Series: Conversations with an Atheist May 20, 2007
Sermon: The Case for “God” Psalm 8
INTRODUCTION
We come to the last sermon in this series called “Conversations with an Atheist.” We’ve looked at the central arguments and challenges atheists present against Christian faith. Today, we’re going to say, “Here’s the basic reason why we believe in a God.” We’re turning from defense and going on the offense.
Many people don’t believe in God is because they don’t believe in a being who loves to send people to hell for breaking his rules. In other words, it may be that when someone describes the God they don’t believe in, I would respond by saying, “That’s a relief! I don’t believe in that God either.” People reject God because they often have very negative impressions of who God is. Sometimes people have had terrible experiences with their earthly father, or with religious authorities, and project this on God. But if we’re talking about the God of Jesus Christ, I believe in him with all my heart! I want to tell you today why I choose to continue to believe in God.
The decision to be an atheist is just as much a decision of faith as the decision to be a follower of Jesus Christ. We really do not have all the evidence, nor can we examine in detail the farthest reaches of the universe to know that no God exists. There is an element of faith in all our human thinking. My belief in God goes far beyond a general belief in God; it includes also a belief in Jesus as the Son of God. But we’ll leave that for a later day. Today, we’re just going to take a quick look at reasons for belief in God.
PHENOMENON OF NATURE
Psalm 8 says this so beautifully, “When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars which thou has ordained, what is man that thou are mindful of him?” For most people, just the encounter with the beauty of nature leads to belief in a higher intelligence that stands behind it all. But there has been an increasing sense in recent times that science can explain all life-forms on earth so completely that we don’t need to refer to God as an explanation. Science takes the place of faith and God and it offers us a complete explanation of all things. This is certainly Richard Dawkins assertion – science takes the place of faith and God. And many other scientists believe that science has simply pointed out the complexities of the world for which God is the only good explanation. In intermediate position is that science and religion are incommensurate magisterial; science deals with fact, religion with value, or science with the ‘what?’ and religion with the ‘why?’
One of the leading theories of origins is called “The Big Bang Theory.” It claims that 14 billion years ago, the whole universe was about the size of a nickel. At some point, all the energy in this matter and singularity exploded into the massive complexity we now see in about the time it takes to make a grill-cheese sandwich. It expanded and continues to expand. But we cannot help but ask, “What came before? Where did it come from? If every action has a cause, what was the first cause? We cannot help but think of God when we ask these questions.
Gregg Easterbrook has written, “Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization – that something transcendent started it all off – which has hard-science types using terms like ‘miracle.’ The science (increasing evidence of a Big Bang) has lead many scientists to very uncomfortable situation; it looks like there must have been a God because some powerful intelligent designer had to have orchestrated such a remarkable beginning. Since they are not willing to accept that solution, they have tried to come up with theories which have absolutely no basis in fact or evidence; that the universe is going through cycles of explosion and implosion. But these are simply theories which try to escape the obvious; if there was a beginning, there had to have been a creator.
Further, we cannot help but ask, “How did the original amino acids come together to produce the first cell which has an incredibly complex capacity to reproduce itself?” There is absolutely no good explanation for the accidental emergence of the DNA chains which are so critical to reproduction of life. There is a virtual library of real information in each human cell. That is real knowledge and it cannot be explained in terms of accidental processes.
There had to be a super-intellect guiding nature. There is way too much complexity. Dawkins’ answer to this is, “If you go with the God answer, you have to explain how God came into existence.” The problem with this response is that every theory, no matter which, is going to end up coming to an ending point. Dawkins has to explain where the original matter of the universe came from. The advantage of the God explanation is that it explains the real information that the universe clearly has attained. Let’s look at some examples of this.
THE FINE-TUNING ARGUMENTS
Recently, a number of thinkers have been proposing a new version of the argument from design called “Fine-Tuning” arguments. It has been increasingly noted by astrophysicists that the basic physical constants of the universe must fall between extremely narrow limits if there is to be the development of intelligent life. For example, The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event--namely, our existence.
The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either had been even slightly different, life, at any rate life of the sort we have, could probably not have developed. Equally interesting in this connection is the so-called flatness problem: the existence of life also seems to depend very delicately upon the rate at which the universe is expanding. Thus Stephen Hawking claims that a reduction of the rate of expansion by one part in 1012 would result in the universe’s collapse and a minute increase would overheat the universe. There are many other similar perimeters which require exquisite fine-tuning for human life to exist.
To these arguments, Dawkins and other claim that there were actually millions and millions of universes, and still are zillions of universes out there. These make the probability that at least one (namely ours) would have the right conditions for life. To this, Francis Collins, a leading Christian thinker and scientist, responds, “This is an interesting choice. . . You either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.” Collins is saying, “There is simply no evidence for billions of parallel universes out there. You are simply making that up to make it more likely that this universe is so finely tuned for human life.” You see, atheism is indeed based on faith, and in this case, a faith which appears rather foolish and even irrational.
BELIEF IN BELIEF
It is fascinating to me that one of the primary reasons to believe in God is so we can believe in belief; that is, we can trust our own minds and thoughts. Here is what I mean. If our minds are simply the results of accidents and atoms bumping into each other, then they simply cannot be trusted. In other words, how can I know that my mind, when I believe something deeply, is not playing tricks on me. According to the evolutionary theory, your mind is simply designed according to natural selection and adaptive behavior for survival of the fittest. This has nothing to do with true belief. If my mind is an accident, I cannot trust it to tell me true things any more than I can spill milk on the floor and say, “Oh,
Alvin Plantinga says it this way. “From this point of view, our beliefs would be dependent on neurophysiology, and (no doubt) a belief would just be a neurological structure of some complex kind. . . . But why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?”
But if my mind is made by God, and I am made in the image of God, my mind is created to believe true things. I remember what I ate for breakfast this morning. That is a memory belief. It isn’t just an adaptive exercise for survival. I can trust my memory because my mind is made by God to believe true things. Another way to say this is as follows. If you don’t believe in God, you cannot trust your mind. Why? Because the only way you can trust your rational thought processes is by use of your rational thought process. You cannot break out of this circle of thought.
A GOD WHO CONTINUES TO ACT
What about deism? Maybe there is a God but not the kind of God we learn of in the scriptures. Maybe God created it all and has nothing to do with it. All we can know for certain is that there is a God. We don’t know what kind of God he is. He may be completely uninterested in us. He may not care about us. He may have nothing to do with Moses or Abraham. I think there is a scientific reason to say this isn’t the case. I realize that I may be pushing things quite a bit here, but this makes good sense to me.
It seems like the evidence from science points to the fact that God has overseen the creation process so that, there are long periods of time of cause-and-effect development, and then flashes of divine interaction to direct the process. Let’s start with the Big Bang – a good place to start! God clearly was before the bang, controlled it with exquisite detail, and started the whole process into being. Then, billions of years later (if you take an old earth view), God stepped in and added new information. The first cell or simplest life-forms were in fact highly complex – virtual libraries of genetic information. God had to step in at this point and add new information.
Then, at the start of the Cam
We can also assume that God is more than raw intelligence, or impersonal force. God must actually have some sort of personality. Why? Because the fact of our consciousness, personality, intelligence, and spiritual/psychological makeup, all points to their having a source in God. God could hardly have endowed us with a personality and self-consciousness when God himself was simply a force field of some sort. Consciousness could not have an accidental provenance; meat does not and cannot think. These things flow from God’s nature; we are created in God’s image and have God’s likeness stamped on our very being. This ennobles and uplifts us all.
THE ARGUMENT FROM MORALITY
Another real reason for believing in God is that God makes sense of our impulse that certain behaviors are moral and others are immoral. We know this is true. It is very hard for us to imagine that someone could bring meaningless pain into the lives of others for simple self-amusement. Yet we all know that true evil exists in this world.
CS Lewis uses this argument with great effect. Notice how children’s play includes things like, “Let me borrow your toy. I let you play with mine!” Kids seem to know that there is some overarching moral code that governs the universe. Some sense of justice behind it all. If atheism is correct, there is no absolute morality. Everything is relative to my desires and well-being. Atheists argue that our moral impulse is all about adaptive behavior; doing what protects ourselves. But selfishness is really a better adaptive behavior and promotes survival much better.
Yet something deep within us knows this cannot be the case. Believing in God makes sense of my moral conviction that certain things are absolutely wrong. They are wrong because there is a God who loves righteousness and hates evil. My impulse to believe in ultimate justice flows from my being created in the image of God. I don’t always follow that which I know to be true but I know it to be true and I know when you don’t follow it.
SO WHO CARES?
Why spend all this time answering atheists. Why cares? I think it is important because atheism represents the maximal doubt, and frankly, most every Christian I know doubts from time-to-time. And doubt can be a wonderful back-door to faith. Faith that has survived the fires of doubt is faith indeed. I’ve said before that I’ve come very close to loosing my faith. I’ve had to struggle to hold on because I’ve studied in places where everything you believe gets smashed every day. But we can be confident that there is a God, that this God stands behind our moral laws, that this God continues to be active in our world. And it is upon this God we depend with all our hearts, our souls, our minds and our spirits.