Category Archives: Existence of God

Evil, Pain, and Suffering, Existence of God, Religion

What Do God and Can Openers Have to Do with Each Other?

1 Comment

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Woody Allen has never been one to shy away from tackling big issues in his movies.  In the movie Hannah and Her Sisters there is a classic scene that depicts Woody Allen’s character first talking to a Catholic priest about converting to Catholicism and then announcing to his Jewish parents his decision.  His mother and father react negatively to his announcement, to say the least.

Below is a 2 minute clip.  Make sure you watch all the way to the end of the clip for a hilarious punchline.  I couldn’t stop laughing.

Caution:  The clip contains one use of the “H” word, so consider yourself warned.

Atheism, Church History, Existence of God, Human Nature, Philosophy, Religion, Skeptics

Does Mankind Really Need God?

8 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In studying church history, I’ve  been looking at the period often called the Enlightenment.  During this time, a movement swept through Europe which attempted to throw off the authority of divine revelation and place man on his rightful throne as the center of all knowledge and wisdom.

Historian Clyde Manschreck suggested that:

Man’s rational powers in league with science made dependence on God seemingly unnecessary.  Men were confident that they had the tools with which to unlock the mysteries of the universe.  Former distrust of human reason and culture, as seen in the traditional emphases on depravity, original sin, predestination, and self-denial, gave way to confidence in reason, free will, and the ability of man to build a glorious future.

Enlightenment values have continued to this day.  Many of the skeptics I know have a deep distrust of authority figures and tend to think of their own abilities as more than adequate to get them through life successfully.  One skeptical friend of mine told me that the only person he could count on to solve any of his problems was himself.  If all you need is yourself, then what need have you of God?

The Enlightenment, in some respects, strikes me as a philosophical temper tantrum against the authority and rightful rule of God over man.  Is man truly able to go it alone?  Is the world getting better due to secular human wisdom?  How you answer these questions has a lot to do with whether you believe in or trust God.

If man needs no authority over him, if he can get the job done on his own, than the Enlightenment was correct.  God, as another friend of mine recently told me, is unnecessary.  We can get along just fine without him.

I don’t know about you, but I think that coming out of the 20th century, a century with more killing of human life than all other centuries combined, you have to be nuts to think we can solve our own problems.  But that’s just me… maybe we just hit a little bump in the road.

Atheism, Evil, Pain, and Suffering, Existence of God, Morality, Philosophy

Can Evil Exist Without God?

27 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Many skeptics of Christianity claim that the existence of evil in the world proves that a good God cannot exist.  I believe this viewpoint is exactly backwards.

If you truly believe that there is evil in the world, then you must believe that there is good in the world as well.  We can’t know what is wrong unless we know what is right.  We can’t know a crooked line unless we know a straight line.  We can’t know injustice unless we know justice.

But if there is real good and real evil in the world, then there must be an ultimate standard, a measuring stick by which to judge goodness and badness.  This measuring stick must be perfect, so that all moral activity can be compared to it, just like determining the straightness of any line requires a perfectly straight line by which to compare.

Here is the argument summarized in short from:

  1. evil implies good
  2. good implies a perfect standard by which to define it

Now, if you believe that there exists real, objective evil in the world – evil that any person from any place or time would agree is really evil – then you are stuck with admitting that there must be a perfect standard of goodness also in existence, a moral law.

Where does this perfect standard of goodness come from?  The Christian answer is that this standard originates in the nature of God.  God’s own nature is the perfect standard of good, and God has always existed as the first cause of everything.

If you’re a person who wants to escape this answer, you can claim that this moral law just sort of exists, like a floating “cloud” of goodness that just permeates the universe.  But the Christian can ask: “Where did this floating ‘cloud’ of goodness come from?”

You could say that the objective moral law, the perfect standard of goodness, comes from blind, purposeless, natural processes (the standard atheist account of everything that exists).  The Christian can ask: “Why should anyone feel obliged to follow and obey a perfect moral standard that comes from atoms randomly banging together over billions of years?”

I don’t think there is a good answer to that question.  The person who wants to affirm the existence of evil while denying the existence of God finds himself caught in a deep hole of irrationality.  He asks us to obey moral laws that come from rocks.

Some atheists, like Nietzsche, saw where this hole was leading and bailed out quickly.  They affirmed that there is no such thing as real moral evil in the world.  What we think is evil is really just our personal preferences.  You like to kill people and I don’t.  I like red and you like blue.

The consistent person who wants to affirm the existence of evil really must affirm the existence of a personal moral lawgiver – God.  If you don’t think God exists, then you should stop complaining about all the evil in the world.  You’re not making any sense.

Existence of God

What is the Cause of the Universe?

25 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

See if you can follow this argument, which is one form of the cosmological argument.

  1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
  2. The universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

The first premise should be uncontroversial.  If something begins to exist, it needs a cause of its existence.

The second premise draws upon the findings of science in the last century.  We have Einstein’s theory of relativity dictating a beginning to space, time, and matter.  We have enormous evidence for the Big Bang, which is the moment the universe exploded into existence about 13. 7 billion years ago.  We also have the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the amount of energy available for work is decreasing in the universe – a universe that is decaying cannot be infinitely old because it would have run out of usable energy by now.

To sum up the last paragraph, science seems to have shown that the universe did indeed have a beginning.  All of time, space, and matter came into existence 13.7 billion years ago.  If that is the case, then the universe needs a cause, and that cause cannot be a part of the universe, because nothing can cause itself to exist.

So what kind of cause are we talking about?  Based on the cosmological argument, we can deduce that this cause of the universe has the following properties: self-existence, timelessness, nonspatiality, immateriality, unimaginable power, and personhood.

Self-existence because whatever is the cause of the universe must ultimately be uncaused.  If it is not, then the argument just moves back one step.  There has to be a first uncaused cause.

This cause cannot exist in the time/space/material universe because then it would exist within the very universe it created.  That is impossible.

The cause must be incredibly powerful to have created the entire universe and all of its physical laws.

The cause must be personal because an impersonal force would be deterministic and mechanistic, not possessing free will.  A mechanistic being only operates according to the programming it received from something else.  But if the cause of the universe received programming from something else, then we have again not provided the answer to the cause of the universe.  We have just found a middle-man.  The cause had to make a choice to create and only beings who are personal can make choices.

All of these are attributes of the God of Christianity.  That is not to say we have proven the exact God of Christianity exists, but we have certainly made a persuasive argument that a being with some of his qualities exists.

Now that’s something to think about.

Existence of God

Does the Appearance of Design Prove God's Existence?

6 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Certainly the appearance of design in the natural world makes a strong case for the existence of a super-intelligent being, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Many people look at the world around them and marvel at its functionality and complexity.  A common reaction to the functionality and complexity of the world is to wonder who or what made it that way.

Based on that intuition about the world, theists, those who believe in a single creator God, have made an argument about the existence of God in the following way.

  1. Every design has a designer.
  2. The universe exhibits complex design.
  3. Therefore the universe has a designer.

Premise 1 is fairly straightforward.  If something can be shown to be designed, it must have had a designer.

Premise 2, however, requires evidence.  Below is an extended quotation from William Lane Craig, one of the foremost Christian scholars of our day.

During the last thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends on a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the big bang itself.  Scientists once believed that whatever the initial conditions of the universe, eventually intelligent life might evolve.  But we now know that our existence is balanced on a knife’s edge.  It seems vastly more probable that a life-prohibiting universe rather than a life-permitting universe such as ours should exist.  The existence of intelligent life depends on a conspiracy of initial conditions that must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable.  For example, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball.  British physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation (without which planets could not exist) is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes, at least.  He also estimates that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in 10,100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the big bang’s low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10 to the 123rd power.  There are [many] such quantities and constants present in the big bang that must be fine-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. And it’s not just each quantity that must be finely tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely tuned. Therefore, improbability is added to improbability to improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.

It is not just the physical conditions that must be present in the universe for life to exist that exhibit complex design.  There is also the issue of life itself.

Living cells are composed of DNA.  DNA consists of nitrogen bases called adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine which are commonly represented by the letters A, T, C and G.  These letters form genetic codes which provide the instructions for the building and replicating of all living things.  The four letter genetic code is identical to any other written language.  The sequences of genetic letters spell out exact instructions just like a sentence in English would.

To give you an idea of how complex life is, a single-celled amoeba contains the equivalent of 1,000 sets of an encyclopedia in its DNA.  The human genome is composed of about three billion nucleotide base pairs.  Years ago, Carl Sagan estimated that there is the equivalent of 20 million books of information stored in the human brain.  This number is considered to be conservative now.  The amount of information contained in living cells and the human brain is truly staggering, and thus the conclusion of complex design seems easily warranted.

Before we move on, I need to quickly add that the evidence presented above of design in the fine tuning of the universe to support life and of the composition of life itself is merely scratching the surface.  Many fantastic books have been written in the past 20 years detailing far more evidence of design in the natural world than what was mentioned above, so hopefully I have just whet your appetite to read more!

But now, if we have shown that the universe is indeed characterized by complex design, then who or what is the designer?

I think we can make the following conclusions about the designer.  The designer is super-intelligent and purposeful.  The intelligence of the designer far surpasses any kind of human intelligence ever seen.  The designer is purposeful because all designs have purposes behind them.  We are not dealing with a being who is randomly creating with no purpose.

Have we arrived at the God of the Bible?  No, we haven’t, but we have certainly made a strong case for the existence of a designer who has at least a couple of the attributes of the God of the Bible, and we have eliminated the possibility that no such designer exists.  We haved ruled out the possibility that the universe is caused by some irrational or purely non-intelligent source.

Theistic arguments for the existence of a Designer confirm the intuition that many people have had since the dawn of man.  To say that everything we see in the world around us just happened by chance is simply unbelievable.