Blind Faith or Logical Reasons to Believe God Exists?

The drought in Atlanta brought out people of faith to the capital steps to pray for rain. Across the street, the Freethought Society protested. I remembered from school, America stood for freedom of religion, but today it is being reinterpreted to mean freedom from religion, like religious expression should never be in the public arena. It appears that you can have “free thought,” but if your free thought leads you to believe in God, you’re parallel to a mindless devotee bowing down before a wooden idol.

 

With the rise of atheism in the media, many conclude that Christians believe in God as a crutch or an escape from reality. For some needy reason they choose to believe in an imaginary concept of God based on blind faith. But there really are solid logical arguments that would indicate it takes more faith to be an atheist. Take this one for example:

The cosmological argument simply states that the universe is limited in that it had a beginning and that its beginning was caused by something beyond the universe:

  1. The universe had a beginning.
  2. Anything that has a beginning must have been caused by something else.
  3. Therefore, the universe was caused by something else, and this cause was God.

Scientific evidence strongly supports the idea that the universe had a beginning. The view usually held by those who claim that the universe is eternal, called the steady state theory, leads some to believe that the universe is constantly producing hydrogen atoms from nothing. It would be simpler to believe that God created the universe from nothing. Also, the consensus of scientists studying the origin of the universe is that it came into being in a sudden and cataclysmic way (the Big Bang). The main evidence for the universe having a beginning is the second law of thermodynamics, which says the universe is running out of usable energy. But if it is running down, then it could not be eternal. What is winding down must have been wound up.

 

But beyond the scientific evidence that shows the universe began, there is a philosophical reason to believe that the world had a starting point. This argument shows that time cannot go back into the past forever. It is impossible to pass through an infinite series of moments. It is like moving your finger across an endless number of books in a library. You would never get to the last book. Even if you thought you had found the last book, there could always be one more added, then another. You can never finish an infinite series of real things.

 

The same goes toward “the beginning of time.” Infinite regress is impossible because there is always one more book on the shelf. So, time must have begun at a particular point in the past, and today has come at a definite time since then. Therefore, the world is a finite event after all and it needs a cause for its beginning. **

 

Norman Geisler puts it this way:

  1. Finite, changing things exist. For example, me. I would have to exist to deny that I exist; so either way, I must really exist.
  2. Every finite, changing thing must be caused by something else. If it is limited and it changes, then it cannot be something that exists independently. If it existed independently, or necessarily, then it would have always existed without any kind of change.
  3. There cannot be an infinite regress of these causes. In other words, you can’t go on explaining how this finite thing causes this finite thing, which causes this other finite thing, and on and on, because that really just puts off the explanation indefinitely.
  4. Therefore, there must be a first uncaused cause of every finite, changing thing that exists. 

Since the universe very plainly had a beginning, it must have been caused or started by something uncaused, which is God. But why do people reject God so strongly? I believe that if we recognize the existence of God, it means that we are accountable to something higher than ourselves. This is not acceptable to anyone who bows to no One.

 

** From Norman Geisler’s When Skeptics Ask.

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4 Replies to “Blind Faith or Logical Reasons to Believe God Exists?”

  1. Stephen

    Well, let’s just say I disagree 😉

    Even should this argument be sound, there is absolutely no reason to jump from “there must be an infinite cause” to “it’s the Christian God who answers prayers, judges souls and inspires holy books.” That remains a blind leap of faith.

    It is my understanding that any scientific knowledge regarding the goings-ons prior to the Big-Bang is premature. If we are to believe the laws of physics, time and gravity (perhaps even cause and effect?) came into existence with the Big Bang, some really weird, counter-intuitive things could have gone on prior to it.

    As someone who is most definitely not a astronomer, physicist or cosmologist, I could be totally wrong on this. But again, it’s my understanding that scientists don’t really know what went on before this universe began.

    With regard to the impossibly of an infinite series of events, I’d like to propose that there is a large, important difference between saying the building blocks of our universe came to be an infinity ago and suggesting the universe simply never began.

    If we are to go with the latter, we see time and events on a relative scale, hence solving the problem.

    This argument really boils down to another god of the gaps fallacy: contemporary science restricts us to uncertainty about an event in nature, therefore a supernatural cause is invoked to explain it away.

    Unfortunately, this only pushes the question back a step leaving unexplained the origins of the defined cause, answering a mystery with an even bigger mystery.

    Stephen

  2. HeartQuest

    Stephen, thanks for your thoughts. You are right on target about making the leap from an infinite cause to the existence of the God of the Bible. At some point I will write about reasoning to Christianity from ground zero, but for now, my intention for this post was to claim that recognizing the existence of something beyond the universe (let’s call it God) is not such an unreasonable belief.

    I hope to also write about logical arguments for the reliability of the Bible.

    Many people are also skeptical about God because of the whole “prayer” thing, but it is my belief that people do not really understand what prayer is all about (not that I claim to be an expert); it’s so much more than just asking for stuff or a magical incantation. I’ve got another post on the purpose of prayer purhaps you’d be interested in reading.

    Scott

  3. Stephen

    Yes, but I don’t think I’d even be willing to go that far.

    There is good reason to object to the first premise of the argument. Scientific knowledge tells us that the current state of the universe began with the Big Bang, but Stephen Hawking has also suggested that the laws of physics break down prior to the singularity. If that is the case, the state of things prior to the Big Bang are irrelevant because there is no standard of measuring them.

    Since the events prior to the singularity can’t even be speculated, belief in a supernatural first cause still requires an irrational leap of faith.

    I’ll try and check out that post, too.

    Stephen

  4. HeartQuest

    BTW, I read the Hawking lectures referenced above and wrote a response in November 2007, where Stephen and I had a good “conversation.”

    Go to categories > apologetics to find more about this.

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