Does God exist?

Whatever your initial reaction, there is no skirting the reality that God’s existence has huge ramifications for how we answer life’s deepest questions. Are we just a cosmic accident, or are we intentionally created? Is the universe ultimately meaningless, or are our lives imbued with purpose? Is death a full-stop in the sentence of reality, or is there the possibility for life beyond the grave? These are not trivial questions. But whether God exists or not is a matter of intense controversy.

Some vocal critics of religion are convinced that God is nothing more than a delusion.

Borrowing from the Greek philosopher Xenophanes, the argument goes that God is merely a psychological fiction, or a projection of our desires upwards into the heavens. These critics flip the creation script, arguing that human beings created God in our own image. And since God only exists in the mind, serving as a psychological crutch for the weak, the confident assertion plastered around the internet is that there is no evidence for God. That belief in God is akin to belief in sky fairies or Santa Claus.

So what does the Christian story point to as evidence for belief in God?

This is not an easy question to answer to everyone’s satisfaction, partly because of the hiddenness of God, where God isn’t as obvious as we may want Him to be (which we’ve tackled in another video), and partly because we are all influenced by different experiences and persuaded by different kinds of evidence. That said, what I find surprising about the Christian story is that far from requiring you to take a blind leap into the dark, Christian faith is described as following the evidence into the light.

Christianity has always been evidence-based.

In fact in Hebrews 11, a chapter all about biblical faith or the kind of faith God celebrates, verse 6 enumerates how if you are going to truly trust God, then at the very least, as a necessary precondition, you need to be convinced or have good reasons to believe, that God actually exists.

So the question of God’s existence is one that the Bible says is fundamental, because if God does not exist, then the Christian story may be full of some good ideas, but it cannot ultimately be good news. Which is why the Christian story is also committed to exploring how faith has its reasons.

You might be surprised to learn that over the centuries Christian thinkers have put forward roughly two dozen families of serious arguments for the existence of God that are informed by all manner of academic disciplines. The bulk of these arguments are based on publicly available evidence, rather than just private religious experience, so since we are all wired differently, let me give you a brief sampler of the case for God.

Firstly, God seems to be the best explanation for the universe we inhabit.

Since, by definition, God is the Creator, and is not Himself part of the material creation, we cannot simply travel to some remote corner of the universe to find God. But just because I cannot point directly at God is no reason to think that there is no evidence for God. When we walk into a grand cathedral, we hardly expect to find the architect inside the structure, and yet the beauty of the building, the intricate design, and the very existence of the cathedral itself, offers a smorgasbord of evidence from which we can infer that there is, in fact, an architect. Which is precisely the case when it comes to God and our cosmos.

Psalm 19:1 claims:

The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of His hands.

That creation itself speaks. Romans 1:20 echoes a similar sentiment, claiming that the invisible God can be clearly perceived through what has been made. The claim of the Christian story is that this entire universe is a grand cathedral punctuated with beauty, purpose, and design; a claim that is supported by various lines of evidence from which we can make justified inferences to the best explanation.

That there is a universe at all—why there is something rather than nothing—has given rise to a family of contingency arguments, arguing that God is a necessary being who serves as the foundation of all contingent reality.

That our universe had a beginning in the finite past—where time, space, matter and energy came into existence out of nothing—is why Greek philosophers, Islamic scholars, and Christian theologians have long defended various cosmological arguments, arguing that God is the eternal first cause in the finite causal chain.

That our universe bears all the hallmarks of design—being finely-tuned in dozens of relevant fundamental features to allow for biological life—serves as the basis for a series of teleological arguments, arguing upwards from the improbability of the chance explanation to opt instead for a designer. Not to mention the more intuitive sense of sheer wonder and beauty as we observe the universe, which occasionally breaks in upon us as signals of transcendence: a sunrise over the ocean or a midnight meteor shower, a sublime piece of music or a child’s laughter.

When you step back to take all of it in, intuitively or philosophically, God seems to be the best explanation for this grand cathedral that is the universe we inhabit.

Second, closer to home, God’s existence makes the most sense of our rich human experience. 

Genesis 1:26-27 makes the claim that all human beings bear God’s image. Now that’s interesting. The logic of the author is that beyond the inert matter that was ordered in creation, and above all the diversity of the animal kingdom, that human beings distinctly reveal what God is like to the rest of creation, which is a claim that is entirely defensible when you consider how distinct and enigmatic human beings truly are. That we are:

• Rational beings, capable of consciously engaging in powerful abstract reasoning.

• Relational beings, innately longing to love and be loved, even self sacrificially.

• Moral beings, acting upon our conscience that good and evil are real categories.

• Purposeful beings, obsessed with contributing something meaningful to the world.

• Spiritual beings, hard-wired to reach beyond the physical world for something more, as is evidenced by the universal spirituality of the human race throughout all cultures.

These are just a small sample of the richest things that are innate to our human experience; things that are difficult to explain on a purely secular register without either diminishing them or explaining them away. Which is why a whole range of arguments—from consciousness and morality and reason and desire—are offered by Christian philosophers, all with the baseline conviction that God’s existence makes the most sense of the dignity and depth of the human experience.

But let me move beyond nature and human experience, what theologians refer to as the general revelation that God has given to all people everywhere, to instead hone in on special revelation,  where God has spoken to specifically reveal himself within our space-time, ultimately entering the grand cathedral by becoming human in history.

The Christian story claims that Jesus is the invisible God made visible, providing evidence of God’s existence through the fulfilment of detailed prophecy, testifying to God’s foreknowledge of the future, and through performing miracles, revealing the hand of a supernatural agent. Now whilst both the argument from prophecy and the argument from miracles can be straw-manned or poorly presented, serious versions of these arguments can be made, and the resurrection of Jesus is undoubtedly the strongest.

For those willing to study the evidence, there is literally a resurrection shaped hole in history, where the historical facts on the ground can only be fully explained by the claim of the earliest Christians: that God supernaturally raised Jesus from the dead. By definition, no miracle can take place without a supernatural cause, and so if Jesus was raised from the dead then that miracle provides good reason to believe in the existence of God. 

Now I cannot prove to anyone that God exists. After all proofs are a mathematical reality, reserved for abstract equations. But the Christian story encourages us to weigh the evidence with an open mind and heart. It remains confident that if we follow the testimony that God has left to Himself in the heavens, humanity, and history, that the most reasonable inference in light of all the evidence, the best conclusion, is that God does, indeed, exist.