I don’t pretend to be able to “prove” to 9th
graders the existence of God. While the proofs are, in fact, relatively simple,
most 9th graders (and most people in our culture) lack the essential
philosophical training related to epistemology and the nature of knowledge to
really “learn” this in a modern classroom setting. What I can do is offer some
fundamental vocabulary needed to discuss various beliefs about God. That is how
I stat this lesson.
I give students the following Bellwork to consider in the
first few minutes of class:
“How do you prove something exists? Give an example.”
They take a few moments and jot down a response. We will get
back to it after some prayer and review.
Prayer does not need to be the static and dry recitation of
words. Those prayers we learned as youngsters in parochial or Sunday schools
are essential components of Catholic piety, but the sooner we realize the
diversity of prayer, the better we will be able to start seeing “God in all
things”.
I show students picture of several Doctors of the Church,
demonstrating how some of the greatest minds in the history of the Church have
used logic and reason and mystical
encounter to argue the existence of God. Students reflect on the concept of God
as being demonstrable with reason and logic in addition to what they may
normally think of as a personal encounter. Augustine, Hildegard, Aquinas,
Catherine, Newman…these are just a few of the great names that I introduce to
my students.
After prayer, I ask students to share what they have written
for their Bellwork. Usually they talk about how they know the material things
around them exist. But they also talk about more transcendent concepts; they
claim that that they know things like Love and happiness and Beauty exist. They
don’t know it, but they are engaged in an exercise related to epistemology, the
study of the nature of knowledge. Some students describe the academic sort of
knowledge they have and the way they gained it. Others describe more personal or
emotional knowledge and how the method of knowing that kind of knowledge is
quite different from academic knowledge. I do not teach them the finer points
of epistemology here, but I do point out that in philosophy, the method we use
to learn or to know something is heavily dependent on the nature of that which
we are trying to know. That is, if something is material, we use material means
to “know” it. If something is more transcendent, we use more transcendent
means. This sets us up to know a little bit about the nature of proving God’s
existence. But first, we need to develop a little vocabulary regarding
monotheism, polytheism, agnosticism and atheism.
(Texas ain't so bad)
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