by Mulled Vine
As this article was for a church newsletter, the answer to this question will be a rather unsurprising "Yes". For unbelievers however, the issue is perhaps less clear.
1 Peter 1:15 states, "... Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect." So how do we make a case for God's existence?
The first and most obvious approach is our personal testimony. The reasons we first believed are bound to be convincing to others too, as will be the story of our changed lives; but personal testimony is subjective, and there will be some out there who will want more objective reasons to believe.
Apologetics is the branch of theology devoted to trying to answer such questions in an objective manner, and its goal is nicely summed up by 2 Corinthians 10:5: "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."
In this article I would like to briefly introduce you to a few of the arguments for the existence of God that have been produced by Christian apologists, in the hope that these will interest you, build your faith, and enable you to more ably "give the reason for the hope you have", always remembering to do this with "gentleness and respect."
The Cosmological argument contends that things do not come into existence by themselves, but are caused to come into being, and that since everything has a cause it follows that all causes trace ultimately back to a first uncaused cause, i.e. God. God does not require a cause because He is eternal and outside the "closed" system of time and space.
Counter arguments that the universe existed forever and hence doesn't need a prime cause, or that the prime cause does not need to be God, don't really hold water: We know that in this universe things just don't exist forever. Everything around us ages; even things like the stars have a finite life. This tendency towards decay and disorder is what scientists call the 2nd law of thermodynamics. So if the universe did exist forever, everything would have died out by now, which is obviously not the case. If not God, what caused the universe to come into being? Sceptic scientists generally agree that there was a start to our universe (the "big bang") but disagree on what happened before that, proposing various ideas such an infinitely expanding and contracting universe, or mysterious sub-atomic particles that just pop out of nothing. It gets very "creative" at this point, and there is no way to disprove such theories, but at the very least we're on even footing when we assert that the creative cause was God.
The Teleological argument is the argument from design. In other words, when one sees a watch, one doesn't think that it came about by means of a series of random accidents, but by design, and thus requires a designer. The same is true of the universe we live in, and the designer is God. Psalm 19:1 "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."
It is very clear that the universe is full of amazing order and balance. For example, astronomy is discovering evidence of a very finely balanced universe with a number of parameters such as the speed of light, gravitational force, the earth's distance from the sun, strength of the magnetic field, and so on, that cannot vary much from their current values without exterminating life as we know it.
The existence of order is not generally questioned, so the debate revolves around what is the most reasonable explanation for this order. There are a number of options, ranging from intelligent design (Theism) through to naturalistic evolution (Atheism).
Many Christians avoid this debate by choosing a middle ground, taking a less literal view of Genesis, believing that God may have used natural processes such as evolution to create the universe over a long time span, perhaps by finely tuning the universe's initial conditions or controlling the process in some way. This is known as theistic evolution.
But for those wishing to follow the Teleological argument to its logical conclusion the task is to show that naturalistic evolution is inadequate as an explanation for all the apparent order. There are several ways to do this, including: Point out that evolution is a theory not a fact. Science deals with the observable, quantifiable and repeatable, as it tries to discover the facts. Theories are proposed and remain theories until proven to be fact by experiment. Micro-evolutionary adaptation that has been observed within species has been extrapolated to a macro-evolutionary scale as an explanation for the origin of life, but there is no way to prove this as it deals with unrepeatable timescales. Point out that evolution is improbable. "If you took all the carbon in the universe and put it on the face of the earth, allowed it to chemically react at the most rapid rate possible, and left it for a billion years, the odds of creating just one functional protein molecule would be one chance in a 10 with 60 zeros after it. In other words, the odds for all practical purposes are zero." (Walter L. Bradley, The Mystery of Life's Origin). And that's just one protein molecule - what about the odds for the rest of it? Point out that evolution is not without its weaknesses. For example, the mechanism of mutation combined with the law of survival of the fittest does not always seem to provide an adequate explanation for complex, apparently irreducible biological structures. Even Charles Darwin admitted: "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree." So the choice is between an Intelligent Designer and an unproven (and arguably inadequate) Naturalistic Process to explain it all. Neither can be proven, so both require faith, but from the evidence which is more likely?
Ah, says the unbeliever, but if we had an infinite series of expanding and contracting different universes, then anything is possible and this is just the universe where the improbable happened.
As I said, both require faith.
In closing, Blaise Pascal, 17th century French mathematician, scientist, and religious philosopher, included the following Wager in his famous work Pensées:
"It is always a better bet to believe in God, because the expected value to be gained from believing in God is always greater than the expected value resulting from non-belief."
So even if God's existence cannot be proved it makes more sense to believe than to not believe because of the consequences. It is slightly ironic that in this case survival of the fittest means survival of those who believe in God. :-)
Further Reading
Stand To Reason (www.str.org) Tekton Apologetics Ministry (www.tektonics.org) The Christian Think Tank (www.christian-thinktank.com) Christian Answers Network (www.christiananswers.net) Reasons To Believe (www.reasons.org) Theistic Evolution (www.theistic-evolution.com) Creation Science
About the Author
http://mulledvine.blogspot.com
As this article was for a church newsletter, the answer to this question will be a rather unsurprising "Yes". For unbelievers however, the issue is perhaps less clear.
1 Peter 1:15 states, "... Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect." So how do we make a case for God's existence?
The first and most obvious approach is our personal testimony. The reasons we first believed are bound to be convincing to others too, as will be the story of our changed lives; but personal testimony is subjective, and there will be some out there who will want more objective reasons to believe.
Apologetics is the branch of theology devoted to trying to answer such questions in an objective manner, and its goal is nicely summed up by 2 Corinthians 10:5: "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."
In this article I would like to briefly introduce you to a few of the arguments for the existence of God that have been produced by Christian apologists, in the hope that these will interest you, build your faith, and enable you to more ably "give the reason for the hope you have", always remembering to do this with "gentleness and respect."
The Cosmological argument contends that things do not come into existence by themselves, but are caused to come into being, and that since everything has a cause it follows that all causes trace ultimately back to a first uncaused cause, i.e. God. God does not require a cause because He is eternal and outside the "closed" system of time and space.
Counter arguments that the universe existed forever and hence doesn't need a prime cause, or that the prime cause does not need to be God, don't really hold water: We know that in this universe things just don't exist forever. Everything around us ages; even things like the stars have a finite life. This tendency towards decay and disorder is what scientists call the 2nd law of thermodynamics. So if the universe did exist forever, everything would have died out by now, which is obviously not the case. If not God, what caused the universe to come into being? Sceptic scientists generally agree that there was a start to our universe (the "big bang") but disagree on what happened before that, proposing various ideas such an infinitely expanding and contracting universe, or mysterious sub-atomic particles that just pop out of nothing. It gets very "creative" at this point, and there is no way to disprove such theories, but at the very least we're on even footing when we assert that the creative cause was God.
The Teleological argument is the argument from design. In other words, when one sees a watch, one doesn't think that it came about by means of a series of random accidents, but by design, and thus requires a designer. The same is true of the universe we live in, and the designer is God. Psalm 19:1 "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."
It is very clear that the universe is full of amazing order and balance. For example, astronomy is discovering evidence of a very finely balanced universe with a number of parameters such as the speed of light, gravitational force, the earth's distance from the sun, strength of the magnetic field, and so on, that cannot vary much from their current values without exterminating life as we know it.
The existence of order is not generally questioned, so the debate revolves around what is the most reasonable explanation for this order. There are a number of options, ranging from intelligent design (Theism) through to naturalistic evolution (Atheism).
Many Christians avoid this debate by choosing a middle ground, taking a less literal view of Genesis, believing that God may have used natural processes such as evolution to create the universe over a long time span, perhaps by finely tuning the universe's initial conditions or controlling the process in some way. This is known as theistic evolution.
But for those wishing to follow the Teleological argument to its logical conclusion the task is to show that naturalistic evolution is inadequate as an explanation for all the apparent order. There are several ways to do this, including: Point out that evolution is a theory not a fact. Science deals with the observable, quantifiable and repeatable, as it tries to discover the facts. Theories are proposed and remain theories until proven to be fact by experiment. Micro-evolutionary adaptation that has been observed within species has been extrapolated to a macro-evolutionary scale as an explanation for the origin of life, but there is no way to prove this as it deals with unrepeatable timescales. Point out that evolution is improbable. "If you took all the carbon in the universe and put it on the face of the earth, allowed it to chemically react at the most rapid rate possible, and left it for a billion years, the odds of creating just one functional protein molecule would be one chance in a 10 with 60 zeros after it. In other words, the odds for all practical purposes are zero." (Walter L. Bradley, The Mystery of Life's Origin). And that's just one protein molecule - what about the odds for the rest of it? Point out that evolution is not without its weaknesses. For example, the mechanism of mutation combined with the law of survival of the fittest does not always seem to provide an adequate explanation for complex, apparently irreducible biological structures. Even Charles Darwin admitted: "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree." So the choice is between an Intelligent Designer and an unproven (and arguably inadequate) Naturalistic Process to explain it all. Neither can be proven, so both require faith, but from the evidence which is more likely?
Ah, says the unbeliever, but if we had an infinite series of expanding and contracting different universes, then anything is possible and this is just the universe where the improbable happened.
As I said, both require faith.
In closing, Blaise Pascal, 17th century French mathematician, scientist, and religious philosopher, included the following Wager in his famous work Pensées:
"It is always a better bet to believe in God, because the expected value to be gained from believing in God is always greater than the expected value resulting from non-belief."
So even if God's existence cannot be proved it makes more sense to believe than to not believe because of the consequences. It is slightly ironic that in this case survival of the fittest means survival of those who believe in God. :-)
Further Reading
Stand To Reason (www.str.org) Tekton Apologetics Ministry (www.tektonics.org) The Christian Think Tank (www.christian-thinktank.com) Christian Answers Network (www.christiananswers.net) Reasons To Believe (www.reasons.org) Theistic Evolution (www.theistic-evolution.com) Creation Science
About the Author
http://mulledvine.blogspot.com
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