Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Evidences of God - part 1

These are my notes from last week's youth group.  We are looking at evidences of God to the objection "God doesn't exist.  If he does then prove it!!!"

How would you go about proving that atoms exist?

    No one has ever really seen an atom, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t evidence that suggests atoms are real.  In fact, science has seen enough evidence through experiments to be confident of the existence of atoms.

So what’s the difference when someone challenges us to prove God?  For some reason people tend to freak out when they are confronted with this challenge.  Is there a need to freak out?  Absolutely not!!

There are many things that man believes in but no one has ever actually seen.  For instance…time.  Time is something we cannot see but we know it exists.  How do we know it exists?  Time leaves evidence.  A person grows older.  A piece of bread deteriorates.  If it wasn’t for the passing of time these things could not happen.

What about love?  Can you see love?  No, you can only see the evidences of love, but you cannot see love itself.

So why freak out when people say “prove God exists.”  What we imagine them say is “If God exists then show me the physical evidence of his existence!”, but many times what they are really saying is “I’ll only believe in God when I see him!”

The problem with this is God is spirit.  Yes, it is true that he can make himself be whatever he wants to be, but if he came to us as a man would people really believe or would they try to rationalize him away?  Oh wait, that already happened!!!

So when we are talking about the evidences of God we need to understand that it is impossible for us to produce some visual/physical piece of evidence such as a picture of God on vacation or an actual physical introduction.

So what do we use as evidence for God’s existence?

Let’s start out by proving my mother exists.  I don’t have any pictures with me, so I can’t show her to you and besides, how would you know she is really my mother anyway.  How do you know that I have a mother when none of you have met her or seen her before?

First, experience tells you that I must have a mother.  There is not a human being alive who does not have a mother.  Many women have children so there must be some woman who gave birth to me.  I am evidence that my mother exists.

Second, I can testify that she exists.  I have seen her, spent time with her and so on.  There are also other people, many other people, who could verify that she does indeed exist.

How can these arguments apply to God?  Does physical evidence, aside from personally seeing him, exist similar the fact that my life is evidence that a woman gave birth to me?  Yes.

The teleological argument says that the evidence of God is all around in nature.  First, nature is too complex to have happened by chance.  Everything is so fine tuned for life to exist that the plausibility of it all happening by chance is virtually impossible.

The cosmological argument says that the laws of nature themselves infer that there is a God.  All of nature is subject to the laws of cause and effect.  For every effect there is a cause.  Similar is the law of motion.  Things don’t move on their own, they have something act upon them before they actually move.  If every effect has a cause and everything moved has something that moved it then where or with what did all this begin for you see there had to be a beginning for us to experience effect and movement right now.  If life has always been then the implication would be that the past has no starting point and therefore would be infinite, and if the past is infinite it is impossible for the present to exist.  Something, or someone, had to be the first cause and the first mover.  This something, or someone, has to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining meaning that it wouldn’t need any outside force to act upon it.  The only being that could possibly fit such a description is God.  So the very laws of nature suggest that there must be a God behind it all.

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