Greg and Amy highlight classical arguments for God’s existence and point out a faulty assumption made by those who claim religion is just a matter of belief.
Transcript
Amy: This one comes from Southern Bell: “How do you talk to someone that believes God is a personal belief in your head and that there is no way to know if there is a God or not?”
Greg: Well, if there is no way to know, then it is a personal belief that you can’t verify. All right? The key here is whether there’s any way to have a confidence that the belief matches the way the world is—that it corresponds to the world—which is another way of saying that the belief is true and that God’s existence is a fact. All right?
It’s kind of interesting. When I’ve had conversations about this with other people, people are comfortable with all sorts of ways of learning about things, whether it’s through empirical, scientific kind of processes or a personal experience or a reflection on history or getting things by an authority who tells you—and that’s in science and that’s in history and it’s in a whole bunch of other things. “Oh yeah, I think that’s true.” Why? “Well, that guy said so, and that guy knows a thing or two about it.” Okay. Well, that’s knowledge by authority. Knowledge by intuition or reflection—how do you know your own thoughts? Well, you’re directly connected to your own thoughts. You don’t know them because you sense them with your five senses, etc.
So, there’s lots of ways that people know things. But when it comes to religious claims, all of a sudden that’s all off the table. “You can’t know any of that. That’s just a belief.” Well, it seems to me you can know those claims like you know about those claims—the truth of those claims or untruth of those claims—the same way you know about a whole bunch of other things.
And this is where the classical arguments for God’s existence come in. And the three main ones are the cosmological argument—which basically is where did the cosmos come from? We know it came into existence. What caused it to come into existence? There’s only two options—something or nothing. Something caused the universe to come into existence. That means it would be something outside of the universe—the natural realm—that’s powerful, smart, an agent capable of making something happen, initiating a causal chain, so to speak. Or not—that is, there was no cause to the universe. It just popped into existence with no cause, for no reason, and with no purpose. And by the way, those all go together. So, what’s the most reasonable alternative? It isn’t that the universe just popped into existence, because that’s contrary to all of our experience about the nature of cause and effect.
All right? So, we see an effect. Something happens. Some change takes place. The universe comes into existence. What caused it is a fair question. So, what we are doing is trading on our normal intuitions about cause and effect that we apply to science in general. We use the same notion and apply it there. Why can’t that be applied to the God question with the origin of the universe? Okay?
Now, somebody might reject the argument, the cosmological argument, but it’s not nothing. They might think, “Well, I think it’s more likely that the universe popped into existence out of nothing, with no cause, for no reason and no purpose.” Okay. Well, you’re welcome to that, but that doesn’t seem to me the smart money decision. All right?
Or the teleological argument—the design argument—that the universe looks pretty orderly. Even the idea of natural law implies that there is an order to the universe that seems to have been imposed upon it. Who imposed that? Who created the order? And so, that’s another argument. We look at something physical, and we infer from that a designer, just like I’m looking at this pen on the table. No one would think that that happened by accident. Based on what we know, we look at the nature of the thing, and we infer a particular kind of cause—a designing cause, not just a cause that brought the substance into existence.
Or the moral argument, which is the world is filled with morality. What best explains that? All right? We know the world is filled with objective morality because people are always complaining about the problem of evil. That requires objective morality to be a problem—for the problem to exist, is my point.
So, I just went through a bunch of things that we’ve talked about in more detail here on other shows and Stand to Reason is always discussing, but I’m just laying them out very quickly—three different lines of argument: cosmological, teleological, and moral—to show that we can use our standard ways of knowing lots of different things that we feel very confident we know and apply them to the question of God’s existence along those three lines and come up with a conclusion that’s a reasonable conclusion—that God exists.
Could be mistaken, and that’s true about all things, but we’re not starting with nothing. We are not just believing for no good reason. All right?
And I mentioned authority. Well, that’s another thing that can be packed in here—the argument from authority—those who know better. And we look at the life of Jesus and the miracles he did, and he becomes now an authority about spiritual things because of the nature of his miracles if they actually took place. And now we got an historical argument.
What I’m saying is, we have lots of tools of knowledge available to us to be able to assess religious claims. Religion isn’t outside of the realm of our knowledge. That is a philosophic notion that came out of the Enlightenment—that all you could know are those things that, basically, science tells you by your five senses—the empiricism—and that’s obviously false anyway because it doesn’t even fulfill its own requirement. People consider empiricism to be an element of knowledge. “We can only know it if….” But that particular truth isn’t secured by the empirical method, so it doesn’t even satisfy its own requirements for truth. On the face of it, self-refuting.
So, those, I think, are some of the things that are in play, and it’s a matter for us, as Christians, and also non-Christians to realize there are lots of ways that we know things, and all those ways that we are confident we know things are all available to addressing the question of religious truth.
Amy: So, as you’re talking, Greg, I’m thinking about how I would introduce these ideas to this kind of person who made this argument. I think the first thing I would say is, why do you think there’s no way to know if there’s a God or not? Because I think how you proceed is going to depend on what they say. What do you think someone would say, Greg, if you said, “Why do you think there’s no way to know if there’s a God?”
Greg: I can’t see him, so, why should I believe in him?
Amy: So, I think whatever comes out, I’m trying to think if there’s another option. Actually, I don’t know what they would say, so, I think it’s hard to know where we would go from there.
Greg: Well, they might raise the problem of evil or something like that, and so there’s a contradiction.
Amy: That’s about why they think God doesn’t exist. That’s not about why they think we can’t know.
Greg: Oh, well, that’s right.
Amy: So, why do you think we can’t know? If God is real, why couldn’t we reason about him? Why would we not know?
I think, ultimately, somebody who says God is just a personal belief in your head, they’re already assuming he doesn’t exist. I think that is the giveaway here.
Greg: God is just a belief.
Amy: God is just a belief in your head.
So, that’s worth pointing out. Well, if you think he’s just a belief in my head, it sounds like you’re already assuming he’s false. But when you come to figure out what’s true about reality, you can’t start with an assumption that he’s false. You have to look at what reality looks like before you can decide. Can you lay aside that kind of assumption for a second? If I could make a reasoned argument for the existence of God, would you consider it?
So, that way, hopefully, that will kind of shake them up a little bit and make them realize that they’ve just been assuming something, because it seems to me, if God really does exist, there’s a very good chance that he would want us to know that.
So, we should be able to figure it out, or at least reason, or at least see evidence, or any of those things. So, unless you assume he doesn’t exist at all—if he didn’t exist at all, then of course we would never know anything about him. I mean, that’s obvious. There would be no evidence of him. There would be no indication of him. He wouldn’t have revealed himself. That’s true. But if he exists, then there would be. So, let’s not start with the assumption that he doesn’t exist. Are you willing to look at that? Are you willing to hear my arguments and then see what happens?