By the Nightwatch Priest
The atheist does not believe that God exist. The agnostic says that he does not know, and that nothing can be known about God. The Christian claims to know God personally. Who is right?
Does God exist and if so can his existence be proved? What reasons do Christians bring forward to support their conviction that there is a God and that he can be known? It is not possible to prove that there is a God by reason or logical argument? This should be made quite clear at the outset.
It is possible, for instance, to prove that the sum of the angels of a triangle is equal to two right angles, but that is only because we are allowed to assure certain truth before stating the theorem. These are ”anxious ” upon which all scientific knowledge therefore, like religious knowledge, rest upon a foundation of faith, but obviously, in the case of God, we cannot be ‘given’ anything more ultimate than God on which to base the logical proof of his existence. The existence of God himself is the ultimate, the axiom, the ground of all thoughts and we have to begin reasoning with this self -evident assumption, this act of faith.
This fact, that all thinking and reason pre-supposes the existence of God is known as the ontological argument and was first expounded by Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages.
That is why thinkers or philosophers, who begin by denying the existence of God, are compelled to reintroduce him into their systems under some other name. The living personal God of the Bible is shown out at the front door only to be readmitted as the ‘Absolute’ or the ‘Life Force’ or the ‘Principle of Integration’ and so on. Man cannot think, much less live without God. It should also be noted that if the existence of God could be proved rationally, it would be the end of all faith. In that case we should be compelled to believe. But God does not will us to believe by compulsion but by the insight of faith. That is why his existence can never be as tangible and obvious as say a bus or the fact that one and one make two.The God of scripture not only reveals himself but also hides himself both in order that he may be sought and also that a man might ”walk by faith and not by sight”
But although the existence of God cannot be proved that does not mean that there is no evidence for our belief in God .Faith is not credulity, it is not “a leap in the dark ” -it is based upon fact. What then are the facts in human life and experience which may be taken as evidence for the existence of God? Five may be selected because of their outstanding importance.
Nature: The vast and mysterious universe around us is convincingly evidence for the existence of God -so convincingly that, as Paul posits out even the most corrupted pagan has read of the existence of God in the open book of nature. “For the invisible things of him since the of nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit) (out of nothing comes nothing) and ”that what is seen has not been made out of things which do appear” (Heb 11:3). These must be an ultimate ground of all existence, an uncaused cause an ”unmoved mover’ from whose creative activity all existence has issued, and is still held in being. Several of astronomers on the ground of scientific knowledge have pointed out that the universe must have had a definite beginning in time; it is not eternal. If then it came into being at a definite time (the second law of thermo-dynamics, which teaches that cyclic universes are impossible in the same way as perpetual motion machines are impossible.
It must have issued from some ultimate ground and cause, since something cannot come from nothing. It was in fact created by the Creator. The cosmological argument is powerfully reinforced by the teleological argument, the argument from design and purpose. These are unmistakable signs of designs throughout the universe and they are most evident in the Kingdom of life. How perfectly everything fits into its environment; how exquisitely perfect is the functioning of all the organs of the body; if there is no designer what is the alternative? To be continued.