I once came across this thought-provoking question: "What evidence do you have for God in your life that couldn't be explained as God being your 'imaginary friend'?
For example, some people say "I used to be sad and depressed and my life didn't have meaning, but now that I have God and talk to Him every day, my life is full of meaning and joy and peace." There's nothing wrong with that, for them (and indeed I've experienced God's joy and peace and love in my own life), but it's not very convincing in an objective way to other people who don't already believe in God... it can easily be explained as God being one's 'imaginary friend' or 'imaginary confidante', who helps one to get through the emotional hurdles of life, while actually being a figment of one's own imagination.
Or, consider the popular Christian hymn "He Lives" by Alfred Ackley, which ends: "...you ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart!" Basically this hymn is saying that one's main reason for believing that Jesus rose from the dead is a subjective, personal, emotional experience or feeling. While Alfred may have felt this way (at least sometimes), and that to him this may have seemed quite convincing, to other people it is not convincing.
Likewise I have had missionaries from other religious groups tell me fervently that the reason they know their doctrines are correct are that they felt a 'burning in their bosom', a psychological/emotional feeling of certainty. Unfortunately, since I have reason to believe that these missionary friends were mistaken in their beliefs, their emotional feelings do not carry much objective weight for me (or other people). I have also heard people saying that when talking about God to other people, it is best to "tell your story", because "people can argue with facts, but they can't argue with your own personal experience or testimony." The same problem arises - sure, maybe people won't argue with you about your personal experience, but neither do they have any solid objective reason to believe either.
So I think there are much better ways to answer the question "What evidence do you have for God in your life that couldn't be explained as God being your 'imaginary friend'?
The three strongest pieces of evidence that God exists, in my opinion are:
1. Creation
2. Jesus' Resurrection
3. Morality
1. Creation - where did we come from? There seem to be three main questions here: (1) Where did matter/energy come from originally? (2) How did life start? (3) Where did the genetic information comprising the diverse myriads of living animal kinds/species come from?
Interestingly enough, there seem to be only two major contenders for the answer to this question: either (A) God created the world and all life, or (B) (B1) matter/energy spontaneously popped into existence out of nothing, (B2) life somehow arose from nonliving chemicals in a warm muddy prebiotic puddle somewhere billions of years ago, and (B3) random mutations coupled with natural selection and associated mechanisms (gene duplication, endosymbiosis, etc) produced all the life forms we now see.
Unfortunately, both of these contenders are difficult to accept. (A) is difficult for many people to accept because it involves a 'miracle', or an unpredictable/unique event which is not currently observed or describable using natural laws, and thus it makes people nervous. Also, if such a God exists and created us, He might very well be in a position of authority over us, which is galling.
Richard Lewontin describes the fear regarding (A): "Either the world of phenomena is a consequence of the regular operation of repeatable causes and their repeatable effects, operating roughly along the lines of known physical law, or else at every instant all physical regularities may be ruptured and a totally unforeseeable set of events may occur.... We can not live simultaneously in a world of natural causation and of miracles, for if one miracle can occur, there is no limit."
Richard Lewontin, Scientists Confront Creationism [New York: Norton, 1983], p. xxvi
On the other hand, (B) is difficult for many people (including me) to accept because scientific evidence strongly implies that these things (B1, B2, and B3) are impossible or have vanishingly small probability of having occurred. Regarding (B1), we do not see matter/energy spontaneously popping into or out of existence in our daily lives or in laboratory experiments, thus it is problematic to handwave and say it occurred in the beginning. (Some people point to the 'spontaneous appearance' of subatomic particles in particle accelerator 'quantum vacuums', but a high-energy 'quantum vacuum' of particles and anti-particles is quite different than the literally "nothing" that supposedly existed before the Big Bang.) And if we really believed (B1), then Lewontin's fear would be even more applicable - at any instant all physical regularities would be expected to suddenly change; we would live in a completely unpredictable world. We can not live simultaneously in a world of spontaneously-appearing universes and of normal, predictable, everyday life, for if one spontaneous uncaused Big Bang can suddenly occur for no reason, there is no limit.
Regarding B2, there is still no explanation (much less demonstration!) of how life could arise from nonliving chemicals. "We're working on it," the evolutionary theorists say, "just give us a few more years, and we'll eventually figure out how it could have happened." (See my previous post at http://tim223.xanga.com/743479966/dont-tell-the-creationists/ ) Another quote from Lewontin -
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
Lewontin, Richard, "Billions and Billions of Demons", New York Review, 1/9/1997, p31
Why can't you, Richard? Rather arbitrary and problematic.
Regarding B3, the problem is that mutations can readily be shown in the lab to 'break' the genetic code, but not to add more functional information to it. Just as splattering ink onto a newspaper page has a tiny chance of adding readable, coherent, and accurate news information (but a larger chance of making the newsprint unreadable), random mutations have been shown to degrade the working of cells, but not to add genetic code for new functional proteins.
Thus the consideration of origins is a strong piece of objective data pointing to the fact that God is very real, and that He created us.
2. Jesus' Resurrection - This is the most powerful piece of real-world, tangible, evidence that the God of the Bible truly exists. If Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion as he predicted he would, his teachings about the God of the Bible would be fully confirmed. And the accounts of his resurrection are so early and historically corroborated that it becomes difficult to believe any other conclusion, after examining the evidence. Paul considered the Resurrection so crucial to Christianity that he said "if Christ has not been raised from the dead, ... your faith is in vain... [and] we are above all men most to be pitied"!
For a quick intro to why the New Testament accounts of Jesus are accurate, see http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/rediscover2.html . The key is that the accounts (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) about Jesus were written and distributed within the lifetimes of people who knew Jesus, so they would not have been believed if they contained falsehoods or exaggerations. Also, the news of Jesus' resurrection was being widely proclaimed in Jerusalem within just a few days and months after the event, which was why the Christian church started in Jerusalem even under heavy persecution. The question is worth considering: "Would someone be willing to die for something they knew to be a lie?" The eleven (and hundreds more) disciples of Jesus were all thrown in jail, beaten, and eventually killed in various locations for their insistence that they had seen Jesus after he had died and then risen from the dead, proving that He was indeed the divine Son of God that He claimed to be. Many people have been willing to die for their faith, but that is not the same as asking whether someone would be willing to die for something they knew to be a lie.
Thus the historical evidence that Jesus lived, taught about God, died, and came back from the dead is extremely strong, and shows that God is very real, and has provided tangible, physical, real-world evidence to help those of us who are naturally skeptical to believe in Him.
3. Morality - As developed well by C.S.Lewis in "Mere Christianity" and Tim Keller in "The Reason For God", the fact that we all tend to live as if we believed in a real objective moral standard is evidence that such a standard does exist, and that a divine transcendent Moral Lawgiver (God) indeed exists.
For example, if you're in line at the checkout counter and someone suddenly jumps in front of you in line, you naturally feel a twinge of moral outrage. "That's not right!" This outrage is much larger for worse crimes, such as murder, rape, or genocide. We all have moral impulses - we believe instinctively that some things are right and other things are wrong. Furthermore, we do not treat these as mere "preferences", but as objective standards.
The most popular explanation by naturalists is to simply deny that morality objectively exists (cf. Michael Shermer in his debate last year with Greg Koukl, and Michael Ruse and others), and say that they are merely biological/neurological impulses that have evolved evolutionarily to help the human race survive. That is to say, objective morality does not exist; moral statements are simply statements of personal preference, at which individuals have been genetically predisposed to arrive. There is no transcendent "ought", there is only "is", although that "is" might take different forms. It might take the form of "morality means you are programmed to perform acts of altruism to enhance the survival of your genes/species" (Richard Dawkins), or "morality entails the optimal 'flourishing' of mankind and can be 'discovered' by scientific observation" (Sam Harris), or "morality is simply an illusion" (Michael Ruse, Edward Wilson, etc). See this excellent review for details - http://www.equip.org/articles/atheists-and-the-quest-for-objective-morality
The problem is that all people live as if morality is objective, transcendent, and cross-personal. But in order to coherently justify this belief, a transcendent objective Moral Lawgiver must exist. Not simply because "He will punish you if you do wrong" (though that is true), but in order to have a basis for WHY one OUGHT to do what is right. Some object (cf Plato's "Euthyphro") that in order to say that "God is good", there must either exist some standard of goodness outside of God to measure Him by, or else one must adopt "divine command theory" and claim that "whatever God says/does is right by definition." But there is another view which avoids those two positions - namely that God's character defines what is good. He IS good; His character defines goodness, and He also naturally always acts and speaks in accordance with His good character, so that we can say his actions and words are also good.
Thus, if you believe that some things are truly objectively "right" and other things are truly objectively "wrong", your belief only makes sense if God exists (and is not simply an "imaginary friend").
Your thoughts are welcome as always...
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