Lecture

Does God exist? Even though most of us say we believe in a divine being, does a Creator exist, outside ourselves? Are we made in His image? Or have we created Him? Do changing times call for a new openness to this old question: Does God exist?

Is there room for God in the twenty-first century? Faith on Trial: Ten Reasons to Believe in the Existence of God, Part 1, on this Day of Discovery.

Dr. Dallas Willard: Atheism is not really new as such...

J. P. Moreland: I’m very concerned about how many people go about forming their beliefs about God.

Dr. Dallas Willard: In America the statistics always run somewhere between 93 percent and 97 percent of people who believe in God.

J. P. Moreland: They pick a little bit from the soaps, they read a little book here, they grab a little bit about what some political figure says, and they end up throwing it all together in a blender and stir it up, and that’s their view of God.

Dr. Dallas Willard: I think what is new is that even for those who believe in God, the natural and human world is so overwhelming, so much more oppressive.

J. P. Moreland: If the person who forms the belief in God is a liberal Democrat, believes that gay rights is OK, and is a Dallas Cowboys fan, guess what? God turns out to hold exactly those beliefs. God is for gay rights, God is a liberal Democrat, and God loves the Cowboys. If a person is a conservative Republican, God ends up being like that.

Dr. Dallas Willard: There used to be an old saying, “God owns the country, the Devil owns the city.” Well, now the whole world almost is city.

J. P. Moreland: Now what concerns me about that is that the God they end up believing in turns out to look strangely like the person who went looking for Him.

If we are inclined to create God in our own image, does He exist outside of ourselves? If you found out that He did not exist, what difference would it make? But does God exist? While there are reasons to wonder, there are at least ten converging lines of evidence that give reason to believe in the existence of God.

Reason 1 to Believe in the Existence of God: The Inevitability of Faith

Everyone believes in something. Everyone accepts, by faith, beliefs that cannot be scientifically proven. Atheists, who believe there is no God, cannot prove there is no God. Pantheists, who believe that everything is God, cannot prove that everything is God. Pragmatists, who believe that what works is what counts, cannot prove that what works for them now is what will work for them in the future. Nor can agnostics, who say that it is impossible to know whether God exists, prove that it is impossible to know one way or the other.

Kerby Anderson: I think it’s important to recognize that faith is a very important part of life. A scientist who walks into a laboratory doesn’t believe that he or she exercises any faith, but they do—faith in the repeatability of experiments, faith that the sun will rise. The way they go about their scientific enterprise requires some kind of faith. So whatever it is, whether it’s the faith we exercise when we get up in the morning, the faith we exercise when we go through a traffic section and recognize that the traffic signals are supposed to be working, the faith that we exercise when we take an aspirin and assume it’s not laced with cyanide, we’re exercising faith. I think it’s important for us to realize that although we can set forth reasonable arguments for why God exists, reasonable arguments for the reliability of the Scripture, ultimately there’s a faith component. We cannot prove 100 percent anything. We can’t even prove 100 percent that we’re here right now. But we can, based upon the evidence, exercise reasonable faith and understand that God exists.

J. Mark Reynolds: Everyone believes in something, even if it’s just belief in themselves and in their own powers. It’s impossible to go through life without some sort of faith commitment, a commitment that my decisions are at least good enough, or that I can live with my decisions.

Most of us, however, find mere faith in ourselves to be inadequate. Sure I could create my own meaning, and I have a lot of friends who are atheists who say, “Yes, it’s true; atheism means that there’s no real meaning to life, that I have to create my meaning, but that’s okay, because I’m pretty good at creating meaning.”

Faith is unavoidable, even if we choose to believe only in ourselves.