How do you know God exists? - sermon notes revised as an addendum to Exodus 3:11-15 comments

I recently watched a comedy about a brilliant little boy who was destined to become a scientist and was an avowed atheist. He simply could not place belief in God within his framework of understanding reality. He had two misconceptions, though, or rather the writers of the comedy did. One, they did not understand what Christians believe and two, they expressed the false notion that science is never based on faith.

Before I get into that I want to point out a debate I watched on Youtube between the militant atheist science celebrity, Richard Dawkins, and a Catholic theologian when, after hearing Dawkins harangue against belief in God expressing what he thought was a description of God, the Catholic said something like, “This is difficult because I don’t believe in the God that he doesn’t believe in.” The atheist had shown that he had no understanding of who God is but only a popular mythology kind of view of an old man with a long beard sending thunderbolts, a sort of Zeus of Greek mythology. Dawkins didn’t say it just like that but it was clear he had no clue of the God of the Bible at all.

So it is with Hollywood writers who will have their characters say the Lord’s Prayer in place of asking a blessing on their food before a meal or in order to put people of faith down will have them say things that aren’t in the Bible but sound Biblical, phrases from old pop Christianity like, “the Lord helps those who help themselves,” as a justification for theft, or, “cleanliness is next to godliness,” to get a child to take a bath.

In this comedy about the genius little boy a preacher makes a statement something like this, “There is a 50-50 probability that God exists. So, I’ll take my chances.” The boy-genius raises his hand and tells the preacher he is confusing probability with chance. There is a 50-50 chance the little boy has a million dollars laying on his bed at home but there is absolutely no probability of it. He also insists he trusts science because it is based on facts.

Well, let me tell you about science. There is a kind of philosopher of science who is called an anti-realist. Now, why would they be called that? Well, for one, they look at something like the Higgs-Boson particle, the so-called God-particle that allows all things to have mass supposedly, and they might say to the theoretical scientists, and of course I’m making this up for my argument’s sake, “Hey, Sparky, the Higgs-Boson particle is valuable because it has the ability to explain something that really happens. It has explanatory power. But, there is absolutely no evidence it exists in reality. In fact, you’re just making it up to justify your worldview and your theories.” I would add, “without God,” but I doubt the anti-realist would care to hear that.

But, we’re not discussing whether the God-particle exists. We’re talking about God. Most of us believe that God exists by faith but there have been lots of arguments in history regarding God’s existence. There is everything from Pascal’s Wager, which is the one you hear preachers repeat all the time in made-up, as in fake or not-true never-happened, salvation stories they like to use. It goes like this in a shortened way. If I believe in God and He doesn’t exist I won’t know because I will cease to exist. If you don’t believe in God and He does exist, you’re fried.

There have been arguments from Aesthetics, Desire, Conscience, the Moral Argument, the Ontological Argument, and on and on for thousands of years. But, really, the argument for God’s existence breaks down to where we live. The most important proof of God’s existence is that there is something rather than nothing and since stuff doesn’t create itself it had to be created, and that’s where God comes in.

Now, I don’t believe in God because of this. My faith is based on my experience with Him and on the truth of what He has said in His book. Not only have I encountered a risen Saviour in prayer, Bible reading, answered prayer, and in the creation and reality around me but I completely trust His book containing His ministry of reconciling mankind to Himself. I have no doubts. God speaks to my heart through His book changing me without me hearing words in my ear but working on me from the inside in His special way.

You may not find me a credible witness. If I told you I had an Uncle Lloyd you might say, “maybe you did, maybe you didn’t.” You might think I was making Uncle Lloyd up. Well, let me tell you nobody could make my Uncle Lloyd up. But, typically, if a person says they have an uncle or a spouse or a close friend and go on to describe them the listener usually accepts that if they have no reason to doubt the truthfulness or sanity of the person.

However, with God it is totally different. Unbelievers become adamant, raving even, that you are a lunatic, or weak, or small-minded. They cannot accept that a perfectly rational scientist, businessman, or scholar of any type could believe in and love a God who has not revealed Himself to them.

So, let me try to start with some basics. These are things outside of our personal experience with God, a personal experience that no unbeliever can understand or accept unless God Himself touches their hearts.

Let’s take something as complex as life. The astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle was born in Yorkshire, England on June 24, 1915. He was conferred a master's degree from Cambridge in 1939 and then was elected Fellow, St. John's College, Cambridge in the same year. He worked his way to become a Professor of Astrophysics and Natural Philosophy in 1958. He was a leading contributor in the discovery of how the elements from lithium to iron are synthesized inside stars.

Professor N. Chandra Wickramasinghe was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on January 20, 1939, studied astrophysics at Cambridge, and was a student of Hoyle's. He received a Ph.D. in 1963 taught at Cambridge. He later became a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy at the University College, Cardiff, Wales. He is an expert in the use of infrared astronomy to study interstellar matter.

These are no lightweights although Wickramasinghe has gone a little bonkers in the last few years. But, they both came to the logical atheist conclusion that life came from outer space. Why? Because it was impossible for it to have happened by random chance on earth, not in 15 billion years or a hundred billion years. Let me read you a quote published recently by Dr. Wick…

“Improbability of Life

The blueprint for all life from bacteria to plants to animals was discovered in the 1950s by Watson and Crick to reside in DNA – in particular in the precise arrangements of the nucleotides A,G,T,C that effectively code for proteins that in turn control cell function. In a series of books and articles published in collaboration with the late Sir Fred Hoyle, I have argued that highly specific arrangements needed for the operation of living cells cannot be understood as arising from random processes. For the simplest bacterium (Mycoplasma genitalium) the probability that its few hundred genes will be discovered by random shuffling of their amino acid components gives a figure of 1 in 10 to the 1000^th power or smaller. Hoyle and I have compared such horrendous improbabilities to the odds against a ‘tornado blowing through a junk yard leading to self-assembly of BOEING 707 airplane.’” [Chandra Wickramasinghe & Robert Bauval, Cosmic Womb: The Seeding of Planet Earth (Rochester, Vermont:Bear & Co., 2017), Kindle ed., chap. 1]

1 in 10 to the 1000^th? These types of scientists estimate there is only 10 to the 80^th power number of atoms in the universe. Saying that life came about by random processes is like me saying that I’m getting handsomer, wealthier, and smarter as I get older. You would just look at me and go, what? I’m joking, right? But, scientists who believe in spontaneous generation, I mean abiogenesis, or life by accident are serious.

So, proof that God exists, step one. Life could not have happened on earth by chance. It’s not mathematically conceivable, not by any stretch of your Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dr. Who imagination. But, what about it coming from somewhere else? That’s called panspermia and that’s what Dr. Wick believes in.

Well, NASA scientists Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, in their book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, explained that it is also highly unlikely that life came from someplace else as this planet, located where it is, is the best and most likely place for life to exist and, in fact, probably could not exist anywhere else.

So, proof that God exists, step two. Life could not have happened anywhere but on earth. But, it couldn’t happen here by chance. So, something else, or someone else rather, must be happening.

Who could it be?

You know if they could have proven that life could have come together by random events on earth like Miller-Urey’s experiment tried to do and failed in the 1950s it would be astounding. But, you’d have to have nothing and then have something suddenly come into existence for it to simulate God without God. After all, Miller-Urey made something happen with the equipment and chemicals they introduced making themselves in the place of God. But, they did not create life and established conditions that evolutionists do not believe were present in their fantasy of early earth anyway. So, it worked as a publicity stunt but was not good science.

Then, there was Dr. Wimmer in the latter part of the twentieth century that supposedly made a virus out of synthetic DNA. Now he admitted in an interview that he did not create life as a virus isn’t alive, it can’t reproduce itself and needs a host, and he used synthetic DNA.

None of these experiments or any other created life or proved that it could be created by random processes without an intelligent mind involved.

So, now you have the gorilla in the living room. You have something as complex as life and you shouldn’t have it if there were no one to inject intelligence into it. Life isn’t possible without God.

You have the atheist or the doubter demanding, “How do you know God exists?” and you have your own testimony, if you have one, and you have this incontrovertible fact, “Because without God life could not exist.”

You see, we are not just alive. We are aware that we are alive. Science has a huge problem with conscious self-awareness. Step three to proving that God exists. I am.

It has been said repeatedly that consciousness is the window through which we understand. Science has failed to pinpoint the actual brain processes that are behind our awareness. Some neuroscientists and philosophers of science express a deep pessimism that we will ever find an explanation for consciousness. But we know. Every car mechanic or customer service rep, a farmer or bank teller can know what a neuroscientist does not know. We know where consciousness comes from, that function of our spirit.

Zechariah 12:1 ¶  The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.

Scientists say that a good theory, a theory that must supplant other theories, doesn’t have to answer every question. But it must answer more questions than its competitors. The belief in God answers far more questions than theoretical science can even come up with.

God is the greatest of all self-aware beings.

Exodus 3:14  And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

He made us. He formed our bodies, our souls, and our spirits. In these verses are all three; body, spirit, and soul.

Genesis 2:7  And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

1Thessalonians 5:23  And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He uses our spirit to see us from the inside.

Proverbs 20:27  The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly.

We are made self-aware and our soul is the seat of our self-identity and will and our spirit makes us aware of it, of God, and of all things. It is our understanding, our skills, our drives, our emotions, our yearnings.

It is sad that the atheist or doubter will question your testimony as to whether or not you are a credible witness for God’s existence. That was how I came to Christ, the mechanism He used, the testimony of others. I vacillated between atheism, happy to believe in any religion at all, and really, God just being irrelevant to my life or thinking. But, over time I saw the truth of Christianity in the lives of people around me.

No, it wasn’t because of someone screaming Bible verses at me on a street corner. It wasn’t from someone handing me a gospel tract. It was the testimony of Christians, filled with faith and goodness, relying completely on God for their very survival, trusting in Christ’s righteousness and not their own for eternal life. Their faith was real, and it took time but God impressed on me that reality until I accepted it myself and received Christ on March 19, 1986. It was a Wednesday evening I believe.

The question of whether or not God exists has been a subject of deep philosophical debate for thousands of years. But, even outside of our experience we know.

Psalm 19:1  The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

The proof of God’s existence is all around us. Without God’s existence no reality makes sense for very long.

Ask yourself, if there was no God, then why is there something rather than nothing? Why is something as complex as life here in this space of earth?  If God doesn’t exist why do I know that I am? Where did that come from, o’ wise one? How can we have this conversation?

The universe is finely tuned, so finely tuned that something as rare and fragile as life can live in it. Things like the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to the strength of gravity for a pair of protons, nuclear efficiency of fusion from hydrogen to helium, the density parameter, the cosmological constant, and a bunch of other intelligent sounding stuff make many scientists insist that the universe is just so and because of that you, me, and that little chipmunk you saw on your deck this morning can exist.

Other scientists invent all sorts of nonsensical things to counteract this belief. They will resurrect the multidimensions of the occult of the late 1800s which impacted theoretical physics then and say there is a multiverse, many universes where things are different and anything is possible. I might even be handsomer, wealthier, and smarter on one of them, in their imagination only of course.

But, the universe is fine-tuned. Now, how does something get tuned? Have you ever seen a radio tune itself? Never mind. In today’s world I suppose that is possible. But, at some point a person was involved; an engineer or someone to tune that radio. How do you think the universe was tuned so close and exact? Who did it? Who maintains it? We all know that if you leave your car in the driveway without maintaining it for thirty years the tires will rot and it will become undriveable. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that all things fall apart. Oh, and there is this;

Colossians 1:17  And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

In a couple of my Sunday School classes I present some scientific studies that express alarm at the harmful mutations produced in each generation of people. One of them was entitled, “Contamination of the Genome by Very Slightly Deleterious Mutations: Why Have We Not Died 100 Times Over?” But, we’re here, our biology is preserved, life goes on and the planet is not yet cold and dead.

Again, I say ask yourself, if there was no God, then why is there something rather than nothing? Why is something as complex as life here in this space of earth?  If God doesn’t exist why do I know that I am? Why is the universe so finely tuned as to permit us to exist?

You know, our government has spent millions of dollars searching for extraterrestrials, life on other planets, even microbial. They will continue to do so but will probably never find it. The scientific community has a hunger, a lust, to overthrow God. They are searching for microbes and water on Mars.

In the Rosetta Mission they recently learned that water in space can be vastly different than water on earth so they feel confident in at least admitting that our water didn’t come from comets. Recent research on earth has shown that water alone will not be the cause of life if other conditions aren’t right. But, they will keep searching, hoping to be able to drive the nail in the coffin for belief in the God of the Bible.

There are two other things that scream the truth of the existence of God. One is the very desperate desire to prove beyond all doubt that He does not. Let me read you part of the short religious history of man that God has provided in Romans.

Romans 1:19 ¶  Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20  For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 21  Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And in another context an ancient warning;

Isaiah 66:4  I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear: but they did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not.

Remember what King David thought of atheists in about 1000 BC.

Psalm 14:1  « To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David. » The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

Finally, evolutionary biologists admit an astounding thing. Belief in God, according to some of them, is hard-wired into the human brain. A neuroscientist and the author of several books, Andrew Newberg, wrote a book entitled Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. He is called a neurotheologist, studying how religious belief and prayer affect the brain.

On page 129 he wrote, “…evolution has adopted this machinery, and has favored the religious capabilities of the religious brain because religious belief and behaviors turn out to be good for us in profound and pragmatic ways.”

As evolutionists often do he refers to evolution as he does in other places with natural selection almost as a god in itself rather than just a process or a mechanism by which new species of dog, cat, or deer are produced by environmental stresses or opportunities or human cross-breeding efforts (There are more than two dozen scientific definitions of species.) The fact is that all of the genetic information necessary for a creature to adapt to its environment are present within the creature’s DNA and no dog ever became a cat and no alligator ever became a trout. But, Newberg, like other of his ilk, refer to evolution as a sort of inert god who unfeelingly adopts and favors in the passage I quoted. In a preceding page he refers to natural selection as not tolerating something. So, it is almost humorous to see how these kinds of scientists use language, at the least, very interesting.

Susan Mazur, a science writer and journalist who doesn’t appear to be a fundamental Baptist (said in a tongue-in-cheek manner), wrote in her book The Altenberg 16: An Expose’ of the Evolution Industry that, “Evolutionary science is as much about posturing, salesmanship, stonewalling and bullying as it is about actual scientific theory.” (v)

In any event, this is not a sermon about comparative religions so we’ll leave the religion of evolution alone for now.

So, to summarize, if you want to look outside of your own experience for proof that God exists I suggest starting with life. There are many other topics we could talk about that prove or at least suggest His existence but let’s stick with the ones I’ve brought up.

One, there is something rather than nothing and since space dust did not create itself then something or someone did. Two, life could not have begun here on earth and probably not on some distant planet by chance. Some intelligent being had to create it. Three, self-awareness and consciousness imply a reality greater than the physical universe. Four, we are apparently “hard-wired” to believe in God. It is part of our make-up.

We believe in God because He has communed with our spirit so that we can. We experience Him in our prayer and in the answers to it, the way the Bible speaks to us, in the truth found in it, the way He molds and changes us by our reading and hearing it read, by the reality arounds us that is confirmed in the Bible, and by His miraculous intervention in our lives.

But, an unbeliever doesn’t have that privilege that we do. So, sometimes you have to think in order to give them something to think about.

In the end, though, these facts revealed through the Bible and common-sense must be accepted and understood without the arguments. No one ever came to Christ by an argument based on logic.

1Corinthians 1:18  For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

Tell them the truth as you know it from the Bible and pray that God will open their eyes for there is no other hope for salvation than God Himself opening someone’s eyes. It is not a numbers game like sales. If you hand out a hundred gospel tracts you’re not assured of getting a 2% return. They will only come to Christ, turn to Him, trust in His righteousness and not their own, if God speaks to their twisted, wicked heart like He did to your twisted, wicked heart, all arguments notwithstanding.