How it is that things exist at all

In a secular world that is suffering from what has been called “metaphysical boredom," atheism is decidedly on the wane. Writing in the New Criterion, David Hart says, "As for why this should be, it is surely not enough to say merely that atheism fails to divert our thoughts from our mortality as religion supposedly used to do; television does that much better." It's more likely that people are realizing theism proves to be the only honest choice to make, given all we know in this supposedly enlightened information age. Or at least, theism isn't the escape from deep thought some would like to portray it as. Quite the contrary.

Religion, far from suppressing the vitality of human reason and will, opens up a dimension of greater rational consciousness. Faith is not a refuge against reason, it expands the scope and imagination of human reason, stretching reason to its very edge, to the edge of reality itself.

Existence. Since I was a young child, I was fascinated by the concept of, and even the word, "existence". The question of why we are here, or why anything is here, or let's say, the question of the "transcendent source of reality", I believe to be a question of existence, not a question of "first causes". The real question is not how things have come to be what they are, but how it is that things exist at all.

Even if physics can trace all of time and space back to a single self-sufficient set of laws, that those laws exist at all must remain an imponderable problem for all those who believe in the material world and nothing more.

The answer to how it is that things exist at all may be related to a God, who gave as one of his names "I AM", the subsistent act of being. At a very basic level, God exists. Of course he does more than just exist. But it's important that he does. Because his existence is tangled up with ours, our existence is dependent on his, for he provides the ground undergirding all existence.

It kind of blows my mind to think about existence... I hit a brick wall when I start thinking, "What if the universe was different?" or "What is it like in other universes?" because I believe this is the universe. Ponder it enough and it might make you go mad and head off into the woods for forty days and nights.