By Dan Paterson
Christianity has always been evidence-based.
In fact in Hebrews 11, a chapter all about biblical faith or the kind of faith God celebrates, verse 6 enumerates how if you are going to truly trust God, then at the very least, as a necessary precondition, you need to be convinced or have good reasons to believe, that God actually exists.
The question of God’s existence is one that the Bible says is fundamental, because if God does not exist, then the Christian story may be full of some good ideas, but it cannot ultimately be good news. Which is why the Christian story is also committed to exploring how faith has its reasons.
Firstly, God seems to be the best explanation for the universe we inhabit.
Since, by definition, God is the Creator, and is not Himself part of the material creation, we cannot simply travel to some remote corner of the universe to find God. But just because I cannot point directly at God is no reason to think that there is no evidence for God. When we walk into a grand cathedral, we hardly expect to find the architect inside the structure, and yet the beauty of the building, the intricate design, and the very existence of the cathedral itself, offers a smorgasbord of evidence from which we can infer that there is, in fact, an architect. Which is precisely the case when it comes to God and our cosmos.
Psalm 19:1 claims:
The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of His hands.
That creation itself speaks. Romans 1:20 echoes a similar sentiment, claiming that the invisible God can be clearly perceived through what has been made. The claim of the Christian story is that this entire universe is a grand cathedral punctuated with beauty, purpose, and design; a claim that is supported by various lines of evidence from which we can make justified inferences to the best explanation.
Second, closer to home, God’s existence makes the most sense of our rich human experience.
Genesis 1:26-27 makes the claim that all human beings bear God’s image. Now that’s interesting. The logic of the author is that beyond the inert matter that was ordered in creation, and above all the diversity of the animal kingdom, that human beings distinctly reveal what God is like to the rest of creation, which is a claim that is entirely defensible when you consider how distinct and enigmatic human beings truly are. That we are:
• Rational beings, capable of consciously engaging in powerful abstract reasoning.
• Relational beings, innately longing to love and be loved, even self sacrificially.
• Moral beings, acting upon our conscience that good and evil are real categories.
• Purposeful beings, obsessed with contributing something meaningful to the world.
• Spiritual beings, hard-wired to reach beyond the physical world for something more, as is evidenced by the universal spirituality of the human race throughout all cultures.
These are just a small sample of the richest things that are innate to our human experience; things that are difficult to explain on a purely secular register without either diminishing them or explaining them away. Christian philosophers, offer a whole range of arguments—from consciousness and morality and reason and desire all with the baseline conviction that God’s existence makes the most sense of the dignity and depth of the human experience.
The Christian story claims that Jesus is the invisible God made visible, providing evidence of God’s existence through the fulfilment of detailed prophecy, testifying to God’s foreknowledge of the future, and through performing miracles, revealing the hand of a supernatural agent. Now whilst both the argument from prophecy and the argument from miracles can be straw-manned or poorly presented, serious versions of these arguments can be made, and the resurrection of Jesus is undoubtedly the strongest.
By definition, no miracle can take place without a supernatural cause, and so if Jesus was raised from the dead then that miracle provides good reason to believe in the existence of God.
Article excerpt taken from *Does God Exist?* by Dan Paterson, Copyright © 2021. Used by permission of Questioning Christianity. Full article at: https://www.questioningchristianity.com/resources/dljadjii080xv7vqegon3r0mq6aask
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