Question: "Is there any evidence that God exists?"

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Question: "Is there any evidence that God exists?"

Is there any evidence that God exists?

Introduction

There are three basic lines of evidence which, taken together, convince us that Christianity is a true picture of reality.

· Nature: The modern scientific picture of our physical universe seems to cry out that it was designed and is not ‘self sufficient’.

· History: If there is a personal God, we must wonder if he or she has communicated with humankind. The historical Jesus is a key figure for the three main one-God religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The picture of Jesus in the New Testament fits well into a whole-Bible pattern, and seems also to be confirmed by historical evidence.

· Experience: All human beings have experience of consciousness, some witness the miraculous, and any who are Christians may have spiritual God-focused experiences too. Each is a strand of evidence for the truth of the Christian view of reality.

Are all three lines of evidence important?

The apostle Paul shows us that all these three strands are important.

He appeals to the evidence from nature in writing:

“what may be known about God is plain” because “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made...”.

At least something of the being of God can be learned from the kind of natural world we live in. Then, writing to Christians about the resurrection of Jesus, Paul appeals to the known historical evidence about the resurrection appearances. This was an appeal to history. Finally, of course, the Apostle Paul recounts profound personal religious experiences, starting with his famous vision of a light and the voice of Jesus that led to his conversion. He relates these experiences as part of the evidence for the truth of the Christian faith. Paul, then, regards as important all the three strands of evidence we have identified: nature, history and experience.

So can the same three be applied today?

Nature – the evidence today

In looking at the world around us we can ask various questions:

( i ) WHY should a universe have the particular fundamental physical properties of matter that it has?

The British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees’ book Just Six Numbers (1999) notes that there are six basic constants in physics that have to be precisely right for life to be possible in any universe:

The cosmos is so vast because there is one crucially important huge number N in nature, equal to 1,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This number measures the strength of the electrical forces that hold atoms together, divided by the force of gravity between them. If N had a few less zeros, only a short-lived miniature universe could exist: no creatures could grow larger than insects.

Another number, e, whose value is 0.007, defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common, whereas gold and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If e were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist.

The cosmic number W (omega) measures the amount of material in our universe - galaxies, diffuse gas, and `dark matter'. W tells us the relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the universe. If this ratio were too high relative to a particular `critical' value, the universe would have collapsed long ago; had it been too low, no galaxies or stars would have formed. The initial expansion speed seems to have been finely tuned.

Measuring the fourth number, l (lambda), was the biggest scientific news of 1998. An unsuspected new force - a cosmic `antigravity' - controls the expansion of our universe, even though it has no discernible effect on scales less than a billion light-years. It is destined to become ever more dominant over gravity and other forces as our universe becomes ever darker and emptier. Fortunately for us (and very surprisingly to theorists), A is very small. Otherwise its effect would have stopped galaxies and stars from forming, and cosmic evolution would have been stifled before it could even begin.

The seeds for all cosmic structures - stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies - were all imprinted in the Big Bang. The fabric of our universe depends on one number, ,Q, which represents the ratio of two fundamental energies and is about 1/100,000 in value. If Q were even smaller, the universe would be inert and structureless; if Q were much larger, it would be a violent place, in which no stars or solar systems could survive, dominated by vast black holes.

The sixth crucial number has been known for centuries, although it's now viewed in a new perspective. It is the number of spatial dimensions in our world, D, and equals three. Life couldn't exist if D were two or four. Time is a fourth dimension, but distinctively different from the others in that it has a built-in arrow: we `move' only towards the future. Near black holes, space is so warped that light moves in circles, and time can stand still. Furthermore, close to the time of the Big Bang, and also on microscopic scales, space may reveal its deepest underlying structure of all: the vibrations and harmonies of objects called `superstrings', in a ten-dimensional arena.

Perhaps there are some connections between these numbers. At the moment, however, we cannot predict any one of them from the values of the others – and all of them are “fine tuned” to form a universe which allows life. Martin Rees himself, not a Christian, suggests that in order to explain this we must imagine a huge number of universes so that we just happen to be in the one in which life is possible. Yet this theory of “multiverses” requires even more faith than believing in God – it is fundamentally untestable.

( ii ) WHY, even if there were these basic constants, should they come together to give our universe- with matter neither too sparse nor too dense for life ?

At present, even given the basic properties of matter, a big bang producing an inhabitable universe would be very unlikely. We would be more likely to get a thinly spread universes or a series of black holes. This area of science may, of course, change, but this is the present situation.

(iii) Could life plausibly have arisen here by chance ?

Similar comments apply to the origins of life. Our DNA based life (the only kind we have) is horrendously complex, with DNA needed to make the proteins needed to make DNA. As it presently stands no one seems remotely near constructing a model which plausibly explains how the first DNA life system could originate through chance molecular variations locked in by some kind of natural selection. This does not prove that no such model could ever be developed, but it does reflect the present state of what we know.

Conclusion

The physical universe is an amazing place, and the findings of science, particularly physics and microbiology, have made it all the more amazing. To many people the existence of a creative God best explains why it is here.

History – the evidence today

The records in the New Testament of the life of Jesus must have sources in the first century. Unlike some of the much hyped alternatives (like the so called “Gospel of Judas”), the Bible’s four Gospels and Acts contain numerous political and geographical details that a later age would not have known. The four accounts of the resurrection of Jesus (see the question on this) all fit together perfectly, and bring corroborating evidence to each other. Jesus of Nazareth stands:

As one who fulfilled amazing Jewish prophecies (particularly in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53) that were written many centuries earlier.
As a key figure in all three three main one-God religions:

Judaism (claiming to be the Jewish Messiah)
Christianity (its central figure)
Islam (which regards him as a prophet and the Jewish Messiah, though does not accept as genuine the records of him written by those who knew him)

If we look for historical evidence that the God revealed in nature has communicated with us, we find it in Jesus.

Personal Experience – the evidence today

All of us experience consciousness, and with it design. Modern figures like Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore effectively argue that this is a self-delusion. Our brains, they say, are parallel processors, infected by ideas (or “memes”) – there is no real “self”. Thus Blackmore concludes:

“In this sense we can be truly free - not because we can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators but because we know that there is no one to rebel.”

This seems bizarrely self-contradictory. How can “we” know that there is no one there to know? It seems a bizarre parody of Descartes: “I don’t think, therefore I think I don’t exist’. Who, anyway, is she writing books for? There is nobody out there to write for – only memes (or ideas) to add to. One is reminded of some ancient words “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools… They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:22-25).

To most of us, our consciousness demands some explanation going beyond denying it is there at all or imagining it comes from nowhere.

Moreover, many people feel that they have directly experienced God. This is not just in the occasional experience of the miraculous (eg healing), but in direct spiritual experience. In particular, a willingness to be committed to him (if he exists), can lead into a direct experience of God himself. In itself, of course, there is no shortage of pundits to “explain it away” or proclaim it self-delusion. It is, of course, possible to replicate some religious experiences by directly stimulating a part of the brain – so does this prove that religious experiences are all delusion? Well it may also be possible to replicate the experience of (say) elephants by stimulating directly a part of the brain, and this does not prove that there are no real elephants! So why is religious experience any different? Particularly in a context where nature and history also point to the reality of a God, religious experience plays its part in giving us evidence that God does indeed exist.