How to look at arguments

• Read: 1 Peter 3:15-16
• We should all spend more time thinking and learning about our worldview:
  • Why do you believe in God? Are there absolute truths? Is there a purpose for your life? Does life have any meaning? What happens when you die? Are there any consequences to your actions?
• Everyone believes in something:
  • Religious people believe in a higher power
  • Secular people believe in their own power
• It takes faith to believe in something because it’s impossible to prove everything
  • Only math has TRUE proofs and does not require faith, it assumes reason is TRUE.
  • Everything else is a theory and can’t be proven in the same way.
• There are two kinds of faiths:
  • Intellectual: believing in something with limited or available evidence.
  • Relational: trusting someone like God/your parents/relatives/teacher/authority.

General Revelation: Nature provides evidence to the existence of a Creator God

• There is something instead of nothing
  • Matter cannot create itself
• Mathematics works unreasonably well when describing the world
  • No reason that should be unless there is a mind that thought it/designed it
• The Big Bang
  • The universe didn’t exist before and had a start just like Genesis 1 states
  • Science can’t answer: Why is there a universe? Why does it go on? Where is it contained?
• The fine tuning of the physical universe
  • If the laws of nature were to change by only a tiny little bit, the universe would not be capable of sustaining life.
• Life itself
  • Science has never made life from inorganic matter, even with the best technology available
    • if someone EVER did it would be intelligently designed
    • Not a God-of-the-Gaps argument, but a statement of fact about the existence of life.
    • There is no such thing as “Random” – it’s an abstract concept just like a circle or a point.    
  • There is engineering inside all living things, from the molecular to the organ level
  • Using probability, it takes more faith to believe that life spontaneously happened than to believe it was created
  • There may be “biological laws” at work but no theory that excludes God from creation can satisfy the evidence.

We can call the power behind the creation of the universe God

• must be a really good mathematician and a really good scientist
• is more than matter, time and space
• cannot “die” if the universe disappeared
• We can’t scientifically test it in the same way we test matter
• Taking evidence as a whole: the watchmaker analogy

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

Psalm 19:1-4

Human revelation: Our mind provides evidence to the existence of God

• The Existence of Reason
  • If reason is the result of a chance, then all its “conclusions” are imperfect and cannot be trusted: including evolution itself.
  • On the other hand the Bible says God made us to his image, imparting some of His attributes including reason, so we can trust its conclusions.
• The Justice Argument:
  • We have an idea of justice/fairness that goes opposite to what we see in nature.
  • If taking the life of the guilty is the most you can do to punish a crime, then justice is not fair.
  • For justice to be fair there must be a higher form of punishment and something more valuable than life.   

The Moral Law: a true standard of Right and Wrong

• How people should behave.
  • • It is found in all people and themes run in all civilizations
    • The moral law calls people to do the Right thing no matter the personal cost
      • Ex: come clean when you lie or cheat or promise to do something; risk your life rather than run away when someone is in mortal danger.
    • When we break the Moral Law we put up excuses to our bad behavior.
    • Free will: that is the ability to choose to act according to it or against it.
    • We are subject to physical laws because we have physical bodies
    • If there was something in the universe besides matter and more like a mind, then we should find something other than physical laws. There is, the MORAL LAW, universally found in all people!
  • We constantly break the Moral Law
    • The more consciously we try to obey the moral law, the more we realize we can’t
    • Reason takes us to the point where we realize that we are incapable of practicing it by our own means.
  • It is obvious that for us to advance any further we must receive that help from its source, it must come from God himself, and that is just what the Bible is – help from the source.   

Conclusions

• God is the creator of the Universe
• There is plenty of evidence for His Existence
• God is also the creator of human reason and expects humans to behave according to a moral law:
  • Romans 1:18-20
• People break the moral law and put up excuses to justify them breaking it, even when they try hard
• God tries to call our attention in this way: that we know right and wrong in our mind but in practice we lack something to practice it, so that we turn to Him for help.

When confronted about your faith the gentle and respectful answer is to point out the fact that their beliefs are based on just a theory whereas my beliefs are based on what God has done in my life.

References:

Timothy Keller. 2016. Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World.

C. S. Lewis. 1952. Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis. 1943. The Abolition of Man

C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces – Audiobook

Francis S. Collins. 2006. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

Stephen C. Meyer, 2019. Defining Theistic Evolution

John Lennox, Material from debates and conferences

The Holy Bible

The Westminster Confession of Faith