Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my second episode. In the previous episode I spoke about critical thinking; how to determine the quality of a truth-claim; and the importance of having a worldview. I suggested to you that there is one worldview that fits all five criteria of truth better than the others. Tonight, we are going to lay the groundwork for that worldview. Tonight’s discussion is going to be about the existence of God.
Do you believe in God? When people used to ask me this question I would answer in the affirmative and go on to tell them who or what I thought God was. Look up at the night sky and you will see a tiny section of stars that are part of the vast grandeur of the universe. My God was somewhere out there. The people who had passed away were somewhere out there. The idea of God and an afterlife was all so distant that it was irrelevant to my daily life. I suspect there are many others who feel the same way I did. I am fortunate beyond measure to have the opportunity to sit here tonight and tell you that your perspective on God does not have to be like mine was.
We cannot entirely prove God, but what we can prove suggests beyond a reasonable doubt that He is real. Furthermore, the evidence allows us to perform a sort of process of elimination that brings us to the God described in the Christian Bible. The other ancient religions appear to be in conflict with the discoveries that have been revealed to us through humanity’s advancement. One could write many volumes on the evidence that suggests the existence of God. For this discussion, I’m going to distil the evidence into three arguments.
Argument number one is the unmoved mover or first cause argument. Our universe is not infinite, it had a beginning. The Big Bang has been the prevailing theory on dating the universe and describing the moments it began. Scientists have championed this model because of the reliability of general relativity – the theory from which Big Bang was extrapolated. However, they can’t see what happened before Big Bang because prior to that moment the laws of physics break down. This is where the unmoved mover steps in. The God of the Bible is the only God who is described to pre-exist and be unbound to space and time.
The universe around us predicates the necessity for an unmoved mover. We can’t study the moments prior to Big Bang, but in the moments we can study we have never observed spontaneous creation from nothing. Look around you. You can’t find anything that didn’t come from some material or some causal agent before it. Allowing the universe to appear from nothing is to discard what you can test by observation for theories that are beyond on the purview of the scientific method. A universe from nothing requires more faith than a universe from God.
There is yet another element to the unmoved mover argument. To understand it, let’s take a deeper look into what a first cause actually is. Consider the laws of nature. It is truth that the laws of nature have never caused an event to happen. The laws of nature simply describe events that are already taking place. C.S. Lewis does an excellent job illustrating this in the following example:
Imagine yourself standing at a billiards table. The laws of nature will tell you exactly what will happen when you take the cue and strike the cue ball. Momentum and inertia can be used to predict with great precision which ball will travel where. But you still have to strike the ball. You are the causal agent that must choose in your mind to set the event in motion.
But let’s say for instance that you and the billiards table are on a ship in the middle of the ocean. A wave hits the side of the ship and the force rocks the billiards table, causing the ball to move. But the wave is also an event, so what caused the wave? Undoubtedly, it was the wind transferring its energy to the water. But the wind is also an event, so what caused the wind? Using the laws of nature you can trace each event to a precursor event that set it in motion. You can follow this regression all the way to the edge of space and time. What you can’t do is observe the laws of nature causing an event to happen. That requires an agent. An agent whom must be outside of space and time feeding events into the system. In the Bible, God is described as a Being influencing events from outside of space and time.
Reason tells us that God preexisted the universe and created it, and the next argument reinforces that claim. Argument number two is called rational intelligibility. Albert Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. You see, we can describe our universe using the language of mathematics. We read it as we would read words on a page. We can also read DNA. Both the universe and DNA have syntax. Reading the universe using math is what allows people like Elon Musk to land a rocket right side up on a launch pad after it falls from the atmosphere.
Isn’t it interesting that everywhere we go, if we see writing, we immediately assume that a mind was behind it. A written word is proof of the complex (which is a mind) producing the simple (which is a word). The simple being derived from the complex is in direct contradiction to the reductionist materialist worldview that is commonly accepted as the most advanced or enlightened way of looking at the world. And yet you yourself can prove that simple comes from complex by writing or speaking anything.
So why should that not also be the case with the universe? We can read it like we would read words, so why not follow the same reasoning we use everywhere else and suggest that the universe comes from a mind? Picture yourself on a beach. Your walking through the surf as the sun rises and all of a sudden you come upon your name written in the sand. What do you think? Do you think that someone wrote it there or that the waves and wind hit the sand in just the right way to produce your name?
And here’s where things get really interesting. The Gospel of John starts off by saying “In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through Him, and nothing was created except through Him.” In that verse the Word is Christ and so Christ spoke and created habitable order from chaos. That sounds an awful lot like an intelligible universe to me.
But let us allow for a moment that billions of years ago unicellular molecules existed on planet earth and evolved across the ages into the person you are right now. Where did these molecules come from? This is another prime origin question that cannot be answered by science. Science tells us that new information cannot come from nothing. We have never observed new information that did not have a precursor. But let’s say that despite huge improbability, the molecules were able to leave a foreign planet on a projectile and land on earth. Somehow surviving the extreme cold and the immense distance of travel. How does our molecule turn into a man?
Molecules to man evolution suffers a fatal and yet unanswered problem which is our third argument for the existence of God. Argument number three is the Cambrian Explosion. Under the earth’s surface exists a strata of rock where the fossils of 80 – 90% of the animal phyla (or body plans) appear all at once. As if they exploded into existence. This part of the fossil record stands in stark contradiction to evolutionary theory. But it happens to fit in nicely with the creation account in Genesis.
We know the universe had a beginning, which means that it had to have a beginner. We can produce wonderful technology and predict events by reading the syntax of our universe. When we read something anywhere else, we assume that what we are reading comes from a mind. Molecules to man evolution doesn’t appear to be a viable story based on fossil representation of the Cambrian Explosion of life.
So together we have explored three powerful evidences for the existence of God. Maybe they don’t really prove anything. Or maybe they are part of a grand story that explains everything. In some sense, it is a futile effort to prove the existence of God. God Himself puts forward in the Bible that we must have faith, not proof. For whatever reason, God set it up so that we would have to choose Him because we love Him, not because he is the only choice.
I hope that you have found these first two discussions helpful. If you’re like me, you are very cautious about coming to faith because culture would indicate that you have to be anti-intellectual or dogmatic to believe in the Bible. I have studied it cover to cover and I can tell you that this is not true. It is possible that we are dealing with the most sophisticated text known to man. I’m convinced that despite thousands of years of study, we are not even close to tapping the wells of its information. I love freedom of speech and freedom of expression; I love science; I love technological progress; and I love the God of the Bible. They are not mutually exclusive in any sense.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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