Over the past month or so, I've been reading, at a gruelingly slow pace, the novel Moby Dick. It’s been a little brutal to get through and reminded me why you shouldn't let friends peer pressure you into doing things, especially when they are English teachers. Anyway, this classic story has a very iconic opening line. "Call me Ishmael." Immediately, we are introduced to the main character of the story.
The Bible, the foundation of the Christian faith, opens with a similar introduction to the main character. "In the beginning, God." (Gen 1:1) Immediately we see that this text is a story, a story about God and his interaction with man and the world. So, in effect, the rest of our study of the Christian faith will be about understanding who is this God of the Bible. We will begin though but studying a little about the reality of God's existence and then some of his basic characteristics.
While the Bible assumes that God exists and many people throughout time, from a large variety of religious persuasions, believe that some form of God exists; this belief is not held by all individuals. Thus, it is important to first lay out a few arguments for the existence of God. I allow that these are just arguments. There is no 100% proof of the existence or non-existence of God. If I want to prove the coffee I'm drinking is real, I can show it to you, you can touch it, you can smell it, you can taste it. You can use your senses to assure that it is real. You can run scientific tests to prove that, chemically, it is the substance we call coffee. We can not, however, do these empirical sense related tests to prove the existence of God, for God is not a physical being like us. Also, even if you could test God with your senses, you could still deny your senses and say that they are lying about true reality, like some philosophers do. Because of this lack of empirical truth, we must look at the evidence we do have around us and draw the most likely, logical conclusions that we can.
Briefly, before we get to the arguments, I admit that what follows is only one side of the argument and only a basic outline, at best, of that side of the argument. There are many other resources out there if you desire to delve deeper into the question of the existence of God. "The Reason for God" by Timothy Keller is one of the best that I have read.
While the Moody Handbook of Theology outlines five arguments for the existence of God, I'm going to combine these into two major arguments because I'm just way smarter than a bunch of college academics. (Not really.) We'll call these arguments the natural and the human because we can look at both nature and ourselves to see that there is a God.
First, we’ll look at the natural argument for the existence of God. In Romans 1:20, Paul says that the created world should point all who see it to believe that there must be a divine creator. Whether a person believes in the Bible or not, to look at the beauty and complexity of the natural world around them should cry out that it could not have just happened but that there must be a divine creator.
Before I was a pastor, I spent five years getting a four year degree in chemistry. (yes, I’m an overachiever) I really enjoyed studying chemistry and physics and learning about the natural world and how it works. What always really stuck out to me was the extreme complexity and precision of the world and that everything works just right. I remember taking my senior chemistry class and being told that everything we had learned in freshman chemistry was wrong because it was a simplification of what is really going on. The more in-depth I got into the sciences, the harder it was for me to believe that this level of complexity just randomly happened.
I’ll give two nerd examples that really stuck out to me. First, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we can not know both the location and velocity of an electron at the same moment in time. If you have taken a basic science class, you know that all matter is made of atoms and atoms are made of a core of protons and neutrons with electrons buzzing around this core. So, electrons are a basic part of everything around us and yet this principle says it is impossible for us to totally figure them out. This basic component of our world is more complex than we can understand.
My second example is the mathematical operation called a limit. Limits are used extensively in physics to generate all the equations and tables that engineers use to build roads, bridges, buildings, and basically everything. The thing about limits though is that in a way they are just an estimate. When you take the limit of an equation you are saying that the answer to the equation is so close to a given value, for example 1, that we are just going to use that value as the solution to the equation. However, the answer is not exactly that value but it is so close that for any practical application, say a bridge, that value works. Hopefully, I didn’t lose you. The point is that the world is so complex that we cannot always find, or practically need to find, exact answers.
There are multiple other examples that could be taken from chemistry, physics, and biology. Like Paul said in Romans, my study of science screamed to me that there has to be a God that designed all this and that that God must be way beyond us. Now, this argument is not conclusive and other scientists will explain this argument away from a naturalistic and atheistic position but this evidence points me to believe in God.
Along, with the nature argument though there is also the human argument. The basic premise of this argument is that we have innate knowledge across of all of humanity that we should not have from strictly observing the things around us. Ecclesiastes 3:11 states that God “has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” This plays out is two big ways.
First, the mere idea of eternity, timelessness, and a God that is eternal and divine is absolutely different than anything that we can observe in our world. Everything in our world is transient, temporary, and yet we have conceived of a God that is eternal. On the surface this sounds contradictory to my previous argument about nature but they actually work together. Nature points to the absurdity of all this being random and the need for something greater. The innate, implanted by God, concept of eternity and an eternal being answers the quandary that nature raises.
Second, innate concepts of morality across cultures and times points to the reality of a God that dictates morally. If the theory of Evolution is true and there is no God, then the only moral imperative should be to do whatever most benefits you and helps you to pass on your genes. However, we all have this concept that there is more to being a good person than that. We all have a desire to call some things right and some things wrong. While cultures and religions differ greatly on many things, there is a surprising amount of agreement on basic principles of right and wrong. There is something inside of us, that cannot be naturally explained, that leads us to think some things are wrong and others are right. While individuals and groups may suppress this internal morality to greater and lesser extents, it is still there. Some may argue that it is a learned behavior that has been passed down through time but this fails to explain why the basic concept of what it means to be a decent human are so wide spread.
The idea of morality as learned behavior also fails to explain why some moral concepts would have been created and passed. A specific moral example would be self sacrifice. From a purely evolutionary point of view self sacrifice is stupid, unless possibly when one is preserving a direct descendant. Yet, self sacrifice is seen as an admirable and good thing in a huge variety of cultures. How did this concept so vastly infect humanity without being implanted there by God?
Like I said earlier, these arguments are not conclusive and can and have been refuted by many people. However, I believe that they are strong evidence that tips the scales and leads me to believe in God. I encourage you to look at the arguments for yourself. Get some better resources and look at them a little more deeply. Be convinced of where you stand because the evidence points that way not because emotion and past history make you want to believe a certain side. Also, come back for the next post to learn a little more detail of who is the God of the Bible.
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