A Logical Explanation for God

The following article was published in the May and June 2012 Personal Update News Journal from Koinonia House.


A LOGICAL EXPLANATION OF GOD
by Steve Elwart


Why is it so hard for some people to believe in God? The answers would probably be linked to personal, social, and possibly some intellectual reasons. Let’s explore this in more detail…


What is the reasoning that leads to belief in God? When talking to an atheist, trying to prove the existence of God using the Bible will not be considered a valid argument. Sometimes, the only way to convince a person of God’s existence is through pure logic. How would one respond to an atheist’s claim that there is no God?


A belief in God is a process based on three types of reasons.


1) Intellectual Reasons
This line of reasoning is based on a set of facts about God you believe to be true. If you investigate these facts and find the evidence compelling, you believe He exists. If the evidence is found wanting, you either disbelieve or take on an agnostic (1) worldview.


2) Personal Reasons
A person does not come to a belief in God by purely intellectual reasoning. Such belief is also a very personal one and these reasons vary. Some people have bad experiences and tragedies in their life as well as difficulties and disappointments. Some people will take these experiences and say, “I really need God in my life. I can’t get through this alone and I need help beyond my own understanding.” Others will take these same set of circumstances and say either “I don’t need a God who lets something like this happen,” or “If there really was a God, He wouldn’t have let this happen.” Belief in God is a very personal experience and that belief (or disbelief) is seen through the lens of one’s own experience.


3) Social Reasons
There is a field study called “The Sociology of Knowledge” popularized by Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), a professor of sociology and economics at the University of Frankfurt. Mannheim posited that one tends to believe in the same things as people whom you want to befriend. These are people that you need, are dependent on, or are in a group you want to be associated with. A simpler way to say it is “peer pressure.” The group’s beliefs seem to be more reasonable than those people with whom you do not want to be associated.


The most obvious example of this is the common problem of raising children in a Christian home. They read their Bible; they go to church and Sunday school. Then they are off on their own, either in their teen years at home or off to college. Many will fall in with the “wrong crowd.” If they do not have a strong Christian background and really know Christ and know why Christ is our Redeemer, they can become lost. They find that their “new friends” may not have the same value system they do and may lose their faith in God (2). Conversely, if these same people find friends with their same worldview, the same love of God, their faith can be reinforced. It is much easier to go along with the temper of one’s peer group than to set the tone for the group. As evangelist Ben Courson once put it, “It is harder to be a thermostat than a thermometer.” Belief or non-belief in God cannot be reduced to just one of these factors. All three factors are in play.


WHY BELIEVE IN GOD?
Bringing a person to a belief is a process. This process consists of three steps:

1. It takes as much faith to not believe in God as it does to believe in God.


2. It takes more of a leap of faith in the dark to disbelieve in God than to believe in God.


3. While one can reason to a point of probability that there is a God, it takes personal commitment to get to know that God exists as a certainty.


If one progresses through these three steps, they can come to know God.


1) IT TAKES AS MUCH FAITH TO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD AS IT DOES TO BELIEVE IN GOD.


The following are some of the arguments that are brought up to prove there is no God.


EVIL AND SUFFERING
The first one is the argument from evil and suffering. This is the argument: There is senseless evil in the world. Given that pointless evil, there may be a God who’s good but not powerful enough to stop it or there may be a God who’s all powerful enough but not good enough to want to stop it. But given evil and suffering in the world there can’t be an all-good and all-powerful God or he would stop it and therefore the God of the Bible cannot exist.


One of the leading philosophers of today is William Alston of Syracuse University who recently wrote that the effort to demonstrate that evil disproves the existence of God “is now acknowledged on (almost) all sides to be completely bankrupt.”


When you say there can’t be a God because of all the pointless evil in the world, here is the question, “How do you know it is pointless?”


The only answer is that the reason is not apparent. So the premise is, “If one cannot think of a good reason for God to allow suffering to continue, there can’t be any.” That means that if you have a God that is big enough to be mad at for evil and suffering, then you have a God that is powerful enough to allow evil and suffering to continue. You can’t have it both ways.


There are people that have had terrible things happen to them in their life and they turned from God. At the same time, there are many people who had every bit as much suffering and that suffering turned them toward God. Personal suffering, the experience of suffering, or the philosophical question of suffering do not disprove the existence of God.


THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION IN THE NAME OF GOD
This is also a concept called “The Hitchens Argument” against the reality of God. The argument is as follows: “If there really is a God, how could his believers have done so much evil in the history of the world?”


The answer to that lies not in the reality of God, but in the human heart. There must be something in Man that is so perverse, so prone to violence and oppression that it can actually twist any worldview, any philosophy, and any state of belief with regard to God into violence.


Japanese militarism of World War II had its roots in Buddhism and Shintoism. From Christianity came everything from the Crusades of the 11th and 12th century to people of today shooting abortion doctors. Out of Islam comes global terrorism.


However, out of atheism came Stalin, the ovens of Dachau, Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.


There is a Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz, who wrote “The Discreet Charms of Nihilism (3).” In it he writes that if you believe there is a God, it is fairly easy to twist that belief into violence because one can shape life and morals according to one’s own personal belief without any accountability. A person could say, “I have the truth; you don’t” and “I’m a better person; you are an inferior person” and thus impose the “superior” person’s values, even at the point of a gun.


Ultimately, what does this mean in terms of a belief in God? It means the argument ends in a tie. It does not disprove God nor does it disprove atheism. The theist could say, “Look at Stalin.” The atheist could say, “Look at Christianity; look at the Crusades.” This particular argument proves nothing except the natural depravity of the human heart.


Augustine of Hippo (354–430 a.d.) offered the following explanation: Evil is the absence of good, in the same way as darkness is the absence of light. It is possible for something created good to diminish in goodness, to become corrupted. Evil crept in when creatures endowed with free will—the angels, lesser spirits (which became demons) and human beings—turned away from higher or more complete goods, and chose lesser ones. It is arguable that Adam (and Satan) did not just choose merely “lesser goods” but fundamental evils (4).


Augustine argued that God allowed evil to come, so that in the end a greater good may prevail. He also wrote that evil was finite—limited and ultimately to be overcome, and that good was infinite (as God is to reign in heaven—the eternal city of God).


Therefore, God did not cause sin to happen, but when sin came into the world, He chose to allow it to occur so that a greater good could emerge. What appears to be evil at first may be seen as a path toward a greater good.


The death of Christ on the cross was an evil, but the ultimate good—the triumph of salvation—came out of it.


Atheists will admit the existence of good, altruism, philanthropy, etc. is a problem for their worldview, because it does not make evolutionary sense as it would if chance creation and natural selection were true. Atheists are left with the reality of evil.


2) IT TAKES MORE OF A LEAP OF FAITH IN THE DARK TO DISBELIEVE IN GOD THAN TO BELIEVE IN GOD.
The 18th century English poet William Cowper, wrote: “The absence of proof is not proof of absence.” It is a logical fallacy to say that because one cannot prove there is a God, it means there is no God.


There were those who sought to prove that the earth was flat with a similar argument. That line of reasoning was eventually disproved and is considered irrational. 


Furthermore, good science can only offer hypothesis and theories based upon data currently available to explain phenomena. Therefore, by the very standards that science uses, the burden of disproof of the existence of God must be borne by the atheist (5).


The argument people will make is: “Until you prove there is a God; until you show rational empirical proof, I don’t have to believe in God. Therefore, until you prove there is a God, there is no God.”


The problem is that the stance requires a big leap of faith. (Even those people who believe that our reality isn’t “real” still look both ways before they cross the street.)


How can one prove that God who created the universe is not somewhere in the universe?


In the above argument, one could say they believe that Manhattan does not exist if they have not gone to Manhattan themselves. Why then does God have to be so inside the world that He can be provable?


The very argument also requires a leap of faith. One is actually assuming something about the nature of God in order to say He doesn’t exist.


C.S. Lewis wrote an article in 1961 that addresses this issue. The Russians were the first country to send somebody into space, Yuri Gagarin. After his flight, Gagarin came back and a few months later the Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was giving a speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU (6).


In talking about atheism he said, “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there (7).” [It is interesting to note that Gagarin himself was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church (8).] In response, C.S. Lewis wrote this: If there is a God who created the world and created us, I could no more “meet” Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. If Hamlet wants to prove there is a Shakespeare, he’s not going to be able to do it in a lab, nor is he going to be able to find Shakespeare by going up into the top of the stage. The only way he will know something about Shakespeare is if Shakespeare writes something about himself into the play (9). 


What that means is if there is a Creator God, you can only prove His existence if He injects Himself into his own creation.


If one can’t prove that there is no God that also means there may be a God, just One whom we can’t prove exists. If one is living their life as if there is no God because His existence can’t be proven, then there is a risk.


Disbelief is an act of faith. Disbelief is as much an act of faith as a person who gives themselves to God and the one who does not believe is taking their destiny in their hands. Also, the existence of God makes more sense of the things in the observable universe then if there is no God. Two examples of this are the anthropic principle and human rights.


THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE
One of the most compelling evidences supporting a theistic worldview involves the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle observes that the earth is fashioned so precisely that life could not exist if the earth were even minutely different. Atheists acknowledge this and then argue that, although the universe is incredibly complex and wonderfully ordered, one should not be surprised that life came into existence through random process, because the very fact that we exist demonstrates that evolution occurred.


The fundamental problem with this argument is that it is merely a philosophical statement that relies on circular reasoning. It assumes that chance accounts for the origin of life and then states, because life exists, there is proof that life came to be by chance.


The value of the anthropic principle, as a support for God, lies in its recognition that life can exist only within very narrow margins.


For example, if the earth was located closer or farther from the sun, life could not exist due to excessive heat or cold. If the chemical composition of the atmosphere varied only slightly, the air would be poisonous to life. If the sea-to-land mass ratio, depth of the oceans, and the earth’s cloud cover were different, the earth’s ability to store and release heat would change dramatically. All such events could result in the absence of life on earth.


Rather than all of these variables being the result of accidental processes (luck), it appears much more probable that the earth was specifically designed to sustain life. And if it was designed, there must be a Designer—God.


HUMAN RIGHTS
Alan Dershowitz in his book, Shouting Fire, has a chapter on the origin of human rights. Dershowitz says human rights is the belief that human beings are so worthwhile that regardless of age, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of gender, regardless of social status, or regardless of how much wealth you have, every human being is of great worth and has certain rights that can’t be exploited or trampled upon.


Now the question comes, “Why should we believe that?”


The first possibility, Dershowitz says, is that we believe that God created human beings and therefore they are sacred; they are made in the image of God.


The second possibility is, “Maybe we find this in nature.” If we look out at nature, do we see that human beings as individuals are valuable?


“No,” Dershowitz says, because all you see out there is the strong eating the weak. That’s how you got here; it’s called evolution.


To believe in human rights is to say everything else in nature is wrong, but why would it be wrong unless you believe in God or a supernatural standard by which to judge? How can you judge that nature is unnatural? Where did you get your idea?


The third possibility is that human beings form human rights ourselves. Legislative majorities create human rights. They’re not discovered, they’re legislated. Morality is something man creates, so we created it.


Society, through a legislative majority, decided human rights make society work better and therefore it is more practical to believe in human rights. So man creates human rights, but Dershowitz says that will never work.


What the argument is advocating is a belief, for example, that genocide is only wrong because man says it is. Therefore if 51% want to vote to take away the rights of 49% and destroy them, nobody can say, “How dare you!” because genocide is wrong only because man says its wrong and now a majority doesn’t say it’s wrong.


By this argument, the whole value of rights is to say to the majority “you have to honor the rights of others.”


Human rights are discovered. They can’t be created. They don’t come from nature, they aren’t created, they just exist. So if one doesn’t believe in God why does one believe in human rights? The answer would be, “They’re just there. We don’t know why they are there—they probably shouldn’t be there—but they’re there.”


So, do human rights prove there is a God? No. The point of the argument is that human rights make sense. If there is no God, human rights don’t make much sense, since one doesn’t know where they came from. If this is true, then a belief in God makes more sense than non-belief.


One can’t “prove” God, one can only show that in issue after issue, the existence of God makes more sense than the absence of one.


If there is a God, then the idea of justice and injustice and the idea of genocide being wrong make sense. If there is no God, it takes a leap of faith to say, “I don’t know why it’s wrong; I just feel it’s wrong.”


It’s a bigger leap of faith to believe in human rights if one doesn’t believe in God than if one does. It is a leap of faith to say somehow human beings are valuable if there is no God, than if there is.


So why would one say they do not believe in God? Why is it so hard to believe in God? The reasons would probably be linked to personal, social, and possibly some intellectual reasons. All of the above arguments only takes one through the realm of possibility. It only goes to prove that it is more likely that God does exist rather than not exist. It does not mean one can’t be certain.


3) IT TAKES PERSONAL COMMITMENT TO KNOW THAT GOD EXISTS AS A CERTAINTY
Ultimately, the issue becomes one of personal commitment. Weak faith in something strong is infinitely better than strong faith in something weak, because it is the object of one’s faith, not the strength of that faith, that saves him. 


One can rationalize all they want, but until one makes a personal commitment, one can’t really know.


As was previously written, C.S. Lewis said that if there is a God the only way one would know about him is if he was like Shakespeare; he would have to write some information about himself into the play.


That is what the Bible attests to. Christianity says God wrote Himself into the play!


Therefore, if personal commitment is the key to certainty, Christianity has an advantage because one has a powerful argument; one has a powerful person, Jesus Christ, against whom, in the end, there can be no argument.


References
(1) In this sense, an agnostic worldview is one where a person says he cannot know that God even exists. The term, first coined by Thomas Huxley, covers varying degrees of skepticism. Agnostics are followers of pragmatism; their belief in something has to be scientifically verifiable, and because God is not scientifically verifiable, they leave Him out of their discussion. (Paul P. Enns, The Moody Handbook of Theology (Chicago, Ill.: Moody Press, 1997), 185.)
(2) On a personal note, it is hard for me to believe that any thinking person cannot believe in God, Supreme Being, or Higher Power. I believe that most people that say they do not believe in God are merely angry at Him.
(3) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/nov/19/discreet-charm-of-nihilism/
(4) Edgar C. Powell, On Giants’ Shoulders: Studies in Christian Apologetics (Epsom, UK: Day One Publications, 1999), 73.
(5) http://www.opposingviews.com/arguments/the-absence-of-proof-is-not-proof-of-absence
(6) Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(7) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin
(8) http://www.oodegr.com/english/epistimi/gagarin1.htm
(9) Lewis, C.S., The Screwtape Letters, Time Inc. 1961.