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Why Do We Believe in God?

Matthew nelson, march 10, 2020.

Home › Articles › Why Do We Believe in God?

Do we come to belief in God through personal encounter, or arguments, or both? When we ask ourselves ‘Why do we believe in God?’ our faith provides the first response,” offered St. John Paul II during a 1985 General Audience . “We believe in God because God has made himself known to us as the supreme Being, the great ‘Existent.’”

We believe in the unseen Trinity first and foremost because we have been convicted by grace through faith. “Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ,” affirms St. Paul (Rom. 10:17). Faith comes by the authority and testimony of another; and as recipients of God’s Word—which may come to us orally, in writing, or indeed through a direct encounter with the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ—we can come to know truths that transcend the humble faculties of reason alone. We believe principally because we trust in what—or who —we have heard and encountered.

But if faith comes to us principally through the authority of another, does reason have a part to play in the acquisition of faith? According to St. Paul the answer is yes. For him it is not only God but that which God has created that can be revelatory. For as the Apostle says in his Letter to the Romans, the physical world can testify and reveal God’s “eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are” (Rom. 1:20).

St. Paul placed great value on the revelatory capabilities of the senses. He believed that through philosophical contemplation that followed upon sense experience, we could come to know the existence of the divine Creator (Rom. 1:20). For St. Paul the senses could indeed reveal to us the real; indeed, by way of the proximately real the senses had the capability of leading us to the really real—the one God who simply and infinitely is .

But St. Paul knew that God might also reveal himself directly, through a person-to-person encounter, by the power of the Holy Spirit: “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15).

Sensing God

We might be moved to believe in God because we have directly experienced him, independently of rational argument. But now here’s a question pertaining the reasonableness of belief based on experience: Would such a religious experience alone , in the absence of other evidence, be adequate to justify religious belief?

From Sigmund Freud to Richard Dawkins, skeptics have often expressed intense discontent towards the justification of faith based on religious experience. This is understandable. We can be tempted to believe many false things if we base our conclusions on feelings alone. But in recent times, Christian philosophers like the (rightly) esteemed Alvin Plantinga—inspired by Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis or “sense of the divine”—have argued that belief in God may be treated as a “properly basic” belief—that is, a fundamental belief that requires no further justification to be rationally held.

On this view, then, belief in God based solely on religious experience may be fully justified if the belief is, 1) true, and 2) undefeated by objections. In such a case then one could be fully justified in believing in God even if they do not have “positive” arguments supporting their belief. Their interior experience of God would be enough.  

Arguments and Belief

But now let’s return to our initial question: Why do we believe in God?

We have already noted that God may reveal himself to us directly through the power of the Holy Spirit. But unless God reveals himself in this way, which is entirely by grace, God’s existence is not immediately evident to us. As St. Thomas tells us, God is self-evident in himself but not self-evident to us. Thus, even the unbaptized know God—but in a “general and confused way.”

And this is where human reason comes in. Indeed, rational arguments have much to add to brute religious experience. First of all, arguments serve to clear the mental debris that prevents us from seeing God more clearly. Second of all, they serve to authenticate our religious experiences and perhaps reveal more to us about the divine person—or persons—we have encountered experientially. Thus, just as religious experience may authenticate in a deeper way what we already know by demonstration, so also may philosophical demonstration authenticate religious experience.

Even if Plantinga is correct that arguments are not necessary to warrant belief in God, it would not follow that arguments have no important part to play in the life of faith. For if belief in God can be warranted by authentic religious experience and we can prove with positive arguments that theism is true, then as William Lane Craig has pointed out, we are doubly warranted to believe in God: first by grace through faith—but also by reason.

In Humani Generis (1950), Pope Pius XII echoed St. Paul’s affirmation of the possibility of natural theology when he wrote, “Human reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and governs the world.”

There are many paths by which we may come to philosophical knowledge of God. Such knowledge always begins in wonder —and then diverges. “Instinctively, when we witness certain happenings, we ask ourselves what caused them,” wrote St. John Paul II. “How can we not but ask the same question in regard to the sum total of beings and phenomena which we discover in the world?”

That the world exists unnecessarily—that is to say, that there is something rather nothing—is a fact that has incessantly poked at the minds of the deepest of thinkers. “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is,” mused Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus . From St. Thomas Aquinas to G.W. Leibniz, great thinkers through the ages have concluded that that the world exists, despite not having to, points to a deeper metaphysical truth—a necessary being that explains all that is. Indeed, for St. Thomas it was not a necessary being but only (and necessarily) Being itself which could sufficiently explain the universe, who possessed all perfections—love, intelligence, creativity, and the like—without limit.

Many Ways to God

The ways to God by reason are many, and rarely work on the mind in isolation from the others. As St. John Henry Newman reminded us in his  Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent , all of our reasons for belief converge upon one single subject from a variety of angles in a symphony of “converging evidences.” Echoing this insight, St. John Paul II observed :

A myriad of indications impels man, who tries to understand the universe in which he lives, to direct his gaze toward his Creator. The proofs for the existence of God are many and convergent. They contribute to show that faith does not humble human intelligence, but stimulates it to reflection and permits it to understand better all the “whys” posed by the observation of reality.

Indeed, the order, intelligibility, and “finality” (or goal-directedness) of nature also compel the mind, intuitively and discursively, to ponder the Supreme Intellect behind it all. Pope John Paul acknowledged the evidential power of such features of the natural world:

The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator.

Of course—as John Paul carefully notes in the passage above—it is the physical sciences that are best appropriated to investigate the phenomena of nature. But science does not precede nor supersede philosophical contemplation. Rather, science presupposes the philosophical, and at the same time integrates it into its method necessarily when it moves into the process of analysis.

For many, a study of metaphysics—that is, what is beyond ( meta ) the physical—has fallen out of style and into the shadow of the physical sciences. As particle physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne has observed , “Metaphysics is not a word that many scientists feel happy with. It is not uncommon for the concept to be dismissed.” But, he counters, this dismissal is in vain. “In actual fact,” says Polkinghorne, “it is impossible to think seriously without taking a metaphysical stance, since this simply means adopting a world-view. We think metaphysics as naturally and inevitably as we speak prose ” (emphasis added).

Indeed, we do. Granted, our metaphysical thinking is not always concretely discursive; that is to say, we are not always aware of our assumptions, premises, and ways of getting to our conclusions, nor are we always thinking in—or even able to think in—the technical jargon of philosophy. That being said, by the virtue of the fact that we are rational , we are ever in the state of mentally peeling back the layers of reality, always drawing conclusions and making distinctions about what is and what ought to be. That being said, we are not often explicitly cognizant of our mental activities as metaphysical. “All men have a reason,” wrote St. John Henry Newman,” but not every man can give a reason.”

When it comes to the existence of God, then, we cannot help but seek understanding to supplement and fortify our faith. God has created us for himself; and as art reveals something of the artist, so also does the world he has placed us in reveal the nature and divinity of God. Every person by nature desires to know, wrote Aristotle famously. And we might also add that every person—at least in a general and confused way—desires to know God. Our rational nature permits us as human persons to intuit God experientially, but also all-at-once instills within us an irremediable appetite to know God intellectually. Thus, both experience and argument play pivotal roles for belief in God.

Believing in God

Why do we believe in God? We believe in God, first, by faith. Trusting in the authority of the Church, strengthened by the wisdom and witness of the Sacred Scriptures, inspired by the testimony of the saints, and moved interiorly by the Holy Spirit, we believe by grace that God has revealed himself to us.

But we believe also because our minds tell us that God is real and Christianity is true. We believe what we know, we know what we believe, and the coming together of faith and knowledge happens not by force but by a harmonious integration. As grace perfects nature, so faith perfects reason. Or in the words of Pope Benedict XVI: “Faith presupposes reason and perfects it, and reason, enlightened by faith, finds the strength to rise to knowledge of God and spiritual realities.”

Why Do People Believe in God?

The evolution of religious belief..

Posted August 21, 2018 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• Early in the history of humans, nobody believed in a god of any sort.
• Religious belief is considerably lower in developed countries compared with the underdeveloped world.
• Believing that God has a plan helps people regain some sense of control, or at least acceptance.

Why do people believe in God? For most people in the world, the answer seems obvious: Because it’s self-evident that God exists. From the point of view of the believer, the really puzzling question is how anyone could not believe.

And yet, as University of California at Irvine psychologist Brett Mercier and his colleagues point out in a recent article, there was once a time in the prehistory of our species when nobody believed in a god of any sort. Our evolutionary ancestors were all atheists, but somewhere along the way they found religion. So we’re back to our original question: Why do people believe in God?

As is common practice in evolutionary science, Mercier and his colleagues distinguish between ultimate and proximate causes. An ultimate cause explains how a behavior evolved in the first place, while a proximate cause outlines the conditions in which that evolved behavior will be performed. Consider, for example, birds flying south for the winter. The ultimate cause of bird migration is the increase in survival and reproduction experienced by those who seasonally moved to warmer climates where food was plentiful. In contrast, the proximate cause is the decrease in daylight hours, serving as a trigger that it’s time to head south.

Religious belief of some sort is a nearly universal feature of humanity, so there’s quite likely some ultimate evolutionary cause that explains it. At the same time, not all people are religious, and furthermore the forms of belief among the religious range widely, so we need to understand the proximate causes for this variation. In their article, Mercier and colleagues outline several ultimate and proximate causes for religious belief.

Fully modern humans arrived on the scene about a quarter-million years ago, and until quite recently they all lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles. In these primitive societies, the men hunted, fished, or scavenged for meat, while the women gathered fruits, roots, and vegetables. They lived in small groups of around 100 to 150 people because this was the largest population that the surrounding terrain could support.

Still, these groups were considerably larger than the societies of primate species, which tend to number in the few dozen range. Furthermore, humans are far more capable of cooperation than other primates, enabled by certain evolved cognitive mechanisms. Chief among these is a sense of agency . As tool users, humans quickly developed an understanding that they can intentionally cause things to happen. The nut cracked open because I smashed it with a rock. The apple fell because I shook the tree.

Humans then apply this sense of agency to interpreting social interactions. That is to say, we not only believe we have agency, we also believe others have agency as well. Thus, we judge the actions of others depending on whether we deem them to be intentional or not. We can easily forgive the person who accidentally steps on our foot, but we really need an explanation and an apology if someone purposely treads on our toes.

In fact, we’re rather hypersensitive about other people’s agency, inferring intention where none existed. For example, when someone cuts us off in traffic, we generally assume they did it on purpose—that is, knowing full well how dangerously they’re driving—rather than supposing they looked but just didn’t see us. We’re quick to assume that people act purposefully and discount the extent to which people’s behaviors are shaped by their current circumstances and limitations.

Because of hypersensitive agency detection, we also have a tendency to infer intentionality in natural processes or inanimate objects. Beliefs in water sprites and woodland spirits, specters and spooks, ghosts and demons, are ancient and observed in every culture around the world. Because the natural world is complex and acts in mysterious ways, we detect agency all around us.

By the way, if you think that you—an intelligent human being living in modern society—are free of such superstitious nonsense, you need to ask yourself: Have you ever begged your car to start on a cold winter morning? Or have you ever complained that your computer has a mind of its own because it doesn’t behave the way you want it to? We tend to automatically detect agency in inanimate objects whenever the situation is unpredictable and out of our control.

This kind of animistic thinking —that is, the belief that supernatural agency inhabits the world and can influence events—is a universal human trait. Such thinking is common in children, and as adults our animistic thinking is shaped by the norms of our culture. Animistic beliefs are also common in hunter-gatherer societies, but what they don’t have is organized religion.

Some 15,000 years ago, humans gradually began adopting agriculture. At first, humans domesticated a few animals and tended gardens to supplement their hunting and gathering, but eventually, all but a few societies around the world shifted solely to farming and herding. Agriculture can support many more people per acre of land compared with hunting and gathering, but this came with a cost.

As long as our group sizes were small, we had the psychological mechanisms to deal effectively with the members of our community. If you live day in and day out with the same 150 people, you get to know them really well. But if your numbers are in the thousands or tens of thousands, most of the people you interact with on a daily basis are strangers. Thus was life in the first cities that arose thanks to the food surpluses that agriculture yielded.

At this point, we see cultural evolution taking place. Human existence depends on cooperation. When we live in small groups, cheaters are punished by other members, and they quickly learn that they have to get along. But in anonymous societies, it’s easy to take advantage of others, as there’s no way for the rest of the group to punish those who take advantage of the system. The solution was to invent ever-watchful gods who’ll punish cheaters for us. Thus, organized religion grew hand-in-hand with the rise of the city-state.

Fast forward a dozen millennia, and here we are living in a technologically advanced society driven by science that tells us the world moves according to the laws of physics and not the whims of spirits or deities. Nevertheless, religious belief in one or more gods that watch over our actions and judge us accordingly is quite common. At the same time, religious belief has dropped precipitously over the last century, and here we need to look at its proximate causes.

Mercier and colleagues divide the proximate causes of religious belief into three types: cognitive, motivational, and societal. One cognitive factor is an analytical thinking style. People who tend to act according to reason rather than intuition are also less likely to believe in God. Perhaps relatedly, we also see a tendency for people who are higher in intelligence to hold agnostic or atheistic beliefs. In contrast, people who are high in what’s commonly called “ emotional intelligence ”—that is, the ability to easily discern the emotions and motives of others—also tend to be more religious. Of course, it’s exactly this ability to read others’ minds that led to the rise of religious belief in the first place, hundreds of thousands of years ago on the African savanna.

There are also motivational reasons for religious belief. People who are socially isolated tend to have more religious faith, perhaps allowing them to feel they’re not truly alone. Likewise, people facing death are more likely to express faith in God and an afterlife. The old saying that there are no atheists on the battlefield is no doubt true to a large extent. Furthermore, faith in God increases when situations become uncontrollable, as in the case of natural disasters. Believing that God has a plan helps people regain some sense of control, or at least acceptance.

Another motivational factor is self-enhancement. If you live in a society where religion is prized, it’s in your best interest to say you believe, whether you truly do or not. I’m sure there are plenty of doubters in the pews at Sunday services, though none will admit it. (I was one of those for most of my teenage years.) And it’s not uncommon to hear stories of priests or pastors who’ve lost their faith but continue to preach because it’s the only way they can make a living.

Finally, there are societal factors that influence the degree of religious belief within societies. As a general rule, religious belief is considerably lower in developed countries compared with the underdeveloped world. For instance, Japan has one of the highest standards of living in the world, but only 4 percent of its population claims to be religious. Traditionally, Japan was a Buddhist country, and religion played an important role in the daily lives of the Japanese until after World War II. A similar trend has occurred in Western Europe, which many social scientists now characterize as “post-Christian.”

The United States, with its high standard of living and high religiosity , is the glaring exception. However, as Mercier and his colleagues point out, Japan and Western European have universal health care and extensive social safety nets, as opposed to the U.S. The Japanese and the Europeans know their governments will come to their aid in their hour of need. But the laissez-faire attitudes of American society make people’s futures less certain and the belief in a benevolent God more attractive.

Although many people in industrialized societies have abandoned traditional organized religion, many of them still confess to some sort of spiritual belief, such as a life force or divine spirit that pervades nature and humanity. As societies become affluent and egalitarian, perhaps people perceive less need for a benevolent God to keep watch over us. Organized religion may no longer be needed in such societies, but it’s still human nature to perceive agency in the complexity and unpredictability of the world, even when there is none.

Mercier, B., Kramer, S. R., and Shariff, A. F. (2018). Belief in god: Why people believe, and why they don’t. Current Directions in Psychological Science. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1177/0963721418754491

David Ludden, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College.

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By BGEA Admin   •   July 13, 2021   •   Topics: Faith , God

There is a lot said about people of faith, yet I have many friends who say they have faith but they cannot identify “faith in what or in whom.” Some say it is just believing that there is a greater power than mankind. What is the truth?

From the writings of the Rev. Billy Graham

Having faith in God the Creator of the world is not simply education or experience. The Bible begins with the simple words: “In the beginning God … ”  These four words are the cornerstone of all existence and of all human history. God is not just “a power.” He is the source of all things. He is the beginning and the end.

Without God, there could have been no beginning and no continuing. God indeed was the creating power. By divine fiat, He brought form out of shapelessness, order out of disorder, and light out of darkness.

God cannot be rationalized—to try is to fail. There are mysteries about God that we will never understand in this life. We should not think it strange that it is impossible to comprehend God intellectually, when it is equally impossible to explain many mysteries in the realm of matter. Who can fathom the law of gravity? Newton discovered it, but he could not explain it.

There are many arguments we could marshal to give evidence of the existence of God. We see objects that have no intellect, such as stars and planets, moving in a consistent pattern, cooperating with one another. Hence, it is evident that they achieve their movements not by accident, but by design. If God can be fully proved by the human mind, then He is no greater than the mind that proves Him. Cry out to God, “Lord … help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). There is only one God, and He wants everyone to come to Him and be saved.

(This column is based on the words and writings of the late Rev. Billy Graham.)

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The Existence of God

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The existence and attributes of God are evident from the creation itself, even though sinful human beings suppress and distort their natural knowledge of God.

The existence of God is foundational to the study of theology. The Bible does not seek to prove God’s existence, but rather takes it for granted. Scripture expresses a strong doctrine of natural revelation: the existence and attributes of God are evident from the creation itself, even though sinful human beings suppress and distort their natural knowledge of God. The dominant question in the Old and New Testaments is not whether God is, but rather who God is. Philosophers both Christian and non-Christian have offered a wide range of arguments for God’s existence, and the discipline of natural theology (what can be known or proven about God from nature alone) is flourishing today. Some philosophers, however, have proposed that belief in God is rationally justified even without theistic arguments or evidences. Meanwhile, professing atheists have offered arguments against God’s existence; the most popular is the argument from evil, which contends that the existence and extent of evil in the world gives us good reason not to believe in God. In response, Christian thinkers have developed various theodicies, which seek to explain why God is morally justified in permitting the evils we observe.

If theology is the study of God and his works, then the existence of God is as foundational to theology as the existence of rocks is to geology. Two basic questions have been raised regarding belief in God’s existence: (1) Is it true ? (2) Is it rationally justified (and if so, on what grounds)? The second is distinct from the first because a belief can be true without being rationally justified (e.g., someone might irrationally believe that he’ll die on a Thursday, a belief that turns out by chance to be true). Philosophers have grappled with both questions for millennia. In this essay, we will consider what the Bible says in answer to these questions, before sampling the answers of some influential Christian thinkers.

Scripture and the Existence of God

The Bible opens not with a proof of God’s existence, but with a pronouncement of God’s works: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This foundational assertion of Scripture assumes that the reader not only knows already that God exists, but also has a basic grasp of who this God is. Throughout the Old Testament, belief in a creator God is treated as normal and natural for all human beings, even though the pagan nations have fallen into confusions about the true identity of this God. Psalm 19 vividly expresses a doctrine of natural revelation: the entire created universe ‘declares’ and ‘proclaims’ the glorious works of God. Proverbs tells us that “the fear of the Lord” is the starting point for knowledge and wisdom (Prov. 1:7; 9:10; cf. Psa. 111:10). Denying God’s existence is therefore intellectually and morally perverse (Psa. 14:1; 53:1). Indeed, the dominant concern throughout the Old Testament is not whether God is, but who God is. Is Yahweh the one true God or not (Deut. 4:35; 1Kgs. 18:21, 37, 39; Jer. 10:10)? The worldview that provides the foil for Hebrew monotheism is pagan polytheism rather than secular atheism.

This stance on the existence of God continues into the New Testament, which builds on the foundation of the uncompromising monotheism of the Old. In his epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul insists that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” are clearly perceived from the created order itself. Objectively speaking, there can be no rational basis for doubt about the existence of a transcendent personal creator, and thus there can be no excuse for unbelief (Rom. 1:20). Endued with a natural knowledge of our creator we owe God our honor and thanks, and our failure to do so serves as the primary basis for the manifestation of God’s wrath and judgment. The apostle’s robust doctrine of natural revelation has raised the question of whether anyone can truly be an atheist. The answer will depend, first, on how “atheist” is defined, and second, on what precisely Paul means when he speaks of people “knowing” God. If the idea is that all men retain some genuine knowledge of God, despite their sinful suppression of natural revelation, it’s hard to maintain that anyone could completely lack any cognitive awareness of God’s existence. But if “atheist” is defined as someone who denies the existence of God or professes not to believe in God, Romans 1 not only allows for the existence of atheists – it effectively predicts it. Atheism might then be understood as a form of culpable self-deception.

Paul’s convictions about natural revelation are put to work in his preaching to Gentile audiences in Lystra and Athens (Acts 14:15–17; 17:22–31). Paul assumes not only that his hearers know certain things about God from the created order but also that they have sinfully suppressed and distorted these revealed truths, turning instead to idolatrous worship of the creation (cf. Rom. 1:22–25). Even so, his appeals to general revelation are never offered in isolation from special revelation: the Old Testament Scriptures, the person of Jesus Christ, and the testimony of Christ’s apostles.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, the question of the existence of God is almost never explicitly raised, but rather serves as a foundational presupposition, an unquestionable background assumption. One exception would be the writer to the Hebrews, who remarks that “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (11:6). In general, the New Testament is concerned less with philosophical questions about the existence of God than with practical questions about how sinners can have a saving relationship with the God whose existence is obvious. As in the Old Testament, the pressing question is never whether God is, but who God is. Is Jesus Christ the revelation of God in human flesh or not? That’s the crux of the issue.

Arguments for the Existence of God

Consider again the two questions mentioned at the outset. (1) Is belief in God true ? (2) Is it rationally justified ? One appealing way to answer both questions affirmatively is to offer a theistic argument that seeks to infer God’s existence from other things we know, observe, or take for granted. A cogent theistic argument, one assumes, would not only demonstrate the truth of God’s existence but also provide rational justification for believing it. There is a vast literature on theistic arguments, so only a sampling of highlights can be given here.

The first generation of Christian apologists felt little need to argue for God’s existence for the same reason one finds no such arguments in the New Testament: the main challenges to Christian theism came not from atheism, but from non-Christian theism (Judaism) and pagan polytheism. Not until the medieval period do we find formal arguments for the existence of God offered, and even then the arguments do not function primarily as refutations of atheism but as philosophical meditations on the nature of God and the relationship between faith and reason.

One of the most famous and controversial is the ontological argument of St. Anselm (1033–1109) according to which God’s existence can be deduced merely from the definition of God, such that atheism leads inevitably to self-contradiction. One distinctive of the argument is that it relies on pure reason alone with no dependence on empirical premises. Various versions of the ontological argument have been developed and defended, and opinion is sharply divided even among Christian philosophers over whether there are, or even could be, any sound versions.

Cosmological arguments seek to demonstrate that that the existence of the universe, or some phenomenon within the universe, demands a causal explanation originating in a necessary first cause beyond the universe. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) famously offered “Five Ways” of demonstrating God’s existence, each of which can be understood as kind of cosmological argument. For example, one of the Five Ways argues that any motion (change) has to be explained by some mover (cause).  If that mover itself exhibits motion, there must be a prior mover to explain it, and because there cannot be an infinite regress of moved movers, there must be an original unmoved mover : an eternal, immutable, and self-existent first cause. Other notable defenders of cosmological arguments include G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) and Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), and more recently Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig.

Teleological arguments , which along with cosmological arguments can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, contend that God is the best explanation for apparent design or order in the universe. Simply put, design requires a designer, and thus the appearance of design in the natural world is evidence of a supernatural designer. William Paley (1743–1805) is best known for his argument from analogy which compares functional arrangements in natural organisms to those in human artifacts such as pocket watches. While design arguments suffered a setback with the rise of the Darwinian theory of evolution, which purports to explain the apparent design of organisms in terms of undirected adaptive processes, the so-called Intelligent Design Movement has reinvigorated teleological arguments with insights from contemporary cosmology and molecular biology while exposing serious shortcomings in naturalistic Darwinian explanations.

In the twentieth century, the moral argument gained considerable popularity, not least due to its deployment by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) in his bestseller Mere Christianity . The argument typically aims to show that only a theistic worldview can account for objective moral laws and values. As with the other theistic arguments there are many different versions of the moral argument, trading on various aspects of our moral intuitions and assumptions. Since such arguments are typically premised on moral realism —the view that there are objective moral truths that cannot be reduced to mere human preferences or conventions—extra work is often required to defend such arguments in a culture where moral sensibilities have been eroded by subjectivism, relativism, and nihilism.

Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) gained some notoriety for his forceful criticisms of the “traditional method” of Christian apologetics which capitulated to “autonomous human reason.” Van Til held that any respectable theistic argument ought to disclose the undeniability of the triune God revealed in Scripture, not merely a First Cause or Intelligent Designer. He therefore advocated an alternative approach, centered on a transcendental argument for the existence of God, whereby the Christian seeks to show that human reason, far from being autonomous and self-sufficient, presupposes the God of Christianity, the “All-Conditioner” who created, sustains, and directs all things according to the counsel of his will. As Van Til put it, we should argue “from the impossibility of the contrary”: if we deny the God of the Bible, we jettison the very grounds for assuming that our minds have the capacity for rational thought and for reliable knowledge of the world.

Since the renaissance of Christian philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, there has been renewed interest and enthusiasm for the project of developing and defending theistic arguments. New and improved versions of the classical arguments have been offered, while developments in contemporary analytic philosophy have opened up new avenues for natural theology. In his 1986 lecture, “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments,” Alvin Plantinga sketched out an entire A to Z of arguments for God, most of which had never been previously explored. Plantinga’s suggestions have since been expanded into a book-length treatment by other philosophers. The discipline of Christian natural theology is thriving as never before.

Basic Belief in the Existence of God

Still, are any of these arguments actually needed? Does confidence about God’s existence have to be funded by philosophical proofs? Since the Enlightenment, it has often been held that belief in God is rationally justified only if it can be supported by philosophical proofs or scientific evidences. While Romans 1:18–21 has sometimes been taken as a mandate for theistic arguments, Paul’s language in that passage suggests that our knowledge of God from natural revelation is far more immediate, intuitive, and universally accessible.

In the opening chapters of his Institutes of the Christian Religion , John Calvin (1509–1564) considers what can be known of God apart from special revelation and asserts that a natural knowledge has been universally implanted in mankind by the Creator: “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity” ( Institutes , I.3.1). Calvin speaks of a sensus divinitatis , “a sense of deity,” possessed by every single person in virtue of being created in God’s image. This internal awareness of the Creator “can never be effaced,” even though sinful men “struggle furiously” to escape it. Our implanted natural knowledge of God can be likened in some respects to our natural knowledge of the moral law through the God-given faculty of conscience (Rom. 2:14-15). We know instinctively that it’s wrong to lie and steal; no philosophical argument is needed to prove such things. Similarly, we know instinctively that there is a God who made us and to whom we owe honor and thanks.

In the 1980s, a number of Protestant philosophers led by Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Alston developed a sophisticated defense of Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis . Dubbed the “Reformed epistemologists,” they argued that theistic beliefs can be (and normally should be) properly basic : rationally justified even without empirical evidences or philosophical proofs. On this view, believing that God exists is comparable to believing that the world of our experience really exists; it’s entirely rational, even if we can’t philosophically demonstrate it. Indeed, it would be quite dysfunctional to believe otherwise.

Arguments Against the Existence of God

Even granting that there is a universal natural knowledge of God, there are unquestionably people who deny God’s existence and offer arguments in their defense. Some have attempted to exposed contradictions within the concept of God (e.g., between omniscience and divine freedom) thereby likening God to a “square circle” whose existence is logically impossible. At most such arguments only rule out certain conceptions of God, conceptions that are often at odds with the biblical view of God in any case.

A less ambitious approach is to place the burden of proof on the theist: in the absence of good arguments for God’s existence, one ought to adopt the “default” position of atheism (or at least agnosticism). This stance is hard to maintain given the many impressive theistic arguments championed by Christian philosophers today, not to mention the Reformed epistemologists’ argument that belief in God is properly basic.

The most popular atheistic argument is undoubtedly the argument from evil. The strong version of the argument maintains that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. The more modest version contends that particularly horrifying and seemingly gratuitous instances of evil, such as the Holocaust, provide strong evidence against God’s existence. The problem of evil has invited various theodicies : attempts to explain how God can be morally justified in permitting the evils we encounter in the world. While such explanations can be useful, they aren’t strictly necessary for rebutting the argument from evil. It is enough to point out that given the complexities of the world and the considerable limitations of human knowledge, we are in no position to conclude that God couldn’t have morally justifying reasons for allowing the evils we observe. Indeed, if we already have grounds for believing in God, we can reasonably conclude that God must have such reasons, whether or not we can discern them.

Further Reading

• James N. Anderson, “Can We Prove the Existence of God?” The Gospel Coalition , April 16, 2012.
• Greg L. Bahnsen, “ The Crucial Concept of Self-Deception in Presuppositional Apologetics ,” Westminster Theological Journal 57 (1995): 1–32.
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion , Book I, Chapters 1-5.
• William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, eds, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
• John M. Frame, Nature’s Case for God (Lexham Press, 2018).
• C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Fontana Books, 1955).
• Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief (Eerdmans, 2015).
• Cornelius Van Til, Why I Believe in God (Committee on Christian Education, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1966).
• Jerry L. Walls and Trent Dougherty, eds, Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Greg Welty, Why Is There Evil in the World (And So Much Of It)? (Christian Focus, 2018).

This essay is part of the Concise Theology series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

Why Believe In God? A Comprehensive Analysis

The existence of God is perhaps the most fundamental question that humanity grapples with. Since the dawn of humankind, we have gazed upon the cosmos and wondered how and why we came into being.

If you’re short on time, here’s the quick answer: There are reasonable arguments to be made both for and against the existence of God based on evidence and logic . Ultimately, belief in God relies to some degree on faith.

In this comprehensive article, we will analyze key reasons why people choose to believe or not believe in God. We will examine philosophical arguments from morality, the origins of the universe, the apparent design and fine-tuning of natural laws, and human experiences of the divine or mystical.

We will also look at the problem of evil and suffering as the main argument put forth by atheists against the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful God. By presenting the strongest cases made on both sides, readers can thoughtfully consider the question for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

The Moral Argument for God’s Existence

The innate sense of right and wrong.

Human beings have an innate and universal sense of right and wrong, good and evil. Even from a very young age, people understand that certain actions like stealing, lying, and hurting others are morally wrong. This sense operates independently of law and social norms.

It indicates an awareness of objective morality that transcends human opinion.

If morality were merely a human construct, it would differ widely between cultures and change over time. However, fundamental moral convictions tend to remain constant despite differences in customs, traditions or laws.

This innate moral sense points to a divine origin – a universal and objective moral law that has been implanted in human hearts by God.

Objective Morality Requires a Moral Lawgiver

If moral truths exist objectively, there must be a supernatural Lawgiver behind them. Because abstract laws like 2+2=4 cannot exist on their own, they require a mind to formulate them. Similarly, moral laws that transcend space and time require a divine Moral Lawgiver who is beyond space and time – God.

As philosopher William Lane Craig argues , if there is no God and morality is the product of unguided evolution, then there really is no right and wrong – only illusions created by biological adaptation. But our moral experience and reasoning affirm objective morality.

Such morality can only be grounded in God’s own perfect goodness.

The Origins of the Universe Point to a Creator

The big bang requires an external cause.

The prevailing scientific view is that the universe began with the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago. This explosively rapid expansion of matter, energy, space and time points to the universe having a definite beginning.

According to the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, any universe which has been expanding must have a spacetime boundary in the past. In other words, the Big Bang requires a cause which transcends the framework of physical laws as we know them.

As cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin concluded, “With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”

The fundamental forces and laws of physics also seem to be exquisitely fine-tuned. The strength of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces fall within an extremely narrow life-permitting range.

If these values differed even slightly, stars and planets could not form and life as we know it would not exist. For example, if the strong nuclear force were even 2% stronger, the Universe would consist entirely of helium.

So precise fine-tuning points to these fundamental parameters being deliberately calibrated and balanced.

The Fine-Tuning of Physical Laws

The physicist Paul Davies calculates that for a universe conducive to life, the laws of physics would have to match an intricate network of interdependent conditions and constraints to within one part in 10 raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 123.

That’s a one followed by 10 raised to 123 zeroes, a mind-bogglingly precise degree of fine-tuning! What are the odds of the universe just happening to satisfy this unbelievably narrowed range of life-permitting conditions?

Astronomer Fred Hoyle remarked it would be like the “aeroplane which could not fly” assembling itself by chance!

There are good reasons to believe our life-supporting universe is not just some cosmic accident. Its beginnings, physical laws and precisely calibrated forces point to intelligent design and purpose.

Beauty, Complexity and Design Imply Intentional Creation

Irreducible complexity in nature.

The intricate complexity and apparent design found in nature point strongly towards an intelligent Creator rather than blind, undirected processes like natural selection. One example of this is the concept of “irreducible complexity.”

An irreducibly complex system is one that requires multiple interconnected parts in order to function, such that removing any one part would cause the entire system to fail. Molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, blood clotting cascades, and ion pumps in cell membranes all exhibit this hallmark of intentional design.

They simply could not have evolved in a step-wise Darwinian fashion because the entire integrated system had to be in place for natural selection to preserve it. The improbable, all-or-nothing nature of irreducibly complex systems powerfully implies they were crafted by a deliberate designing intellect rather than cobbled together by mutation and selection.

Famous biochemist Michael Behe convincingly argues this in his groundbreaking book Darwin’s Black Box . Another compelling evidence of intentional design in life is the encoded digital informational content in DNA, which employs a complex language, coding and decoding system to regulate living cell functions.

Random errors in copying this coded information leads to corruption, disease and death in organisms. This would not be the case if blind physical processes rather than intentional mental processes originally created the genetic code.

The informational content in DNA powerfully points to an intelligent sender, encoder and creator of life.

The Anthropic Principle

The precise fine-tuning of various physical constants and laws in the universe also strongly indicates intentional design by a Creator. This is known as the anthropic principle, which states that fundamental physics constants seem meticulously tuned just right for carbon-based life to exist.

If they differed even slightly, we would have no universe capable of supporting complex life. For example, a change in the gravitational constant by only 1 part in 10 40 would preclude stars from forming.

A change in the cosmological constant of 1 part in 10 120 would have prevented the universe from expanding at the precise rate required for life. Other constants like the mass of the proton, strength of electromagnetic force, initial entropy state of the universe, and dozens more exhibit this eerie life-enabling precarious balance.

Random mindless chance simply can’t reasonably explain such meticulous fine-tuning everywhere we look. As scientist Fred Hoyle remarked, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.”

The evidence strongly indicates that a superintelligent Creator intentionally calibrated the laws of physics for human existence, rather than our existence being an unintended byproduct of random forces.

According to astronomer Dr. Hugh Ross’ Reasons to Believe ministry, the probability random chance explains the universe’s life-supporting conditions is less than 1 chance in 10 282 – a number exceeding imaginable limits.

Religious and Mystical Experiences

Accounts throughout history.

Records of religious and mystical experiences date back thousands of years across nearly every culture and religion. From Moses and the burning bush to the Apostle Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, such tales fill the pages of sacred texts.

These life-changing moments often mark key turning points in the establishment of faith traditions.

In addition, accounts of mystical revelations continue today. Surveys indicate over 60% of Americans claim to have experienced or witnessed supernatural occurrences , ranging from subtle sensations of peace to dramatic visions of religious figures.

Though details differ, common threads like ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and positive transformation run through them .

Common Themes and Transformational Impact

Beyond culture or creed, several shared characteristics emerge in mystical revelations. First is a sense of ineffability – the experience resists full verbal description, feeling wholly outside normal perception.

Those undergoing visions also often report expanded knowledge or insight in an instant, dubbed noetic quality. Despite feeling intensely real in the moment, the events rapidly fade back into normal consciousness. This transience means the revelations prove fleeting.

However, the profound shifts sparked tend to persist. Studies by psychologists like William James reveal those undergoing such epiphanies, however brief, emerge with lasting positive life changes. Though the experiences differ dramatically, from a Native American’s vision quest to a Christian nun’s divine union, the transformational impact proves similar.

Mystics describe a dissolving of ego, profound sense of connection to others, decreased materialism, and increased life purpose, empathy, and tolerance.

Skeptics may dismiss mystical revelations as delusions or wishful thinking. But with millions throughout history pointing to life-changing moments of divine insight, perhaps science has only begun to scratch the surface of understanding them.

The profound personal growth sparked indicates even fleeting glimpses beyond normal perception can reconstitute lives from the inside out. And the similarities across eras, cultures, and faiths suggest universal yearnings of the human spirit for purpose and connection.

The Problem of Evil and Suffering

Natural evils and the limits of our knowledge.

Natural evils like earthquakes, floods, and diseases cause much suffering in the world. Some wonder how an all-powerful and all-good God could allow such tragedies. However, our knowledge is limited. As philosophical giants like Augustine have argued, natural laws and complex ecosystems often have unavoidable negative side effects.

Yet they also allow for great goods, like the Earth’s sustainability for human life. Though tragic, some suffering may result indirectly from the very laws that make life possible.

As psychologist Jordan Peterson notes, life requires an orientation towards the future. But the future contains both good and bad possibilities. An earthquake gives no warning; we cannot predict where its effects will ripple. Yet we continue living, facing uncertainty with hope and responsibility.

Perhaps natural evils force us to recognize our lack of control, humbly embrace our vulnerability, and make the most of our fleeting days.

Moral Evils and Free Will

The philosophical problem of evil also concerns the origins of moral evils – cases where humans willfully harm others. Some argue an all-good God would not allow such acts. However, many religions teach that God gives humans free will – the ability to choose right or wrong.

Removing free will could eliminate moral evil but would reduce humans to robotic slaves incapable of love or virtue.

As Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote, God whispers to humans from within about what is right, but we remain free to shut our ears. Tragically, humans often use God’s great gift of freedom towards selfish ends, harming others. Yet moral evils trace back to human decisions, not divine causation.

With patient love, God continues nudging humanity towards justice and virtue, respecting our freedom while hoping we use it wisely.

In this analysis, we have explored some of the most compelling reasons offered for and against God’s existence. While neither side presents an absolute knockdown argument, there are thought-provoking points around morality, origins, design, experience and the problem of evil that should give any rational observer pause.

Ultimately, belief in God relies on some level of faith to bridge the gap between the knowable and the unknowable.

For many billions of adherents across time and cultures, this faith is amply justified by personal spiritual encounters, ancient traditions, daily benefits received through prayer and the indestructible hope that death does not have the final word.

Others regard such faith as superstitious wish fulfillment in the face of harsh realities. Where one comes down is frequently more a matter of the heart than the head.

In the end, the question of God is one that demands humility. None of us will ever have the full picture during our finite existence here on Earth. We would do well to hold our views tentatively, respect those with whom we disagree and pursue truth together in unity.

Amanda Williams is a dedicated Christian writer and blogger who is passionate about sharing Biblical truth and encouraging believers in their faith walks. After working as a youth pastor and Bible teacher for several years, she launched her blog in 2022 to minister to Christians online seeking to grow deeper in their relationship with Jesus Christ. When she's not creating content or connecting with readers, Amanda enjoys studying theology, being out in nature, baking, and spending time with family. Her goal is to provide practical wisdom and hope from a genuine Christian perspective. Amanda currently resides in Colorado with her husband, daughter, and two rescue dogs.

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Apologetics

Why i believe in god by cornelius van til.

You have noticed, haven’t you, that in recent times certain scientists like Dr. James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington, as well as some outstanding philosophers like Dr. C.E.M. Joad, have had a good deal to say about religion and God? Scientists Jeans and Eddington are ready to admit that there may be something to the claims of men who say they have had an experience of God, while Philosopher Joad says that the “obtrusiveness of evil” has virtually compelled him to look into the argument for God’s existence afresh. Much like modernist theologian Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr who talks about original sin, Philosopher Joad speaks about evil as being ineradicable from the human mind.

Then, too, you have on occasion asked yourself whether death ends all. You have recalled, perhaps, how Socrates the great Greek philosopher, struggled with that problem the day before he drank the hemlock cup. Is there anything at all, you ask yourself, to the idea of a judgement after death? Am I quite sure, you say, that there is not? How do I know that there is no God?

In short, as a person of intelligence, having a sense of responsibility, you have from time to time asked yourself some questions about the foundation of your thought and action. You have looked into, or at least been concerned about, what the philosophers call your theory of reality . So when I suggest that you spend a Sunday afternoon with me discussing my reasons for believing in God, I have the feeling that you are basically interested in what I am proposing for discussion.

To make our conversation more interesting, let’s start by comparing notes on our past. That will fit in well with our plan, for the debate concerning heredity and environment is prominent in our day. Perhaps you think that the only real reason I have for believing in God is the fact that I was taught to do so in my early days. Of course I don’t think that is really so. I don’t deny that I was taught to believe in God when I was a child, but I do affirm that since I have grown up I have heard a pretty full statement of the argument against belief in God. And it is after having heard that argument that I am more than ever ready to believe in God. Now, in fact, I feel that the whole of history and civilization would be unintelligible to me if it were not for my belief in God. So true is this, that I propose to argue that unless God is back of everything, you cannot find meaning in anything. I cannot even argue for belief in Him, without already having taken Him for granted. And similarly I contend that you cannot argue against belief in Him unless you also first take Him for granted. Arguing about God’s existence, I hold, is like arguing about air. You may affirm that air exists, and I that it does not. But as we debate the point, we are both breathing air all the time. Or to use another illustration, God is like the emplacement on which must stand the very guns that are supposed to shoot Him out of existence. However if, after hearing my story briefly, you still think it is all a matter of heredity and environment, I shall not disagree too violently. My whole point will be that there is perfect harmony between my belief as a child and my belief as a man, simply because God is Himself the environment by which my early life was directed and my later life made intelligible to myself.

The “Accident of Birth”

We are frequently told that much in our life depends on “the accident of birth”. In ancient time some men were said to spring full-grown from the foreheads of the gods. That, at any rate, is not true today. Yet I understand the next best thing happened to you. You were born, I am told, in Washington, D.C., under the shadow of the White House. Well, I was born in a little thatched roof house with a cow barn attached, in Holland. You wore “silver slippers” and I wore wooden shoes.

Is this really important for our purpose? Not particularly, but it is important that neither of us was born in Guadalcanal or Timbuktu. Both of us, I mean, were born in the midst and under the influence of “Christian civilization.” We shall limit our discussion, then, to the “God of Christianity.” I believe, while you do not believe or are not sure that you do believe, in this particular kind of God. That will give point to our discussion. For surely there is no sense in talking about the existence of God, without knowing what kind of God it is who may or may not exist.

So much then we have gained. We at least know in general what sort of God we are going to make the subject for our conversation. If now we can come to a similar preliminary agreement as to the standard or test by which to prove or disprove God’s existence, we can proceed. You, of course, do not expect me to bring God into the room here so that you may see Him. If I were able to do that, He would not be the God of Christianity. All that you expect me to do is to make it reasonable for you to believe in God. And I should like to respond quickly by saying that that is just what I am trying to do. But a moment’s thought makes me hesitate. If you really do not believe in God, then you naturally do not believe that you are his creature. I, on the other hand, who do believe in God also believe, naturally, that it is reasonable for God’s creature to believe in God. So I can only undertake to show that, even if it does not appear reasonable to you, it is reasonable for you, to believe in God.

I see you are getting excited. You feel a little like a man who is about to undergo a major operation. You realize that if you are to change your belief about God, you will also have to change your belief about yourself. And you are not quite ready for that. Well, you may leave if you desire. I certainly do not wish to be impolite. I only thought that as an intelligent person you would be willing to hear the “other side” of the question. And after all I am not asking you to agree with what I say. We have not really agreed on what we mean by God more than in a general and formal way. So also we need not at this point agree on the standard or test in more than a general or formal way. You might follow my argument, just for argument’s sake.

To go on, then, I can recall playing as a child in a sandbox built into a corner of the hay-barn. From the hay-barn I would go through the cow-barn to the house. Built into the hay- barn too, but with doors opening into the cow-barn, was a bed for the working-man. How badly I wanted permission to sleep in that bed for a night! Permission was finally given. Freud was still utterly unknown to me, but I had heard about ghosts and “forerunners of death.” That night I heard the cows jingle their chains. I knew there were cows and that they did a lot of jingling with their chains, but after a while I was not quite certain that it was only the cows that made all the noises I heard. Wasn’t there someone walking down the aisle back of the cows, and wasn’t he approaching my bed? Already I had been taught to say my evening prayers. Some of the words of that prayer were to this effect: “Lord, convert me, that I may be converted.” Unmindful of the paradox, I prayed that prayer that night as I had never prayed before.

I do not recall speaking either to my father or mother about my distress. They would have been unable to provide the modern remedy. Psychology did not come to their library table — not even The Ladies Home Journal ! Yet I know what they would have said. Of course there were no ghosts, and certainly I should not be afraid anyway, since with body and soul I belonged to my Savior who died for me on the Cross and rose again that His people might be saved from hell and go to heaven! I should pray earnestly and often that the Holy Spirit might give me a new heart so that I might truly love God instead of sin and myself.

How do I know that this is the sort of thing they would have told me? Well, that was the sort of thing they spoke about from time to time. Or rather, that was the sort of thing that constituted the atmosphere of our daily life. Ours was not in any sense a pietistic family. There were not any great emotional outbursts on any occasion that I recall. There was much ado about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and sheep in the winter, but round about it all there was a deep conditioning atmosphere. Though there were no tropical showers of revivals, the relative humidity was always very high. At every meal the whole family was present. There was a closing as well as an opening prayer, and a chapter of the Bible was read each time. The Bible was read through from Genesis to Revelation. At breakfast or at dinner, as the case might be, we would hear of the New Testament, or of “the children of Gad after their families, of Zephon and Haggi and Shuni and Ozni, of Eri and Areli.” I do not claim that I always fully understood the meaning of it all. Yet of the total effect there can be no doubt. The Bible became for me, in all its parts, in every syllable, the very Word of God. I learned that I must believe the Scripture story, and that “faith” was a gift of God. What had happened in the past, and particularly what had happened in the past in Palestine, was of the greatest moment to me. In short, I was brought up in what Dr. Joad would call “topographical and temporal parochialism.” I was “conditioned” in the most thorough fashion. I could not help believing in God — in the God of Christianity — in the God of the whole Bible!

Living next to the Library of Congress, you were not so restricted. Your parents were very much enlightened in their religious views. They read to you from some Bible of the World instead of from the Bible of Palestine. No, indeed, you correct me, they did no such thing. They did not want to trouble you about religious matters in your early days. They sought to cultivate the “open mind” in their children.

Shall we say then that in my early life I was conditioned to believe in God, while you were left free to develop your own judgment as you pleased? But that will hardly do. You know as well as I that every child is conditioned by its environment. You were as thoroughly conditioned not to believe in God as I was to believe in God. So let us not call each other names. If you want to say that belief was poured down my throat, I shall retort by saying that unbelief was poured down your throat. That will get us set for our argument.

Early Schooling

To the argument we must now shortly come. Just another word, however, about my schooling. That will bring all the factors into the picture.

I was not quite five when somebody — fortunately I cannot recall who — took me to school. On the first day I was vaccinated and it hurt. I can still feel it. I had already been to church. I recall that definitely because I would sometimes wear my nicely polished leather shoes. A formula was read over me at my baptism which solemnly asserted that I had been conceived and born in sin, the idea being that my parents, like all men, had inherited sin from Adam, the first man and the representative of the human race. The formula further asserted that though thus conditioned by inescapable sin I was, as a child of the Covenant, redeemed in Christ. And at the ceremony my parents solemnly promised that as soon as I should be able to understand they would instruct me in all these matters by all the means at their disposal.

It was in pursuance of this vow that they sent me to a Christian grade school. In it I learned that my being saved from sin and my belonging to God made a difference for all that I knew or did. I saw the power of God in nature and His providence in the course of history. That gave the proper setting for my salvation, which I had in Christ. In short, the whole wide world that gradually opened up for me through my schooling was regarded as operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-powerful and all-wise God whose child I was through Christ. I was to learn to think God’s thoughts after him in every field of endeavor.

Naturally there were fights on the “campus” of the school and I was engaged in some — though not in all — of them. Wooden shoes were wonderful weapons of war. Yet we were strictly forbidden to use them, even for defensive purposes. There were always lectures both by teachers and by parents on sin and evil in connection with our martial exploits. This was especially the case when a regiment of us went out to do battle with the pupils of the public school. The children of the public school did not like us. They had an extensive vocabulary of vituperation. Who did we think we were anyway? We were goody goodies — too good to go to the public school! “There! take that and like it!” We replied in kind. Meanwhile our sense of distinction grew by leaps and wounds. We were told in the evening that we must learn to bear with patience the ridicule of the “world.” Had not the world hated the church, since Cain’s time?

How different your early schooling was! You went to a “neutral” school. As your parents had done at home, so your teachers now did at school. They taught you to be “open-minded.” God was not brought into connection with your study of nature or history. You were trained without bias all along the line.

Of course, you know better now. You realize that all that was purely imaginary. To be “without bias” is only to have a particular kind of bias. The idea of “neutrality” is simply a colorless suit that covers a negative attitude toward God. At least it ought to be plain that he who is not for the God of Christianity is against Him. You see, the world belongs to Him, and that you are His creature, and as such are to own up to that fact by honoring Him whether you eat or drink or do anything else. God says that you live, as it were, on His estate. And His estate has large ownership signs placed everywhere, so that he who goes by even at seventy miles an hour cannot but read them. Every fact in this world, the God of the Bible claims, has His stamp indelibly engraved upon it. How then could you be neutral with respect to such a God? Do you walk about leisurely on a Fourth of July in Washington wondering whether the Lincoln Memorial belongs to anyone? Do you look at “Old Glory” waving from a high flagpole and wonder whether she stands for anything? Does she require anything of you, born an American citizen as you are? You would deserve to suffer the fate of the “man without a country” if as an American you were neutral to America. Well, in a much deeper sense you deserve to live forever without God if you do not own and glorify Him as your Creator. You dare not manipulate God’s world and least of all yourself as His image-bearer, for you own final purposes. When Eve became neutral as between God and the Devil, weighing the contentions of each as though they were inherently on the face of them of equal value, she was in reality already on the side of the devil!

There you go again getting excited once more. Sit down and calm yourself. You are open-minded and neutral are you not? And you have learned to think that any hypothesis has, as a theory of life, an equal right to be heard with any other, have you not? After all I am only asking you to see what is involved in the Christian conception of God. If the God of Christianity exists, the evidence for His existence is abundant and plain so that it is both unscientific and sinful not to believe in Him. When Dr. Joad, for example says: “The evidence for God is far from plain,” on the ground that if it were plain everybody would believe in Him, he is begging the question. If the God of Christianity does exist, the evidence for Him must be plain. And the reason, therefore, why “everybody” does not believe in Him must be that “everybody” is blinded by sin. Everybody wears colored glasses. You have heard the story of the valley of the blind. A young man who was out hunting fell over a precipice into the valley of the blind. There was no escape. The blind men did not understand him when he spoke of seeing the sun and the colors of the rainbow, but a fine young lady did understand him when he spoke the language of love. The father of the girl would not consent to the marriage of his daughter to a lunatic who spoke so often of things that did not exist. But the great psychologists of the blind men’s university offered to cure him of his lunacy by sewing up his eyelids. Then, they assured him, he would be normal like “everybody” else. But the simple seer went on protesting that he did see the sun.

So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.

Later Schooling

Meanwhile let us finish our story. At ten I came to this country and after some years decided to study for the ministry. This involved preliminary training at a Christian preparatory school and college. All my teachers were pledged to teach their subjects from the Christian point of view. Imagine teaching not only religion but algebra from the Christian point of view! But it was done. We were told that all facts in all their relations, numerical as well as others, are what they are because of God’s all comprehensive plan with respect to them. Thus the very definitions of things would not merely be incomplete but basically wrong if God were left out of the picture. Were we not informed about the views of others? Did we not hear about evolution and about Immanuel Kant, the great modern philosopher who had conclusively shown that all the arguments for the existence of God were invalid? Oh, yes, we heard about all these things, but there were refutations given and these refutations seemed adequate to meet the case.

In the Seminaries I attended, namely Calvin, and Princeton before its reorganization along semi-modernist lines in 1929, the situation was much the same. So for instance Dr. Robert Dick Wilson used to tell us, and, as far as we could understand the languages, show us from the documents, that the “higher critics” had done nothing that should rightfully damage our child-like faith in the Old Testament as the Word of God. Similarly Dr. J. Gresham Machen and others made good their claim that New Testament Christianity is intellectually defensible and that the Bible is right in its claims. You may judge of their arguments by reading them for yourself. In short, I heard the story of historic Christianity and the doctrine of God on which it is built over and over from every angle by those who believed it and were best able to interpret its meaning.

The telling of this story has helped, I trust, to make the basic question simple and plain. You know pretty clearly now what sort of God it is of which I am speaking to you. If my God exists it was He who was back of my parents and teachers. It was He who conditioned all that conditioned me in my early life. But then it was He also who conditioned everything that conditioned you in your early life. God, the God of Christianity, is the All-Conditioner!

As the All-Conditioner, God is the All-Conscious One. A God Who is to control all things must control them “by the counsel of His will.” If He did not do this, He would himself be conditioned. So then I hold that my belief in Him and your disbelief in Him are alike meaningless except for Him.

Objections Raised

By this time you are probably wondering whether I have really ever heard the objections which are raised against belief in such a God. Well, I think I have. I heard them from my teachers who sought to answer them. I also heard them from teachers who believed they could not be answered. While a student at Princeton Seminary I attended summer courses in the Chicago Divinity School. Naturally I heard the modern or liberal view of Scripture set forth fully there. And after graduation from the Seminary I spent two years at Princeton University for graduate work in philosophy. There the theories of modern philosophy were both expounded and defended by very able men. In short I was presented with as full a statement of the reasons for disbelief as I had been with the reasons for belief. I heard both sides fully from those who believed what they taught.

You have compelled me to say this by the look on your face. Your very gestures suggest that you cannot understand how any one acquainted with the facts and arguments presented by modern science and philosophy can believe in a God who really created the world, who really directs all things in the world by a plan to the ends He has in view for them. Well, I am only one of many who hold to the old faith in full view of what is said by modern science, modern philosophy, and modern Biblical criticism.

Obviously I cannot enter into a discussion of all the facts and all the reasons urged against belief in God. There are those who have made the Old Testament, as there are those who have made the New Testament, their life-long study. It is their works you must read for a detailed refutation of points of Biblical criticism. Others have specialized in physics and biology. To them I must refer you for a discussion of the many points connected with such matters as evolution. But there is something that underlies all these discussions. And it is with that something that I now wish to deal.

You may think I have exposed myself terribly. Instead of talking about God as something vague and indefinite, after the fashion of the modernist, the Barthians, and the mystic, a god so empty of content and remote from experience as to make no demands upon men, I have loaded down the idea of God with “antiquated” science and “contradictory” logic. It seems as though I have heaped insult upon injury by presenting the most objectionable sort of God I could find. It ought to be very easy for you to prick my bubble. I see you are ready to read over my head bushels of facts taken from the standard college texts on physics, biology, anthropology, and psychology, or to crush me with your sixty-ton tanks taken from Kant’s famous book, The Critique of Pure Reason . But I have been under these hot showers now a good many times. Before you take the trouble to open the faucet again there is a preliminary point I want to bring up. I have already referred to it when we were discussing the matter of test or standard.

The point is this. Not believing in God, we have seen , you do not think yourself to be God’s creature. And not believing in God you do not think the universe has been created by God. That is to say, you think of yourself and the world as just being there. Now if you actually are God’s creature, then your present attitude is very unfair to Him. In that case it is even an insult to Him. And having insulted God, His displeasure rests upon you. God and you are not on “speaking terms.” And you have very good reasons for trying to prove that He does not exist. If He does exist, He will punish you for your disregard of Him. You are therefore wearing colored glasses. And this determines everything you say about the facts and reasons for not believing in Him. You have had your picnics and hunting parties there without asking His permission. You have taken the grapes of God’s vineyard without paying Him any rent and you have insulted His representatives who asked you for it.

I must make an apology to you at this point. We who believe in God have not always made this position plain. Often enough we have talked with you about facts and sound reasons as though we agreed with you on what these really are. In our arguments for the existence of God we have frequently assumed that you and we together have an area of knowledge on which we agree. But we really do not grant that you see any fact in any dimension of life truly. We really think you have colored glasses on your nose when you talk about chickens and cows, as well as when you talk about the life hereafter. We should have told you this more plainly than we did. But we were really a little ashamed of what would appear to you as a very odd or extreme position. We were so anxious not to offend you that we offended our own God. But we dare no longer present our God to you as smaller or less exacting than He really is. He wants to be presented as the All-Conditioner, as the emplacement on which even those who deny Him must stand.

Now in presenting all your facts and reasons to me, you have assumed that such a God does not exist. You have taken for granted that you need no emplacement of any sort outside of yourself. You have assumed the autonomy of your own experience. Consequently you are unable — that is, unwilling — to accept as a fact any fact that would challenge your self-sufficiency. And you are bound to call that contradictory which does not fit into the reach of your intellectual powers. You remember what old Procrustes did. If his visitors were too long, he cut off a few slices at each end; if they were too short, he used the curtain stretcher on them. It is that sort of thing I feel that you have done with every fact of human experience. And I am asking you to be critical of this your own most basic assumption. Will you not go into the basement of your own experience to see what has been gathering there while you were busy here and there with the surface inspection of life? You may be greatly surprised at what you find there.

To make my meaning clearer, I shall illustrate what I have said by pointing out how modern philosophers and scientists handle the facts and doctrines of Christianity.

Basic to all the facts and doctrines of Christianity and therefore involved in the belief in God, is the creation doctrine. Now modern philosophers and scientists as a whole claim that to hold such a doctrine or to believe in such a fact is to deny our own experience. They mean this not merely in the sense that no one was there to see it done, but in the more basic sense that it is logically impossible. They assert that it would break the fundamental laws of logic.

The current argument against the creation doctrine derives from Kant. It may fitly be expressed in the words of a more recent philosopher, James Ward: “If we attempt to conceive of God apart from the world, there is nothing to lead us on to creation” ( Realm of Ends , p. 397). That is to say, if God is to be connected to the universe at all, he must be subject to its conditions. Here is the old creation doctrine. It says that God has caused the world to come into existence. But what do we mean by the word “cause”? In our experience, it is that which is logically correlative to the word “effect”. If you have an effect you must have a cause and if you have a cause you must have an effect. If God caused the world, it must therefore have been because God couldn’t help producing an effect. And so the effect may really be said to be the cause of the cause. Our experience can therefore allow for no God other than one that is dependent upon the world as much as the world is dependent upon Him.

The God of Christianity cannot meet these requirements of the autonomous man. He claims to be all-sufficient. He claims to have created the world, not from necessity but from His free will. He claims not to have changed in Himself when He created the world. His existence must therefore be said to be impossible and the creation doctrine must be said to be an absurdity.

The doctrine of providence is also said to be at variance with experience. This is but natural. One who rejects creation must logically also reject providence. If all things are controlled by God’s providence, we are told, there can be nothing new and history is but a puppet dance.

You see then that I might present to you great numbers of facts to prove the existence of God. I might say that every effect needs a cause. I might point to the wonderful structure of the eye as evidence of God’s purpose in nature. I might call in the story of mankind through the past to show that it has been directed and controlled by God. All these evidences would leave you unaffected. You would simply say that however else we may explain reality, we cannot bring in God. Cause and purpose, you keep repeating, are words that we human beings use with respect to things around us because they seem to act as we ourselves act, but that is as far as we can go.

And when the evidence for Christianity proper is presented to you the procedure is the same. If I point out to you that the prophecies of Scripture have been fulfilled, you will simply reply that it quite naturally appears that way to me and to others, but that in reality it is not possible for any mind to predict the future from the past. If it were, all would again be fixed and history would be without newness and freedom.

Then if I point to the many miracles, the story is once more the same. To illustrate this point I quote from the late Dr. William Adams Brown, an outstanding modernist theologian. “Take any of the miracles of the past,” says Brown, “The virgin birth, the raising of Lazarus, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Suppose that you can prove that these events happened just as they are claimed to have happened. What have you accomplished? You have shown that our previous view of the limits of the possible needs to be enlarged; that our former generalizations were too narrow and need revision; that problems cluster about the origin of life and its renewal of which we had hitherto been unaware. But the one thing which you have not shown, which indeed you cannot show, is that a miracle has happened; for that is to confess that these problems are inherently insoluble, which cannot be determined until all possible tests have been made” ( God at Work , New York, 1933, p. 169). You see with what confidence Brown uses this weapon of logical impossibility against the idea of a miracle. Many of the older critics of Scripture challenged the evidence for miracle at this point or at that. They made as it were a slow, piece-meal land invasion of the island of Christianity. Brown, on the other hand, settles the matter at once by a host of stukas from the sky. Any pill boxes that he cannot destroy immediately, he will mop up later. He wants to get rapid control of the whole field first. And this he does by directly applying the law of non-contradiction. Only that is possible, says Brown, in effect, which I can show to be logically related according to my laws of logic. So then if miracles want to have scientific standing, that is be recognized as genuine facts, they must sue for admittance at the port of entry to the mainland of scientific endeavor. And admission will be given as soon as they submit to the little process of generalization which deprives them of their uniqueness. Miracles must take out naturalization papers if they wish to vote in the republic of science and have any influence there.

Take now the four points I have mentioned — creation, providence, prophecy, and miracle. Together they represent the whole of Christian theism. Together they include what is involved in the idea of God and what He has done round about and for us. Many times over and in many ways the evidence for all these has been presented. But you have an always available and effective answer at hand. It is impossible! It is impossible! You act like a postmaster who has received a great many letters addressed in foreign languages. He says he will deliver them as soon as they are addressed in the King’s English by the people who sent them. Till then they must wait in the dead letter department. Basic to all the objections the average philosopher and scientist raises against the evidence for the existence of God is the assertion or the assumption that to accept such evidence would be to break the rules of logic.

I see you are yawning. Let us stop to eat supper now. For there is one more point in this connection that I must make. You have no doubt at some time in your life been to a dentist. A dentist drills a little deeper and then a little deeper and at last comes to the nerve of the matter.

Now before I drill into the nerve of the matter, I must again make apologies. The fact that so many people are placed before a full exposition of the evidence for God’s existence and yet do not believe in Him has greatly discouraged us. We have therefore adopted measures of despair. Anxious to win your good will, we have again compromised our God. Noting the fact that men do not see, we have conceded that what they ought to see is hard to see. In our great concern to win men we have allowed that the evidence for God’s existence is only probably compelling. And from that fatal confession we have gone one step further down to the point where we have admitted or virtually admitted that it is not really compelling at all. And so we fall back upon testimony instead of argument. After all, we say, God is not found at the end of an argument; He is found in our hearts. So we simply testify to men that once we were dead, and now we are alive, that once we were blind and that now we see, and give up all intellectual argument.

Do you suppose that our God approves of this attitude of His followers? I do not think so. The God who claims to have made all facts and to have placed His stamp upon them will not grant that there is really some excuse for those who refuse to see. Besides, such a procedure is self-defeating. If someone in your home town of Washington denied that there was any such thing as a United States Government would you take him some distance down the Potomac and testify to him that there is? So your experience and testimony of regeneration would be meaningless except for the objective truth of the objective facts that are presupposed by it. A testimony that is not an argument is not a testimony either, just as an argument that is not a testimony is not even an argument.

Waiving all this for the moment, let us see what the modern psychologist of religion, who stands on the same foundation with the philosopher, will do to our testimony. He makes a distinction between the raw datum and its cause, giving me the raw datum and keeping for himself the explanation of the cause. Professor James H. Leuba, a great psychologist of Bryn Mawr, has a procedure that is typical. He says, “The reality of any given datum — of an immediate experience in the sense in which the term is used here, may not be impugned: When I feel cold or warm, sad or gay, discouraged or confident, I am cold, sad, discouraged, etc., and every argument which might be advanced to prove to me that I am not cold is, in the nature of the case, preposterous; an immediate experience may not be controverted; it cannot be wrong.” All this seems on the surface to be very encouraging. The immigrant is hopeful of a ready and speedy admittance. However, Ellis Island must still be passed. “But if the raw data of experience are not subject to criticism, the causes ascribed to them are. If I say that my feeling of cold is due to an open window, or my state of exultation to a drug, or my renewed courage to God, my affirmation goes beyond my immediate experience; I have ascribed a cause to it, and that cause may be the right or the wrong one.” ( God or Man , New York, 1933, p. 243.) And thus the immigrant must wait at Ellis Island a million years. That is to say, I as a believer in God through Christ, assert that I am born again through the Holy Spirit. The Psychologist says that is a raw datum of experience and as such incontrovertible. We do not, he says, deny it. But it means nothing to us. If you want it to mean something to us you must ascribe a cause to your experience. We shall then examine the cause. Was your experience caused by opium or God? You say by God. Well, that is impossible since as philosophers we have shown that it is logically contradictory to believe in God. You may come back at any time when you have changed your mind about the cause of your regeneration. We shall be glad to have you and welcome you as a citizen of our realm, if only you take out your naturalization papers!

We seem now to have come to a pretty pass. We agreed at the outset to tell each other the whole truth. If I have offended you it has been because I dare not, even in the interest of winning you, offend my God. And if I have not offended you I have not spoken of my God. For what you have really done in your handling of the evidence for belief in God, is to set yourself up as God. You have made the reach of your intellect, the standard of what is possible or not possible. You have thereby virtually determined that you intend never to meet a fact that points to God. Facts, to be facts at all — facts, that is, with decent scientific and philosophic standing — must have your stamp instead of that of God upon them as their virtual creator.

Of course I realize full well that you do not pretend to create redwood trees and elephants. But you do virtually assert that redwood trees and elephants cannot be created by God. You have heard of the man who never wanted to see or be a purple cow. Well, you have virtually determined that you never will see or be a created fact. With Sir Arthur Eddington you say as it were, “What my net can’t catch isn’t fish.”

Nor do I pretend, of course, that once you have been brought face to face with this condition, you can change your attitude. No more than the Ethiopian can change his skin or the leopard his spots can you change your attitude. You have cemented your colored glasses to your face so firmly that you cannot even take them off when you sleep. Freud has not even had a glimpse of the sinfulness of sin as it controls the human heart. Only the great Physician through His blood atonement on the Cross and by the gift of His Spirit can take those colored glasses off and make you see facts as they are, facts as evidence, as inherently compelling evidence, for the existence of God.

It ought to be pretty plain now what sort of God I believe in. It is God, the All-Conditioner. It is the God who created all things, Who by His providence conditioned my youth, making me believe in Him, and who in my later life by His grace still makes me want to believe in Him. It is the God who also controlled your youth and so far has apparently not given you His grace that you might believe in Him.

You may reply to this: “Then what’s the use of arguing and reasoning with me?” Well, there is a great deal of use in it. You see, if you are really a creature of God, you are always accessible to Him. When Lazarus was in the tomb he was still accessible to Christ who called him back to life. It is this on which true preachers depend. The prodigal [son] thought he had clean escaped from the father’s influence. In reality the father controlled the “far country” to which the prodigal had gone. So it is in reasoning. True reasoning about God is such as stands upon God as upon the emplacement that alone gives meaning to any sort of human argument. And such reasoning, we have a right to expect, will be used of God to break down the one-horse chaise of human autonomy.

But now I see you want to go home. And I do not blame you; the last bus leaves at twelve. I should like to talk again another time. I invite you to come to dinner next Sunday. But I have pricked your bubble, so perhaps you will not come back. And yet perhaps you will. That depends upon the Father’s pleasure. Deep down in your heart you know very well that what I have said about you is true. You know there is no unity in your life. You want no God who by His counsel provides for the unity you need. Such a God, you say, would allow for nothing new. So you provide your own unity. But this unity must, by your own definition, not kill that which is wholly new. Therefore it must stand over against the wholly new and never touch it at all. Thus by your logic you talk about possibles and impossibles, but all this talk is in the air. By your own standards it can never have anything to do with reality. Your logic claims to deal with eternal and changeless matters; and your facts are wholly changing things; and “never the twain shall meet.” So you have made nonsense of your own experience. With the prodigal you are at the swine-trough, but it may be that, unlike the prodigal, you will refuse to return to the father’s house.

On the other hand by my belief in God I do have unity in my experience. Not of course the sort of unity that you want. Not a unity that is the result of my own autonomous determination of what is possible. But a unity that is higher than mine and prior to mine. On the basis of God’s counsel I can look for facts and find them without destroying them in advance. On the basis of God’s counsel I can be a good physicist, a good biologist, a good psychologist, or a good philosopher. In all these fields I use my powers of logical arrangement in order to see as much order in God’s universe as it may be given a creature to see. The unities, or systems that I make are true because [they are] genuine pointers toward the basic or original unity that is found in the counsel of God.

Looking about me I see both order and disorder in every dimension of life. But I look at both of them in the light of the Great Orderer Who is back of them. I need not deny either of them in the interest of optimism or in the interest of pessimism. I see the strong men of biology searching diligently through hill and dale to prove that the creation doctrine is not true with respect to the human body, only to return and admit that the missing link is missing still. I see the strong men of psychology search deep and far into the sub-consciousness, child and animal consciousness, in order to prove that the creation and providence doctrines are not true with respect to the human soul, only to return and admit that the gulf between human and animal intelligence is as great as ever. I see the strong men of logic and scientific methodology search deep into the transcendental for a validity that will not be swept away by the ever-changing tide of the wholly new, only to return and say that they can find no bridge from logic to reality, or from reality to logic. And yet I find all these, though standing on their heads, reporting much that is true. I need only to turn their reports right side up, making God instead of man the center of it all, and I have a marvelous display of the facts as God has intended me to see them.

And if my unity is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of those who reject it, it is large enough even to include that which those who have been set upright by regeneration cannot see. My unity is that of a child who walks with its father through the woods. The child is not afraid because its father knows it all and is capable of handling every situation. So I readily grant that there are some “difficulties” with respect to belief in God and His revelation in nature and Scripture that I cannot solve. In fact there is mystery in every relationship with respect to every fact that faces me, for the reason that all facts have their final explanation in God Whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and Whose ways are higher than my ways. And it is exactly that sort of God that I need. Without such a God, without the God of the Bible, the God of authority, the God who is self-contained and therefore incomprehensible to men, there would be no reason in anything. No human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things, but only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is an explanation at all.

So you see when I was young I was conditioned on every side; I could not help believing in God. Now that I am older I still cannot help believing in God. I believe in God now because unless I have Him as the All-Conditioner, life is Chaos.

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else. But since I believe in such a God, a God who has conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can to your own satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians, and the Bible critics reduce everything I have said this afternoon and evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. Well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy.

Copyright © 1996 Jonathan Barlow All Rights Reserved

Converted to the electronic domain and into html format by Jonathan Barlow. Some typographical corrections have been made. The original citation for this essay, published as a pamphlet, was:

Van Til, Cornelius. Why I Believe in God. Philadelphia: Committe on Christian Education, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, n.d.

Refer to this version as:

Van Til, Cornelius. Why I Believe in God. Reformed.org, 1996, Barlow, Jonathan ed.

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Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question

By maria popova.

“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God,” the trailblazing astronomer and leading Figuring figure Maria Mitchell wrote in the second half of the nineteenth century as she contemplated science, spirituality, and the human hunger for truth . Every great scientist in the century and a half since has been faced with this question, be it by personal restlessness or public demand. Einstein addressed it in answering a little girl’s question about whether scientists pray . Quantum theory originator Max Planck believed that “science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature [because] we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” His fellow Nobel laureate and quantum theory founding father Niels Bohr defied the sentiment in his incisive distinction between subjective and objective reality , noting that religions have always addressed the former, while science addresses the latter, which is measurable and therefore knowable. Wolfgang Pauli, whose groundbreaking scientific ideas were greatly influenced by Bohr’s, concluded that the effort to reconcile science and religion “will always be full of pitfalls and one can fall down on both sides.”

It takes a mind of rare courage and insight to address this abiding question without falling into the most pernicious trap of all — that of artificial compatibilism; to take a lucid stance without fright of offense, then to explain the basis of that stance thoughtfully and sensitively, systematically dismantling every reflexive argument against it.

That is what Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942–March 14, 2018) does in his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions ( public library ) — a collection of ten enormous questions Hawking was asked regularly throughout his life, by children and elders, by entrepreneurs and political leaders, by men and women young and old attending his prolific lectures and public appearances, with answers drawn from his extensive personal archive of correspondence, notes, drafts, interviews, and essays. The book — which was conceived during Hawking’s lifetime but finished only after his death with help from his family and academic colleagues, and proceeds from which benefit the Stephen Hawking Foundation and the Motor Neurone Disease Association — opens with the question that has bellowed in humanity’s chest since science first confronted superstition: Is there a God?

Hawking — whom many consider the greatest scientist since Einstein and whose residual stardust was interred between Darwin’s and Newton’s in Westminster Abbey — enlists his disarming deadpan humor in placing the query in a personal context, then uses the fulcrum of his magnificent mind to pivot into the serious answer to the universal question:

For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. Well, I suppose it’s possible that I’ve upset someone up there, but I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature. If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence.

With an eye to the discovery, which began in antiquity and culminated with Kepler and Galileo, that “the heavens” are in fact a complex universe governed by discoverable and discernible physical laws, he builds upon his earlier reflections on the meaning of the universe and adds:

I believe that the discovery of these laws has been humankind’s greatest achievement, for it’s these laws of nature — as we now call them — that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all. The laws of nature are a description of how things actually work in the past, present and future. In tennis, the ball always goes exactly where they say it will. And there are many other laws at work here too. They govern everything that is going on, from how the energy of the shot is produced in the players’ muscles to the speed at which the grass grows beneath their feet. But what’s really important is that these physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal. They apply not just to the flight of a ball, but to the motion of a planet, and everything else in the universe. Unlike laws made by humans, the laws of nature cannot be broken — that’s why they are so powerful and, when seen from a religious standpoint, controversial too. […] One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe, and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most implausible. I use the word “God” in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature. My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century.

But even with the laws of nature conceded, Hawking recognizes that their existence still leaves room for religions to lay claim to the grandest question — how the universe and its laws began. He addresses the question both plainly and profoundly:

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. […] Despite the complexity and variety of the universe, it turns out that to make one you need just three ingredients. Let’s imagine that we could list them in some kind of cosmic cookbook. So what are the three ingredients we need to cook up a universe? The first is matter — stuff that has mass. Matter is all around us, in the ground beneath our feet and out in space. Dust, rock, ice, liquids. Vast clouds of gas, massive spirals of stars, each containing billions of suns, stretching away for incredible distances. The second thing you need is energy. Even if you’ve never thought about it, we all know what energy is. Something we encounter every day. Look up at the Sun and you can feel it on your face: energy produced by a star ninety-three million miles away. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place. So we have matter and we have energy. The third thing we need to build a universe is space. Lots of space. You can call the universe many things — awesome, beautiful, violent — but one thing you can’t call it is cramped. Wherever we look we see space, more space and even more space. Stretching in all directions.

The instinctual question is where all the matter, energy, and space came from — a question we hadn’t been able to answer with more than mythological cosmogonies until the early twentieth century, when Einstein demonstrated that mass is a form of energy and energy a form of mass in what is now the best known equation in the history of the world: E=mc 2 . This reduces the ingredients of the “cosmic cookbook” from three to two, distilling the question to where the space and energy originated. Generations of scientists built upon each other’s work to deliver the answer in the Big Bang model, which holds that in a single moment around 13.8 billion years ago, the entire universe, with all its space and energy, ballooned into being out of the nothingness that preceded it.

Half a century after Nabokov’s poetic admonition against common sense , Hawking echoes Carl Sagan’s observation that common sense can blind us to the realities of the universe and addresses this deeply counterintuitive notion of generating something out of nothing:

As I was growing up in England after the Second World War, it was a time of austerity. We were told that you never get something for nothing. But now, after a lifetime of work, I think that actually you can get a whole universe for free. The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialise out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called “negative energy.” To help you get your head around this weird but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy. Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he’s not just making a hill — he’s also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out. This is the principle behind what happened at the beginning of the universe. When the Big Bang produced a massive amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. In this way, the positive and the negative add up to zero, always. It’s another law of nature. So where is all this negative energy today? It’s in the third ingredient in our cosmic cookbook: it’s in space. This may sound odd, but according to the laws of nature concerning gravity and motion — laws that are among the oldest in science — space itself is a vast store of negative energy. Enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero. I’ll admit that, unless mathematics is your thing, this is hard to grasp, but it’s true. The endless web of billions upon billions of galaxies, each pulling on each other by the force of gravity, acts like a giant storage device. The universe is like an enormous battery storing negative energy. The positive side of things — the mass and energy we see today — is like the hill. The corresponding hole, or negative side of things, is spread throughout space. So what does this mean in our quest to find out if there is a God? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don’t need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

This is where the wheels of our common-sense understanding screech to a frustrated halt — after all, in our daily lives, we can’t just manifest a cone of ice cream or a long-lost lover with the snap of our fingers. But on the subatomic stratum undergirding our physical reality, things work differently — particles pop up at random times in random places only to disappear again, governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, which seem downright mystical in their manifestation but are in fact discovered and calculable laws of the universe. Hawking explains:

Since we know the universe itself was once very small — perhaps smaller than a proton — this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature. From that moment on, vast amounts of energy were released as space itself expanded — a place to store all the negative energy needed to balance the books. But of course the critical question is raised again: did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to occur? In a nutshell, do we need a God to set it up so that the Big Bang could bang? I have no desire to offend anyone of faith, but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator.

Once again he illustrates this assault on our basic common-sense intuitions with that supreme lever of understanding, the analogy:

Imagine a river, flowing down a mountainside. What caused the river? Well, perhaps the rain that fell earlier in the mountains. But then, what caused the rain? A good answer would be the Sun, that shone down on the ocean and lifted water vapour up into the sky and made clouds. Okay, so what caused the Sun to shine? Well, if we look inside we see the process known as fusion, in which hydrogen atoms join to form helium, releasing vast quantities of energy in the process. So far so good. Where does the hydrogen come from? Answer: the Big Bang. But here’s the crucial bit. The laws of nature itself tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing.

This explanation, Hawking points out, rests on the shoulders of Einstein’s groundbreaking relativity theory — that daring leap of the imaginative intellect, which furnished the staggering revelation that space and time are a single entity comprising the basic fabric of the universe. Hawking writes:

Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began. To understand this mind-boggling idea, consider a black hole floating in space. A typical black hole is a star so massive that it has collapsed in on itself. It’s so massive that not even light can escape its gravity, which is why it’s almost perfectly black. It’s gravitational pull is so powerful, it warps and distorts not only light but also time. To see how, imagine a clock is being sucked into it. As the clock gets closer and closer to the black hole, it begins to get slower and slower. Time itself begins to slow down. Now imagine the clock as it enters the black hole — well, assuming of course that it could withstand the extreme gravitational forces– it would actually stop. It stops not because it is broken, but because inside the black hole time itself doesn’t exist. And that’s exactly what happened at the start of the universe. […] As we travel back in time towards the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until it finally comes to a point where the whole universe is a space so small that it is in effect a single infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And just as with modern-day black holes, floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that here too time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.

Hawking concludes with his most direct, personal answer to the universal question:

It’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

Rather than dispiriting, this lucid awareness of our ephemerality can be the wellspring of our noblest, most deeply spiritual and spiritualizing impulses — a catalyst for finding holiness in the richness of life itself, in the splendor of this peculiar and irreplaceable planet, rooted in the awareness that, in the poetic words of naturalist Sy Montgomery, “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom — and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.” Hawking channels this orientation of mind and spirit in a stirring passage from the book’s introduction:

One day, I hope we will know the answers to all these questions. But there are other challenges, other big questions on the planet which must be answered, and these will also need a new generation who are interested and engaged, and have an understanding of science. How will we feed an ever-growing population? Provide clean water, generate renewable energy, prevent and cure disease and slow down global climate change? I hope that science and technology will provide the answers to these questions, but it will take people, human beings with knowledge and understanding, to implement these solutions. Let us fight for every woman and every man to have the opportunity to live healthy, secure lives, full of opportunity and love. We are all time travellers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit. Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done.

Complement this particular portion of Hawking’s altogether magnificent Brief Answers to the Big Questions with Carl Sagan on science and mystery , Alan Lightman on nonreligious divinity in the known and the unknowable , and Buckminster Fuller’s scientific revision of “The Lord’s Prayer,” then revisit poet Marie Howe’s gorgeous tribute to Hawking .

— Published July 17, 2019 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/07/17/stephen-hawking-brief-answers-to-the-big-questions/ —

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Why I Believe Jesus Christ Is God

This article is based on Pastor Adrian Rogers' message, Why I Believe in Jesus Christ .

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If you had only one chance to tell someone why you believe Jesus Christ is God, what would you say? How would you try to convince them? I once had one of the most challenging experiences of my life. I was in Moscow, Russia, given the opportunity to preach in a beautiful concert hall, the Red Army Theater, built to glorify Communist totalitarianism. Massive portraits of Lenin and Stalin hung in that theater. Sitting in the audience in their resplendent uniforms were Russian Army officers with their wives. God had given me a once-in-a-lifetime privilege—to tell them why I believe Jesus is God.

They had been raised in an atheist society, taught from their youth there is no God, and trained to hate Americans. I prayed, “Lord, what would You have me to say?” The Holy Spirit answered, “ Adrian, tell them about Jesus—why you believe in Jesus Christ .” 

That’s what I did, from John 6 : 

From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more. Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?” But Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

I want to tell you why—just like Simon Peter—I’m sure Jesus is “ the Christ, the Son of the Living God .” I gave the men and women in Moscow four reasons, found in this chapter, that will reinforce your faith and help you share with others.

I want to tell you, just as I told them, why I’m sure Jesus Christ is really God. Peter’s question of “ Lord, to whom shall we go ?” is my question for you: If you turn from Jesus, where will you go? To atheism? Philosophy? Materialism? False religions? Man is incurably religious. If he turns from Jesus Christ, he’ll go to a false religion.

Jesus Christ alone can meet the deepest hunger of the human heart, provide the answer to man’s sin, give meaning to life and death, take the sting out of sin, the gloom out of the grave, the pain out of parting, and give hope that is steadfast and sure.

But how do we know Jesus is who He says He is? Why do we believe in Him, give our lives to Him, serve Him, be willing even to die for Him?

Historical Reasons

Jesus Christ is a fact of history. All secular historians having any merit admit Jesus Christ walked the earth, regardless of what they believe about Him. H. G. Wells in his Outline of History  listed the ten greatest men of history. Number 1 was Jesus Christ. Historian Sir J. G. Frazer, not a believer, wrote:

My theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth as the great religious and moral teacher who founded Christianity and was crucified at Jerusalem under the governorship of Pontius Pilot. The testimony of the Gospels, confirmed by the hostile evidence of Tacitus and Younger Pliny, appears amply sufficient to establish these facts to the satisfaction of unprejudiced inquirers.

You cannot explain the church of Jesus Christ apart from the history of Jesus, who lived, died, and rose again. After His resurrection, He appeared to 500 eyewitnesses at one time. “…declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” ( Romans 1:4 ). “He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3). There is more proof Jesus Christ rose from the dead than that Julius Caesar lived. That’s a historical fact.

Scriptural Reasons

The Bible, a book standing the test of the ages, confirms Jesus is the absolute, totally unique Son of God.

• His life began with a miraculous birth, the virgin-born Son of God.
• He lived a sinless, miraculous life. He never asked advice, though He walked among the scribes; He never apologized for anything He did or justified His actions, though He was often misunderstood; He never asked forgiveness because He never needed to, and never confessed sin a single time. Every part of His life was totally balanced in perfect sinless symmetry.
• He died a sacrificial death.
• He rose from the dead, becoming the “first fruits” of those resurrected for eternity.

The Bible presents the story of the incredible life He lived. But how do we know the Bible is true ?

Five Proofs that the Bible is the Inspired Word of God:

• F ulfilled prophecy : One-fourth of the Bible is prophecy. Of the 1,000 prophecies in the Bible, 500 have already been fulfilled down to the smallest detail.
• Miraculous unity: Written over 1,500 years by at least 40 different authors in 3 different languages, on all kinds of subjects, 66 books, it is yet one book completely unified in message.
• L ongevity/Divine protection : It has survived through the centuries, even when governments banned or burned it.
• Scientific and historical accuracy : The more archaeology uncovers, for example, the more the Bible is confirmed.
• P ower: Jesus said, “ The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life ” ( John 6:63 ). The Word of God has transformed countless lives, empowered saints, upheld martyrs, strengthened the dying, comforted the grieving, inspired global missions, motivated building of schools and hospitals worldwide, and brought countless millions into a relationship with God. Of this book, Jesus is the central theme. “To Him [Jesus] all the prophets witness that, through His name, whoever believes in Him will receive remission of sins” ( Acts 10:43 ).

SPIRITUAL REASONS

Some say, “Do you expect me to believe Jesus is God just because you say He was a historical fact? Or because the Bible says He lived, and you have evidence for the inspiration of the Bible? That’s not enough.” I agree. You must have the Holy Spirit to help you. If you want to know who Jesus Christ is, ask the Holy Spirit. The human mind on its own cannot comprehend God’s deepest truths. The Holy Spirit will testify in your heart that Jesus is indeed God. Jesus said, “…these are they which testify of Me” ( John 5:39 ).

From 1 John 5:6-10 :

…And it is the Spirit who bears witness, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit…for this is the witness of God which He has testified of His Son. He who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself…

He witnesses to you, and then He witnesses in you. If you want to know who Jesus Christ is, ask the Holy Spirit. God doesn’t just say, “You must believe, and if you can’t believe, that’s your hard luck.” God says, “If you want to believe, I will help you understand and know these things are true.”

Personal Reasons

When Peter said, “Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God” ( John 6:69 ), Peter was saying, “I know it personally, through personal experience . I can testify. I’m sure.”

Don’t say you cannot believe. You may refuse to believe, but if you want  to know the truth, God the Holy Spirit will confirm to you that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Once I received Him into my heart, now I have the witness on the inside. You could argue with me all day and never convince me against Jesus Christ. A Christian with the witness in his heart is never at the mercy of a man with an argument in his mouth. I know personally.

This is why I believe in Jesus, and I want to ask you to believe in Him. Precious friend, do you know Him? There’s nowhere else to go. He alone is the answer to your sin and your heart’s need. No one else can fill the longing of your heart. No one else can give you peace that passes all understanding. No one else has the words of eternal life. No one else walked out of that grave. But Jesus did. You can know and be sure that He is the Son of God.

I’d like you to pray and ask Jesus Christ into your heart. Trust Him and be saved today. Pray this from your heart:

“Dear God, I need You. I want You. I need to be saved. Jesus, I believe You’re the Son of God. I believe You paid my sin debt with Your blood. I believe that God raised You from the dead, and now I repent of my sin. I open my heart. By faith, like a little child, I receive You as my Lord and Savior. Come into my heart; forgive my sin, save me, Lord Jesus.”

If you prayed that prayer, then say,

“Lord Jesus, give me the power and help me to obey You and make public what I’ve done. Help me not to be ashamed of You. In Your name I pray, Amen.”

What is truth? 

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• How You Can Be Sure (1253)
• How You Can Be Sure
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Why We Have Good Reason to Believe in God Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Rationality of beliefs, true and justified belief in god, works cited.

The question of the validity of belief in God, no matter how it may seem beaten at first glance, is very actively discussed in the modern analytical philosophy of religion and the related sciences. It might be assumed that the perspective, according to which we have good reason to believe in God, has an epistemological foundation. The below discussion will be focused on proving the latter statement.

It is irrational to adhere to all beliefs because there are strong counter-arguments against them. Suppose there are no arguments against the existence of God or the basic Christian dogmas outlined in the Nicene Creed. It seems that for 2,000 years, no one has succeeded in proving that Jesus Christ did not exist as a historical person or that he did not rise from the dead (Moser 20). It is hardly reasonable to expect such evidence to appear in the future. However, the absence of arguments against certain views does not mean that they should be taken on faith. Imagine a small china teapot revolving in orbit between Mars and Earth, or that an invisible pink unicorn lives at the other end of the universe. No one can prove or disprove these judgments. Still, it would not be wise to believe in them.

To qualify for rational agreement on our part, the judgment must not only be true but also justified. For example, one likes the number three, and therefore they are convinced that in the stack of instant lottery tickets, the third from the bottom is the winner. They ask the saleswoman to sell this ticket, erase the protective layer and win a large sum of money. Thus, their judgment “the third from the bottom ticket is the winning one” turned out to be true. However, from this, it did not become justified – after all, they came to it in a completely random way, with the help of a chain of arbitrary associations that have nothing to do with the development of true judgments about the winning of lottery tickets.

At this point, the main epistemological aspect of God should be stated. It can be formulated as follows – if the Christian faith is true, then it is also justified (Plantinga xii). For many other beliefs, this is not so: even if the pink unicorn exists, then the belief in it, is true and does not become more justified. On the contrary, if God – God in the Christian sense – exists, then faith in Him is certainly the result of the processes of generating true faith provided for by Him and, therefore, can be considered justified (Plantinga xii). Of course, one cannot exclude the possibility that there is no God, and then the belief in Him is only the fruit of a bizarre, albeit very widespread, aberration of human consciousness. However, if one is endowed with faith in the unknowable God of revelation, then the point for them to arbitrarily replace it with an equally unfounded belief in its nonexistence is uncertain. Especially since the latter proceeds from the erroneous assumption that the limits of our knowledge coincide with the boundaries of all existing reality. Thus, if one finds a belief in the truth of revelation, then they have every right to consider it justified.

Nevertheless, it may be said that the above position simply pushes the problem of evidence aside instead of solving it. Assume that a person cannot come to know God by proof, but only through faith in revelation, and we find it in ourselves. However, according to Moser, it might seem that there is no evidence that this belief was inspired by God (265). The problem with the latter maxim is that it is self-contradictory – proofs in its favor have not yet been presented (Goldman 360). Therefore, it may be proper to deny it. In addition, belief in revelation is by its nature much closer to a set of framework beliefs inherent in every person, to which there is no reason to extend the requirement of evidence. For example, we believe that the world we perceive is actually about the way it appears to us. Still, how can it be proved appropriately? Perhaps, things-in-themselves have nothing to do with the phenomena provided to us in the sensory experience. Given the evolutionary origins of our cognitive abilities, such doubts are not unfounded. Natural selection encourages adaptive behavior, but there is no guarantee that it is always accompanied by true representations of the world.

It is impossible to prove that our ideas about the world correspond to reality adequate to them. In any case, this is as unprovable as the fact that God is really behind the religious revelation (Plantinga 190). However, if we believe in the former, it is acceptable to take the latter on faith. Moreover, the Universe, for the adequacy of ideas about which we claim, is filled with cold indifference to man. The Universe does not care what a person means and represents it. On the contrary, the concept of God assumes that He cares what we think of Him and that He will not allow us all to be mistaken about Him. Therefore, our knowledge of God may be generally the most reliable of all the straws that we can grab onto in that shaky ocean of doubt.

Goldman, Alvin. “A Causal Theory of Knowing.” The Journal of Philosophy . 1967, vol. 64, no. 12, pp. 357–372.

Moser, Paul. The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology . Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief . Oxford University Press, 2000.

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IvyPanda. (2022, November 17). Why We Have Good Reason to Believe in God. https://ivypanda.com/essays/why-we-have-good-reason-to-believe-in-god/

"Why We Have Good Reason to Believe in God." IvyPanda , 17 Nov. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/why-we-have-good-reason-to-believe-in-god/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Why We Have Good Reason to Believe in God'. 17 November.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Why We Have Good Reason to Believe in God." November 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/why-we-have-good-reason-to-believe-in-god/.

1. IvyPanda . "Why We Have Good Reason to Believe in God." November 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/why-we-have-good-reason-to-believe-in-god/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Why We Have Good Reason to Believe in God." November 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/why-we-have-good-reason-to-believe-in-god/.

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Reasons to Believe in God

Today belief in God is often seen as a naiveté. For many, believing in God is like believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny – nice, something for the kids, a warm nostalgia or a bitter memory, but not something that’s real, that stands up to hard scrutiny and indeed stands up to the dark doubts that sometimes linger below the surface of our faith. Where’s there evidence that God exists?

A true apologetics, I believe, needs at a point to be personal. So here are my own reasons why I continue to believe in God in the face of the agnosticism of our overly-adult world and despite the dark nights that sometimes beset me.

First, I believe in God because I sense, at the deepest level of my being, that there’s an inalienable moral structure to things. Life, love, and meaning are morally-contoured. There’s an inalienable “law of karma” that is experienced everywhere and in everything: good behavior is its own happiness, just as bad behavior is its own sorrow. Different religions word it differently but the concept is at the heart of all religion and is, in essence, the very definition of morality:  The measure you measure out will be the measure that’s measured back to you.  That’s Jesus’ version of it, and can be translated this way:  The air you breathe out is the air you will re-inhale.  Simply put: If we cut down too many trees we will soon be breathing in carbon monoxide. If we breathe out love, we will meet love. If we breathe out hate and anger we will soon enough find ourselves surrounded by hated and anger. Reality is so structured that goodness brings goodness and sin brings sin.

I believe in God because blind chaos could not have designed things this way, to be innately moral. Only an intelligent Goodness could have built reality this way.

My next reason for believing in God is the existence of soul, intelligence, love, altruism, and art. These could not have emerged simply from blind chaos, from billions and billions of cosmic bingo chips coming out of nothing, with no intelligent loving force behind them, endlessly churning through billions of years.  Random chaos, empty of all intelligence and love from its origins, could not have eventually produced soul and all that’s highest inside it: intelligence, love, altruism, spirituality, and art. Can our own hearts and all that’s noble and precious within them really be just the result of billions of fluke chances colliding within a brute, mindless process?

I believe in God because if our hearts are real then so is God. 

Next, I believe in God because the Gospel works – if we work it. What Jesus incarnated and taught ultimately resonates with what’s most precious, most noble, and most meaningful inside of life and inside each of us. Moreover, this checks out in life. Whenever I have the faith and courage to actually live out the Gospel, to roll the dice on its truth, it always proves to be true, the loaves multiply and feed the thousands and David defeats Goliath. But it doesn’t work unless I risk it. The Gospel works, if we work it.

The objection could be raised here, of course, that many sincere, faith-filled people risk their lives and truth on the Gospel and, from all appearances in this world, it doesn’t work for them. They end up poor, as victims, on the losing side of things. But again, that’s a judgment we make from the standards of this world, from the Gospel of Prosperity where whoever has the most worldly success wins. The Gospel of Jesus undercuts this. Anyone who lives it out as faithfully as he or she is able, will be blessed with something beyond worldly success, namely, the deeper joy of a life well-lived,  a joy which Jesus assures us is deeper, less ephemeral, and more lasting that any other joy.

I believe in God because the Gospel works! As does prayer!

Finally, though certainly not least, I believe in God because of the community of faith that stretches back to the beginning of time, that stretches back to the life and resurrection of Jesus, and that baptized me into the faith. Throughout all of history virtually all human communities have been also communities of faith, of belief in God, of worship, and of sacred ritual and sacrament.

I believe in God because of the existence of families of faith and the existence of church and sacrament.

I wrote my doctoral thesis on the classical proofs for the existence of God, arguments for God’s existence taken from some of the great intellectuals in history: Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Alfred North Whitehead. I rambled through nearly 500 hundred pages of articulating and evaluating these proofs and then ended with this conclusion.

We don’t come to believe in God because of the compelling power of some mathematical equation or logical syllogism. God’s existence becomes real to us when we live an honest, sincere life.

By Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI. This article originally appeared on  ronrolheiser.com .

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Why Should We Love God?

• August 14, 2020

Lots of reasons.

Loving God (1) “Hear, O Israel: The L ORD our God, the L ORD is one! You shall love the L ORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Deuteronomy 6.4, 5 Jesus said to him, “‘ You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. ’ This is the first and great commandment.” Matthew 22.37, 38 Of gods and men In this section of our study on “Which Works?” we will be considering how the Law of God helps us grow in and express our love for God. But we don’t want to take anything for granted, just as God did not want Israel to take anything for granted as they made their way toward the land of promise. In a lengthy chapter of The City of God , Augustine pokes fun at the Roman belief in the plethora of deities that made up their pantheon. The Romans acknowledged a single, overarching god, whom they called Zeus. He was the ruler of all the other gods, and was considered to be sovereign in the affairs of men and empires. He had at his disposal a seemingly endless array of lesser deities whose job it was to do the will of Zeus with respect to his servants, the people of the Roman world. These lesser gods were highly specialized. There was a god for the nose, the mustache, the eyes and eyebrows; a god for the ears, a god for the rain, a god for this, that, and everything else. Augustine chided his Roman readers, wondering why they had so many gods. Wasn’t one sovereign deity enough? And if not, what made him worthy of his post? More important than this, however, is that Augustine showed that the basic relationship between Roman pagans and the gods they served was one of obeisance and service. They were forever trying to keep on the good side of the gods, because they knew their deities to be fickle, demanding, and capable of bashing people who didn’t offer them the right sacrifices or prominence in their daily prayers. The gods of Rome did not love their servants, and there was no sense in which the pagans of Rome could be said to have loved their gods. They barely trusted them. Mostly they tried to placate them in one way or another, or to buy their support against some rival by adding an extra offering along with their request. The idea of loving a god was not part of Roman religion. Indeed, it’s not part of pagan religion generally, where the basic goal of religion is to keep the gods placated and on the side of the worshiper. The same was true of the pagan peoples who occupied the land of Canaan. All they wanted from their gods was a life of security and sufficiency; and to keep their gods happy and producing for them, they went to extraordinary lengths to placate them, including slashing themselves and offering their children in the flames. It’s hard to love a god who demands so much, whether that god is Baal or Moloch or one’s work or wealth or personal power. Which makes it all the more important we understand God’s greatest commandment to Israel – and through Jesus, to us – and take up whatever practices will allow us to nurture and express our love for Him. Why, precisely, ought we to work hard to love God with all our soul and strength? Creator and Sustainer We cannot catalog all the reasons why loving God and always seeking to increase in love for Him makes perfect sense. But I want to mention four. First, God is our Creator. We are not here by chance. We are not merely the highest link in the chain of some merely mechanical process that has given rise, over billions of years, to our species. Christians do not accept this view of who we are and where we’ve come from, and while they don’t always agree on the details of our provenance, all believers understand that God is our Creator. He is our Creator in a general sense, in that, in the beginning, He created the heavens and the earth and all things (Gen. 1). And He is Creator in the more specific sense in that He is ultimately the One responsible for each one of us being conceived and born into life (cf. Ps. 139.13-16). We live, we love, we delight and enjoy our lives, and we seek to make the most of our opportunities in the life our Creator has given us. He loves us enough to have brought us into this world; it makes sense, therefore, that we should love Him supremely. Moreover, not only has God made us, but He sustains us day by day. All that we are, along with everything else in the vast cosmos, is upheld in its being by the Word of God, even our Lord Jesus Christ (Heb. 1.3). In Him all things consist and hold together (Col. 1.15-17). The fact that we enjoy new day after new day, and all the goodness and wonder those days contain, is only because God Who loves us keeps, sustains, and provides for us in every aspect of our being. He is for this reason to be wholeheartedly and mightily loved. Holy Redeemer God is to be loved because He is holy. His holiness consists of the perfection of all virtues and attributes, including love, goodness, beauty, truth, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and more. Those who truly know God as holy delight to contemplate Him, to look upon His beauty, gaze upon His glory, and rejoice in His Presence. He is everything most to be desired and enjoyed, and He invites to know, love, and enjoy Him at all times, in all we do. Such a God is to be loved for the unfailing virtues and endless delights of which His holiness consists. And this Creator, this sovereign and holy God, has made it possible for us to know Him, to commune with Him, to enjoy, love, and glorify Him by giving His Son, Jesus Christ to redeem us from our sins. God did not have to redeem us. But His love for us is so great, so constant, and so personal and intimate, that He simply would not let us go to eternal destruction, the consequence of our own foolish choices. Instead, He came among us, laid out the path of righteousness into the Presence of God, took away the debt of our sin, and sent His Spirit to dwell in all those who believe in Him for salvation. Surely these are good reasons for loving God! And they are just the merest sketch of the greatness of God and the enormity of His love for us. As we grow to know God, we should expect our love for Him to increase. And as our love increases, we will never tire of discovering new ways to show this great and loving God how much we love Him. And, happily, He has shown us precisely how we can fulfill that longing.

For reflection 1.  What does it mean to you to love God? Why do you love Him? 2.  If it were possible to love God more, to love Him more constantly, and to delight more in loving Him, would you want to do that? Explain. 3.  What do you hope to gain from this study of how we as Christians may improve in loving God? Next steps – Preparation: Spend time in prayer reviewing before the Lord the four reasons given here for why we should love Him. What others come to mind? T. M. Moore For additional insight to the contemporary relevance of God’s Law, download the three studies in our Scriptorium series, “The Law of God: Miscellanies” by clicking here . We hope you find ReVision to be a helpful resource in your walk with and work for the Lord. If so, please prayerfully consider supporting The Fellowship of Ailbe with your prayers and gifts. We ask the Lord to move and enable many more of our readers to provide for the needs of our ministry. Please seek Him in prayer concerning your part in supporting our work. You can contribute online via PayPal, or by sending a gift to The Fellowship of Ailbe, 360 Zephyr Road, Williston, VT 05495. Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

T. M. Moore is principal of  The Fellowship of Ailbe , a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He and his wife, Susie, make their home in the Champlain Valley of Vermont. Books by T. M. Moore

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Seeing Is Not Believing

Why we miss god in daily life.

To Gain the World and Lose Your Soul

Love her less to love her more, facing a task unfinished, forget your first name, keep watch over souls, war your way to heaven.

Staff writer, desiringGod.org

Perhaps you’ve had unbelieving friends or neighbors tell you they will believe when they see God writing his message in the clouds. I can tell you firsthand, this is untrue.

The cloudy letters began to appear one by one while we were on a family trip to a crowded theme park. As if scribed ex nihilo , they read,

PRAISE JESUS

And then minutes later,

JESUS GIVES. . . . ASK NOW

Here they were, letters drawn in the sky by an unseen hand, exalting the Son of God and calling us to ask and receive from Christ’s goodness. Yet they incited little more than hurried glances. No one tore his garments in repentance or fell to his knees to worship Christ or cried aloud in gratefulness. Some already toting cross necklaces stopped to take pictures, but the masses continued unmoved, unmindful.

Moses tells us that God wrote the Ten Commandments himself, with his finger (Exodus 31:18). No one believed that these messages in the sky were written the same way. A man in a plane gave immediate causation.

But how did they know? The plane was nearly invisible to the naked eye. If you squinted hard enough, for long enough, you could catch the tiniest flash from the plane as he traced the letters.

Yet the masses did not stand staring at the clouds. The masses — some of whom believed in the existence of aliens and Bigfoot, or that men could become women — knew, without requiring a second glance, that this message could not be from God . Most did not see the plane — most did not need to see the plane. They already knew a human must have done it. If God granted their request and wrote the message himself, they would “know” in the exact same way.

All this to illustrate that seeing is not believing, as C.S. Lewis observes,

I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles. Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural. ( C.S. Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Stories , 107)

The crowds could not be bothered to stop at the spectacle because all of life up to that moment told them that God, if God there be, would not do such a thing. He would not trifle in their daily affairs. The “god” of many who check the box is too often the distant god of good morals and clean living, not the God with inescapable actuality, breaking into our world without permission to write on tablets or with clouds.

Christian Naturalist

I thought these things as we continued walking when, like lightning, the realization struck me. Was I all that different? Their unbelief was clear to me — was mine? How had I received this message?

“Praise Jesus.” “Jesus gives. . . . Ask now.”

I knew that my God rules over all things. I knew that “The [the pilot’s] heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). I knew that my God made possible the weather conditions for that day — along with a million other factors that brought my family and me to that exact spot at that exact time to witness that exact message. I knew that in a real sense, God had in fact written in the sky that day — yet there I stood, wondering why other people weren’t getting the message.

Did any of my prayers find their response in this preordained spectacle? What, from a list of pressing needs, should I stop and ask Jesus for? Maybe God had something for me , a word for me , a desire to answer specific prayer and so liberate me from the barren land of “you have not because you ask not.”

Why had I assumed that God orchestrated all of this for the sake of unresponsive masses and not for his blood-bought son? If God scribbled his message in his clouds before my eyes, grinning, why did I reply unmindful, unmoved?

Devil in the Details

How would you have responded? How do you respond?

How many moments, big or small, do we miss given to functional naturalism, secularism, materialism? How often do we rise from our knees in the morning only to enter a world without God? The message written in the clouds, or the word given by a friend, or the “odd” coincidence we interpret as curious and causeless, as an unbeliever would. Do we often see the world as we ought? Can we also say of God, “You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me” (Psalm 139:5)?

“How often do we rise from our knees in the morning only to enter a world without God?”

The devil is busy in the details, providing reasonable explanations for this or that, assuring us there is nothing of our heavenly Father to see here.

And one of the strategies employed to keep us in a world without a personal God is to give us names for his created wonders. If we have a name to explain something, we can demystify it, taking something wonderful and making it dumb.

To illustrate, indulge me in a digression about lightning. A.W. Tozer quotes Thomas Carlyle as saying,

We call that fire of the black thundercloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience [the state of not knowing], whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. ( Knowledge of the Holy , 18)

“We smear the wondrous fingerprints of God all around us by thinking that because we name a thing, we know a thing.”

We smear the wondrous fingerprints of God all around us by thinking that because we name a thing, we know a thing. “Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds, the thunderings of his pavilion?” asked the ancient world (Job 36:29). “Oh, that blazing, electric fire flung down from the heavens? That’s just lightning ,” responds the modern man. “Particles,” the more learned might say, “some negatively charged and others positively charged, separate and meet again in a massive current.” Wonder debunked.

Forgetting to Tremble

What is lightning, beyond the superficial facts and name? The unscientific poets outstrip us in seeing the manifest and untamable majesty.

He loads the thick cloud with moisture;      the clouds scatter his lightning. (Job 37:11) He covers his hands with the lightning      and commands it to strike the mark. Its crashing declares his presence . (Job 36:32–33) He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth,      who makes lightnings for the rain      and brings forth the wind from his storehouses. (Psalm 135:7)

Let a man answer his God if he can:

Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,      that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go      and say to you, “Here we are”? (Job 38:34–35)

As we claim to be wiser than our prescientific ancestors, we miss what is most obvious. We wax eloquent about protons and electrons and miss God; we claim we’ve seen it before and forget to tremble.

Lives Without Lightning

As with naming lightning, we are tempted to miss the daily realities of God for a name. “Oh, that? It’s just some guy in a plane.” “Oh, that? It’s just a random text of encouragement from a friend.” “Oh, that? It’s just a lucky break, a random kindness, a smiling accident.” We even can wonder at answers to prayer: Can I really prove this wasn’t just a coincidence?

When did God leave his world? When did he stop intervening in its affairs and governing its happenings with purpose? In an effort to protect the overindulgence of the imagination that saw God “telling us” to do things irrespective of his word and wisdom, have we sacrificed interpreting our circumstances (even the hard ones) in relationship to our great God? Do we look at lightning as only lightning, setbacks as only setbacks, read the words written in the sky and miss their meaning?

Ours is a supernatural existence under a sovereign God. He uses secondary causes, but it is he who uses them — all of them — for our good. God is acting, today and every day. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28); “in his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:10). Let’s see his personal care and personal provision more in our everyday lives, composed for us daily, personally in the clouds.

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Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on God’s Importance In Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Understanding god’s role.

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a guide who helps them choose right from wrong. When life gets tough, thinking of God can give comfort and hope.

Learning Through Stories

Religious books are full of stories about God’s love and power. These tales teach kids about bravery, kindness, and honesty. They often look to these stories for lessons on how to live well.

Prayer and Strength

Praying to God is like talking to a friend. It can make you feel strong and calm. When you’re scared or sad, praying might bring peace and a sense of not being alone.

Belonging to a Community

Believing in God can connect you with others. Many gather in places like churches or temples to worship together. This can create a feeling of family and support among the people.

250 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Learning right from wrong.

God is often seen as a teacher of what is good and what is bad. Different religions have their own rules that God has given them. These rules help people decide how to act and treat others. With God’s teachings, they learn to be kind, honest, and fair.

Finding Strength in Tough Times

Life can be hard sometimes. When people face problems, they may pray to God for help. They believe God listens and gives them strength to get through tough times. This belief can make them feel less alone and more able to handle life’s challenges.

Bringing People Together

Belief in God can bring people together. In churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship, people gather to pray and celebrate their faith. This creates a sense of community and belonging, which is very important in life.

Hope for the Future

Thinking about God can give people hope for the future. They believe that God has a plan for them and that everything will work out for the best. This hope can keep them going when things are difficult and can inspire them to work towards a better future.

500 Words Essay on God’s Importance In Life

Many people believe in a higher power known as God. They see God as a source of strength, guidance, and love. In this essay, we will explore why God plays a significant role in the lives of believers.

Comfort in Tough Times

Guidance for right choices.

Every day, we make choices. Some are easy, and some are hard. Believers turn to God for help in making the right decisions. They may read holy books, like the Bible or the Quran, to learn what God teaches about living a good life. By following these teachings, they feel they can choose the path that will make them and the people around them happy.

Feeling Loved and Valued

Everyone wants to feel loved. Believers find this love in God. They think of God as a parent who loves them no matter what. This love gives them confidence. It makes them feel important and valued. When they know God loves them, they also learn to love themselves and others.

Learning to Forgive

We all make mistakes, and sometimes we hurt others. God teaches about forgiveness. Believers try to follow this teaching by forgiving those who have wronged them. They also ask God to forgive their own mistakes. This helps them live without anger and bitterness.

Building a Community

Believing in God often brings people together. They gather to worship, celebrate, and help each other. This creates a community where people care for one another. In this community, they share their love for God and find friends who support them in their beliefs.

In conclusion, God holds an important place in the lives of those who believe. God offers comfort, guidance, love, hope, and a sense of community. These things help believers lead a fulfilling life. Whether it’s finding strength in tough times, making the right choices, feeling valued, looking forward to the future, learning to forgive, or being part of a community, God’s role is central to many people’s lives. While not everyone believes in God, for those who do, God’s importance in life is clear and deeply felt.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Why I Believe in God

Genesis 1:1.

September 30, 2009 | Ray Pritchard

Listen to this Sermon

The Bible never argues for the existence of God.

It begins instead with a simple, majestic sentence: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Bible begins with a declaration, not with an argument.

There is a God who created all things.

If you do not start there, you will miss the central truth of the universe . That’s what Proverbs 1:7 means when it says that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” Note the two beginnings here:

“In the beginning God.” “The beginning of knowledge.”

This leads us in a particular direction:

1. All things begin with God. 2. All knowledge begins with God.

It is in precisely this sense that the Bible proclaims that those who deny God are “fools” (Psalms 14:1). This stands as a moral judgment, not a statement about IQ or educational attainment. A very smart person can drive off a cliff and be smashed on the rocks. That’s the sort of folly the psalmist has in mind . If you leave God out of the calculation, you have missed the central fact of the universe. You are wrong at the very core of life, and therefore life itself will remain a mystery to you.

If you leave God out of the calculation, you have missed the central fact of the universe. </h6 class=”pullquote”>

Did you know that today (September 30, 2009) is the first-ever International Blasphemy Day ? I didn’t either until I read about it on Al Mohler’s weblog. This “celebration” includes an invitation for people to “blaspheme the Holy Spirit” (see Mark 3:29) by making a video renouncing their Christian beliefs and saying, “I deny the Holy Spirit,” thus daring God to punish them. You can find a host of these videos on YouTube where ex-Christians (many of them young people) renounce their faith and invite God to judge them.

There are a number of ways to respond to this, and the least effective would be to get angry . Those of us who believe in God need not be threatened by those who do not believe or by former believers who now are doubters or agnostics or atheists. I do think it is sad to consider young people raised in the church who now find it necessary to publicly renounce a faith that never really took hold.

Consider two simple words. God is. That’s the central fact of the universe . Miss that and you can be right about a lot of other things and still be wrong where it matters most. With that in mind, let’s think together about five facts relating to God’s existence.

1. God has made himself known to every person.

Romans 1:19-20 says it very clearly.

Since what may be known about God is plain to them , because God has made it plain to them . 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 men are without excuse.

God has revealed himself so clearly that no one can miss it. Even though men suppress the truth about God (v. 18), they cannot completely obliterate the message. It is “plain” and “clearly seen” both in nature and in conscience. This plainly-seen revelation of God in nature has been available “since the creation of the world.” That means Adam saw it, Cain saw it, Noah saw it, Abraham saw it, Jacob saw it, Moses saw it, David saw it, and every other person who has ever lived since the beginning of time saw it. Don’t miss this point. Everyone knows something about God! No one has ever lived who missed this revelation. It doesn’t matter whether they consciously thought about it or not. The truth was there for all to see, so plainly laid out that no one could miss it. That means it doesn’t matter whether you were a headhunter on some South Pacific island or an upscale yuppie in Miami. No one could miss the truth about God . . . and no one has ever missed it because God made the truth about himself as plain as day.

Everyone knows something about God! </h6 class=”pullquote”>

 2. something about god “gets through” to every person..

In the second half of verse 20 Paul comments that the truth of God in nature has been “clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” Those two verbs are exceedingly important. “Clearly seen” means that everyone has seen something of God’s handiwork in the world. “Understood” is even stronger. It means that the revelation of God in nature strikes the heart of every man. Paul is not suggesting that nature contains a revelation about God which every man may see. That’s not strong enough. To the contrary, Paul is saying that every man actually sees the revelation and every man actually understands it to some degree.

No one can ever say, “I didn’t know” or “You didn’t make it clear,” because God made it abundantly and overwhelmingly clear.

“Lord, you have made us for yourself. Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.” </h6 class=”pullquote”>

That explains why every culture on earth has some conception of a Supreme Being-however flawed it might be. Man was made to look for answers outside of himself. He is incurably religious in that sense. The French philosopher Pascal said that inside the heart of every man there is a “God-shaped vacuum.” And Augustine said, “Lord, you have made us for yourself.  Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God has put “eternity in the hearts of men,” meaning that the longing for ultimate answers comes from God himself. God put that longing (the “God-shaped vacuum”) inside the human heart to cause men to look to him.

3. Creation testifies to the Creator.

Psalm 19:1 says that “the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” Now either you see this or you don’t. Some people, brilliant scientists, can study the stars for a lifetime and come away saying, “There is no God.” But others will see the mighty Milky Way and say, “There must be a God!” Psalm 19:1 means that God has not left us any room to doubt. The heavens preach a sermon about the wonders of our great God. “Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge” (Psalm 19:2). God so arranged the universe that light from heaven streams in on every side. You have to cover your face not to see it.

A week ago I flew to Washington state in the Pacific Northwest, to a little town near the Canadian border called Sumas. To my surprise (because I had never been there before), the whole area is a verdant paradise. Because of the abundant rainfall, it is actually a lush rainforest. For two days I spoke to pastors (most of them from British Columbia) at Cedar Springs Conference Center. On my final day there, John Bargen, the founder of the conference center, picked me up in his ATV and took me for a ride so I could see the massive cedar trees that cover the property. At one point we got out of the ATV, and John took out a tape measure and walked all the way around the most massive cedar tree I had ever seen. It turned out to be 18 feet in circumference and towered 130 feet above us, creating a massive green canopy overhead. John said the tree was probably 200 years old. As we made our way back to the main lodge, he showed me the beautiful gardens they had planted over the last 35 years. Then I saw that someone had planted flowers in a certain pattern on the hillside:

God Bless You

Now suppose that someone came hiking up the mountainside and saw “God Bless You” spelled out in beautiful flowers. They might conclude that this was a fantastic freak of nature, that somehow the flowers had come together entirely by chance to spell those three words. It could happen. If 10,000 monkeys typing for 100 million years could produce Shakespeare, then presumably the flowers could randomly spell out “God Bless You.”

You are free to believe that if you like. And you can also presume that millions of years of wind and rain and erosion produced the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore.

If 10,000 monkeys typing for 100 million years could produce Shakespeare, then presumably the flowers could randomly spell out “God Bless You.” </h6 class=”pullquote”>

Opinions are free . Think what you want. But I prefer to believe that just as loving hands planted the flowers at Cedars Springs, and wise hands carved the faces on Mount Rushmore, even so the hands of Almighty God carefully crafted the universe.

You either see that or you don’t. That doesn’t prove God. But just as a watch points to a watchmaker, just as Mt. Rushmore points to a dedicated architect, just as The Old Man and the Sea points to Ernest Hemingway, the beauty and order and complexity of the universe points directly to Almighty God, the Ultimate Designer of all things.

Psalm 8:3 says, “When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place.” God has left his fingerprints on the universe. Every rock, every tree, every river, every ocean, every star in the sky-they all bear the Divine DNA that points back to the God who created all things.

This world is God’s house. He’s left clues everywhere about what kind of God he is . </h6 class=”pullquote”>

This world is God’s house. He’s left clues everywhere about what kind of God he is . When you stand at the Grand Canyon, you can’t help but be overwhelmed at the power of God to create such magnificence. He must have had a mighty hand to scoop out the Royal Gorge in Colorado. He is as infinite as the dark recesses of the mighty Atlantic Ocean. Each snowflake testifies to his uniqueness. The changing colors of the Great Smoky Mountains proclaim his creativity.

The galaxies shout out, “He is there.” The wildflowers sing together, “He is there.” The rippling brooks join in, “He is there.” The birds sing it, the lions roar it, the fish write it in the oceans-“He is there.” All creation joins to sing his praise. The heavens declare it, the earth repeats it and the wind whispers it-“He is there.” Deep cries out to deep, the mighty sequoia tells it to the eagle who soars overhead, the lamb and the wolf agree on this one thing-“He is there.”

No one can miss the message. God has left his fingerprints all over this world . Truly, “This is my Father’s world,” and every rock, every twig, every river and every mountain bears his signature. He signed his name to everything he made. The earth is marked “Made By God” in letters so big that no one fails to see it.

Some people may deny it, but no one fails to see it.

4. Some choose not to believe because they are spiritually blind.

Unbelief is a moral choice not to believe the evidence God has placed all around us . Recently the Wall Street Journal asked Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to independently answer the question, “Where does evolution leave God?” Titled Man vs. God , the discussion starts with the assumption that evolution as an explanation for the universe must in fact be true. If so, where does God fit in? Karen Armstrong says we still need the idea of God even though evolution has demolished any need for the reality of a personal God:

Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.

The earth is marked “Made By God” in letters so big that no one fails to see it. </h6 class=”pullquote”>

But if that is true, why retain even the idea of God?  Dawkins follows this to its logical conclusion:

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

For the record, I think Dawkins is right. If naturalistic evolution is true, then there really is no room for God, and no need for him either . If science can answer all things, then we hardly even need the idea of God.

But what we really have here are two atheists arguing with each other . I would simply point out that the conclusions here are not driven as much by evidence as by presuppositions. Richard Dawkins has chosen not to believe in God, therefore he has done exactly what Romans 1:18 said he would do. He has suppressed the truth in his own heart.  Atheism is not just a philosophical position. It’s also a moral choice of the heart .  Over the whole exchange one could write the words of Romans 1:22, “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.” This is a terrible, damning judgment on those who turn away from the truth.

My point here is not to target Karen Armstrong or Richard Dawkins in any particular way. They merely represent a very popular worldview. One tries to embrace naturalism and leave room for a vague concept of “God” that in reality represents nothing at all. The other rightly says, “That’s nonsense!”

Atheism is not just a philosophical position. It’s also a moral choice of the heart. </h6 class=”pullquote”>

To choose not to believe has enormous moral implications . Because we do not live in true moral neutrality, someone is truly and absolutely and utterly wrong.  And they are wrong at the starting point.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” “God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.”

Someone is really, really, really wrong here. And whoever it is has missed the fundamental truth of the universe.

So why does a man like Richard Dawkins not “see” the truth about God? We may say it many ways but finally it comes down to this. He is morally and spiritually blind . 2 Corinthians 4:4 describes the whole human race apart from God’s grace. “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”

If you can’t see, you can’t see.

Here is a vast paradox regarding the human race. Light from heaven streams in on every side . God has made himself plainly known so that the truth about himself is “clearly seen” by every person. Yet Satan has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the gospel and believe in Jesus. All of us know the truth about God because it is stamped on our spiritual DNA and yet we are blind to the truth of who God really is . Thus most of the human race instinctively believes in God without knowing who he is. But a tiny minority suppresses even the limited knowledge of God they have so that they end up like Richard Dawkins, denying the God who made them.

All of us know the truth about God because it is stamped on our spiritual DNA and yet we are blind to the truth of who God really is. </h6 class=”pullquote”>

That is the very definition of what it means to be a fool.

5. God has revealed himself to us in Jesus.

When all is said and done, I believe the best argument for the Christian view of God is found in the person of Jesus Christ . God has revealed himself to us in the Person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Father sent the Son to the earth in the form of a little baby, conceived through a miracle of the Holy Spirit, born in Bethlehem, born to Mary and Joseph, born in an out-of-the-way corner of the Roman Empire, raised in a carpenter’s home, misunderstood by his own family, rejected by his own people, convicted by the religious leaders, put to death for blasphemy (!), and on the third day God’s Son rose from the dead.

Now we know what God is like. Jesus has made him known to us.

The debate no longer centers around arid scholastic arguments. It’s all about Jesus now. </h6 class=”pullquote”>

Ever since the “Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14), Jesus has been the great issue between believers and unbelievers. The debate no longer centers around arid scholastic arguments. It’s all about Jesus now.

Breakfast with an Atheist

A few years ago I had breakfast with an atheist. It turned out to be a most enlightening experience. Although we were meeting for the first time, I immediately came to appreciate his many positive qualities . He was charming, friendly, positive, talkative, and obviously very well-educated. He was raised Catholic and attended a Catholic high school and two excellent Catholic universities. Sometime during his college years, he abandoned not only the Christian faith but his belief in God. He actually converted from Christianity to atheism. He truly believes there is no God. As we talked, he kept emphasizing that only this life has meaning. Since there is no life after death, what we do now becomes vitally important. Heaven for him is just a myth that religious people use to comfort themselves in times of trouble. We had a long talk and I learned a great deal from him. It’s always useful to see yourself as others see you.

I came away from our time together with three fundamental observations:

1. How difficult it is to be an atheist. 2. How hard you must work to keep your faith. 3. How careful you must be lest you start believing in God.

“We’d Have a Problem, Wouldn’t We?”

Toward the end of our time together, I asked him what he thought about Jesus Christ. He seemed a bit surprised by that question, as if it had no relevance to the question of God’s existence. It was my turn to be surprised when he told me that he hadn’t thought about Jesus very much one way or the other . He then ventured to say that Jesus was probably a great man and a learned teacher. But he probably never meant to start a religion. That happened after he died and his followers wanted to honor his memory.

Upon hearing that, I decided to press the point. What about his resurrection? What if he really did rise from the dead? My friend stopped for a moment, thought a bit, and then a smile crossed his face. “Well, we’d have a problem then, wouldn’t we?” Exactly! If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then He really is the Son of God and God really does exist.

“Well, we’d have a problem then, wouldn’t we?” </h6 class=”pullquote”>

That’s what I mean when I say that Jesus is the best proof of God’s existence . In our witnessing we should bring people back again and again to Jesus Christ . He is the ultimate argument for God because he was in fact God in human flesh. “In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1, 14). In one of his sermons John Piper puts the matter this way:

If someone says, “Why do you believe in God?” you can say, “I believe in God because Jesus believed in God, and all that I know of Jesus makes me trust him more than I trust any philosopher or any scientist or any theologian or any friend I have ever known or read about.” Then you can ask them, “Do you know anyone more trustworthy or better qualified to teach us about the existence of God than Jesus?”

Piper is right. No one is more qualified than Jesus to teach us who God is.

I believe in God because nothing in the universe makes sense without him. I believe in God because he has left his fingerprints everywhere. I believe in God because he revealed himself in Jesus. I believe in God because Jesus died and rose again.

And I believe in God because he revealed himself to me, gave me eyes to see and faith to believe, and drew me by his Spirit to embrace his Son as my Savior. It is not that I “found” God on my own. He drew me to himself, and I gladly came to him.

I close with this simple statement: Not only does it make sense to believe in God, it makes no sense not to! 

-No fact is so obvious as the fact of God’s existence. -You must deny reality itself in order to deny God’s existence. -The atheist must stand on ground God created in order to deny God.

Not only does it make sense to believe in God, it makes no sense not to! </h6 class=”pullquote”>

I submit to you that the evidence for God’s existence is overwhelming for those who have eyes to see . But it still demands a choice! In one of his books Anthony Campolo tells how he shares the gospel with secular-minded university students who ask him why he believes the Bible. “Because I decided to,” he replies. Then he asks the student, “Why is it that you don’t believe the Bible?” The answer is almost always the same: “I guess because I decided not to.”

After all the arguments on both sides are finished, you still have to decide for yourself. You still have to choose. What choice have you made?

I believe in God because nothing in the universe makes sense without him. God exists-he is real and Jesus Christ is his Son. He knows you and he loves you and he gave his only begotten Son that you might be saved. I believe in God! What about you?

Questions to Consider 1. Some people say that belief in God is nothing but superstition. If you disagree, how would you explain your own belief in God? 2. In what sense are people who deny God’s existence fools? 3. What truths about God can be discovered by studying the universe around us? How do unbelievers explain the complexity and evidence of intelligent design in nature? 4. Where have you seen God’s “fingerprints” in your own life? 5. Why is Jesus “the best proof for God’s existence”? 6. “It makes no sense not to believe in God.” Do you agree?

Scriptures to Ponder Psalm 19:1-6 Isaiah 40:21-28 Romans 1:18-21 Romans 11:33-36

Additional Material from the Keep Believing website A Place to Begin         Empty on the Inside What Happens to Those Who Never Hear About Jesus? In the Beginning

Additional Resources The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath Why I Am a Christian , ed. by Norm Geisler Reasons to Believe by R. C. Sproul Does God Exist? ed. by J. P. Moreland

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Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith Paperback – June 1, 2011

• Print length 144 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pitchstone Publishing
• Publication date June 1, 2011
• Dimensions 4.75 x 0.4 x 7 inches
• ISBN-10 9780984493210
• ISBN-13 978-0984493210
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In the Beginning Was the Word

Our Propensity to Believe

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. ... It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

— Charles Darwin

There are those who say that evolution conflicts with faith, or that the natural wonders of evolution were kick-started by some sort of sentient, omniscient being. Yet if an all-powerful, all-seeing god does exist, he designed into the creation and evolution of man something powerful: the propensity to believe in a god.

Throughout recorded history, from the ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs to the Romans and beyond — Polytheist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, Satanist, Scientologist — all known cultures have revolved around some concept of at least one god and/or central mystical figure, with or without a corresponding supernatural world. Why? Why is religion an apparently universal feature of humans and the cultures we create?

We are beginning to understand. Over the past two decades there has been a revolution in psychology and the cognitive neurosciences. Out of it has come an evolutionary explanation of why human minds generate religious belief, why we generate specific types of beliefs, and why our minds are prone to accept and spread them.

We now have robust theories with empirical evidence, including evidence from imaging studies — pictures of the brain itself — that supports these explanations. The pieces are in place; we can now look to science for a comprehensive understanding of why human minds produce and accept religious ideas and why humans will alter their behavior for, die for, and kill for these ideas.

Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection remains one of the most important ideas that ever occurred to a human mind, and the evidence proves him right. Natural selection is the sole workable scientific explanation for the variety and design of all life — plant, animal, and every other form — on this earth. It is also the only workable explanation for the design and function of the human mind, which is the real birthplace of gods.

Look around. We are all the same species, Homo sapiens. Yet we come in all shapes and sizes and with varying capacities. But for all the variation, many traits are heritable. We tend to resemble our parents and close kin, sharing strengths and weaknesses with those ancestors who came before. We are all descendents of success.

The term "survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood. In the Darwinian sense, fitness is the ability to adapt, to survive, and to reproductively thrive. The struggle for survival winnows out organisms lacking that ability.

Of course, Darwin did not have the advantage of knowing precisely how traits passed from one generation to the next. That had to wait until 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick unraveled the structure of DNA, and in so doing instantly saw its possible copying mechanism and identified the method of inheritance.

Combining Darwin with Watson and Crick, natural selection with genetics, creates the modern Darwinian synthesis. To survive, we adapt over evolutionary time, just as Darwin's Galapagos creatures adapted to their unique environments. Nowhere else do iguanas live in the ocean, the obvious solution to the problem of finding food and surviving on a tiny island. Even from island to island, each with its own isolated ecosystem, creatures in the Galapagos faced slightly different problems and solved them differently. They adapted. But more importantly, they passed those adaptations on.

Every organism, including the human one, is an integrated collection of adaptations — problem-solving devices — shaped by natural selection over the vast stretches of evolutionary time. Each adaptation promotes in some specific way the survival of the genes that directed the construction of those adaptations.

At every level, from molecules to minds, we see Darwinian natural selection at work.

Look at yourself. To survive, you need oxygen. As a developing organism, you needed to evolve a way to efficiently extract the oxygen from the air and distribute it throughout your body.

The structure of your heart solves the survival problem of pumping blood. The protein hemoglobin solves the problem of transporting oxygen to our brain and other organs. The oxygen in the hemoglobin pumped by the heart comes from lungs that solve the problem of extracting oxygen from the air. And so on. We simply call that whole process "breathing."

This modern synthesis applies also to the human mind and the human brain. The brain is an organ, and as Harvard psychologist and researcher Steven Pinker notes, the mind is what the brain does. And the brain, like every other piece of living tissue, is an elegantly integrated collection of devices designed through natural selection to solve specific problems of survival over vast stretches of evolutionary time. These adaptations, including social adaptations that helped us survive in small groups, evolved within the brain to promote in some way the continuation of the genes that directed their construction.

When you look at a face, the image on your retina actually is upside down and two dimensional. Your brain converts that image into an upright three-dimensional face using a myriad of visual adaptations: color detectors, motion detectors, shape detectors, edge detectors — all working symbiotically, silently, and seamlessly.

Our ancestors evolved a myriad of equally complex social adaptations. When you see that face, you also make abstract judgments about sex, age, attractiveness, status, emotional state, personality, and the contents of that individual's unseen mind, including intentions, beliefs, and desires. These judgment-forming adaptations are largely outside of awareness, many forever unconscious. Your snap judgments are millions of years in the making.

The mind/brain is relentlessly complex. Consider the Apollo spacecraft, a packed array of engineering devices, each dedicated to analyzing a constant stream of information and solving a particular problem, all while the astronauts are consciously aware of only a select few. We work the same way. Consider all of the things you are conscious of; they are a very small part of an entire system, the tip of the iceberg of what goes on in your mind.

This is important to understand because religion, while not an adaptation in itself, derives from the same mind-brain social adaptations that we use to navigate the sea of people who surround us. These adaptations formed to solve specific social and interpersonal problems as humanity evolved. Almost incidentally, but no less powerfully, they come together to construct the foundation of every religious idea, belief, and ritual. Religious beliefs are basic human social survival concepts with slight alterations.

That religion is a by-product of adaptations that occurred for other reasons does not negate its incredible power. As we'll explain in chapter 9, reading and writing are not in themselves adaptations; they also are by-products of adaptations designed for other purposes.

All religions — as sets of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe — begin with belief in one or more central holy figures or teachers. Most also involve a deity or deities capable of interacting with us, able and willing to intervene in our lives, to hear our silent wishes, and to grant them, and capable of doing literally anything. For our purposes, we'll discuss just one, and designate it as male, though some religions have multiples with differing powers and a few have snuck in female personalities. Still, they are all remarkably similar. Certainly the god of the three major Abrahamic religions is the same, so we'll use "him" for our examples.

That god is paternal and, like a good father, loves us unconditionally. Usually, though, he only hears our prayers if we worship him hard enough, make sacrifices of some sort, acknowledge that we are highly imperfect and thank him profusely (whether or not he grants our wishes), and believe that we are all born bad. This god makes decisions based on not only our prayers but also the prayers of every other human being, or at least every other human being who shares the particulars of our beliefs. Even when he refuses our wishes or needs, we continue to believe that whatever occurs is in our best interests, even if it doesn't seem that way, and that this invisible god has a purpose for everything. And all of this goes in our mind even when we're not thinking about it.

If, when you were a teenager, your mother had set you up on a blind date and assured you that your date was extraordinarily good looking, wealthy beyond measure, kind, loving, willing to do anything for you even though you'd never met, and wanted nothing more than for you to have the best of everything, would you have believed her? Well, maybe when you were a teenager. For a few minutes.

So why are we so willing to believe in an invisible god that does all of that, and more?

Compared to what really goes on in our minds, the concept of one holy supernormal entity seems easy. Just to believe in a god, our mind bounces off of no fewer than twenty hardwired adaptations evolved over eons of natural selection to help us coexist and communicate with our fellow Homo sapiens to survive and dominate the planet. In the pages that follow, we'll show you exactly how and why human minds not only accept the impossible but also have created cults of it.

We will show you how and why humans came to, among other things, believe in a god, love a god, fear a god, defer to a god, envision a god like us, pray to a god and assume prayers would be answered, create rituals to worship a god, and even die and kill for a god. And we will show you why these hardwired social traits make it extraordinarily difficult to depart from those beliefs, even if and when you are so inclined.

But let's start with a crash course in evolution.

In the Image and Likeness

Evolution 101

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

We are risen apes, not fallen angels — and we now have the evidence to prove it. Our vanity might make it difficult to accept, and those who believe in divine creation find the whole concept outrageous. The mere contemplation that humanity could have developed from the "lower" animals has caused many to reject evolution outright, from the moment Charles Darwin promulgated his theory. But the evidence overwhelmingly shows that we evolved along with all other living things from the primordial ooze, where life on earth really began.

Along the east side of the African continent, the Great Rift Valley runs from Ethiopia to Mozambique. Think of this valley as the birth canal of the human species, the true Garden of Eden. This is where our particular species began its unique evolutionary trail.

We did not descend from apes. From a purely scientific viewpoint, we are apes. We share 98.6 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. We also share with them a common ancestor that lived some 5 to 7 million years ago. From that common ancestor, the human line diverged and developed along many different paths, like the varied branches of a bush. Eventually all but one, the one from which you and I evolved, died out.

We are the last surviving example of a specific African ape, the hominid. As evolutionarily recently as 50,000 years ago there may have been four species of closely related but distinct hominids sharing the planet with us. We alone among the hominids survive.

We have now met many of our ancestors. We possess fossils of Ardipithecus, probably one of the closest species to the distant ancestor we share with chimps. They seem to have been a pair-bonded species with low levels of aggression.

The Australopithecus, meaning the southern ape of Africa, is best known through its most famous fossil, Lucy, found in Ethiopia nearly forty years ago. Fossils of Paranthropus (meaning "beside human") found in southern Africa in 1938 and 1948 show it to have had a brain about 40 percent the size of ours; it likely died out because it could not adapt to changes in environment and diet.

In 2008, a nine-year-old boy, the son of a paleontologist, discovered the skull of a considerably older nine-year-old boy in Africa. This skull, also of a hominid since named Australopithicus sediba, may provide further links between the australopithecines and us.

Those species, along with our earliest hominid ancestors, coexisted in Africa for about 2 million years, surviving mind-bendingly longer than we have so far.

Our group, Homo, shows up in the fossil record about 2 million years ago and includes Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis. Homo erectus made it out of Africa, probably without language, more than a million years ago, migrating as far as the Caucasus Mountains, China, and Indonesia.

It appears that some members of Homo heidelbergensis gave rise to the Neanderthals after migrating to Europe, and recent DNA sequencing data suggests that there was some hybridizing between our Homo sapiens ancestors and Neanderthals. Those Homo heidelbergensis who remained in Africa ultimately gave rise to early, anatomically modern Homo sapiens.

The earliest recognized fossils of Homo sapiens occur back to nearly 200,000 years ago. There is evidence of symbolic abilities, such as pigments potentially used in coloring, and also evidence of long -distance exchanges and trade between groups, which required a sophisticated means of symbolic communication. It seems likely that the oldest known members of our species probably had the most significant species-specific cognitive, social, and behavioral feature — the ability for language.

You and I, modern Homo sapiens with our ability for language, began to leave Africa 60,000 years ago, a blink of the eye in evolutionary time.

Put aside our ethnic, racial, nationalistic, and religious differences. Underneath our skins we are all Africans, the sons and daughters of a small group of hunter-gatherers who arose in Africa, outsurvived all others, and conquered the world.

What is even more amazing is that a severe climate variation between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago apparently reduced our population to perhaps as few as 600 breeding individuals. That is what modern genetics now tells us. That means that every one of the 7 billion people on this planet is a descendant of that small group of hunter -gatherers who lived in Africa and survived the harsh climate change.

Why us? How and why did we survive? Comparing Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and modern human skulls shows a gradual transformation in the area above the eyes. The forehead loses its steep slope and becomes rounded. A brain size of 400 to 500 cubic centimeters in Australopithecus doubles for Homo erectus and almost triples by the time of modern Homo sapiens. That change is particularly notable in the frontal lobe regions. These are the areas of our brain that contain the complex machinery, the evolved adaptations that enable us to negotiate our social worlds.

So what drove the evolution of these big brains of ours? We did. Or, more specifically, others of our species did, because we needed to work together to survive. Physical survival required social survival; we developed "groupishness."

If you arbitrarily divide a room full of people into two groups for a game, they will invariably begin to identify with the group to which they've been assigned. They will consider those in their group as "in," and those in the other as "out." There likely will be strong competition between the two groups, even if the people in them were strangers to each other when the game began. The strangers have become teammates. Hasn't that ever struck you as odd? Probably not, because it is quite literally natural. You most likely would do the same thing. This "groupishness" is hardwired and helped our ancestors survive the worlds in which they evolved.

The crucible of small, tightly knit bands of kin sculpted us into the people we are today. This is not ancient history. As recently as five hundred years ago, two-thirds of the world's population still lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes, the kind of social environment that shaped us and to which we are adapted. In many ways we are still quite tribal in our psychology. But then we are still very young.

So, you ask, what does this have to do with religion? Everything.

Religion utilizes and piggybacks onto everyday social-thought processes, adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved to help us negotiate our relationships with other people, to detect agency and intent, and to generate a sense of safety. These mechanisms were forged in the not-so-distant world of our African homeland. They are why we survived.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0984493212
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pitchstone Publishing (June 1, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780984493210
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0984493210
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.75 x 0.4 x 7 inches
• #501 in Atheism (Books)
• #560 in Psychology & Religion
• #5,964 in Medical General Psychology

About the author

J. anderson thomson.

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Customers say

Customers find the book provides a good understanding of the question we often ask about why. They also say the writing style is clear and concise. Customers also mention the book is short and to the point. Opinions are mixed on the content depth, with some finding it brief yet commendable, while others say it lacks depth.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book provides a good understanding of the question we often ask about why seemingly. They say it's a concise, readable summary of the psychology of religion. Customers also say it helps advance their growth in theology, with an easy and compelling prose style. They also mention that the book is not egotistical or diminishing of persons of faith.

"Excellent, concise explanation of how we seem designed to believe in god." Read more

"...Dr. Thomson has the ability to reduce complex concepts into easy-to-understand arguments that are hard to refute...." Read more

"...2. Thought-provoking book. The topics are interesting and makes for an enjoyable read.3. Short and to the point. Refreshing approach.4...." Read more

"...It's broken into bite-sized sections, research is summarized and properly attributed , and central analogies (despite what one reviewer stated) are..." Read more

Customers find the writing style clear, concise, and well-presented. They also say the Kindle version is well edited and formatted.

"...Positives:1. A well written , accessible book for the masses.2. Thought-provoking book...." Read more

"This little book is a true gem. In a precise and concise writing style , Dr. Thomson has summarised the brain and social research that convincingly..." Read more

"...behind a tremendously beautiful and awespiring cover photo, presents clear and IMHO irrefutable arguments for his thesis that religion and gods..." Read more

"...In my opinion the book is well written , interesting and gives a primer to why religions exist by pointing to the mechanisms in the brain religions..." Read more

Customers find the book short and to the point.

"...3. Short and to the point . Refreshing approach.4. Each chapter is introduced with a fitting quote by Charles Darwin.5...." Read more

"...This is a short , concise presentation of religion, not as an adaptation, but as a byproduct of adaptation...." Read more

"...This book is a jewel. It's short , clearly written and packed with knowledge new to most of us." Read more

"...It's brevity is enough for covering in a few pages a vast array of books and opinions of experts in several fields...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the content depth of the book. Some find it commendable, accessible, and thought-provoking. They also appreciate the amount covered in its short sections, which is impressive. However, some readers feel the book lacks depth and is overly repetitive. They mention that some topics were treated too lightly.

"This little book is a true gem ...." Read more

"...Yes it is succinct. It is also sensible, sapient and significant ." Read more

"...In summary, a few shortcomings aside I enjoyed the book. The book lacks depth as one would expect of a book of this brevity...." Read more

"...Who is more authoritative than an all-powerful god? This book is a jewel ...." Read more

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• Why would I believe Jesus is the son of God?

Why Would I Believe Jesus is the Son of God?

The Bible often refers to Jesus as the Son of God. God is portrayed as the trinity: father, son and holy spirit. God being the Father. Jesus the Son. The Holy Spirit as God’s presence in our daily lives. This might be a difficult and hard thing to grasp. It seems like three different identities. Yet there is only one God and in him all joins together.

Different Forms

For example: water is water. Right? But you can drink water and when it’s frozen you can walk on it. If it’s hot you can boil an egg. God is like water. H2O. Present in different forms, with different outputs. But always the same God.

Jesus as the Son of God. This remains a stumbling block to many people.

Struggling with Jesus

Maybe you believe in God but you struggle with Jesus. Inspiring as he may be, by saying he is the Son of God it seems to become more of a fairy tale to you. It’s physically impossible that something as divine as God could produce an actual human being. 

Unthinkable

To muslims saying that Jesus is the Son of God is unthinkable concept. To Islam God is so holy and him having a son would take away from his reign. ‘Allah does not procreate nor is he created.’ He is outside of the chain of cause and effect. Jesus does play an important in Islam though. A far greater one than people often assume. Muslims also believe that Mary is holy and has given a virgin birth. 

What Does Jesus Say? 

What does Jesus say about himself? Is Jesus the Son of God? In the Bible you will find different statements of Jesus describing him as the Son of God. Jesus often to refer to himself as the Son of Man. In four books in the Bible this is mentioned 80 times. It points back to the Old Testament that writes about the arrival of the Son of Man.

By the end of his life, when he is on trial, he is asked to testify: Are you the Son of God? Jesus’ answer: “Yes, I am”. This answer means his fate is sealed, he will be sentenced to death. Because anyone claiming to be the Son of God was sentenced to death at that time and age.

Is Jesus a Liar?

Who is Jesus ? Jesus himself claims to be the Son of God. So he is either a liar, a lunatic or he is speaking the truth. If he was a liar or lunatic, should we even be taking him seriously at all? Someone who makes claims like this, as extraordinary as they may be, should be considered a wacko. Unless he was telling the truth.

Do you want to know more about Jesus?

Do you want to learn more who Jesus is? Follow this online course with a personal e-coach that can help you on your way to Jesus.

Did Jesus really exist?

Is Jesus God?

Who is Jesus

Why Did Jesus Become Human?

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KS3 - Religious Studies/ Education Lesson (RS) -Why do people believe in God? (Lesson 2)

Subject: Religious education

Age range: 11-14

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

30 August 2024

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KS3 - Religious Studies/ Education Lesson (RS) -Why do people believe in God?

A ready to use Religious Studies lesson (from KS3 upwards) which is part of a module focused on the three classical arguments for God. This unit is designed to introduce philosophy of religion to younger students. This lesson is designed to get student’s thinking about what reasons people may have for their beliefs. I use this lesson with my Y8 class as their second lesson in this unit.

Fully editable and also includes a knowledge organiser for the unit –“Why do people believe in God?", A philosophy of religion focused SOW also available to purchase as individual lessons or a full scheme

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