize that He does indeed exist.  Fr. Robert Spitzer works tirelessly to promote arguments for God's existence.

Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer -- a philosopher, accountant, former university president and leadership consultant -- always has had a fascination with the intersection of faith and reason. He's smart enough to have debated physicist Stephen Hawking, an avowed atheist, on national television over the scientific underpinnings of the beginning of the universe and the theological arguments for the existence of God. In a recent address in New Orleans, Father Spitzer said the exciting news for the new evangelization being called for by Pope Benedict XVI is the recent discoveries in "space-time geometry," prompting eminent physicists to assert the cosmos had to have a beginning and thus had to have a creator. On the occasion of Hawking's 70th birthday in January, physicist Alexander Vilenkin, director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University, read a paper asserting just that. Science journalist Lisa Grossman, writing in New Scientist, pithily described Vilenkin's presentation as "the worst birthday present ever." If the rate of expansion of the universe is greater than zero -- something virtually all physicists agree on -- "at the end of the day we will reach an absolute beginning point prior to which the universe and multiverse (a combination of universes) were nothing," said Father Spitzer, founder and president of the Spitzer Center for Ethical Leadership in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Physical reality itself was nothing, and the one thing we know about nothing is that it's nothing," he said.  He also said that recent studies about near-death experiences point to God.

 

For years Dr. Eben Alexander III had dismissed near-death revelations of God and heaven as explainable by the hard wiring of the human brain. He was, after all, a neurosurgeon with sophisticated medical training.

 

But then in 2008 Dr. Alexander contracted bacterial meningitis. The deadly infection soaked his brain and sent him into a deep coma.

      

During that week, as life slipped away, he now says, he was living intensely in his mind. He was reborn into a primitive mucky Jell-o-like substance and then guided by “a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes” on the wings of a butterfly to an “immense void” that is both “pitch black” and “brimming with light” coming from an “orb” that interprets for an all-loving God.

 

Dr. Alexander, 58, was so changed by the experience that he felt compelled to write a book, “Proof of Heaven,” that recounts his experience. He knew full well that he was gambling his professional reputation by writing it, but his hope is that his expertise will be enough to persuade skeptics, particularly medical skeptics, as he used to be, to open their minds to an afterworld.