Does God Exist?

"You can't prove God exists and you can't prove God doesn't exist." This is the response one often hears when the question of God's existence is raised.

It is true in one trivial sense, but quite misleading in another critical sense. If we are using "prove" in the strict sense of absolute certainty, it may be true that we can't prove or disprove God's existence. But this does not mean that there is no good evidence or arguments for God, which might make belief in God's existence very reasonable. We know very little (if anything) with absolute mathematical certainty, so certainty is neither a reasonable or necessary standard. Like virtually all of our other knowledge, I think we can show that it is highly probable that God exists.

There is no shortage of good arguments for God's existence

The premises of the argument need not be certain, merely more plausible than their denials. It follows that merely having a possible alternative explanation does not defeat a probabilistic theistic argument. What one needs is a more probable alternative explanation.

There is no shortage of good arguments for God's existence. Alvin Plantinga, arguably one of the world's more brilliant philosophers, once delivered a paper outlining two dozen or so theistic arguments. Space will limit me to two.

GOD IS THE BEST EXPLANATION FOR THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE

Premise 1. Whatever begins to exist must have a cause.
Premise 2. The Universe began to exist.
Conclusion: Therefeore the Universe has a cause.¹

Whatever begins to exist must have a cause. Most of us have no problem accepting this principle. We assume its truth in virtually every aspect in our daily lives. Our experience always confirms it and never denies it. But surprisingly philosophers have been unable to prove its veracity.

Nevertheless, it has always been a fundamental first principle of philosophy and science that "from nothing, nothing comes", "being cannot come from non-being". Even the great sceptic David Hume, who argued that we could not prove the causal principle through ordinary means, still believed it to be true and thought a denial of it was absurd, "I never asserted so absurd a proposition that anything might arise without a cause."²

Surely it is more reasonable to hold to this premise than to believe that things pop into existence out of nothing and by nothing. Can we reasonably disagree with the atheist Kai Neilson when he writes, "Suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang and you ask me, 'What made that bang?' and I reply 'Nothing, it just happened.' You would not accept that - in fact you would find my reply quite unintelligible."³

Scientific Confirmation

Regarding premise number two, we have both scientific confirmation and logical argument for the Universe having a beginning. According to the standard Big Bang expansion model, space, time, matter and energy all came into existence simultaneously around 12-15 Billion years ago. The beginning point is often called a singularity, the boundary of space and time, or a mathematical point, where our expanding universe was shrunk down to nothing at all. Significantly, it was not the result of prior natural, physical processes. The atheist philosopher, Quentin Smith, acknowledges, "It belongs analytically to the concept of the cosmological singularity that it is not the effect of prior physical events. The definition of a singularity...entails that it is impossible to extend the spacetime manifold beyond the singularity. ...This rules out the idea that the singularity is an effect of some prior natural process."⁴

Furthermore, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, given enough time, the universe will eventually reach a state of equilibrium, a cold, dark, dead, virtually motionless universe. Clearly, if the universe is beginningless, then there has been an infinite length of time preceding this present moment. But obviously, there is still plenty of heat, light and movement left in the universe. Thus the past must be finite. The universe had a beginning.

Infinite Past Impossible

The third and strongest piece of support for the beginning of the universe comes from the impossibility of an infinite past. This is because an actual infinite number of anything cannot exist in the real world. But to have a universe with no beginning you would have to have an actual infinite number of past events. We might think that since we do use the concept of infinity in mathematics there would be no problem here.

But mathematicians who work with the concept of actual infinity, do so by adopting some arbitrary rules, like "the whole is not always greater than the part", and "subtraction and division are not allowed", to avoid the absurdities and contradictions that come with an actual infinite number of anything. And these rules don't apply to the real world. Actual infinity only works in the abstract realm, and only with some special rules.

As David Hilbert, one of this century's greatest mathematicians has written, "The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite...is solely that of an idea..."⁵

An Absurd Library

To see the absurdity and contradictions of an actual infinite number of things in the real world imagine or hypothesize your campus library having an infinite number of black books and an infinite number of green books, alternating colours on the shelves and numbered consecutively on the spines.

Does it make any sense to say that there are as many black books as there are black plus green books together? But that is what you would have to say if you want to claim the infinite is possible in the real world.

Suppose you withdrew all the green books. How many books are there left in the library? There would still be an infinite number of books in the library even though we just withdrew an infinite number and found a way to get them home! Suppose you withdrew the books numbered 4,5,6...and so on. Now how many books are left? THREE! Something surely is wrong here! One time we subtract an infinite number of books and we're left with an infinite number; the next time we subtract an infinite number and we're left with three - a clear logical contradiction. Since our hypothesis leads to a contradiction, the hypothesis must be false - a library with an actual infinite number of books cannot exist.

While we can avoid these contradictions in the mathematical realm by making up rules like you can't subtract or divide when using infinity, we cannot in the real world prevent people from taking books out of libraries.

Therefore, since a beginningless past would be an actual infinite number of things (events) and since an actual infinite number of things cannot exist in the real world, it follows logically that the past is not infinite. The universe had a beginning.

Furthermore, an infinite past is impossible because adding one member after another cannot form an actual infinite. It's like counting to infinity - you just never get there. Just like we can never finish counting to infinity, we can never begin to count down from a negative infinity. There is no first term. As the great sceptical philosopher David Hume admitted, "An infinite number of real parts of time passing in succession...appears so evident a contradiction that no man whose judgement is not corrupted... would ever be able to admit of it."⁶

Thus the Big Bang Theory, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the impossibility of an infinite past all support the universe having a beginning.

Since whatever begins to exist must have a cause, it follows logically that the universe has a cause. And since it cannot be the result of some prior natural process, the cause of the universe must be beyond nature.

Most Common Objection

"What caused God"

The question "What caused X?" only makes sense if there was some indication that "X" had a beginning. There is nothing that indicates that the cause of the Big Bang had a beginning. In fact since time did not exist beyond the Big Bang, the cause of the Big Bang must have existed timelessly. Thus it could have no beginning, and hence no cause. We may want to say this about the universe, but we can't, since as we have seen, the evidence is the universe had a beginning.

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