Apologia Christi

‘There is probably no God.’ Atheism and evidence.

According to the atheistic billboard near Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, there is probably no God. The campaigners assert that it is beyound reasonable doubt that God doesn’t exist. In my previous two articles I showed that if that is true human life is without morality and without meaning.

We however do not have to surrender to this fateful statement about the so-called probable non-existence of God. The premise is built on nothing but wishful thinking and vain trust in a so-called scientific consensus on this point. Everyone is entitled to his of her own opinion and also the atheist is free to think whatever he wants, but the word ‘probable’ in his statement is simply a joke. It’s a fairy tale based on fiction not fact.

For starters the atheist has to face the challenges that his own worldview poses to him, namely, the impossibility of life without absolute morals and the absence of meaning for humanity, both of which are logical conclusions of atheism. The atheist has to provide answers before he pronounces self-assuredly the non-existence of God.

What follows here is a summary of a few arguments for the existence of God. I deal with the arguments only briefly, but they at least do provide an indication that it actually is probable that God exists and that the billboard’s conclusion is unfounded to say the least. These arguments are modern forms of the arguments of classical apologetics.

The moral argument
The moral argument for the existence for God consists of two premises and a conclusion that follows from them. The argument goes like this:

(1) If God doen not exist there are no objective moral values and duties.
(2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.
(3) Therefore God exists.

In my first article I have shown that on an atheistic worldview objective morals are not possible. The only thing one can attempt to do is to see morals as a result of the evolutionary process. That would be a morality in development. So premise (1) is right.

Now with regard to premise (2). We often see atheists getting upset when they hear premise (1). ‘What? How dare you say that we, atheists, are not decent, civilized and moral?’ Well, it’s true, there are many very decent atheists. Most of them will react with horror to the genocide that took place in former Yugoslavia and Ruanda. They denounce rape and get sick at the thought of someone torturing a baby for fun. In short: they affirm premise (2) that absolute moral values and duties exist that are valid irrespective of situation, culture or era.

Since the atheistic worldview denies the atheist an absolute morality, while at the same existing in practice and experience, we conclude that the main belief of atheism, namely that God doesn’t exist, is not true. Therefore conclusion (3) is true. God does exist.

How do we know we are dealing with God here? Our knowledge and experience of objective and absolute morals cannot be grounded in a naturalistic worldview. It points to a supra-material reality as the source of this morality. We may speculate on the source of this morality. As we do so we realize that morality is only possible in the case of moral choice. Moral choice in turn is a property of personality. Our objective morals therefore point to a supernatural non-material personality who is the source of them. A being with such properties is normally called ‘God’.

The cosmological argument
The cosmological argument states that everything has a cause. Everything is dependent on something else for its existence, i.e. everything is contingent. Every object, every living being exists as the result of an event or an action. You can go back and back, but will always find earlier causes of events. But surely this cannot go on forever. Somewhere there has to be a first cause that is not dependent on something else for its existence: the uncaused first cause.

The initial version of this argument was made by Aristotle who spoke of an unmoved mover. Thomas Aquinas and Leibniz refined this argument. Recently a variation of the cosmological argument, originally developed by the medieval islamic scholar Al Ghazali, has beeen rejuvenated. The so-called kalam cosmological argument has been reformulated and re-developed by one of todays brightest philosophers, William Lane Craig.

The kalam cosmological argument is structured as follows:

(1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Therefore the universe has a cause.

This argument seems to have little to do with God’s existence, but don’t be mistaken. This argument has tremendous implications for the existence of God.

Premise (1) seems to be plausible. Philosophers make a distinction between necessity and contingency. Things exist necessarily or they don’t in which case they are dependent on something else for their existence, i.e. they are contingent. According to premise (1) all contingent things did not exist at one point. They stand as a consequence in relation to something that caused them. All things we observe (including ourselves) are consequences of causes. So we agree with premise (1) that everything that begins to exist has a cause.

Premise (2) was not generally accepted until recently. The new cosmological insights that began with Einstein and through the work of Hubble among others led to the general acceptance of Big Bang cosmology brought a tremendous change in this respect. According to this theory the fact of a currently expending universe implies that this same universe was very small at one point in the distant past. The further one goes back in time, the smaller the universe until ones reaches a point at which space, time and matter simply did not exist. During the past decades more and more scientific clues have been discovered that seem to confirm this theory.

The conclusion of the Big Bang theory of a universe that is not eternal is confirmed by mathematical insights from equations in which the number infinity plays a crucial role. It goes too far at this point to explain this in detail. But you can imagine that when the universe would be infinite into the past (literally without beginning), this same universe could never arrive at the present moment.

We could also look at the entropic law which states that everything decays into chaos and that all energy will be used up and dispersed. Well, if the universe were to be inifite into the past, then all energy would have been used up an infitie time ago. But we still see stars and galaxies and so on. So the universe simply cannot be endlessly old. Premise (2) must therefore be true as well. The universe began to exist. This implies that also time, space and matter began to exist when the universe began to exist.

Given the fact that both premises are true we conclude that the universe, since it began to exist, must have been caused by something of somebody. With this argument we haven’t yet shown God, but have nevertheless broken through the material barrier of naturalistic atheism. There is a cause outside of matter,time and space which caused the universe to exist. The atheistic fairy-tale explodes as it were in a mini big bang.

We could go on by examining the metaphysical implications of this conclusion. That is beyond the scope of this article. In combination with the forementioned moral argument is should however be clear that the existence of God is probable rather than improbable.

The teleological argument
The word ‘teleological’ has nothing to do with theology. It is derived from the greek word ‘telos’ which means ‘purpose’ or ‘goal’. We encounter purposefulness everywhere we go. This has to come from somewhere. Chance can hardly be considered a solution, because the purposefulness we abserve at both micro level (molecular biology) and macro level (astrophysics) begs for intelligence.

I won’t elaborate here on this argument. I mention it because one of the most influential atheistic philosophers of our time, Anthony Flew, has come to the conclusion that God must exist partly on the basis of this argument.

Flew says: ‘naturalistic efforts have failed to provide ‘a plausible conjecture as to how any of these complex molecules might have evolved from simple entities’,and, ‘It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.’ On the other hand, ‘The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved looks to me like the work of intelligence’.

Conclusion
In the end it is not necessary to prove that God exists. It will suffice to show that the existence of God is more probable than not. For every thinking person that should be a suffictient basis to build his or her worldview.

It should be noted that I did not speak directly of the God of the Bible although I do believe that these arguments will in the end lead toward an acknowledgment of the God of the Bible. All I have tried to show here is the bankruptcy of atheism as a coherent worldview (a) with regard to the untenability of its premises and (b) because of its consequences for meaning and morality.

The beautiful thing in all of this is that we escape the dire implications of the atheistic worldview in which we cannot find a foundation for our moral consciousness nor meaning in human existence. God exists. Our moral consciousness finds its source in Him, Who is the ground of our existence. He provides meaning, for He is the purpose of everything.

Now who believes in fairytales? If God exists – and this is a philosophically necessary conclusion – it has tremendous consequences for the possibility and plausilibity of miracles, the inspiration of the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.