Fr Billy Swan
Ever since human beings appeared on the earth about 200,000 years ago, we have been asking the question of whether or not God exists. We still ask it today. For us as Church, it is good for us not to take for granted that many people struggle with this question and are searching for evidence that will take them closer to faith in the existence of God or not. For us as Church, we mustn’t be complacent or lazy. We must take people’s doubts seriously. Yes, we must grapple with issues of Church, teaching, structures, resources, parishes, etc. Yet, for many people, especially young people, they have moved on to more weightier matters – one of which is whether God exists at all. As Church, the hard questions of people push us to reach into our storehouse of wisdom and reflection to engage with the most important question of all. We owe it to the younger generation to provide reasons for them to believe that God truly does exist. In this article, I present five arguments for God’s existence. Each of them on their own does not definitively answer the question of God’s existence but taken together, they are convergent clues that point to the same conclusion.
The Kalam Argument. One of the most significant developments in cosmology in centuries happened in the first half of the 20th century when it was discovered that the universe had a beginning, about 13.8 billion years ago. This led to a new argument for the existence of God called the ‘Kalam Argument’. It runs like this: Premise 1: something that begins to exist has a cause; Premise 2: the universe began to exist; Conclusion: therefore the universe has a cause. This cause must be immaterial and outside of time for this to happen. Otherwise, a material and time dependent cause would have to be explained by another cause. Faith in an immaterial and eternal God is the faith of Jews, Muslims and Christians – that God who is immaterial and transcends time, is that first cause of creation. This argument is significant in the sense that our universe does not explain its own existence. Everything was caused by something else. But if the universe was caused by God, then who caused God to exist? Here is where we come to the end of the line where one Being causes things to exist but is not caused by anything else. This precisely what thinkers for thousands of years, from Plato to Thomas Aquinas, have called God. In the case of St Thomas, he referred to God not as a being among many but as ‘Existence itself’. Contrast this to the conclusion of the late Stephen Hawking. Despite him being a brilliant physicist, he came to this clumsy and questionable conclusion: ‘I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science’ (Brief Answers to the Big Questions, John Murray Publications, London, 2018, p. 29). But how could the universe be created according to the laws of science when the laws of science came into being with creation?
The Moral Argument. Human beings have a conscience. This is the space where we feel a sense of what we ought to do and what is right to do. It is also the space where we know we have done wrong. The question is. Where does this demand of doing right and avoiding evil, come from? If there is a moral duty that seems to bind all of humanity, what or who gives it that authority? Or, to put it another way – if we have a moral law, who is the moral lawgiver? One thing for sure is that the moral law does not come from ourselves. It is not something we make up. If it was, then we would have no basis to condemn horrible crimes other than saying: ‘I personally don’t like them’. For Muslims, Jews and Christians, the moral law comes from a Creator God. We humans have been created in the likeness of a God who is good. Therefore, our conscience is a mechanism within us that keeps us in harmony with that same goodness that is part of our nature. Right and wrong, truth and lies are not things we can create for ourselves. They exist before us. There is a moral law within us that makes demands. Conscience is not something socially conditioned but is a universal norm.
Fine Tuning. It may come as a surprise but despite the age of the universe being 13.8 billion years, human beings arrived much later on the stage, about 200,000 years ago. This could only have happened when a series of cosmological consonants were exactly in place. If any of these were even minutely different, human life could not have occurred. We humans arrived just when creation was ready for us. Where did this remarkable fine-tuning come from? If the universe did have a Creator then the evidence points to a supreme intelligence responsible for it all. Intelligent design points to an intelligent designer.
The Structure of the Physical World. Albert Einstein once said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility. In other words, we should not take for granted that creation has an order and stability that we can measure and observe. There is a correspondence between what is in our minds and what we find the universe, proven in the study of disciplines such as maths and physics. Why is this the case? Because both objective reality and the mind’s reason have the same origin – namely in the mind of the same Creator God.
A Homing Instinct for God. The created world is not statice but dynamic – positive and negative electrons, the force of gravity between two objects, etc. The same is true for us humans. We have needs and desires that go beyond reason. We long to love and be loved. Christian faith sees this side of our nature as no coincidence. God created us this way so that he could draw us back to himself. ‘You have created us for yourself O God and our hearts are restless unless they rest in you’ (St Augustine). There is a magnetism in us humans that is not in other animals. We are social beings who are built for relationships. This experience of ourselves points to a higher source of love, truth, beauty and goodness. Christians call this source, God – the God of love, beauty and relationality, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
To conclude. In any good detective novel or movie, the police gather the evidence from the case and focus on the theory that is the best fit for the evidence that presents itself. The same is true when it comes to belief and non-belief in God. Is there greater evidence that God exists than He doesn’t? I believe the answer is yes. I hope you will agree too and that the reasons to believe are more than you first thought.