Can we prove God’s existence? (Easter 2022 panel)
Are there sound reasons to believe that God exists? Can we prove His existence? (Karen)
“The first question which should rightly be asked,” wrote 17th century mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” One of my favorite contemporary Christian philosophers, William Lane Craig, says his favorite proof for the existence of God is what’s known as “The Cosmological Argument.” Here it is broken down into three parts:
Part 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. (Things don’t just pop randomly into existence. If something could come into being from nothing, then why don’t we see this happening all the time? Everyday experience and scientific evidence confirm to us that if something begins to exist, it must have a cause.)
Part 2: The universe began to exist. (The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe is slowly running out of usable energy. If the universe had been here forever, it would have run out of usable energy by now. The universe has a definite beginning. This is not something that is debated in scientific circles anymore – because of Einstein’s equations and many other scientific discoveries, there is consensus that the universe is expanding and that it sprang into being at a single point in the finite past. This was one of the most monumental discoveries of the 20th century. More recently, in 2003, three cosmologists proved that “Any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be eternal in the past, but must have an absolute beginning.”)
Part 3: The plausibility of these first two parts leads us to the conclusion that the universe has a cause. Since the universe cannot cause itself, its cause must be beyond the space-time universe. It must be: spaceless, timeless, immaterial, uncaused, and unimaginably powerful. We call that cause – God! Think about it – God is spaceless, timeless, immaterial, uncaused, and unimaginably powerful. It is reasonable to believe that God does exist. I encourage you to be alert to opportunities to engage in conversations about the existence of God.
