Does God Exist?

For someone to show interest in studying the Bible, two basic questions must be answered:

• Does God exist?
• Has God spoken?

Obviously it would be pointless to study the Bible if God did not really exist or had not spoken. In this post, we’ll focus on answering the first question.

Over the years philosophers have defended the existence of God in a variety of ways. I’ve found the best argument to be what’s called the Transcendental Argument. You can listen to an excellent example of this argument in use in “The Great Debate” between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein here.

This argument is also called the Impossibility of the Contrary argument. Here is a brief summary of the argument.

One person claims that God exists. For another person to say contrary is logically impossible.

Really? Why?

The argument is that that person has no basis for a logical argument upon which he or she can argue to the contrary without in the end supporting his or her own worldview by necessarily borrowing from the Christian worldview. Because of this necessary borrowing from the Christian’s worldview, the atheist falsifies his or her own worldview.

How so?

Where does the atheist get certainty about the laws of logic, science, morality, and so on. He or she has no basis for this kind of absolute uniformity. Yet, without absolute laws he cannot do science or argue for laws of logical consistency or for laws of morality. He cannot be absolutely sure about anything. And yet people necessarily operate in this universe with some surety in the workability of the universe and in laws of logic (or we couldn’t even live and communicate in this world). Total relativity is not realistically possible. There are absolutes in this universe. The atheist can’t account for them.

An atheist has to use the laws of logic to make his arguments. However in so doing he must borrow from the Christian worldview which allows for these laws of logic to exist. These are abstract (metaphysical), universal, non-varying concepts, which cannot extend from the atheistic worldview – which only allows for material, always evolving, and varying/relative concepts that are based on sociological agreement.

Here’s an example: Mathematics’ rules are not just a convention that people make up that works – people discovered these laws that are inherently true (the communication of these laws through symbols may be a construct but the law itself is real/discovered and not just a construct). The atheistic worldview cannot justify the laws of mathematics because they have no valid basis for any universal, invariant, abstract entities that exist. A naturalist can never justify something being universal, invariant, abstract. Yet they use these to try to make their logical arguments (they use something to support their worldview which rules out these very things). What accounts for this? They borrow from my Christian worldview which says that this is one example of the existence of God – since this extends from the mind of the Creator God that made our world this way.

So here is the Transcendental argument: God is in fact a precondition for the experiences that we have (in order for our experiences to be possible). God exists. To say contrary is impossible because the reality of this world can never support that logically because of the absolutes that God has built into this world that cannot be accounted for otherwise.

This is demonstrated by the example of the existence of the laws of logic for which an atheist cannot justify or account for all the while trying to use them – the same is true for accounting for laws of science and morality. The laws of logic are justified in Christianity because they are derived from God and it must be the God of the Bible because that is the only self-coherent worldview (but that will have to be further argued elsewhere).

Romans 1:18-20 reveals that all humans have received God’s clear and unquestionable communication of His existence. God has made plain to all people certain things that can be known about Him. It is so plain that all people are without excuse. God has revealed His existence and power in the created order, in history, and in every individual’s own conscience. There is only one reason a person denies God’s existence. And it is not for lack of evidence. It is a purposeful rebellion, a suppression of the truth. Psalm 53:1 explains the reason: only a fool could deny the evidence of God’s existence. And such a person does so because he or she is corrupt. Such a person does not want to admit that he or she is in danger of judgment. So like a two year old who closes his eyes to pretend he is out of reach of his parents’ discipline, so also is the fool who denies his creator who made him to have embedded into his conscience the intrinsic knowledge of the Creator.

There’s a better way to deal with one’s own corruption. And it’s not to pretend it doesn’t exist or that God doesn’t exist. It’s to own it and to reckon with God. In fact, God has provided a way to rescue you from corruption and judgment. So there is no need to deny it or God and His coming judgment.

Romans 1:16-17

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”