Are we intimidated by atheistic claims that God is dead, that evolution is proven science? Do we hesitate to explore the facts, worried we might lose our faith? Are we afraid of being disdained as ignorant and superstitious?
Scripture asserts that atheists are foolish and corrupt (Ps 53:1), implying God is easily found. Yet who can show this from facts and reason? Are we missing the obvious?
Here’s a 3-step proof that atheists are as God claims, from easily understood and readily verifiable facts:
[1] Establish atheists’ burden of proof; then prove atheism is unprovable.
[2] Establish atheists’ foolishness: Pascal’s Wager vs absurdity.
[3] Consider Moral Law: it transcends Nature, implying metaphysical reality.
Q.E.D. Done. Let’s talk: what’ve I missed?
The burden of proof for theists is different than that of atheists since proving something does exist is quite different than proving it does not exist. We may experience God in ways which prove the existence of God to ourselves, so theists may make rational claims based on experiences which are inaccessible to others. Such claims are, obviously, uninteresting for the purposes of any helpful debate. For those who are willing to see, infallible proof of the existence and nature of God abounds.
Another easy proof of God’s existence from the physical sciences:
[1] The universe is changing, expanding, decomposing, decaying.
[2] This implies the universe is not infinitely old; an infinitely old universe would be at steady state.
[3] This implies the universe had a beginning, of extremely high order, before which there was nothing.
[4] This implies a Creator; nothing, especially a highly ordered system, comes from nothing on its own.
[5] This Creator must be:
—i- outside time and space, because He created time and space;
–ii- rational, because He chose to create;
-iii- immeasurably intelligent and powerful, because He created such a complex and finely-tuned universe.
Atheists often criticize the content of the biblical narrative, proposing alternatives which seem to them more intuitive or believable. They seldom (if ever) make such criticisms of other historical narratives, only with the Bible.
Such criticism is irrational, revealing a bias and animosity for which atheism provides no grounds. If one claims the Bible was fabricated, providing evidence of this and a plausible explanation for how and why it was done is both necessary and sufficient. Yet this cannot be done with the Bible; it would violate the universal nature of Man, as shown in infallible proof.
Further proof of the reality of God can be found in the mere existence of Christianity: it would not exist if Christ weren’t authentic, and if He didn’t actually rise from the dead. The apostles suffered and died for their testimony here, never wavering in their sacrificial zeal; people don’t die for something they know is a lie.
As evidence for the existence of God, I submit the claim of the late Stephen Hawking, that there are two possibilities for the origin of the universe: Either [P1] God created it ex nihilo, or [P2] The Laws of Physics did.
Hawking chooses P2, positing that the laws of physics exist as creative forces independent of Nature. “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” he writes. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”
The flaw in P2 is that the laws of physics don’t actually exist: they are merely abstract concepts describing patterns consistently observed in nature. So, P2 is a delusion: a claim explicitly contrary to science simply because one wants it to be true.
So, Hawking appears to leave us with a very simple choice: Deity, or Delusion. He sides with Delusion; anything but Deity, no matter how absurd.
I anticipate 3 possible responses:
[R1] Hawking is not an expert in this field, and should not be trusted This counter-claim is easily dismissed.
[R2] I have misrepresented Hawking’s claim. A counter-claim that is also easily refuted with commonly available facts.
[R3] Fall back on “God of the gaps” (GOTG), and assert that P2 is a valid choice, merely something science can’t fully explain yet. The problem here is that GOTG is reasonable only when the “gap” that needs to be bridged does not require contradicting all known science. Claiming that we might eventually discover how something which does not exist could create everything that does exist – ex nihilo, from NOTHING — does contradict all known science. In this case, GOTG isn’t an argument; it’s a cop out, an easy way to refuse to consider any evidence for God at all.
I did get a few atheistic replies to the above, but nothing substantive by way of reason/logic. This was my goal, in fact, to see what the weaknesses were in my position. I didn’t expect a rational response, couldn’t even conceive of one. This has been validated so far.
In my limited experience, as a general rule, atheists claim they aren’t making a formal claim (that there is no god, realizing this cannot be proved). Rather, they assert that they see no evidence of a god, so they have no interest in acting as if there might be one. Yet they appear to be acting differently, as if they know for a fact there is no god, and therefore dismissing any/all evidence no matter how clear and scientific it is. I see this repeatedly, and I think this behavior is irrational, exposing an unreasonable bias/enmity against God, as the Bible claims. What seems to fuel and encourage this behavior, at least in part, is the irrational and unrighteous behavior of those who claim to be Christians, and the fuel is endless.
There can be no scientific explanation for the spontaneous creation of everything from nothing, and I believe this is both apparent and inherent in Hawking’s claim. Science will never be able to provide such an explanation because any conceivable explanation is anti-science. That’s why this particular argument is so powerful: it is very simple but it is also inarguable.
Hawking evidently realized that the very existence of our universe implies that a supernatural Creator exists (i.e. Nature began, and cannot create itself from nothing, implying a Super-natural Cause [P1] by definition), something he found intolerable, so he fabricated a delusion as an alternative. In his mindset (Philosophical Naturalism), any alternative at all to P1 will do, whether or not it is absurdly unscientific.
In other words, Hawking’s choice of P2 is unreasonable, openly anti-science, and he wasn’t ignorant, insane or unintelligent. The only reasonable explanation for his behavior is that he was profoundly biased: his motivation in choosing P2 must have been an a priori denial of the existence of God. His irrational behavior, given his knowledge and intelligence, thus essentially proves P1 (by contradiction) as an established scientific fact, as knowable as any scientific fact can possibly be.
In establishing P1 via the fact of Creation, as we understand it scientifically, I see that much of the essential nature of this Creator (“God”) is self-evident. God must be:
• Eternal and Spiritual, existing outside/independent of time and space, since He created both;
• Extremely (infinitely) powerful, since He created a spec of infinite order and density containing all the matter and energy in our universe;
• Extremely (infinitely) intelligent, since He designed a very precise explosion and the fine tuning of hundreds of settings which allow the universe to exist;
• Rational, since He chose to create the universe, implying He had a purpose in doing so;
• Relational, since He also created life (another topic: the existence of life itself implies this; on several levels, it is statistically impossible for life of any kind to occur naturally).
I can’t yet understand how the very fact of our existence does not clearly imply all of the above, and move everyone to seek to be in right relationship with God. I am still looking for some kind of rational alternative, yet have no idea what it might be.
The only disagreement I find with the above amounts to: “I don’t like this so I will live as if it can’t be true and dismiss/ignore any and all evidence for it.” This is no surprise; it is exactly what the Bible predicts. Even so, experiencing it first hand is intense and difficult, yet curiously encouraging. Personally interacting with and experiencing the blindness and darkness of the natural Man in the face of established scientific fact has been validating to my understanding, like observing a continual miracle. I can’t actually explain why I myself am not acting in such an irrational manner, other than the mercy of God, and it makes me thankful.
If you can poke any logical/scientific holes in this I am very interested.
As further evidence for the existence of God, I submit the findings of the COBE experiment: the discovery of cosmic temperature ripples predicted by the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking described this as “the most important discovery of the (20th) century, if not of all time.” Why so?
The ripples formed during the explosion happen to be precisely tuned, on the order of one part in one hundred thousand, to allow just enough matter to congregate for galaxy formation, but not enough to allow the universe to collapse again on itself. George Smoot, the winner of the Nobel prize for Physics in 2006 for his work in this area, called this evidence, “machining marks from the creation of the universe,” and the “finger prints of the maker.” Is this an unreasonable posture to take? Why not attribute this phenomenon to blind chance?
Well, if we lined up 99,999 people and one manikin shoulder to shoulder in a circle, and positioned a pistol in the center on a swivel with a single bullet, such that it would hit exactly one of the targets when fired, and rotated the pistol at 10 revolutions per second, and fired the gun and hit the manikin, would you be suspicious if we claimed the timing of the shot was made completely randomly, by chance? Of course you would; because you wouldn’t be biased against the idea that someone could have rigged the event to ensure no one would get hurt.
To an unbiased observer, whatever caused this primal explosion seems to have done so with amazing precision, suggesting that this was very likely not a random, unintelligent Cause.
We can certainly dismiss this as “zero evidence” if we like, and make the a priori assumption there can’t possibly be an intelligent Cause for the origin of our universe, and say it’s no big deal. But to any unbiased observer looking in, this is exposing a very strong bias, a blindness, which we don’t carry with us into any other area of science or life.