Tim Keller in
The Reason for God teaches us to say “clues” because it’s not really possible to “prove” God exists in a scientific sense. But you can’t “prove” Napoleon existed by a scientific method, either. And think about it: Have you ever seen three cubic feet of love or two pounds of kindness? No. But I think we’d all agree that they exist.
I think that rather than argue for the existence of God, we might be better off asking questions. Here are three.
1) What’s the cause for all the effects?
I strike a match. The effect is the fire. The cause is friction. But the cause of the friction is me. But what caused me?
No effect can be produced without a cause. Everything we know in this world is “contingent.” Something happened to make something happen. Every effect has a cause that precedes it. Nothing moves with a prior mover.
The whole universe is a vast collection contingent entities. Everything in the universe has to be dependent on some cause. What caused this effect? What caused that effect? What caused the effect before this? What caused the effect before that? And on and on we go back and back. What caused the original effect?
We come eventually to an Uncaused Cause. There must be a supernatural, non-contingent Being that existed before and beyond the very first effect. He is the Uncaused Cause. God.
2) What’s behind the design?
Look at a baby. Especially a baby asleep. Just look. And think. Think about that little body. What’s going on inside. The circulatory system. The nervous system. The digestive system.
Darwinians want us to believe that the intricate functioning of a human body all happened through the process of natural selection. I think we should fight for the right of an evolutionist to believe what he or she feels to be the truth. But for me, I think that the human body looks as though it’s been designed. What’s behind the design?
An astronomer named Fred Hoyle wrote a book called The Intelligent Universe. He wrote the following:
"A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe."
The order of the universe demands a Designer.
Some might say, “Well, that’s not a good analogy for evolution. Evolution isn’t about random chance, but about natural selection. And evolution isn’t about a single, complex assembly of an organism, but a cumulative ordering a various parts. And evolution doesn’t target a specific predictable organism ahead of time, but produces a non-specific, unpredictable functioning organism.
OK. Change the analogy. “A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747. A tornado races through a junkyard not just once, but hundreds of thousands of times. At each step it somehow preserves rather than tears apart functional parts. It ultimately produces some sort of working machine. Maybe it’s a 747. Maybe it’s a station wagon. Maybe it’s a personal computer. Maybe it’s something else.”
Some evolutionists would say that that is a better analogy. But even that analogy seems supremely implausible to me. It would take a greater leap of faith for me to believe in the process of evolutionary natural selection than for me to believe in a Designer.
Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Therefore, there must have been a designer. God.
Life as we know it cannot exist without liquid water. In our solar system, earth circles around the sun in the “Goldilocks zone” – not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Closer to the sun, we’d fry. Further away, we’d freeze. And if earth didn’t rotate on its axis, one side of the earth would fry and the other would freeze. The earth is situated in the solar system on the sun side of the massive planet, Jupiter. Why is that important? Jupiter with its huge gravitational pull acts like a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks up asteroids that might threaten us with a lethal collision. And our sun is a single star not a binary star in mutual orbit with another star. And planets have a hard time surviving in orbit around binary stars because the one star might destroy the life that another star might permit. For life to exist on this planet, it is as if there were a large number of dials that all had to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits. And they were.
How do you explain life on this planet? That there are billions and billions of stars so the likelihood of an earth existing is possible and that life evolved through natural selection? Or that God made the world, placed it in the Goldilocks zone, and deliberately set up all the details for our benefit.
Maybe people who believe that life emerged through natural selection have to have a great deal more faith than those of us who believe that that there’s an Intelligent Designer.
Look at the order and design in the universe, in your body. No one would think a computer could come into being without an intelligent designer. How much more incredible is it to believe that the universe, in its infinite complexity, could have happened through natural selection?
If a natural explanation doesn’t make as much sense to you, then it’s appropriate to look for a supernatural explanation.
3) What’s the source of right and wrong?I think we’d all agree well-adjusted reasonably healthy people have a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. If you see someone hit a pregnant woman in the stomach, you’d say, “That’s wrong.” Even non-believers have a sense of right and wrong. Things happen in the world and we’re morally outraged.
It’s not right that children starve. It’s not right that woman are abused. It’s not right for people to be discriminated against because of the color of their skin.
We just know that every human being has inherent dignity. We know that it is wrong to violate the equal dignity of other human beings. But why should we believe that? On what does this dignity depend? Where do human rights come from? in his book,
Reason for God, Keller tells us that there are three possibilities. Human rights come from nature. Human rights are created by people. Human rights come from God. Let’s think about each possibility.
(A) Human rights come from nature.
But nature thrives on violence, on the survival of the fittest. But if we base human rights on nature, then those in power have the right to oppress those not in power. It’s survival of the fittest, right?
(B) Human rights are created by people.
In other words, whatever the culture says is right is right. But what if a majority decides it is not in their interest to grant human rights? We’ve seen in WWI Germany what happens when human rights are created by the majority. The murder of 6,000,000 Jews happened. The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn’t feel it was immoral at all. We don’t care. We don’t care if they sincerely felt they were doing a serve to humanity. They ought not to have done it.
(C) Human rights come from God.
If the world was made by a God of justice and if we have been created in His image, then that is why we know that violence, oppression, and hate are wrong. The Russian writer, Dostoyevsky, wrote, "If God does not exist, everything is permissible."
We have to have some basis for why we find some things to be evil and other things good. Our moral intuitions can’t just free-float in midair
In The Reason for God, Tim Keller writes, “If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is ‘moral’ and another ‘immoral’ but only ‘I like this.’ If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective, arbitrary moral feelings into law? You may say ‘the majority has the right to make the law,’ but do you mean that then the majority has the right to vote to exterminate a minority? If you say, ‘No, that is wrong,’ then you are back to square one. ‘Who sez’ that the majority has a moral obligation not to kill the minority? Why should your moral convictions be obligatory for those in opposition? Why should your view prevail over the will of the majority? If there is no God, there can be no good reason to be kind, to be loving, or to work for peace.”
If you believe human rights are a reality, then it makes much more sense that God exists than that He does not.
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Take any one of these reasons to believe in a God who created and the evidence might seem underwhelming. But add them together? That God created the heavens and the earth seems to me to be by far the most reasonable explanation of what we see. I think that, cumulatively, the clues for God have a lot of force to them.
