By Joel M Stevao

Belief in God as a Rational Position

Atheists deny the existence of God but in this essay, I will explain why the belief in God is a rational position. There are four basic arguments used to prove God’s existence. They are called cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments. I am going to use the cosmological or from creation and teleological or from design arguments in this paper.

Argument from Creation or Cosmological

            This argument asserts that since there is a universe, something outside the universe caused it into existence. There are two different forms, the first is a universe that needed a cause and the second argues that it needs a right cause to continue existing. It can be stated like this: The universe had a beginning, anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else, and therefore the Universe was caused by something else which we call “God.” ¹

Skeptics reject this idea of God and believe the universe is eternal called the Steady State theory which claims that the universe is spontaneously producing hydrogen atoms from nothing. ² But this idea is easily dismissed since scientific evidence strongly supports the idea that the universe had a beginning, like the “Big Bang” which is a widely accepted theory among scientists. Also, the second law of thermodynamics says the universe is running out of usable energy and thus cannot be eternal.

Another argument is the philosophical argument. This argument shows that you cannot go back in time forever and believe the world had a starting time. Norman Geisler explains it in this way: You might be able to imagine passing through an infinite number of abstract dimensionless points on a line by moving your finger from one to another, but time is not abstract or imaginary. Time changes are real and each moment uses real-time and we can’t go back. It is likely moving your finger across an endless number of books in a library. You would never get back to the last book.  You can never finish an infinite series of real things, “If the universe had always existed without a beginning we would never have passed through the time to get to today. ³ The second form states that the Universe needs a cause for its continuing existence. Thomas Aquinas (1225- 1275) uses five ways to prove God’s existence, four of them are cosmological arguments. In the first way, he argued for the observable movement or change to the existence of an unmoved Mover. In the second way, Aquinas argued from the effects in the Universe which cannot for their own present existence to their uncaused cause). In the third way, Aquinas argues for the existence of beings that have the possibility of nonexistence must have their existence grounded by a Being that has no possibility of non-existence.  Fourth, Aquinas reasoned since there are different degrees of perfections, there must be a most perfect being. ⁴

Argument from Design or Teleological

               This argument argues from complex design to an intelligent designer. First, all complex design implies a designer. Second, the universe including life has a complex design, there, the universe must have had a designer. ⁵

            Norman Geisler and Ronalds Brooks explain it this way:  Anytime we see a complex design we know from previous experience that it came from the mind of a designer. Watch imply watchmakers; buildings imply architects; Likewise the greater the design, the greater the designer, a thousand monkeys sitting in typewriters would not write Hamlet, but Shakespeare did on a first try. The more complex the design, the greater the intelligence required to produce it. ⁶

Ray Comforter in his blog, puts it this way:

“First, I would say that I can prove that anyone who looks at a building and says that he doesn’t believe that there was a builder, is a fool. This is because a building is absolute proof that there was a builder. Buildings don’t build themselves, from nothing. Only a fool would believe that. Second, I would say that anyone who looks at a painting and believes that there was no painter, is a fool. The painting is absolute proof that there is a painter. Paintings don’t paint themselves, from nothing. Only a fool would believe that. Then I would say that creation is absolute 100% scientific proof that there is a Creator. Creation cannot create itself, from nothing. But that’s what the atheist believes–that nothing created everything from nothing. That’s a scientific impossibility, and only a fool would believe that.” ⁷

The design we see in the universe is complex. Even the atheist Richard Dawkins admits in his Book Blind Watchmaker, that the DNA information in a single-cell animal equals that in a thousand sets of an encyclopedia! ⁸

            Carl Sagan admits that the information content of a human brain expressed in bits would be comparable to the total number of connections among neurons, about a trillion, 10 to the 14 power bits. If written out in English it would be the equivalent of twenty million books inside of our heads. The brain is a very big place in a very small space. The neurochemistry of a brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. ⁹

            Some skeptics object to this argument on a basis of chance, saying when you roll a dice any combination can occur. This is not convincing as is explained by Professor Norman below.

First, we design argument is not an argument from chance but from design, which we know from repeated observation to have an intelligent cause. Second science is based on repeated observation, not on chance, so this objection to the design argument is not scientific. Even if there is a probability chance, the changes are a lot higher if there is a designer. One scientist figured the odds for once-cell animal to emerge by pure chance at 1 in 10 to the 40,000^th power. The odds for an infinitely more complex human being to emerge by chance are too high to calculate! ¹⁰ So it is reasonable to conclude that there must be a designer behind the design of this world.

Conclusion

               Based on the arguments presented and explained in this paper I can definitely say that belief in God is a rational position.

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1. Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences ( Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Books, 2013), 9-10[↩]
2. Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (Toronto: George J. Mcleod Limited, 1992), 99[↩]
3. Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences ( Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Books, 2013), [↩]
4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1989),12-14[↩]
5. Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences, Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Books, 2013, 14[↩]
6. Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences ( Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Books, 2013), 14.[↩]
7. Ray Comfort, Words of Comfort blog, July 23, 2008.[↩]
8. Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist ( Wheaton: CrossWay Books, 2004), 116-118.[↩]
9. Carl Sagan, Cosmos ( New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1980), 230.[↩]
10. Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences ( Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Books, 2013), 16[↩]