Real Answers to Big Questions: Is God Real?
Scott Bayles, pastor
Blooming Grove Christian Church: 6/28/2015
We all have questions. Some questions are simply curiosities. Why is the sky blue? Why do we drive on parkways but park on driveway? If you tied buttered toast to the back of a cat and dropped it from a height, how would it land? Did Adam and Eve have belly-buttons? Other questions are a bit deeper and more meaningful: Why is there suffering in the world? What’s the meaning of life? Did the universe explode into existence without cause or design, or were we created for a purpose? Is there a God? Does He care for us?
As Christians we not only wrestle with the questions ourselves, but we’re often approached by others looking for answers. The Bible says, “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” (1 Peter 3:15 NIV).
We live in an increasingly skeptical society. According to survey’s conducted by The Pew Research Center, 20% of Americans ages 18 to 25 identify themselves as non-religious, atheists or agnostics, which is nearly double what it was 20 years ago. And therefore, it’s become increasingly important for Christians to be equipped with real answers to those big questions about God, Jesus and the Bible. Fortunately, those answers are not as elusive as they may sometimes feel. In fact, it all boils down to three big questions. I call them the God Questions:
• Does God exist?
• Is Jesus God’s Son?
• Is the Bible God’s Word?
If we can provide compelling answers to these three questions, then not only will our own faith be strengthened, but we’ll be in a better position to share our faith confidently and convincingly with others. For the next three weeks I want to explore these questions and hopefully equip you with solid, sensible answers, starting with that first question: Does God exist?
Throughout human history, people have questioned the existence of God. We can’t see, hear, touch, or taste him, so how can we know for sure if he exists?
This questions weighs so heavy on our collective minds that scholars, scientists, and philosophers have given it deep thought over the ages—many concluding that God must be real, and that there are sound reasons to believe in him. I’d like to share three of those reasons with you today. First, is the evidence of cosmology.
• THE EVIDENCE OF COSMOLOGY
Cosmology is the study of the cosmos, or universe. And cosmology tells us not only that there is a God, but it even tells us a little bit about what he’s like! The Bible says, “The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world” (Psalm 19:1-4 NLT).
The Hebrews didn’t have a word for universe or galaxy, so when they spoke of the cosmos they used the word heavens. The Bible, in others words, is saying that we can look to stars and learn about the glory of God without ever having to open a Bible. The cosmos is big and beautiful, and its very existence raises the question: “How did the universe get here?”
The seventeenth century philosopher G.W. Leibniz observed, “The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?” Answering that question has led many scientists and philosophers to conclude that God must exist.
There are only three possible explanations for the existence of the universe. The first, is that the universe is simply eternal and has always existed. Prior to the 1920s this was actually a commonly held view dating as far back as Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Most people assumed that the cosmos was static, unchanging, and eternal. Since that time, thanks to astonishing developments in modern astronomy, we now have strong scientific evidence that the universe had an absolute beginning—commonly referred to as the Big Bang. In the 1920s a Russian mathematician, Alexander Friedman, and the Belgian astronomer, Georges Lamaitre developed models of an expanding universe based on Einstein’s equations. These predictions were confirmed in 1929 by the American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, when he observed a “red shift” in light coming from distant galaxies, which indicates that they are getting further away. As you trace the expansion of the universe back in time, everything gets closer and closer together, until the distance between any two points is zero. At that point, often called the singularity, you’ve reached the boundary of space and time. The standard Big-Bang model, which is almost universally accepted among astronomers and astrophysicists, thus predicts an absolute beginning to the universe.
Another option for the origin of the universe is that it simply popped in being, uncaused from absolutely nothing. What amazes me is that some staunch atheists, such as Lawrence Kraus, actually believe this. Common sense and scientific evidence tells us you cannot get something from nothing. To claim that something can come into being literally from nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, at least you’ve got the magician, not to mention the hat! Nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause. I think Maria said it well, in The Sound of Music, when she told Captain Von Trapp, “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.” The conditions that hold true in our universe preclude the possibility of matter springing out of nothing!
Which leaves us with only one other possibility: the universe was created by some outside Cause. Whatever caused the universe must be a transcendent Cause beyond the universe. It must transcend space and time, since it created space and time. It must also be unimaginably powerful, since it created all matter and energy. Finally, it must be a personal being. If the Cause was simply an impersonal set of circumstances that existed from eternity past, then logically, the effect (our universe) would also exist from eternity past. But the universe hasn’t existed from eternity past, so the best explanation for this is that the Cause of the universe choose to create the universe at a specific moment, indicating that it is a personal being with freedom of will. Thus, we’re brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe but to a timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful, Personal Creator! I don’t know about you, but that sounds an awful lot like the God of the Bible to me. In fact, I think the Bible got it right when it said, “For every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything” (Hebrews 4:3 NIV).
Just as houses don’t pop into existence uncaused, neither do universes. Thus we have our first reason to believe in God. Furthermore, we have the evidence of creation!
• THE EVIDENCE OF CREATION
From the earliest times, philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, wholly apart from the Bible, have concluded that God must exist, based on what they perceive in the created world. The Bible makes this remarkable claim: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20 NIV).
In other words, creation itself is evidence of a Creator.
This is what the Intelligent Design movement is all about. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an Intelligent Designer, rather than random undirected processes. The classic illustration is the Watchmaker analogy. If you stumbled across a watch in a field, even if you had never seen a watch before, you could discern from its inner workings and intricate design, that there must be a watch-maker. Similar tell-tales signs of design are discernible all throughout the created world.
A memorable example is found in the giraffe. (NEXT SLIDE)
Giraffe’s supposedly descended from the climacoceras—a much smaller deer-like animal—some 14 million years ago. Imagine that you are a newly evolved giraffe, the first of your kind, with this long gangly neck—the average male giraffe stands about 18 feet tall. You take a few steps and immediately keel over and die. Why? Because, in order to get blood to flow up that long neck and into your brain, you need an enormous heart. The giraffe’s heart is among the largest most powerful in the animal kingdom, about 2 feet wide. So you’re lying there dead and you think, “I need to evolve a bigger heart so this doesn’t happen.” So now you’re a giraffe with a long neck and a big heart, you’re walking along and decide to bend down and get a drink of water, but now that powerful heart is pumping with gravity instead of against it and all that blood rushes into your head and your brain explodes. So you’re lying there dead and you think, “I need to evolve some kind of system here to keep from blowing my brains out.” Giraffes have a series of valves in their neck to shut off one-at-a-time as a giraffe bends down to slow the flow of blood. But still enough blood gets through to burst the arterials in its brain, so that blood is soaked up by a little sponge at the base of the brain. So now you bend down and get a drink, but suddenly you see a lion coming, so you raise your head and try to run, but you pass out because you’re not getting enough blood to your brain. Well, the giraffe doesn’t pass out because as he raises his head the sponge releases the blood and all the valves open and by the time he’s up and running he blood pressure is back to normal.
It is unimaginably improbable that the giraffe could have evolved all these complex, interdependent parts through simply through natural selection acting on random mutation. This sort of irreducible complexity bares the fingerprints of a designer.
It’s not just large land animals that bare the marks of design. Sir Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer and mathematician at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge who actually coined the term “Big Bang” Theory, once said, “The odds of even the simplest cell forming by chance are like believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”
Barrow and Tipler, two physicists, in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, list ten steps in the course of human evolution—each of which is so improbable that before it would occur by chance alone the Sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and incinerated the Earth! They calculated the probability of the evolution of the human genome by chance alone to be between 4-180(110,000) and 4-360(110,000). Therefore, if evolution did occur on this planet, it was literally a miracle and, therefore, evidence that God exists!
Design necessitates a Designer and creation demands a Creator. Finally, in addition to the evidence of cosmology and creation, we also have the evidence of conscience.
• THE EVIDENCE OF CONSCIENCE
This third reason for God has less to do with the material world and more to do with the moral world. I like how Jiminy Cricket responded in the 1940 classic, when Pinocchio asked, “What’s a conscience?” Jiminy Cricket said, “What’s a conscience!? I'll tell ya! A conscience is that still small voice that people won’t listen to. That's just the trouble with the world today...” To paraphrase the Blue Fairy’s follow-up, your conscience is what allows you to differentiate between right and wrong, good and evil, moral and immoral.
The Bible has something to say about that, too: “Even though they do not have the law, they show that in their hearts they know what is right and wrong, just as the law commands. And they show this by their consciences. Sometimes their thoughts tell them they did wrong, and sometimes their thoughts tell them they did right” (Romans 2:14-15 NCV). By letting our conscience be our guide, we discover a powerful reason to believe in God.
You see, if there is no God, then there really aren’t such things as good and evil; there’s no real difference between right and wrong. The values that we hold dear—such as, do not lie, do not steal, or love your neighbor as yourself—are just social conventions, like driving on the right side of the road versus the left side of the road. Or they’re simply matters of opinion, like preferring pizza over tacos.
A man wrote: "Dear Abby, I am in love and I am having an affair with two different women other than my wife. I love my wife but I love these other women too. Please tell me what to do, but don’t give me any that morality stuff." Signed: Too much love for only one.” In this case Abby’s answer was classic. She wrote: “Dear Too much love for only one. The only difference between humans and animals is morality. Please write to a veterinarian."
She’s right! But in an atheistic worldview, human beings are nothing more than highly evolved primates—the by-product of natural selection acting on random mutations. And our morals are simply a sort of “herd mentality” that evolved from sociobiological conditioning as a means of propagating the species. Human beings simply invented the concept of right and wrong to help our species survive. Michael Ruse, a noted philosopher of science, elaborates, “The position of the modern evolutionist… is that… morality is a biological adaptation no less than our hands and feet and teeth… Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction… Any deeper meaning is imaginary.” Without God there are no objective moral values.
But—I contend that good and evil, right and wrong, objective moral values and duties are very real, and we all know it! We know walking into a church in Charleston, SC and killing 9 church-goers in order to start a “race war” is categorically wrong. It’s objectively unarguably evil! Even staunch atheists tend to also be devout moralists.
Michael Ruse, the atheist I quoted a moment ago, has also said, “The man who says it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says 2+2=5.” So it’s clear even to non-religious people and unbelievers that some things, at least, are really wrong. And similarly, some things—like love, equality, and self-sacrifice—are really good. But if good and evil truly exist, then God must also exist.
Ravi Zacharias was once asked, “If God is real, why is there so much evil in the world?” I loved his response: “When you say there's too much evil in this world you assume there's good. When you assume there's good, you assume there's such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But if you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral Law Giver, but that's Who you're trying to disprove and not prove. Because if there's no moral Law Giver, there's no moral law. If there's no moral law, there's no good. If there's no good, there's no evil. What is your question?”
The evidence of Creation and Cosmology reveal that a timeless, spaceless, immeasurably powerful and intelligent Creator must exist. But they don’t tell us much about the character of that Creator. The evidence of conscience, however, shines a light on the nature and character of our Creator—namely, that God is good.
Our moral values—like honesty, integrity, compassion, self-sacrifice, kindness, and goodness—are all grounded in the nature of God. God himself is the source of moral rightness and his commandments—treat others as you would want to be treated, care for orphans and widows, help the weak, don’t lie, cheat or steal—are reflections of his nature. God is good and, therefore, we have a reason to be good too. Like the psalmist, we can say, “You made me; you created me. Now give me the sense to follow your commands” (Psalm 119:73 NLT).
Conclusion:
Some people have a strong desire to believe in God. They want assurance that they’re not alone in the universe. Other people have an equally strong desire not to believe in God. The thought of an all-powerful Creator cramps their style.
The decision to believe or not believe in God shouldn’t be based on preconceptions or on what we want to believe. It ought to be based on evidence, experience, and reason. There are many more reasons beside these, but based on these three reasons—cosmology, creation, and conscience—I think it takes more faith to believe there is no God than to believe there is.
Invitation:
Next week, we’ll try to answer the second big question: Is Jesus God’s Son? In the meantime, you have the opportunity to not only intellectually agree that God exists, but to personally experience him. If you will draw near to God, he will draw near to you. If I can help you with that, please come forward as we stand and sing.
