The Existence of God the Creator

2004-10-15

The Theistic God Exists

There are two prerequisites to understanding the arguments in this essay: 1) The truth about reality is knowable, and 2) the opposite of true is false. To read about the reasoning behind these statements, refer to the article Is Truth Relative.

There are three major religious worldviews. The first is theism, where God made all. The second is pantheism, where God is all. The third is atheism, where there is no God at all. Another worldview would include panentheism, which means all in God, as if God were a changing, finite Being who is director of all that is (see discussion in BECA 576-580).

Cosmological Argument for the Existence of the Theistic God

Here is Geisler’s argument (Geisler’s Twelve Points 14):

Evidence That the Universe Had a Beginning

First Geisler notes the second law of thermodynamics. This states that the universe is running down; it is running out of energy. Second is that the universe is expanding. Galaxies are expanding from a point where there was no space, time or matter. We know space and time are related from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Space and time exist only within the universe. There was a point when there was nothing, and since then the universe has been uniformly expanding. Craig concludes that there was a point in the past where the entire known universe “was contracted down to a single point” (Craig 58). The universe is more dense the further we go back in time, and there was a point where the universe was infinitely dense, “which is synonymous to ‘nothing’” (Craig 59). This indeed is the Christian worldview, that God created the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing).

In the article, Evolution: In the Image of God or Animals, I discuss briefly about redshift and the Doppler effect. Scientific exploration points to evidence that the universe had a beginning. Scientists have also found that there is a radiation echo, or some sort of fossil radiation that is a vestige of this “big bang” (by which I mean the instantaneous creation of the universe, not to be confused with naturalistic evolution’s term). If this is true, there should be a great mass of energy somewhere.

It is also impossible to have an infinite amount of time. You cannot have an infinite number of moments, because you can always have one more. For example, if today is the last of a series of moments, then there is not an infinite amount of minutes, because there cannot be an end of infinity.

Craig presents the following as one of his arguments (Craig 49):

The first point states that history clearly is a chain of events, one after another. The second point, which is crucial, states that if one can add to a collection of something, in this case, events in history, then it is not infinite. This is because “no matter how many members a person added to the collection, he could always add one more. Therefore, he could never arrive at infinity” (Craig 49).

Furthermore, the theory of relativity states that there can be no space without time, and there can be no space and time without matter. Also, Einstein concluded that both space and time exist only within the universe; there is no time outside of it (Hewitt 205). The universe, which had a beginning, had a cause that is distinct from, or exists outside of space, time and matter.

Since we know the universe had a beginning, we are left with two options: No one created something out of nothing or someone created something out of nothing. If there is no God, it does not make sense that there is something, rather than nothing. Wouldn’t there be absolutely nothing at all?

Teleological Argument for the Existence of the Theistic God

Here is Geisler’s argument (Geisler’s Twelve Points 25):

The Anthropic principle reveals the fingerprint of the creator. So many conditions in the universe and on our planet make us, and all life, possible. When we think about the complexity of all of these things, we see how a super-intellect has engineered the world in which we live. The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere allows for life to exist; one extreme would allow human beings to suffocate, the other would cause fires. Altering the gravitation force by 1 part in 1040, the moon would not keep in its orbit, and the sun would not exist. And if the universe were expanding at the rate of one millionth more slowly, the earth’s temperature would be 10,000 degrees. There are many such other things that suggest that such a super-intellect created the earth and its exact conditions so that human life could exist (BECA 26-27).

When thinking about the cause of life, we are overwhelmed with the same complexity. The information contained in the DNA of one cell is the equivalent of 5 million pages of information (Twelve Points 50). And to think that DNA code based on a four letter genetic alphabet could be arranged in such a way in a cell! It is not possible for something this complex and essential to our being as individuals to come about from chance.

In the article, Evolution: In the Image of God or Animals, I discuss in brief Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, where he discusses irreducible complexity. The human eye, for example, is irreducibly complex because without any one portion or building block it will not function. It could not have evolved from any less than what it is.

The cause of life and the observation of how intricate living things are do not point to evolution from non-intelligent matter. As intelligent beings we must ask ourselves the question: Can non-intelligent elements beget intelligent life? To take another step, as human beings, we are personal beings. Can impersonal elements beget personal beings?

Moral Argument for the Existence of the Theistic God

Here is Norman Geisler’s argument (in Twelve Points):

The absolutes are undeniable. We know the difference between right and wrong best by our reactions (Twelve Points, 71). If I were to say “there is nothing wrong with murder,” most people would strongly disagree. Why? We also cannot know injustice unless we know justice. Most people agree that injustice exists in the world. How can we know what is absolutely unjust without knowing what is absolutely just? In C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, for example, he states that one cannot call a line crooked unless one knows the concept of what a straight line looks like. Therefore, when we call the world unjust, what is our concept of what is just? Real moral disagreements imply an objective standard.

Lewis also states in his book Mere Christianity that if one says one moral system is better than another, they are being based on some standard. But that same standard is different from both moral systems.

Other things to think about: We would not make excuses for doing wrong if there was no Moral Law (Twelve Points 80). We also wouldn’t know the world was getting either better or worse if there was no Moral Law either. On the other hand, in regards to a world without God, William Craig Lane quotes Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted” and Craig then concludes, “If there is no God, there can be no absolute standards of right and wrong” (Craig 17).

Comparing Worldviews

From all of these reasons, the creator God that is distinct from His creation is identified without reference to the Bible. Pantheism and Atheism are discounted because we know that the universe had a cause by a highly intelligent being that exists outside of space, time, and matter. This also discounts panentheism because this is a worldview, different from pantheism, where God was more a part of the world as if He were the soul of the world. Polytheism is discounted because the finite world must come from something that it is infinite, that is, without bound of space, time, and matter. There cannot be two infinites; therefore there is one God. We can also discount Deism. Deism states that God created the universe, then stepped away and left the universe to be governed by reason. But if God is infinite yet also distinct from His creation, He must transcend His creation, and by no means can He be remote from creation. And from the moral argument for the existence of God, we know that God would not forsake His creation.

Knowing this, the only religions that are left are the theistic religions. We can discount all others because of the above argument. From the argument on the law of non-contradiction, which affirms that opposites cannot both be true, no two different theistic religions can co-exist, for these religions teach contradicting tenets. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are all contradicting theistic religions; therefore at most one can be true. For an article that makes the case for the Bible, why it can be trusted and how it is indispensable as the foundation for the Faith, see the article Evidence for the Bible.

References

Craig, William Lane. The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe. San Bernardino: Here’s Life Publishers, 1979.

Geisler, Norman L. Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999. Designated above as BECA.

Geisler, Norman L. Twelve Points That Show Christianity Is True, a PowerPoint presentation. April 2003.

Hewitt, Paul G. Conceptual Physics. Menlo Park: Addison-Wesley, 1992.