Does God Exist ? What is the truth ?

Is there such thing as a God?

 Does God exist? Here are five good reasons to think that God exists:

1.  God makes sense of the origin of the universe.
2.  God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.
3.  God makes sense of objective moral values in the world.
4.  God makes sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
5.  God can be immediately known and experienced.

 After all, if God does not exist, there's no reason to be interested in God at all.

 On the other hand, if God does exist, then this is of paramount interest, and our ultimate concern ought to be how to be properly related to this being upon whom we depend moment by moment for our very existence.

Three reasons why His existence makes a difference.

Reason 1: Life is Ultimately Meaningless Without God.

 If God does not exist, life is ultimately meaningless. If your life is doomed to end in death, then ultimately it does not matter how you live. In the end, it makes no ultimate difference whether you existed or not.

 Thus, if atheism is true, life is ultimately meaningless.

Reason 2: Without God, We Live Without Hope.

 If God does not exist, then we must ultimately live without hope. If there is no God, then there is ultimately no hope for deliverance from the shortcomings of our finite existence.

 If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering, and there is no hope for deliverance from evil.

 Or again, if there is no God, there is no hope of deliverance from aging, disease, and death. Although it may be hard for you as university students to contemplate, the sober fact is that unless you die young, someday you will be an old man or an old woman, fighting a losing battle with aging, struggling against the inevitable advance of deterioration, disease, perhaps senility. And finally and inevitably you will die. There is no afterlife beyond the grave. Atheism is thus a philosophy without hope.

Reason 3: If God Exists, You Can Know His Love Personally.

 On the other hand, if God does exist,  there is also the possibility of coming to know God and His love personally.

 That the infinite God should love you and want to be your personal friend! This would be the highest status a human being could enjoy!

 Clearly, if God exists, it makes not only a tremendous difference for mankind in general, but it could make a life-changing difference for you as well.

 Now,  none of this shows that God exists. But it does show that it makes a tremendous difference whether God exists. Therefore, even if the evidence for and against the existence of God were absolutely equal, the rational thing to do, I think, is to believe in Him. That is to say, it seems to me positively irrational when the evidence is equal to prefer death, futility, and despair over hope, meaningfulness and happiness.

 Does God exist? As travelers along life's way, it's our goal to make sense of things, to try to understand the way the world is. The hypothesis that God exists makes sense out of a wide range of the facts of experience.

God makes sense of the origin of the universe.

 Have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from? Why everything exists instead of just nothing? Typically, atheists have said the universe is just eternal, and that's all.

 But surely this is unreasonable. Just think about it a minute. If the universe never had a beginning, that means that the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite.

 But that entails that since past events are not just ideas, but are real, the number of past events must be finite. Therefore, the series of past events can't go back forever; rather, the universe must have begun to exist.

 This conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics.

 It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men, and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.

 Out of nothing, nothing comes. So why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

 We can summarize our argument thus far as follows:

1.  Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2.  The universe began to exist.
3.  Therefore, the universe has a cause.

 Given the truth of the two premises, the conclusion necessarily follows.

 From the very nature of the case, this cause must be an uncased, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being which created the universe. It must be uncased because we've seen that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be timeless and therefore changeless—at least without the universe—because it created time. Because it also created space, it must transcend space as well and therefore be immaterial, not physical.

       God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.

 During the last 40 years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the Big Bang itself. Scientists once believed that whatever the initial conditions of the universe, eventually intelligent life might evolve.

 First, when the laws of nature are expressed as mathematical equations, you find appearing in them certain constants, like the gravitational constant. These constants are not determined by the laws of nature. The laws of nature are consistent with a wide range of values for these constants.

 Second, in addition to these constants there are certain arbitrary quantities which are just put in as initial conditions on which the laws of nature operate, for example, the amount of entropy or the balance between matter and anti-matter in the universe. Now, all of these constants and quantities fall into an extraordinarily narrow range of life-permitting values. Were these constants or quantities to be altered by a hair's breadth, the life-permitting balance would be destroyed and life would not exist.

 Now there are three possibilities for explaining the presence of this remarkable fine-tuning of the universe: physical necessity, chance, or design.

 The first alternative holds that there is some unknown Theory of Everything  which would explain the way the universe is. It had to be that way, and there was really no chance or little chance of the universe's not being life-permitting.

 By contrast, the second alternative states that the fine-tuning is due entirely to chance. It's just an accident that the universe is life-permitting, and we're the lucky beneficiaries. The third alternative rejects both of these accounts in favor of an intelligent Mind behind the cosmos, who designed the universe to permit life.

 Even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn't follow that the physical universe itself is unique.

The laws of physics must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions.  There is nothing in present ideas about 'laws of initial conditions' remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness. Far from it.

  It seems, then, that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is: it could have been otherwise.

 So what about the second alternative, that the fine-tuning of the universe is due to chance?

 The problem with this alternative is that the odds against the universe's being life-permitting are so incomprehensibly great that they cannot be reasonably faced. Even though there will be a huge number of life-permitting universes lying within the cosmic landscape, nevertheless the number of life-permitting worlds will be unfathomably tiny compared to the entire landscape, so that the existence of a life-permitting universe is fantastically improbable.

 So once again, the view that Christian theists have always held, that there is an intelligent designer of the universe, seems to make much more sense than the atheistic view that the universe just happens to be by chance fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of intelligent life.

 We can summarize this second argument as follows:

1.  The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2.   It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3.  Therefore, it is due to design.

        God makes sense of objective moral values in the world.

 Does God exist? If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so.

 But in order to avoid God's existence, Mackie therefore denied that objective moral values exist. He wrote, "It is easy to explain this moral sense as a natural product of biological and social evolution.

 Friedrich Nietzsche, the great 19th century atheist who proclaimed the death of God, understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life.

 But we must be very careful here. Can we recognize objective moral values without believing in God?

 Rather, the question is: "If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?" Like Mackie and Ruse, I don't see any reason to think that in the absence of God, human morality is objective. After all, if there is no God, then what's so special about human beings?

 Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience.

 We can summarize this argument as follows:

1.  If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2.  Objective moral values do exist.
3.  Therefore, God exists.

     God makes sense of the historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

 New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God's place.

 That's why the Jewish leadership instigated his crucifixion for the charge of blasphemy. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracles and exorcisms. But the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead.

 If Jesus did rise from the dead, then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and, thus, evidence for the existence of God.

 Now most people would probably think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just accept on faith or not. But there are actually three established facts, recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today, which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus: His empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples' belief in his resurrection. Let's look briefly at each one of these.

 Fact #1:
  Jesus' tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers on Sunday morning.

 Fact #2:
  On separate occasions different individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death.  

  "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ." These appearances were witnessed not only by believers, but also by unbelievers, skeptics, and even enemies.

 Fact #3:
  The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Think of the situation the disciples faced following Jesus' crucifixion:

1.  Their leader was dead, and Jewish Messianic expectations included no idea of a Messiah who, instead of triumphing over Israel's enemies, would be shamefully executed by them as a criminal.

2.  Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone's rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world.

 The simple fact is that there just is no plausible, naturalistic explanation of these facts.

 Therefore, it seems to me, the Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be. But that entails that God exists.

          God can be immediately known and experienced.

 This isn't really an argument for God's existence; rather it's the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing him.

 In the same way, belief in God is for those who seek Him a properly basic belief grounded in our experience of God.

 We can summarize this consideration as follows:

1.  Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally accepted as basic beliefs not grounded on argument.
2.  Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
3.  Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded on argument.