Does God Exist? - Southbury Baptist Church of Southbury CT

DOES GOD EXIST?

Introduction

Does God exist? Most Americans overwhelmingly say yes—86% according to a recent Gallup poll. Though our belief in God stands out in contrast to other parts of the world like Europe, interestingly it has been dropping lately, down from 90% to 86% since 2001 according to Gallup. Other polls show a similar decline. I would attribute this decline primarily to the atheist onslaught in recent years. People such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris have written books attacking belief in God. Their books have sold millions of copies and received tons of media attention. People are reading their books and sadly, being persuaded.

What gives? Have these atheists unveiled some new arguments never thought of before? I have not read all of these books though I read Dawkins’ book which is the most famous. There is nothing new in terms of substance but what is new is a seething hatred of God and a blind passion to destroy belief in God.

I think these attacks need to be addressed because the question of whether God exists is the most important question. Why? Because attached to this question are other massive issues like prayer, morality, creation, sanctity of human life, human rights, miracles, the after life, and our purpose and meaning in life. The famous pastor A. W. Tozer said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” I could not agree more. The question of God’s existence has enormous significance.

Let me say a word about the various quotes in support of my arguments. Instead of saying this before each quote, I will say it just once now. I chose quotes that have two elements: a) they are from leading authorities in their field b) they are from non-Christians and many of them specifically atheists or agnostics. I did this because I want you to see that the strength of the evidence is not somehow religiously motivated. It is there for anyone who has an open mind to accept it.

The first area of evidence comes from science, that’s right science. Unfortunately, many people think science and belief in God are at odds. To the contrary, did you know that we live in the golden age of scientific evidence for the existence of God? We know and can prove things that previous generations could never have even imagined. The more we learn about our universe, the more it reveals the existence of God. First, let us look at the origin of the universe.

Origin of the Universe

The origin of the universe is a fact that we humans do not ponder as much as we should. It is really astounding to think that something exists rather than nothing. Where did it all come from? In essence, there are really only three possible answers: atheism, pantheism, and theism.

Atheism would assert that the universe is eternal. In the words of the late Carl Sagan, “The cosmos is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be.” Everything in the universe is matter and matter has existed forever. Pantheism would agree that the universe is eternal but differ in saying that the universe is entirely spirit, not matter. Pantheism undergirds religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

However, there is remarkably strong evidence for the fact that the universe is finite, it had a distinct beginning. There are several lines of evidence for this assertion such as the laws of thermodynamics and the life story of the stars which we observe are slowly burning out. In a nutshell, if the universe is slowly coming to an end, it must have had a beginning because if it was eternal it would already have ended.

The greatest piece of evidence is the Big Bang which states that the entire universe—all of its matter began as an unbelievably hot, dense point in the past. In one fell swoop, the Big Bang is a deathblow to both atheism and pantheism. Why is that? The Big Bang theory clearly and powerfully points to the fact that the universe had a beginning . . . it is not eternal.

The story behind the discovery of the Big Bang is really fascinating. Until recently, we did not possess the technology to gather empirical evidence for the universe’s origin. So, at least in the western world, people simply trusted the teaching of Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Bible teaches the universe came into existence by the command of God and so this was the prevalent belief. In the 18^th and 19^th century, belief in the Bible began to wane somewhat. As a result, philosophers and scientists began to speculate that the universe was not created but eternal. By the end of the 19^th century, it was a generally accepted fact.

Albert Einstein and his famous theory of relativity helped to change all that, albeit unintentionally. When Einstein and others applied his theory to the universe as a whole, they found that the universe was not the same size but actually expanding. In the 1930’s a man by the name of Edward Hubble confirmed these findings empirically with his telescopic observations. What makes that so significant? It showed that the universe had an absolute beginning point. This news shocked scientists and frankly made some of them quite angry because they realized the implications of it—something or better said, someone was behind it all. Einstein did not like it and even fudged his numbers to try and make the universe static. To his credit, he later admitted his mistake and conceded the universe was finite. Arthur Eddington called the discovery “repugnant” and hoped to find a “loophole.” Even Hubble spent the rest of his life trying to disprove his own discovery.

Since then, the evidence has only mounted for the Big Bang. Do you remember the COBE satellite back in the early 1990’s? COBE stands for Cosmic Background Explorer. If the universe actually had a beginning point, then we could detect background radiation. From earth, we can detect it, but COBE was sent into space to get additional readings. What did it find? It confirmed previous findings and went beyond them in showing that the background radiation was evenly spread throughout the universe. So what? That meant that the universe had an extremely hot beginning point in the center of the universe. It was so hot that it would be impossible to happen repeatedly.

Have other theories been proposed? Yes, several other theories have appeared but as more has been learned about the universe, the more evidence sides with the Big Bang. What are we left with? It leaves us with the inescapable conclusion: an unbelievably powerful being, seemingly omnipotent, and apparently outside the confines of time, created the universe a certain time ago. This being has traditionally been called God.

Christians sometimes have a knee jerk reaction to the Big Bang because they associate it with atheism. To the contrary, the Big Bang is one of the most potent evidences for the existence of God. One of the things that make it so remarkable is that no one believed it a century ago nor was looking to prove it. It came as a total surprise.

I remember when I was a little kid—maybe 5 years old—playing at a family gathering. I was running up some steps and into the house. The front door was wide open. I was running pretty fast and expected to go through the door when . . . boom, I fell backward. Then, I realized that a glass door was there! The Big Bang is like that—it was unforeseen and totally knocked scientists backward. They were not looking for it and afterward wanted to disprove it. However, the facts are impossible to deny. The conclusion is obvious: God exists.

Robert Jastrow is a former NASA scientist. Though an agnostic, he writes in his book God and the Astronomers, “That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact . . . Astronomers now find that they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation . . . For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries” (116).

At this point, we could end the discussion right there. That is a smoking gun type evidence for the existence of God. If you do not accept this, what will you accept?

Origin of Life

Let us move ahead to the origin of life. The Big Bang was the beginning point of the universe—all the matter that now exists. However, at the beginning point of the universe nothing animate existed. Everything was inanimate—rocks, minerals, gases.

How did life originate? Charles Darwin, in his day, speculated that if the right conditions existed in “some warm little pond,” a living creature could arise. The basic idea has remained with us, even in popular culture. If you have ever seen the 1940 Disney classic Fantasia, you might remember the scene as described by Jonathan Wells:

Accompanied by music from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the primordial Earth seethes with volcanic activity. Red-hot lava flows over the land and tumbles into the sea, generating clouds of steam while lightning flashes in the sky above. Slowly, the camera pans down until it reaches the calm depths of the ocean, where mysterious specks glow in the dark. Suddenly, a single-celled animal darts across the screen. Life is born . . . The narrator calls it ‘a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet’s existence.’ (Icons of Evolution, 9)

I vaguely recall such images from the textbooks I read in school. I do recall reading about the famous Stanley Miller and Harold Urey experiment in 1953 which supposedly proved life came from non-life. Miller recreated the conditions of the early earth and shot a bolt of electricity—which represented lightning—through a mixture of gases. By the end of the week, the water contained several organic compounds, glycine and alanine which are the two simplest amino acids found in proteins. Miller’s work was soon put into high school and college textbooks as proof that life came from non-life.

There are two huge problems though for the famous experiment. First, it was later shown that Miller-Urey’s simulation was nothing like the actual early earth. In other words, the prebiotic soup envisaged by Darwin never really existed. Second, Miller did not actually create life, he created several chemical components that are found in life but not life—the difference is enormous. Scientists today, with all of their advances, cannot make life out of non-life. They can make some of the components that are found in life but there is a quantum leap between the two, a distinct category difference.

In summary, the original conditions of earth do not allow us to create the components of life. Even if somehow they did, to go from the components of life to an actual living cell is beyond comprehension. So it seems that the more we learn about life, the less it seems that we can explain its origin. Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times, said in 2000, “Everything about the origin of life on Earth is a mystery, and it seems the more that is known, the more acute the puzzles get” (cited in Icons of Evolution, 24). Fred Hoyle, the famous atheistic British cosmologist said, “The current scenario of the origin of life is about as likely as the assemblage of a 747 by a tornado whirling through a junkyard” (The Intelligent Universe, cited in The Creation Hypothesis, edited by James P. Moreland, 190-91).

What now? Different theories have been batted around that I will not discuss because your eyes will glaze over like a doughnut. None of these theories have gained any real momentum. Let me tell you one theory though just so you get an idea of the degree of desperation. Francis Crick is an absolutely brilliant man. He was the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA—the double helix. For his efforts he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize. As much as anyone, Crick knows the incredible complexity of cellular life and if it could somehow have evolved from inanimate elements. Here is his assessment: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” (Life Itself, 88)

Recognizing that it was utterly improbable on earth, therefore he came up with the theory called “panspermia.” Crick speculates that aliens living far away sent primitive life forms to earth in a spaceship. The aliens knew they could not make the space voyage so they sent a simple life form that would survive the trip and the rough landing on earth. For Crick, this is not some sporadic thought; he wrote an entire book discussing it in detail. People actually have followed Crick and postulated things like meteors carried life here—Fred Hoyle is also such a proponent. What is still the problem? It does not address the origin of the life on the meteor . . . or the aliens?

Why would brilliant people come up with theories that are a) incredibly bizarre and b) do not even solve the problem of life’s origin? Why don’t they just acknowledge God? That is a great question. We’ll get to it in a few moments.

Design Argument

Now, for centuries, people have marveled at the apparent design of the world around them. Perhaps more than any other proof, the design of the world is something that many people readily accept. Even atheists admire the apparent design of the world. However, it has only been since the last half of the 20^th century that scientists have been finding out how unbelievably complex our universe is, and particularly life on planet earth. Scientists from a variety of fields—astronomers, physicists, biologists, chemists—have been inundated by the evidence of a highly complex universe.

I thought I would take a quick tour through the history of the universe and, in particular planet earth, and point out some of the incredible evidences of design. To begin with, let us go back to the Big Bang. You might think that this explosion could have happened any old way and the universe would be the same. Not even close. We have discovered how the Big Bang was perfectly calibrated. Modern physics tells us that there are four fundaments forces in the universe: strong nuclear force, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational. All four of these are just right for life. Here is a short list of factors that are precisely calibrated for life to exist. If the factors were a little less or more, life would not exist:

· Gravitational force

· Expansion rate of universe

· Earth’s distance from sun

· Earth’s rotation period

· Thickness of earth’s crust

· Carbon dioxide level

· Ozone level

When you add together all these factors, easily over a hundred of them that have to be just right for life to exist, the evidence of design is unavoidable. Hugh Ross estimates that the likelihood of this happening by chance is 1 in 10¹²⁹. Fred Hoyle states, “A commonsense interpretation of the fact suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” Stephen Hawking, probably the world’s most famous scientist, says, “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous . . . I think clearly there are religious implications whenever you start to discuss the origins of the universe” (quotes found in 20 Compelling Evidences that God Exists, Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman, Jr., 78).

This is the design just for life to get started. I haven’t even scratched the surface about how complex life is. For example, we have e-coli bacterium in our intestines that helps absorb food and other things. The information content contained within the genetic code (DNA) is roughly equivalent to 100 million pages of an Encyclopedia Britannica.

The bottomline is that I do not have enough faith to be an atheist. The apparent design of this universe makes a lot better sense to me as coming from the hand of a Creator than it does blind chance. And the bad news for the atheist is that things are only getting worse, the more we discover about our universe, the more we learn about how unbelievably complex it is.

Moral Argument

In talking about the existence of God, people often point to human morality. Turn in your Bible to Romans 2:14-15. Here the apostle Paul asserts that God has instilled within humanity a universal law written on the heart. He does not elaborate the contents of the law but I think it is safe to say that it includes essential things like murder, adultery, stealing, lying, coveting, etc; basically, the last 6 of the 10 Commandments and probably some others In other words, there are objective universal ethical principles—this is how we do live. In every society, you see rules and regulations built around these principles. Even people with little contact from outsiders, on islands, for example, maintain these morals. I believe God has deeply woven them into human beings so that it is inescapable that we practice them.

Let me clarify something. I am not saying that all people agree about every matter of morality. That would be ridiculous. What they differ on is how to apply it? For example, probably the most divisive moral issue in our country is abortion. Sometimes it appears that the two sides have absolutely nothing in common. That is not true. They both would agree that unjustified killing is wrong. The battle lies over what constitutes a justifed killling. Pro-lifers say it is a human life and should not be killed. Pro-choicers either will say the baby is not a life or that it is justified because the mother has a right to do so. You never hear pro-choicers simply say killing babies is perfectly fine.

It is important to remember that disagreements presuppose agreements. You cannot have disagreements unless you have enough common ground to disagree—otherwise you will completely talk past each other. Even with abortion, there is common ground which both sides share. The question is: Where did this universal morality come from? The best explanation for this shared morality is from a transcendent source, namely God.

Not only do we have this basic universal morality, but without, God we cannot justify morality. I am not saying that someone has to believe in God to be a moral person. Someone can be an atheist and be a moral person; again, because God has woven this basic morality into our souls. What I am saying is that you need God in order to justify your morality. Without God, all you have is preference. You cannot say something is categorically wrong. Something like the Holocaust or 9-11 is not wrong without God. You can only say we wished it would not happen.

It is funny how you never hear people arguing that we should get rid of is shared morality. You never hear a defense attorney say, “The whole concept of premeditated murder is archaic. We need to get rid of it. That is my client’s defense.” No, the lawyer does not try to disprove the law—he tries to prove the client is innocent of the law—because the law is so deeply embedded in our hearts. You think of the Nuremberg Trials where the Nazis stood trial for war crimes. Did they say murder was wrong? No. They said they were simple following orders. In other words, they were shifting the blame but they were not saying murder was excusable. So if there exists a universal human morality, where does this morality come from? The best explanation is God.

Objection: Man-made Morality

Not everyone will agree with this. Some object on the basis that we learn our morals from our parents or our society. They are not God-given but human-given. I agree that our our parents and society can reinforce our morality. However, that our morality is reinforced does not mean it is not objectively true. For example, in elementary school, I learned the multiplication tables. However, these math tables are objectively true whether I learn them or not. More importantly, we could ask: Where did our parents learn their morality from and their parents until we reach a point that it had to originate from somewhere? And why is this basic morality all the same? The answer is God.

The bottomline is that there exists a universal morality, things such as lying, stealing, murder, etc. How can we explain that all people have the same makeup? The best explanation is God. Also, without God, we cannot have objective morals—they simply are preferences. We know that life in such a world is completely unlivable.

Summary

So we have looked at some powerful evidences for the existence of God: the origin of the universe and of life, the incredible complexity and design of the universe, and human morality. For time’s sake, I will not go over anything else. However, do not think that is it; there is a whole lot more where that came from. You can look at things such as religious experience where people encounter God through prayer, guidance, and circumstances. You can look at the moral transformation of believers. You could look at aspects of human beings that defy any sort of atheistic explanation—consciousness, personality, rationality, free will, meaning and purpose, and our appreciation of beauty and aesthetics.

All of these evidences are available apart from the Bible. They exist for any open-minded person to explore. Taken together, they form a powerful cumulative case for the existence of God. You may not be convinced by this or that argument, but taken as a whole; it is very compelling. This leads me to my final point, what does the Bible say about all this?

Biblical Analysis

In Psalm 14:1, it says, “The fool says in his heart that there is no God.” Now, in the English language the word “fool” really hits on the fact that someone is not with it intellectually. To me, it would be foolish to wear a Red Sox jersey to a Yankees game and taunt Yankees fans, especially when they are losing and have had a few too many beers. It is interesting that the Hebrew word for “fool” speaks of an intellectual deficiency but the primary focus is on a moral deficiency. In other words, if someone rejects God, it is not because of a lack of intellectual reasons because, as we have seen, there is abundant proof for God’s existence. Perhaps that is why the Bible more or less assumes the existence of God rather than argues for it. God does not believe in atheists. For the atheist, the problem is not an intellectual one but a moral one.

Turn to Romans 1:18-21. Here Paul says that the existence of God is something that people know intuitively because God reveals it to them via the creation. There is no excuse. There are no atheists. But, people suppress this knowledge of God . . . why? Because of their sin. They suppress the knowledge of God because of their sin. In the original language, the particular verb tense emphasizes that God continually reveals himself to humanity and that we continually suppress this knowledge. It is not a one-shot deal where God reveals himself and we suppress it. This goes on all the time. People refuse to believe in God because they do not want to be accountable for their sin. As someone wisely said, “The atheist can't find God for the same reason that a thief can't find a policeman.” This explains why brilliant people such as Francis Crick invent theories that life originated from aliens in outer space.

The issue is ultimately not a matter of evidence but of the heart. If a person will stop running from God, suppressing the truth, and will allow God to be in control over their lives, it is amazing how all of a sudden they see things for the first time.

Further Reading

Lee Strobel, Case for a Creator

Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 2^nd ed.

Kenneth D. Boa and Robert Bowman, Jr., 20 Compelling Evidences that God Exists