Does God Exist?
Introduction
This edition of the cartoon Doonesbury cartoon ran on Easter Sunday. [show cartoon on screen]. Trudeau's not so subtle point is that anyone who denies the theory of evolution is some backwoods redneck who might as well be a member of the flat-earth society.
We are not going to debate the merits of the evolutionary theory. Among Christians themselves, there is considerable debate about how God created the world – did He do it in six literal 24-hour days, or did He use evolutionary processes over an extended period of time?
Yet, there are many who believe that anyone who believes in a Creator God at all is an unscientific, superstitious rube. In his book, A Brief History of Time, to the great scientist, Stephen Hawking, claims that everything can be explained without God except for possibly the first few microseconds of the Big Bang. If that is the case, then whether or not God exists does not matter because He is completely irrelevant.
That leaves us with two questions, not just the one that is the title of our discussion. The questions are:
- Does God exists, and
- Does it matter?
Not surprisingly, the Bible addresses these two questions. One of the places it addresses these questions is in Psalm 19.
Psalm 19
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. 3 There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. 4 Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, 5 which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. 6 It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat.
7 The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. 8 The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. 9 The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous. 10 They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb. 11 By them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward. 12 Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults. 13 Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then will I be blameless, innocent of great transgression. 14 May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.
The absurdity of life without God
The psalmist says, "The heavens declare the glory of God." In verse 4, he says that "there is no speech or language where their voice is not heard." He is saying that the existence of God is self-evident. In a sense, it requires no proof because all of creation tells us the glory of the Creator.
Yet, you might say, "There are other ways to explain the world without referencing God. So, it is possible to live in the world and see what the psalmist sees and still not believe in God." Well, is it? Is it really possible to live as if there is no God?
Here, we are going to look at four very important aspects of life, four things that both the atheist and the non-atheist believe in that do not make any sense if there is no God.
Morality
The first is rather obvious. It is morality. If there is no God, how do you define what is good and what is evil? Good and evil are not scientific terms. You cannot derive morality from evolution. The only moral, if you can even call it that, is the survival of the fittest. That isn't a description of how things ought to be, but simply how the evolutionists believes things are.
Yet, all of us, Christian and non-Christian, theist and atheist, all of us would agree that some things are wrong and some things are right. We all make moral judgments. But, on what basis do you make your moral judgments? If you have ever said, "This is right" or "That is wrong", then you have made a moral judgment. You have set up a standard of good and bad but can you justify your beliefs about good and evil without God?
You might say, "Come on, Mark. We all know in our hearts what is right and what is wrong." How? Are morals just instincts? If so, can you really call them morals? Can any activity be judged either good or bad, particularly if you believe in survival of the fittest?
You might say that society determines right and wrong. After all, that is what society is. It is the collective intuition of many. Most people's intuition are not like Saddam Hussein's. But is culture and society a reliable guide to morality? One hundred a fifty years ago, Southern culture said that slavery is okay. Fifty years ago, separate but equal was considered morally good. Wouldn't you say that society was wrong in what it did to Blacks both 150 and 50 years ago?
In the not so distant past in Afghanistan, women were not allowed to be educated, to drive, or to hold a job, and had to be completely covered from head to toe whenever they left the home. Is it morally acceptable to oppress women like that?
Without God, all moral claims are mere power plays. Morals and rules are nothing more than a way for those who have power to subjugate those who do not. There is no way to determine which morals are better, what is right and wrong. There is no right and wrong, only power.
As soon as a person makes a claim that there is such a thing as good and evil, he is assuming that there is such a thing as a moral law by which we distinguish good and evil. If there is such a thing as a moral law, then there must be such a thing as a moral lawgiver. If there is no moral lawgiver, then there is no moral law. If there is no moral law, then there is no such thing as good. If there is no good, then there is no evil.
Beauty
Have you ever listened to a song or a piece of music and found your heart welling up with emotion, maybe even cried? Have you ever gazed at a sunset and been bewitched by its beauty? What is that?
I'm not a very emotional person, which might be the understatement of the day. Tricia and I have only been to New York once, been to one Broadway play and it was Les Miserables. We enjoyed it so much, we bought the CD's. On Monday night, we went to see University High School's production of it. Let me tell you, it was phenomenal. It wasn't just good for a high school play. It was great for any play. Well, every time I listen to the CD, and even when I saw it at the high school, there are a couple of times when your heart is just in your throat. It isn't just the sadness of the story, it is the beauty of the music. It is absolutely moving.
Now, if there is no God. How do you explain that? In other words, if there is no God, then I don't have a soul. You don't have a soul. We are purely physical beings. That means that every pleasure, what we call beauty is not really beauty, it is merely a physical response we have to certain stimuli. Sound waves bounce off your eardrums in such a way that it causes certain chemicals to be released into your body. A beautiful sunset is nothing more than light reflecting off of dust in the atmosphere in such a way that it is physically pleasing. In other words, there is no beauty. There is no pleasure. There is merely physical response to physical stimuli.
Yet, there is something in the human heart that says, "No. That can't be. There is something beautiful about Mozart and Monet. The splendor of the beach or the grandeur of the mountains is not just pleasant physical reflection of light against the eyes. There is more than that.
This is very similar to our third point.
Love
A few years ago, US News had an article on this very subject. If there is no God and we are merely biological creatures and not spiritual beings, then love must be explained in purely scientific terms. What scientists in this article concluded is that love is merely a chemical response to hormones in our bodies. Oxytocin is the love hormone and can explain human loving behavior.
When a mother gives birth, Oxytocin is released into her body, acting as a natural tranquilizer, lowering a new mother's blood pressure, blunting her sensitivity to pain and stress, and helping her view her child more as a bundle of joy than as a burden.
That heady feeling we call romance—it is not love. It is not even infatuation. It just means your brain just got a full dose of oxytocin. Researches have found that it is oxytocin that bonds rodents together and assume that the same is true of human beings.[1]
Is love nothing more than a chemical reaction? Is the feeling of love that you have for your children, your friends, your spouse, nothing more than your brain's response to a chemical? If there is no God, if we are merely products of evolution as social creatures, then the feeling of love is no different from the feelings of euphoria a person gets when they get drunk. It is just the brain's response to a chemical. You get a shot of oxytocin. I get a puff of marijuana. We both feel good.
If there is no God, then there really cannot be such a thing as love, hate, or even beauty. All human behavior is simply a biological response to various stimuli because all human behavior must be explained in purely naturalistic terms.
However, we all know intuitively that this must not be true. We all know that there is something called love that goes beyond hormones. This means, there must be more to reality than the natural order. There must be a God.
Meaning
Even more important than morality, or beauty, or even love is meaning. Why are you here? What is the purpose of your life? Does it have any meaning?
If the world came into being through a Big Bang and will either cease to exist through a Big Bang or a Big whimper. In either case, the assumption is that world came from nothing and will end with nothing. If the world began in nothingness and will end in nothingness, then how is it possible for life to have meaning at all? Human life is then nothing more than grass that is here today and gone tomorrow.
Why worry about global warming, the environment, etc. … If the world came from nothing and will eventually end in nothing, then all of our efforts to save the planet are nothing more than attempts to delay the inevitable nothingness by a meaningless period of time.
Who cares, then if the grown up white germs subjugate the black germs? What meaning, then, does your life have? Does it matter if you live a good life or a bad life? Does it matter if you make an impact with your life or not? Eventually, whatever impact you make will be lost.
My daughters and I like to build sandcastles at the beach. Every year, they get larger and more elaborate as we obsess for hours over their details. Yet, it building sandcastles, there is always that moment of reality when either someone steps on it or a wave destroys it.
If there is no God, then your whole life, your greatest accomplishment is no different than my sandcastles. It was a moment of pleasure, but full of frivolity.
Yet, as human beings, we long for meaning. Our hearts ache to know why. This longing, this ache in our heart for meaning is itself a signpost, a beacon pointing us to a reality beyond the physical world.
As Blaise Pascal said, "We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart…The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." But these reasons of the heart are not irrational reasons. There is evidence all throughout creation that our hearts are right. Here is where the psalmist takes us.
The testimony of creation to God
Theologians like to speak of the two books of God—the two means by which God reveals Himself to us and speaks to us. One book of God, of course, is the Bible. Here, we have the clear Word of God. The other book is creation. Through creation, God speaks to us as well, telling us of His glory.
That is what the psalmist says. He writes:
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.
When we look into the heavens and see the sun, the stars, and the moon, we are beholding the glory of God. When we consider that it is he who stretched out the heavens as a tent and sends the sun on its course, we cannot help but be amazed at His majesty.
In our area, you can see about 300 stars on a clear night. With a large telescope, you can see over 30 billion stars, while the total number of stars in the universe is estimated between 1020 and 1024[2]. To get a picture of that number, it is 10 followed by 24 zeros.
When you gaze into the heavens, the first thing that strikes you is the sheer vastness of it. Scientists used to believe that the universe was infinite in its size. Few scientists now believe that. Most scientists estimate that the universe is between 10 and 20 billion light-years across.[3] That means, traveling if you traveled at the speed of light, 670 million miles per hour, it would take you 10 to 20 billion years to go from one end of the universe to the other. By comparison, our solar system is one light day across. That means our solar system makes up less than one trillionth of the universe.
John Glenn, when he returned to space in the space shuttle in 1998 said, "To look up out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible."[4] When we look at the stars and gaze into the far reaches of the heavens, our minds confirm what our hearts already know. There is a God and He is greater than we ever imagined.
Look at the beauty and wonder of the earth, even the way the earth relates to the sun as the sun traverses the sky. Can you really believe that this all happened by chance, that it is nothing more than a cosmic accident? A change in the earth's distance from the sun by a mere 2% would make it uninhabitable. Not all planets have magnetic fields, and if the earth did not, the sun's radiation would destroy all life and if the moon did not exist, Jupiter's gravitational pull would have a catastrophic influence on the earth's axis.
Even scientists who deny the existence of God cannot help but to be in awe of this. The odds of life even being formed are astronomical. In their book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, geologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee state that life on our planet was merely the result of a "fortuitous assemblage" of the correct elements and "an intricate set of nearly irreproducible circumstances."[5]
Yet, even if those who deny God could explain life, which they cannot, they cannot possibly explain the enjoyment of beauty and pleasure. That we can find enjoyment in beauty and the delights of the earth are only explainable as gifts of God. Creation confirms the truth that there is a God, and He is a loving Creator who delights in giving pleasure.
God has not left us to wonder if He exists. He is shouting to us His presence. All of creation bears His name and declares His wonder and glory.
The reason we resist God
If God exists, and if the evidence is so obvious around us, then why do people deny his existence? The psalmist tells us, in a way. If there is a God, then there are many implications of this. If there is a God, then the things that we have always believed in are real. There is meaning to our lives. There is such a thing as beauty. Love is more than a chemically induced response. And there is such a thing as morality.
Notice what the psalmist does. In verses 1-6, he tells us how the heavens declare the glory of God. Then what does he talk about in the second half of the psalm? The law of God.
7 The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. 8 The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.
If there is a God, then ultimately, He is in charge. I am not an autonomous being, making my own laws and determining my own standard of right and wrong. Rather, there is a God and He is sovereign. He makes the laws and I am accountable to those laws.
In Romans 1, the Apostle Paul tells us that this is exactly what bothers us about God. We don't want to be held accountable to a higher power. We don't want to answer to someone else. So, Paul writes, we suppress the truth, we go into denial about God.
If there is a God, then there are moral absolutes. Then some things are right and some things are wrong. Furthermore, if there is God, then I will be held accountable for the wrong that I have done. There is justice.
Denial is a defense mechanism. We are afraid that, if there is a God, then He will give us what we deserve. That terrifies us because we all know, every last one of us, that we have not kept the law of which the psalmist speaks so fondly.
Yet, here is the irony. The irony is, in our attempt to protect our independence and our freedom from God, we have become slaves. We find ourselves either to be slaves to the boredom of a meaningless life, slaves to destructive behaviors that once were promised pleasure and now bring only misery, or slaves to the despair that this is as good as it gets.
That is the irony. In running to God to find freedom, we have become slaves. Yet, in an even greater irony, the God that we are running from has come running after us, not to enslave us, but to set us free.
That is why Jesus came. Jesus came. Jesus came to set us free both from our slavery to sin and from our fear of judgment. By dying on the cross, Jesus shows us that there is a moral lawgiver who is just. This just God must punish sin. However, He is also a gracious and forgiving God. On the cross, Jesus took the punishment for sin for all who would hope in Him.
What that means is, even though you are a sinner, even though you have violated the law of God, if you turn to Jesus and put your hope in Him, you do not have to fear God's justice because, through His life and death, He has satisfied the justice of God. By rising from the dead, He broke the power of sin and death as well, which means, if we come to Him, we no longer need to live as slaves.
[1]Can't do without
love: What science says about those tender feelings, by Shannon
Brownlee, US News and World Report, 2/15/99.
[2] Swenson, p. 146.
[3] Swenson, Richard A. More Than Meets the Eye, p. 142.
[4] Swenson, p. 141.
[5] Swensen, p. 151.