Second article in the series “With Good Reason”
by Keith Bassham
I will depart from the expected format a Bible student/teacher might use for getting at the arguments for the existence of God. For one thing, the words used are hard to spell and pronounce (for instance, teleological argument, anthropological argument, cosmological argument, etc.) and hard to work into a conversation. Additionally, those words are hard to incarnate, that is, put into flesh, so the ordinary person can quickly grasp their importance. The concepts themselves are not so difficult, but the packaging could use some work.
Instead, I want to begin by giving some ground to the atheist or agnostic. The truth is, I can think of no one who believes in God because he or she came to that position because of a rational argument. No one put forward the idea of the existence of God because of a hypothesis in which God’s existence explains some type of observed phenomena. As Alvin Plantinga writes, Christians do not
…typically propose the existence of God (let alone other characteristic Christian doctrines, such as Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement) as a kind of hypothesis, designed to explain organized complexity or other phenomena. They don’t believe in God because God’s existence and activity is a good hypothesis, a good explanation of organized complexity in the world. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses didn’t say, “Hey, look at that weird bush! It’s on fire but isn’t burning up! And listen to those sounds coming out of it! What’s the best explanatory hypothesis I can think of? Perhaps there is an all-knowing, all-powerful wholly good being who created the world, and he is addressing me from that bush. Yes, that must be it, that’s a good explanation of the phenomena.” Christians do not reason as follows: “What is the best explanation for all that organized complexity and the rest of what we see about us? Well, let’s see, perhaps there is an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good being who created the world. Yes that’s it; and perhaps this being is one of three persons, the other two being his divine son and a third person proceeding from the first two (yet there are not three Gods but one); the second person became incarnate, suffered, was crucified, and died, thus atoning for our sins and making it possible for us to have life and have it more abundantly. Right; that’s got to be it; that’s a dandy explanation of the facts.” What Christian would reason like that? (Alvin Plantinga in a book review, Books and Culture, May/June 1996)
No, we Christians think the way we do about God by way of faith, by way of the revelation of Himself through the Bible. Now at a certain level, that may seem irrational, and even ignorant to some, but all people everywhere accept all sorts of things without making rational arguments for them. Pardon my side trip into philosophy here, but I have to go that direction briefly to make the case. For instance, we accept the fact that we are individuals, that there are other persons separate from ourselves, that there is a past, and a future, that some things are right, and other things are wrong — all without what most people consider to be a purely rational argument for their existence — and all these concepts have generated mounds of philosophical thought and literature. We routinely trust intuition, memory, and perception as valid sources of knowledge. Is this considered so very irrational, or does it make the conclusions derived from these sources automatically invalid?
Of course not. But often the non-believer thinks this is the big gun to use against believers: because the believer must depend upon faith rather than rational arguments for the certain existence of God, there is no God. So, that’s the ground I am giving to the atheist/agnostic: you can’t certainly demonstrate God’s existence by reason alone. But that is not as big a giveaway as it seems. For one thing, the non-believer has a faith-thing going as well.
In his book, The Reason for God, and lectures he gives on the subject, Tim Keller outlines why a person should believe in God, and the rest of this article will take a look at his simple proposal. Think of a ladder with three rungs, a ladder takes someone from unbelief to belief. A person on the first rung will realize that it takes faith to disbelieve as well as to believe in God. That’s something the non-believer had not counted on, because he or she took it for granted that the decision was very rational and reason-based. However, take away the “reasons” for not believing, or remove the “proofs” there is no God, and you are left with faith.
It gets tougher though. The second rung is where a person sees that it takes a larger leap of faith to disbelieve than to believe, and the third is the one calling for commitment in order to achieve certainty. But we will leave those two rungs for later. Let’s work on Keller’s first rung, the faith rung, where he takes care of what he considers some common arguments against the existence of God.
Argument 1 – The presence of evil and suf¬fering show that God does not exist — the idea being that if an all-good and all-powerful God was truly there, He would remove all pointless evil and suffering. David Hume, the famous 18th-century philosopher, framed the issue thus: “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” The argument still appears in popular best-selling anti-God books, but the late Christian philosopher William Alston said the effort to use evil as an argument to disprove God “is now acknowledged on almost all sides in philosophy as completely bankrupt.” His own argument is simple: Because we cannot know or perceive a reason for suffering or evil does not mean that reason does not exist — our limited understanding and knowledge is not enough to say there is no God on that basis.
A friend recently gave me an example of this from his early life several decades ago. He had been a Christian a few years, but he had wandered away from God. Working two jobs and barely getting by financially, he received a call from his mother that his father was very ill, and perhaps dying. He left work late at night, and walking home, he was arrested and taken by a squad car to a nearby house where a woman “identified” him as a peeping tom. He was placed in jail, all the while pleading that he urgently needed to leave to catch a bus for a long trip to be with his father. The police chief was merciful and allowed him to go, on the condition that he report back to the station on his return a couple of days later.
He was allowed to go home and catch his bus for the 400-mile journey. Over the weekend, the police checked him out and determined that he was probably not the guilty party, but my friend, not knowing this, left his dying father to report to the police back home. That same day, his mother phoned again, and before he could return to his father’s side, his father died. He was crushed — innocent of the false accusations, but because of them he had been mistreated and deprived of precious time with this dad.
However, he related that during that first evening, while he waited for his bus, he “did some serious business with God at the Greyhound station.” As a result, he took his family to Lockland (Landmark) Baptist Church in Cincinnati, surrendered his life to the ministry, attended Baptist Bible College, and entered the ministry 40 years ago.
No one looking at the injustice suffered at the time could have guessed that God had his hand in my friend’s life, and it only became apparent later. To say there is no God because we cannot explain or find a reason for injustice, suffering, or evil is incredibly shortsighted. Ironically, biblical characters with the strongest hold on a belief in God were sometimes the ones who themselves were the victims of much suffering — Job and Joseph come to mind. And yet Joseph, after a lifetime of suffering injustice at the hands of others, can say at the end, “But as for you (his brothers), ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” Without Joseph’s suffering, Israel would not have survived as a nation, and Messiah would not have come to be the savior of the world.
Argument 2 – Those who have believed in God have often been guilty of much evil. Again, this argument proves nothing. Evil is evil, whether committed in the Crusades or the Khmer Rouge, whether by religionists or atheists. The existence of misled followers of God (or followers of no god at all doing the same thing) proves nothing at all except there is some violent nature in man.
A Christian should admit violence and wrong has been done in the name of God and Christianity. To deny such is ludicrous, and there is no excuse. But the French Revolution was as godless a movement as the world ever saw, and the atrocities committed by the atheist and secular regimes of Stalin, or Mao, or Hussein, or any number of others had no theistic underpinnings, so something else must have been at work there.
Keller writes, “We can only conclude that there is some violent impulse so deeply rooted in the human heart that it expresses itself regardless of what the beliefs of a particular society might be — whether socialist or capitalist, whether religious or irreligious, whether individualistic or hierarchical. Ultimately, then, the fact of violence and warfare in a society is not necessary refutation of the prevailing beliefs of that society.” (The Reason for God, p. 57)
Argument 3 – The burden is on the believers to prove there is a God, and until there is irrefutable evidence for God, you can safely assume He does not exist. Ordinarily, this argument is paired with a statement regarding the incompatibility of science with a belief in God. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, is definite on this. He confidently states that a person could not be an intelligent scientific thinker and hold a religious belief.
One wonders how the founders of the universities of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in America, and Cambridge and Oxford in England would have handled such a statement.
Before I take on the logical first premise (the believer has to prove God exists), I really want to tackle the science question. Is it true that believers are at war with science, or that scientists must renounce religious faith to be considered intelligent as Dawkins contends?
Baylor University professor Rodney Stark has corrected the myth that believers have historically been opposed to science. He writes in one place, “It is the consensus among contemporary historians, philosophers and sociologists of science that real science arose only once: in Europe. …The leading scientific figures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were overwhelmingly devout Christians who believed it their duty to comprehend God’s handiwork.”
Stark contends this is because real science and research can only take place when you believe in order and natural laws. He says, “The Christian God was rational, responsive, dependable and omnipotent and the universe was His personal creation in which His divine nature was put on display for man’s benefit and instruction.”
Stark says that of the acknowledged leaders in science from 1543 to 1680, 52 in all, one was a skeptic, one a pantheist, and 50 were Christians, 30 of whom could be characterized as devout because of their zeal. (See The Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts and the End of Slavery by Rodney Stark). According to Stark then, the very basis of scientific research has a Christian (or at the least, a monotheistic) view of the universe.
And what about today? Dawkins claims that a 1998 study of the members of the National Academy of Sciences showed about seven percent of them believed in a personal God. But a Pew Research Center study from last year shows that among members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a majority of scientists (51 percent) say they believe in God or a higher power, while 41 percent say they do not. Further, according to the report, the percentage of believers versus non-believers among scientists has remained virtually unchanged since 1914 despite decades of scientific discoveries and technological advances. Another fascinating facet of the survey is a finding showing younger scientists (ages 18 to 34) are more likely than older ones to believe in God or a higher power. (David Masci, Los Angeles Times, November 24, 2009)
Historically, then, and for the present, I think we can say science does not disprove God — at least it does not for the scientists themselves.
But what about the burden of proof issue? Is it fair to require the believer to present evidence? My first response is that a thing may exist whether I can demonstrate it or not. Whether or not I can “prove” something does not create or destroy its reality. Second, how do we decide on the rules for the evidence?
Keller says something to the effect that God, the Creator of the universe, is outside and beyond the created universe — we would use the term transcendental. Looking around for God in the physical universe, you may find clues, but not certain proof. And in fact, that is what the Bible asserts in Psalm 19:1 (“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork”), and Romans 1:20 (“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead”), and Hebrews 11:3 (“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear”) — clues, footprints, and signs pointing the way, but no certain evidence.
The Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first person in space, is said to have reported he did not see God there. C. S. Lewis’s response was to write, “To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find him on earth are unlikely to find Him in space. …But send a saint up in a spaceship and he’ll find God in space as he found God on earth. Much depends on the seeing eye.” (“The Seeing Eye,” Christian Reflections, p. 171)
In part 2 of “The Existence of God,” we will take the next step up the ladder where we learn it takes more faith to disbelieve in God than to believe, and we look at some of the clues and positive reasons to believe in God.