Faith Seeks Understanding Pt.1: What Is God?

Word on Fire introduces a new video series featuring Father Robert Barron entitled "Faith Seeks Understanding." This series explores questions frequently posed to Father Barron by believers and skeptics alike. Word on Fire has taken a different approach for these videos, employing more of a discussion format. We hope that Fathers lively responses to these questions will be both clarifying and edifying and serve as yet another helpful resource in the dialogue of the Faith and culture.

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People & Blogs

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• Word On Fire
• Fr. Robert Barron
• Faith
• Catholicism
• Christianity
• God
• Jesus

[livelaughlove311]

@skewed12

Desire is different than necessity. He used the example of food, not unicorns. People need happiness, love, and ultimately those things can only be fulfilled in their entirety by God who is Love and Truth itself.

[MichaelGuardia887]

God can be experienced or known intimately by some of us, like in the case of Moses.But God cannot be known completely by any intellect.We will be spending our eternity in Heaven, knowing more and more about God.The same is true of the angels.For no intellect, whether saintly or angelic, can ever know or contain God completely.If God can be contained in any intellect, then He is not INFINITE.But we know that God is INFINITE.

[HopefulSaint]

@VanessaTexasGal You're issue there is that you take God as not "being itself" but "all beings themselves" which, as you correctly saw, is pantheism. But to put God as all beings is still not to put him as being itself. God as being itself means that he is existence, not in the sense of "all things that exist," but in the sense that through God, these things contingently exist rather than non-exist.

[VanessaTexasGal]

the one thing I don't get, and I'm genuinely curious about the answer, is: god is "being itself". But isn't that a useless definition of god? If god is being, then it basically means that god is everything, which would be pantheism. and in that case, why would we even need the word god? Am I missing the point here?

[kyzersoze74]

So bottom line God cannot be known? Yet how is it that "Moses knew God face to face/intimately"? And Jesus say "this is the way to eternal life/salvation, to know you, the only true God"?

[kyzersoze74]

So bottom line God cannot be known? Yet how is it that "Moses knew God face to face/intimately"?

[DavidCastoe]

@livelaughlove311 Happiness and love through friends and family, is allot more fulfilling than from an invisible man in the sky.

[uncatila]

Fr Baron you must be famous because you don't have time to respond to email.

[billybagbom]

@3rosesred Yeah, that shocked me, too. But that doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't a nice person.

[billybagbom]

@spjohnso Amen, brother!