1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature (e.g. mathematical object) or in an external cause (e.g. mountains, galaxies, people and chairs).
2. The universe exists (whether it always existed or not).
3. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is an external, transcendent, personal cause (that is beyond the universe: beyond space and time: beyond matter and energy: a non-physical, immaterial, spiritual entity that has brought the universe into being: the only thing that fits this description is an unembodied Mind: a transcendent consciousness).
4. Therefore, the (only) explanation inextricably and inexorably for the existence of the universe is an external, transcendent, personal cause.
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause (things don't just come into being from nothing).
2. The universe began to exist (science says the universe began to exist according to Einstein's General Law of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics: not just our universe, but all space, matter and time: God's clock measures 13.7 billion years according to astronomy).
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause (a transcendent being beyond space, time, matter and energy who has brought the universe into being).
1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
- If you were to change the constants or quantities, over 800 that we know of (Hugh Ross), from the moment of the big bang by a hairs breath, life would not exist at all.
- The universe was fine-tuned with such incomprehensible precision and delicacy, it requires an intelligent designer.
- These constants and quantities are not determined by nature, they are not physically necessary, but are put into the equation of the universe at the beginning which is inexplicable other than by the Transcendent Causal Agent.
- The exquisitely narrow range these constants and quantities have to fall into for such a narrowly permitted range for the universe to even exist blows away all human conceptions of a model for the universe.
- Chance is not viable, because if you altered the weak force by 1 part in 10^100 power, the universe would not have been life permitting, so for the universe to happen by chance is infinitesimally improbable.
- There hasn't even been enough time (13.7 billion years) for such chance events to occur. There has only been 10^17 seconds in the universe (this is just one parameter of over 800 parameters).
- Therefore, the best explanation is God did it. Most scientists today who specialize in this cutting edge data hold this view even though they may not accept a particular God.
- Those who don't want to accept the universe by design are positing absurdly fantastical metaphysical hypothesis with no scientific basis whatsoever, e.g. if in one throw of the dice the universe could not have happened, they postulate many throws of the dice for multiverses (which we have no way of detecting) so eventually our universe will come up snake eyes. This is a compliment to the power and strong evidence for the design argument that otherwise sober scientists become pseudo-scientists desperately in order to object to a Divine Designer. Dawkins absurdly claimed we were created by aliens in another multiverse (see the movie Expelled).
3. Therefore, it is due to design.
The Moral Argument
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist (if God is not your standard then everything becomes socio-culturally relative; moral behavior just becomes ingrained patterns of behavior that have evolved through biological evolution, e.g murder and rape could be acceptable in some societies such with child sacrifices and male-centric abusive systems).
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist (some things are really wrong, even though some atheists objective otherwise).
- Rape, torture of a child, molestation, hate crimes, and cruelty are really wrong; but to Atheists, the relativity of different societies are perfectly natural and acceptable behaviors.
- Love, self-sacrifice, generosity are not necessarily good qualities to have or valued.
- Just because objective values don't exist for atheists, most of society accepts objective moral values, so you can disregard the atheists' immorality. And besides, when evil acts are brought upon them, they end up pleading for objective moral values after all.
- Objective moral values are self-evident in our moral common human experience which is, therefore, common grace upon us all by God.
- When an atheist says objective moral values don't exist, but says this or that is wrong, he is affirming his own what he considers to be objective moral values that are offensive to him if imposed on him by others, so he is acknowledging in his own selfish way nonetheless objective moral values do exist. He is insisting upon tolerance, open-mindedness, fair play; so it is very hard for any of us to deny the objectivity of moral values.
- what we are offering to atheists is a foundation in the source for objective moral values so you guys aren't so flighty, but more effective and consistent.
3. Therefore, God exists.
- Christopher Hitchens asks, why do I have to believe in God to be moral? He misunderstands what we are proving here. The argument is not belief in God is necessary for morality. The argument presented here is: God is necessary for objective morality to exist.
- God's existence doesn't depend on your belief or acceptance of whether objective moral values exist; they exist independently. God exists as a necessary foundation for objective moral values to exist. If God exists and there are objective moral values, they exist independent of whether you believe them or not.
- Objective moral values (and realities) exist for the atheist whether they believe in them or not.
- An atheist could still live a good and decent life (theoretically) as a hard as that is to believe (though I have never met an ethical atheist). We are not saying you have to believe in God to live a good life (even though that is the Christian position since good works must flow from regeneration of the spirit and to walk in Christ by the Holy Spirit). That's not the argument here.
Which Monotheism is True?
God has revealed Himself decisively in the Person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth who claimed to be the Son of God, the absolute revelation of God, and whose radical personal claims were publicly vindicated by God by raising Him from the dead. If the resurrection happened it does seem to set Jesus apart. Paul said if the resurrection didn't happen by the eyewitnesses he gave and his experience, we of all men are to be pitied because we would be utter fools. The broad mainstream view criticism today of NT scholars accept some facts.
1. There are four established facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth: his honorable burial by the Joseph of Arimathea, the discovery of the empty tomb (first by women followers), his post-mortem appearances (that the disciples came to believe suddenly and sincerely despite every predisposition to the contrary), and the origin of the disciples' belief in the resurrection.
- N.T. Wright, a prominent historian, said the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances are so well attested to be virtually undeniable and comparable to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 or the reign of Augustus Caesar.
- When NT scholars look at the NT books, they are not treating it as holy writ, but as a bunch of historical documents to glean what facts they can derive from it for originally what it was, just a bunch of separate documents: letters, biographies, and so forth written in the Greek language, handed down out of the first century-the contemporary writings of the day.
- Excluding extra-Biblical writings, we have more writings for Jesus than any other figure in antiquity so what higher standard is there?
2. The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" is the best explanation of these facts.
- Deists and German rationalists of the late 18th century claimed you can't trust those documents because those writers were part of the conspiracy. But that's uninformed and has been uniformly rejected by critical scholars shortly after their attempts because it is anachronistic. It reads the disciples situation through the rear-view mirror of Church history thinking they would fake a resurrection so Jesus could be the Messiah rather than showing empathy and putting yourself in the shoes of these disciples to experience what they were going through in their time and circumstances which given what we know was clearly a genuine response to what they believed was their own eyewitness of the risen Jesus. Look at what they faced. The Messiah was suppose to throw off the enemies of Israel and establish David's throne in Jerusalem, but instead He was humiliated by His enemies by being executed on the cross. There was no connection between the Messiah to the Jews of being raised from the dead, for the resurrection was suppose to take place at the end of the world, not by an isolated event of an individual in history. So the idea of a conspiracy is a failure to understand the mentality of a first century Palestinian Jew. There is simply no doubting the sincerity of these men and women when you read the NT. The problem is few people actually read the NT (or just portions) let alone the whole Bible which sets the stage for the Messiah's atoning sacrifice and understanding the big picture. These men died for what they believed was the truth. So you can't say this was the result of a deliberate hoax or conspiracy or that any of the original eyewitnesses made it up.
3. The hypothesis "God raised Jesus form the dead" entails that the God revealed by Jesus exists.
- Compare and assess various other hypothesis to determine which one is most likely using the standard criteria most historians use (e.g. Swoon Theory, Hallucination Theory, Wrong Tomb Hypothesis, Conspiracy Theory).
- What you will find is the resurrection has greater explanatory power, wider explanatory scope, greater plausibility, less ad hoc or contrived.
4. Therefore, the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.
- Therefore, God of the Bible is the One whom you are in account to and whose morality you are subjected to whether you like it or not, whether you abide in or not.
- You can turn to the Scriptures to find out what God teaches, what He demands of us, and what His moral nature is.
Argument From Evil
Claiming because evil exists therefore God can't exist. Is there a logical contradiction between these two statements:
A. God is all-powerful and all-loving.
B. Evil exists.
There is no explicit contradiction, but the atheist is making an implicit contradiction.
The hidden assumption by the atheist is:
1. If God is all-powerful, He can create any world that He wants.
2. If God is all loving, He prefers a world in which evil does not exist.
Both of these assumptions have to be necessarily true. If God is all-powerful, can He choose any world He wants? Not if He chooses to give man free will. It's logically impossible to make someone do something freely. That is as logically impossible as making an unmarried bachelor or a square circle. God may not be able to create many worlds because the creatures would do more harm to each other than they do in this world. And to have moral agents He may have to put up with a certain amount of evil. In order for creature to have and experience true love they must also be given the choice to reject these feelings and live unlovingly. In order for there to be true moral goodness in the world, you got to have more than robots or puppets. If God removes one of these attributes, He has to remove the other, thus making the world an amoral world and not a perfect world.
It also doesn't stand that God is good and loving that He won't permit evil. We all know some experience or situation in the world where we put up with evil for a while for some greater good to come about. C.S. Lewis remarked, "What do people mean when they say, I am not afraid of God because I know that He is good. Have they never even been to the dentist?" They didn't use Novocain in his day when they drilled into teeth.
Atheists are simply unable to show because evil exists that this is somehow inconsistent with God's existence. We can show, in fact, they are consistent:
C. God could not have created a world that has as much good as the actual world, but with less evil; and God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evil that exists.
Atheist scholars have given up trying to prove that evil and God are logically inconsistent. All atheists have is satire, ridicule, and failure upon failure in their logic. It's all rhetoric, emotionally poisoned, and the nature of a mind and attitude of the heart that belongs in Hell by being unwilling to given into the plain and clear evidence.