This is surely a question most of us have all asked. If you have always been a believer and have always accepted that there is a God (even in mature Christians, doubts do creep in), then perhaps the question might be, how would I answer this question if a non-believer asked me? Trust me, if you answer, He just does, or you just have to have faith that God exists, how are you going to convince a sceptic to just have faith?
I am a vociferous reader, especially on apologetics, and loved studying it at seminary. This question is the topic of many, many books, but I have always found that when asked the question “Does God exist?” there are a few major pointers that all these books concur on. I will focus on these and leave the deeper apologetics to the theology section of this site.
I am enthralled by stories of atheists who turned into theists. The more determined their atheism was, the more their stories grip me. Those favourites that come to mind, C.S Lewis, Lee Strobel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to name but a few. Another group I find fascinating is the scientists who are Christian, such as John Lennox, Francis Collins, and Stephen C. Meyer. These are a few of the modern ones, but there have been numerous throughout the centuries.
Before I get to how we can know God exists, I must just clarify that no, we cannot “prove” the existence of God beyond a shadow of doubt. This is where faith comes in. It is not blind faith as so many think. Sean McDowell says it better than I could, expanding on JP Moreland’s premise:
“I think a better definition of faith is trusting God in light of what we have reason to believe is true. Faith is a kind of trust in God, not in spite of the evidence, but in light of the evidence. Faith is not believing God in spite of the evidence; it’s a direction and a step towards God because of the evidence.”
Do you believe in gravity? Of course, gravity exists. Can we see it? No, but it demonstrates its existence. Are our thoughts and feelings real? Yes, they are very real; we do not see them, but we certainly feel their effects. Can we see God? No, but just as we have faith that gravity and thoughts and feelings exist, so do we have faith that God exists. Just as gravity reveals itself to you when you jump out of an airplane and you think you are going to die, God reveals himself. Let us look at how.
There are a few main categories for the apologetic argument for the existence of God, such as:
• The cosmological argument – The argument that the universe must have a first cause or origin, which is identified as God.
• The teleological argument – The argument that the complexity and order in the world show evidence of a purposeful designer (God).
• The ontological argument – The argument that God must exist because the very concept of a greatest possible being requires existence.
These are great when you are debating Richard Dawkins at the Oxford Union, but let us think more on the level of answering the average nonbeliever.
Before creation, there was a creator,
R.C Sproul puts it like this: “If there was ever a time when there was nothing, then there could never be anything. There is nothing that can come into existence from nothing. Out of nothing, nothing comes.” The argument that creation has no creator just seems nonsensical. All around us, there is something, something could not have come from nothing. We hear the term “Creatio ex nihilo (Latin for creation out of nothing). Yes, God could do it; he could create, he most certainly can bring things into existence that did not previously exist, something out of nothing, but the argument of nothing including God becomes circular. If God created something out of nothing, there could not have been nothing, because there was something – a creator.
To put it simply, when the term ex nihilo is used, the atheist believes that nothing existed and then poof, something just existed. Christians believe that nothing existed, but the triune God brought into existence that which did not exist prior – reasons.org.
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place” (Psalm 8:3 NIV).
Who created the creator?
Of course, the counterargument is then who created God? Firstly, the cosmological argument does not say that everything that exists has to have a cause. It is everything that has a beginning that has to have a cause. God does not have a beginning. He is outside of our universe. Think about it: a creator created the universe, but in the argument of who created the creator, we would have to say a creator created the creator. Then who created the creator who created the creator who created the universe? We would have to say a creator created the creator who created the creator who created the creator who created the universe, and this would have to go on ad infinitum. You would therefore have to continue infinitely with a creator creating a creator creating a creator creating a creator creating a creator creating a creator… You get the picture. So, if we never reach the beginning of the creators, we will never reach a creator who actually created the universe, and the universe would never exist. But that cannot be because everything that has a beginning has to have a cause, and amazingly enough, I am sitting in this universe that had a beginning and now exists, writing this and counting how many times I have had to type the word creator!
Where there is life, there must be a life-giver
Frank Turek and Norman Giesler have a wonderful book called “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist”. This goes exactly to the argument of how much faith it must take for the atheists (not only atheists, though) to believe life suddenly appeared out of a primordial soup. The presence of life demands a life-giver. Scientists try in vain but continue to try to create life. They have utterly failed in this attempt.
George Wald, a Nobel prize-winning scientist, famously said:
“There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God…. There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility… that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can’t accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.”
Sometimes we have to accept that no amount of evidence put forward to the atheist will ever be enough.
Design needs a designer.
There is a famous story in the argument for a master creator:
The renowned mathematician and scientist Sir Isaac Newton, with a strong belief in God, had an atheist friend. One day, he had a carpenter design a replica of a solar system, intricately designed with gears and cogs, bells and whistles. Eventually, Newton brought the manufactured model home. When his atheist friend visited, he became intrigued by the model. He asked Newton who it was that crafted this intricate, beautifully designed replica of a solar system. Newton said no one had made the model. His friend was confused; he asked where then had it come from? The reply was ‘from nowhere it just appeared out of thin air, spinning in perfect order and unison around the sun.” Of course, the atheist friend did not believe that and after an angry minute or two, the truth was divulged. The atheist friend who could not believe that the solar system model came from nowhere and had been designed by no one believed that the actual, real complex solar system had no designer!
Another famous example is William Paley’s design argument. Imagine you are walking down a dusty old road and happen upon a watch just lying in the dirt. You admire the complexity of its gears, which drive the hands, and you marvel at how precisely the glass covers the face. What is the more reasonable belief: that the rains and the wind and all the elements just happened to come together to form this watch, or that there was an intelligence behind who designed the watch? The world is balanced just perfectly. Flowers need bees for pollination, the animals need the plants to live, and the plants need the animals. Is the world not more complex than a simple watch?
Stephen C. Meyer has an eye-opening book called Signature in the Cell. It is the argument for an intelligent designer through observing DNA as a form of information similar to a computer code. The complexity of DNA is mind-boggling. How DNA stores information and, with such precision, transmits the assembly instructions for building the crucial protein molecules cells need to serve life functions. He claims that, in our experience, information-rich codes (like language or computer software) come from intelligent minds, not unguided natural processes.
Fine Tuning
Another argument Meyer and other apologists make is that of fine-tuning. Science has observed that the universe has to be, and is, so finely calibrated for the existence of life that the minutest of changes to the measurements would mean life could not exist. The astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, an atheist, produced an outstanding calculation which caused him to abandon his God-denying beliefs. He calculated that the odds for life arising by only natural law were 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power. That is, one followed by 40,000 zeros. An incomprehensible number. To put it into perspective, the chance of life arising by natural law is less than that of finding one single atom while searching the entire universe.
Moral law
If God does not exist, objective morals do not exist.
If we say there is “evil,” then there must be an opposing “good.” If we say something is wrong, then we must know when something is right. Evil, goodness, right or wrong, you are affirming a moral law. Affirming moral law posits a moral lawgiver. Knowing right from wrong is universal; some cultures or individuals might have a differing moral code, but ultimately, the deep principles remain universal. Without moral law, there would be no empathy, no compassion, no understanding of the grievousness of murdering, raping, stealing and hurting; there would just be survival of the fittest. If morality is just a product of the mechanisms of nature, then man would not be bound by consciousness to obey.
These are the very basics. I do not need empirical evidence to know that God exists. I know he exists. To me, he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph. The personal God we call Yahweh.
If you are required to provide evidence that God exists (we do not need evidence that God exists, but the secular world seems to demand it), is it really incumbent on only us to present this evidence? Why are we seldom presented with empirical evidence that God does not exist? Not suppositions but actual evidence.
