Evidence for the Existence of the Christian God
By Gregory Heil
The title that I chose for this paper was not phrased the way it is by accident. I am going to attempt to present evidence for the existence of the Christian God. I am not going to prove with one hundred percent certainty that the Christian God exists. I do, however, believe that the vast majority of evidence truly does point towards the existence of God.
The first pieces of evidence that I would like to present relate to the beginning of the universe. First off, if something begins to exist, there needs to be something that caused it to begin to exist. There is no reasonable way for you as an atheist to argue against this. It is completely illogical to expect nothing to come from nothing. Nothing is what rocks think about! Next, there is convincing evidence that the universe began to exist. For instance, look at the laws of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics shows that the amount of energy in the world does not change. The second law of thermodynamics indicates that the amount of usable energy in the world is being depleted. So, the universe will eventually run out of energy. This fact indicates that there must have been a point in time when the universe was all usable energy. So the universe must have had a beginning. If the universe had a beginning, and every beginning requires a cause, it naturally follows that the universe had a cause. You may argue that the Big Bang was the cause of the universe. But what caused the Big Bang? You might say, “Well, then who made (or caused) God?” Well, as we were discussing, everything that had a beginning requires a cause. However, God never had a beginning; He has always existed. Therefore, God doesn’t need a cause.
The second convincing group of evidence relates to the design of the universe. If design exists, it is only logical that a designer designed and made it. If you are walking along a beach, and see the words “Greg was here” drawn in the sand, you would automatically assume that someone named Greg had been there and had drawn those letters into the sand. Why do you think that, though? By evolutionary standards, could not these words have been eroded into the sand by wave action? No, it would be completely ludicrous to think that. But why exactly is it ludicrous to believe that the words “Greg was here” did not come about by natural causes? The answer: those words contain information. The problem (for atheists) is that we see information all around us in nature. Darwinist Richard Dawkins, who is a professor of zoology at Oxford University, has stated that the message found in just a single amoeba is so large that it would fill up 1,000 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica! That is a great deal of information. Furthermore, information must come from a mind. How can Darwinian evolution explain the information that we see in nature? It simply cannot! The only logical explanation is that God created it and put it there!
Finally, I think that the existence of morality gives great evidence for the existence of God. You as an atheist may state that if there was a God, then there would be no evil in the world. But here is my question to you: what is evil? The answer: evil is the deviation from the way things should be. How then do we know the way things should be? The only way to know the way things should be is by having a higher standard to compare the world to. God is that standard. If there is no God, everything comes down to your personal likes and dislikes. We have already determined that information cannot appear by natural means, and as morality is not a physical thing, it cannot be produced by any means of evolution. So morality cannot come from evolution, and it also cannot come from within us. If it came from within, what would stop you from changing your mind about the principle “murder is wrong?” Some atheists claim that morality comes from society, but that simply cannot be the case. If society dictated good and evil, then the Holocaust would have been completely moral, but the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa would not have been. The German society was (on the whole) behind Hitler, and his elimination of the Jews. Does that make it moral to commit genocide? I doubt it! The majority of society was against Martin Luther King Jr. and black rights for a very long time. Does that make it immoral to fight racism? I believe not! Therefore, morality has to come from someone that is above all people and societies. That is the only way a real moral law can exist. Admittedly, there are some atheists that deny that the moral law exists at all. They are sorely mistaken. If I was to walk up to an atheist who espoused this sort of thinking and punch him in the jaw and break it, I think he would probably call the police and report me. But wait a second: if a moral law does not exist, then what is wrong with me breaking this atheist’s jaw? Nothing! You see, he really does follow a moral law.
In conclusion, the existence of the God of the people who call themselves Christians is almost undeniable! The fact that God had to cause the universe to come into being, the fact that information could only have come from an intelligent being (God), and the fact that without God morality would not exist are all incredible evidence for the existence of God!
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