Does God Exist?

“In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers, but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.”
-- Time, 1998

Cover of Newsweek: "Science Finds God”

“The achievements of modern science seem to contradict religion and undermine faith. But for a growing number of scientists, the same discoveries offer support for spirituality and hints of the very nature of God…Once, science and religion were viewed as two fundamentally different, even antagonistic ways of pursuing that quest, and science stood accused of smothering faith and killing God. Now, it may strengthen belief.”
-- Newsweek 1988

“For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
-- Dr. Robert Jastrow
Founder and Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute

Have you ever wondered why there is something rather than absolutely nothing? Why does the universe even exist? Has it always been there or did it come into existence? These are all questions in which the answers lead you to God or to absolutely nothing.

Until recently many scientists still believed that the universe was eternal, that it had always existed. The reason scientists liked this view was because if the universe has always been here, there would be no need for a God to create it.

However, the view that the universe is eternal has fallen under severe attack. There is a virtual consensus among contemporary astronomers and physicists that the universe did in fact have a beginning.

There are four options that explain the presence of the universe.
1. The universe is eternal.
2. The universe is an illusion
3. The universe came into being by nothing
4. The universe came into being by something.

Of each of these four options only one really seems to be reasonable. The first option contradicts the findings of science. The second one doesn’t make any sense. The third one accepts the fact that the universe came into being but contradicts itself in saying that something can come from nothing. The fourth one has to be the best option. The universe came into being by the power of something, God. This is called the First Cause Argument.

Walter Nusbaum brings up the following analogy. Think anbout everything that surrounds your life. Is there anything that ever happens without any sort of cause? In fact, everything we think of has some prior cause. If this is true, then it makes sense that the universe had a cause too!

A term you might want to familiarize yourself with is the Kalam Argument. It is a three part argument that says that everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, and therefore the universe has a cause.

There is another popular argument that is called the argument from design. It says that anything with order and complexity required a designer because nature does not produce complexity and information.

Again Nusbaum gives us the following thought. You wake up one morning and your wife had poured your alphabet cereal in your bowl. If you saw the words “Good morning, Honey” spelled out, would you think it was just a fluke chance that the cereal letters came out of the box like that or would you think your wife did that?

When you look at the complexity of our world, universe and even your own body are you going to say that it just randomly happened or that it was a designer who created it that way? Christians believe in God for many different reasons but one of the largest is because His creation screams out about his existence.