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Does God really exist?
Is there a God? How can anyone be sure such a being exists? Questions relating to the existence of God can be intelligently answered. The reason we know God exists is that He has told us so, and He has revealed Himself to us. He has told us all about who He is, what He is like and what His plan is for planet earth. He has revealed these things to mankind through the Bible. The question, "Is there a God?", is a question that must be answered by every human being, and the answer is far-reaching in its implications for every individual. More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question. Is man supreme in the universe or is there a superhuman being whom they conceive of as an object of fear or love, a force to be defied or a Lord to be obeyed. (I am reminded of the college student who was asked how is philosophy class was going. He replied that they had not done much because when the teacher tried to call roll, the kids kept arguing about whether they existed or not.)
It is not possible to put God in a test tube or prove Him by the usual scientific methodology. And it can be said with equal emphasis that it is not possible to prove Napoleon by the scientific method. The reason lies in the nature of history itself, and in the limitations of the scientific method. In order for something to be proved by the scientific method, it must be repeatable. One cannot announce a new finding to the world on the basis of a single experiment. But history in its very nature is nonrepeatable. But the fact that these events can’t be proved by repetition does not disprove their reality as events.
What evidence is there for God? It is very significant that anthropological research has indicated that among the farthest and most remote primitive peoples today, there is a universal belief in God. And in the earliest histories and legends of peoples all around the world, the original concept was of one God, who was the Creator. (Ecc. 3:11 - He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.). Pascal, the great seventeeth-century mathematician, described is as "the God-shaped vacuum" in every man.
The Bible Tell Us
As we learned last week, the Bible has demonstrated itself to be more than a mere book; it is the actual Word of God. The evidence is more than convincing to anyone who will consider its claims honestly. Martin Luther stated:
Mighty potentates have raged against this book and sought to destroy and uproot it—Alexander the Great and princes of Egypt and Babylon, the monarchs of Persia, of Greece and Rome, the Emperors Julius and Augustus—but they prevailed nothing. They are gone while the book remains, and it will remain forever and ever, perfect and entire, as it was declared at first. Who has thus helped it—who has protected it against such might forces? No one, surely, but God Himself, who is master of all things.
The Bible, therefore, gives us sufficient reason to believe that it is the Word of the living God, who does exist and who has revealed Himself to the world.
"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" (Psalm 14:1).
Jesus Christ Tells Us
Another reason we know God exists is that He has appeared in human flesh. Jesus Christ was God Almightly who became a man. The Bible says, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), and it states clearly that Jesus came to earth to reveal who God is and what He is all about (John 1:18). If someone wants to know who God is and what He is like, he need only to look at Jesus Christ. Instead of man reaching up to find God, God reached down to man. Jesus, in coming back from the dead, established Himself as having the credentials to be God, and it was this fact that demonstrated its truth to the unbelieving world.
Scientific Perspective
The above mentioned facts are the really strong evidences we have—historical events right in front of our eyes. But there are other arguments that generally support the idea of God’s existence, that we can glean from the fact and nature of the universe. (Bare with me as I get a little bit technical). To begin, we need to make a few assumptions. We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real. If you do not believe that you exist, you have bigger problems than this study will entail and you will have to look elsewhere.
The Beginning
If we do exist, what are the only two possible explanations as to how our existence came to be? (Either we had a beginning or we did not have a beginning. The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). The atheist has always maintained that there was no beginning. The idea is that matter has always existed in the form of either matter or energy; and all that has happened is that matter has been changed from form to form, but it has always been. The Humanist Manifesto says, "Matter is self-existing and not created," and that is a concise statement of the atheist’s belief.
The way we decide whether the atheist is correct or not is to see what science has discovered about this question. Have you ever seen the pictures of galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope? Picture three galaxies at the points of a triangle. All of these galaxies are moving relative to each other. Their movement has a very distinct pattern which causes the distance between the galaxies to get greater with every passing day. Picture the triangle. Tomorrow, the triangle they form will be bigger. The day after tomorrow the triangle will be bigger yet. We live in an expanding universe that gets bigger and bigger and bigger with every passing day.
Now let us suppose that we made time run backwards! If we are located at a certain distance today, then yesterday we were closer together. The day before that, we were still closer. Ultimately, where must all the galaxies have been? At a point! At the beginning! At what scientists call a singularity ! (You still with me?) Scientists have explained this, in an attempt to eliminate God from the equation, as the Big Bang Theory. (God and the Atronomers by Robert Jastrow)
This [the advent of the big bang theory] is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. To which St. Augustine added, 'Who can understand this mystery or explain it to others?' It is unexpected because science has had such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time....
Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery 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.
A second proof is seen in the energy sources that fuel the cosmos. Picture the sun. (NO, don’t look at it!) Like all stars, the sun generates its energy by a nuclear process known as thermonuclear fusion. Every second that passes, the sun compresses 564 million tons of hydrogen into 560 million tons of helium with 4 million tons of matter released as energy. In spite of that tremendous comsumption of fuel, the sun has only used up 2% of the hydrogen it had the day it came into existence. The incredible furnance is not a process confined to the sun. Every star in the sky generates its energy in the same way. Throughout the cosmos there are 25 quintillion stars, each converting hydrogen into helium, thereby reducing the total amount of hydrogen in the cosmos. Just think about it! If everywhere in the cosmos hydrogen is being consumed and if the process has been going on forever, how much hydrogen should be left?
Suppose I attempt to drive my car without putting any more gas (fuel) into it. As I drive and drive, what is eventually going to happen? I am going to run out of gas. If the cosmos has been here forever, we would have run out of hydrogen long ago! The fact is, however, that the sun still has 98% of its original hydrogen. The fact is that hydrogen is the most abundant material in the universe! Everywhere we look in space we can see the hydrogen 21 cm line in the spectrum (a piece of light only given off by hydrogen). This could not be unless we had a beginning!
A third scientific proof that the atheist is wrong is seen in the second law of thermodynamics. In any closed system, things tend to become disordered. If a car is driven for years and years without repair, for example, it will become so disordered that it would not run any more. Getting old is simple conformity to the second law of thermodynamics. In space, things also get old. Astronomers refer to the aging process as heat death. If the cosmos is "everything that ever was or is or ever will be," as Carl Sagan was so fond of saying, nothing could be added to it to improve its order or repair it. Even a universe that expands and collapses and expands again forever would die because it would lose light and heat each time it expanded and rebounded.
The atheist’s assertion that matter/energy is eternal is scientifically wrong. The biblical assertion that there was a beginning is scientifically correct.
The Cause
If we know that creation has a beginning, we are faced with another logical question : was the creation caused or was it not caused? The Bible states, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Not only does the Bible maintain that there was a cause (a creation) but it also tells us what the cause was. It was God. The atheist tells us that "matter is self-existing and not created." If matter had a beginning and yet was uncaused, one must logically maintain that something would have had to come into existence out of nothing. From empty space with no force, no matter, no energy, and no intelligence, matter would have to become existent. Even if this could happen by some strange new process unknown to science today, there is a logical problem.
In order for matter to come out of nothing, all of our scientific laws dealing with the conservation of matter/energy would have to be wrong, invalidating all of chemistry (which I never liked anyway). All of our laws of conservation of angular momentum would have to be wrong, invalidating all of physics. All of our laws of convervation of electric charge would have to be wrong, invalidating all of electronics and demanding that your TV set not work! (Now that is serious!) Your television set may not work, but that is not the reason! In order to believe matter is uncaused, one has to discard known laws and principles of science. No reasonable person is going to do this simply to maintain a personal atheistic position.
The atheist’s assertion that matter is eternal is wrong. The atheist’s assertion that the universe is uncaused and self-existing is also incorrect. The Bible’s assertion that there was a beginning which was caused is supported strongly by the available scientific evidence.
The Design
If we know that the creation had a beginning and we know that the beginning was caused, there is one last question for use to answer— what was the cause? The Bible tells us that God was the cause. We are further told that the God who did the causing did so with planning and reason and logic. Romans 1:20 tells us that we can know God is "through the things he has made." The atheist, on the other hand, will try to convince us that we are the product of chance. Julian Huxley (noted atheist) once said: "We are as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. We have just happened, and man was made flesh by a long series of singulary beneficial accidents."
The subject of design has been one that has been explored in many different ways. For most of us, simply looking at our newborn child is enough to rule out chance. As more and more scientific discoveries occur to explain the atom or life, chance is being ruled out as a valid mechanism to explain creation. If chance is not valid, we are constrained to reject Huxley’s claim and to realize that we are the product of an intelligent God.
In addition to the simple fact of the universe, the nature of the universe also makes more sense if it were created by a God. We naturally believe that behind every work or art is an artist, that behind every invention is an inventor, that behind every building is an architect. When we see evidence of intelligent design (even imperfect or incomplete) we suspect that there was an intelligent designer. And the same applies to the universe in all its incredible complexity and inter-connectedness. The delicate balances in physical and biological laws can be seen as strong evidence for an Intelligent Designer—God.
Conclusion
The evidence in both history, nature, and science argues pretty strongly that God exists, that He is active in our History, and that He cares for us. But, to be honest, in addition to these evidences, I personally have an additional source of data—God has changed my life and has answered prayer beyond the boundary of statistical probability. I’m sure He’s done the same for you!
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