James . . .
I've been asked to put something together for the Chapel's website, to try and explain why I am a Christian. This is a massive subject for me, so I have decided to try and explain first of all why I believe that God exists. Please feel free to e-mail me at jnicol@tesco.net if you would like to ask any questions or respond in any way at all.
Does God exist - How can we know?
The argument from first cause
Everything in the universe is caused, i.e. brought into existence, by something else. There is nothing that doesn't have a beginning or an end. These causes in turn have something that caused them, and so on, back up the chain of causes. Eventually there must be something that started off the chain and which is dependent on nothing else as its cause. This thing is the 'first cause', and the first cause, I believe, is God. The Big Bang theory is that in the beginning there was no time, no space, no matter, nothing at all. I find it easier to believe that something outside the system i.e. God, made it all appear in that Big Bang, than everything just randomly appeared out of that nothingness, which is impossible to imagine.
The argument from design
This argument states that the world is so complex and intricately fitted together that it could only be the result of design, rather than random chance. If this is the case, it is logical that there is a designer, and this designer is God. If you were walking along a beach one day and you trod on something hard, you looked down and realised it was a working watch, what would you assume? I would assume that somebody had dropped it i.e. that the watch had been designed and put together in a watchmaker's shop somewhere. I wouldn't assume that somehow the sea, sand and wind had got together and made the watch appear by random chance. If this is true about the watch, I look at the world around me, which is much more complicated than a wrist watch, and come to the conclusion that this must also have a designer and a creator, i.e. God.
The argument from experience
There are different types of religious experience, which may persuade those who experience them that God exists. These range from seeing God's hand in the blooming of a flower or the beauty of a sunset, to witnessing a breach in the laws of nature (a miracle) or experiencing a direct encounter with God. One experience that has happened to me is prayer that I believe was answered. My sister, when she was a teenager had anorexia. She is now fully recovered, which is brilliant, but while she was anorexic she went down to five stone. Damage caused to her body by anorexia, along with the fact that she has polycystic (ie. dodgy) ovaries, meant that doctors told her that she wouldn't be able to have children without the help of IVF treatment. This is something she doesn't agree with as, being a Christian, she believes that unborn foetuses are fully human, and IVF treatment would involve destroying a number of these. Anyway, to cut a long story short my sister got married, asked her Church and family to pray for her, as she and her husband really wanted to have some children, and she fell pregnant almost straight away and now has two very healthy boys. You could say it was just a coincidence, but the medical staff don't understand it to this day. Personally I believe God decided to intervene and change his laws of nature, a miracle.
The problem of evil
The argument goes that if God cannot stop evil, he is not all-powerful. If he can stop evil but chooses not to, then he is not good. If he could stop evil and chose to do so, then there would be no evil in the world…. but there is; therefore he does not exist. A possible Christian defence against this argument is that it assumes that there are no good reasons why God might choose to delay dealing with evil. Christians believe that one day Jesus Christ will return to judge the world and put everything right. However, once he does this, it will not only mean the end of evil, but also the passing of the last chance for people to put their faith in Jesus Christ and be rescued from evil and suffering.
The argument from morality and conscience
If there is no God and we are the product of blind chance, then there can be no such thing as morality. The fact that we instinctively have a sense of right and wrong is incompatible with a random origin to human life. Our moral sensitivity points towards the existence of some external basis for determining morality, and the source of our sense of right and wrong is God.
Pascal's Wager
This takes as its starting point the assumption that logical reasoning is incapable of determining whether or not God exists. If this is the case, which I don't believe it is, we are left with an uncertain wager. If you place your bet on God existing, and you are wrong, you lose nothing (whether you believed in him or not, you still cease to exist). If you place your bet on God not existing, you gain nothing for being right, but stand to lose everything - heaven, eternal life - if you are wrong. Pascal concluded that to bet on the side of God was to stand to win everything and risk losing nothing, but to bet against him was to win nothing and risk losing everything. Pascal's wager cannot be used to force belief, but I think it's an incentive to seek God out. I think it's worth thinking about for yourself.
God Bless. James Nicol.