Topic : God, existence of

Have you ever wondered why some people try to disprove the existence of God? When you think about it, their very efforts undermine their own arguments.

In Interpreting Basic Theology, Addison Leitch wrote, “Unless [an atheist] is carrying on his fight against absolute nothingness—and this makes us wonder about his zeal—then he must be [arguing] against something he finds ingrained in himself and in others.”

This inherent belief in God doesn’t prove He exists, but it strongly points in that direction. When C. S. Lewis was an atheist, he rejected the idea of a divine Being because of all the injustice in the world. But when he asked himself where he got the idea of justice in the first place, he had a problem. He wrote, “Man doesn’t call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” - DJD

Our Daily Bread, Sept.-Nov. 1997, page for October 24.

God is not discoverable or demonstrable by purely scientific means, unfortunately for the scientifically minded. But that really proves nothing. It simply means that the wrong instruments are being used for the job. - J. B. Phillips in For This Day

Source unknown

Paul Davies quit the Anglican Church as a teenager, convinced that “science offers a surer path to God than religion.” The 48-year-old Australian physicist’s studies of the origins of the universe led him to conclude: “The world is not only ordered by order in an intelligible way.” Last week, Davies won the $1 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for breaching the barrier between religion and science. Yet he is not conventionally religious. “I hesitate to use the word God,” he says, “but … I have come to the conclusion that there is some purpose to it.”

U. S. News & World Report, March 20, 1995, p. 24

You are free in our time to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He exists and is evil; you are free to say … that He would like to exist if He could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or mystification; you may water Him down with gallons of long words, or boil Him to the rags of metaphysics; and it is not merely that nobody punishes, but nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a fact, as a thing like a tiger, as a reason for chanting one’s conduct, then the modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer.

G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, Christianity Today, November 9, 1992, p. 37

Morris Davis was put in jail for “praying.” It all began when Davis was picked up and charged with arson. After his arrest, he was taken to a room at the police station for a lie detector test. Thinking he was alone, he prayed that old familiar prayer, “Lord, let me get away with it just this once.” But a policeman overheard his prayer and submitted it as evidence against him. The lower court ruled that this was a private conversation and therefore could not be submitted as evidence. The Canadian government, however, appealed this ruling and the Court of Appeals decided that it was admissible evidence because prayer is not a private conversation, since God is not a person.

Peter Dieson, The Priority of Knowing God, p. 4.

Near the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre told Pierre Victor: “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.

Protested fellow philosopher and long-time companion Simone de Beauvoir: “How should one explain the senile act of a turncoat?”

HIS Magazine, April, 1983

Have you not heard of the madman who lit a lamp in the bright morning and went to the marketplace crying ceaselessly, “I seek God! I seek God!” There were many among those standing there who didn’t believe in God so he made them laugh. “Is God lost?” one of them said. “Has he gone astray like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Has he gone on board ship and emigrated?” So they laughed and shouted to one another. The man sprang into their midst and looked daggers at them.

“Where is God?” he cried. “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I We are all his killers! But how have we done this? How could we swallow up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What will we do as the earth is set loose from its sun?” - Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889

Nietzsche’s point was not that God does not exist, but that God has become irrelevant. Men and women may assert that God exists or that He does not, but it makes little difference either way. God is dead not because He doesn’t exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He doesn’t.

C. Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict, p. 181

Sir Fred Hoyle has never made any pretense about the personal philosophical motivation behind his cosmological models. In the introduction to his 1948 paper, he makes this statement:

“This possibility [steady state] seemed attractive, especially when taken in conjunction with aesthetic objections to the creation of the universe in the remote past. For it seems against the spirit of scientific enquiry to regard observable effects as arising from ‘causes unknown to science,’ and this in principle is what creation-in-the-past implies.”

Hoyle rejected the idea that God must be invoked to explain the existence of the universe. In his book The Nature of the Universe, written in 1952, though he admits that “there is a good deal of sociology in the Bible” and that “it is a remarkable conception,” he writes off all religion as a “desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves” and Christianity, in particular, as “an eternity of frustration.”

Through the years, Hoyle has increasingly broached theological subjects in his writings. In his undergraduate text on general astronomy written in 1975, Hoyle attacks Friedmann’s relativistic model on what seem to be wholly theological grounds:

“Many people are happy to accept this position [Friedmann’s] ... without looking for any physical explanation of the abrupt beginning of the particles. The abrupt beginning is deliberately regarded as meta-physical — i.e., outside physics. The physical laws are therefore considered to break down at t=0, and to do so inherently. To many people this thought process seems highly satisfactory because as “something” outside of physics can then be introduced at t=0. By a semantic maneuver, the word “something” is then replaced by “god,” except that the first letter becomes a capital, God, in order to warn us that we must not carry the enquiry any further ... I do not believe that an appeal to metaphysics is needed to solve any problem of which we can conceive (emphasis in the original).

In 1982 he declares his rejection of God by defining the universe as “everything there is,” and the first letter of the word universe becomes a capital, Universe. There is no need, then, to look beyond the universe itself for anything. By so deifying the universe, Hoyle must, of course, argue against its finite age: The attribution of a definite age to the Universe, whatever it might be, is to exalt the concept of time above the Universe, and since the Universe is everything this is crackpot in itself. I would argue the need for the Universe to take precedence over time as a knockout argument in favor of a negative answer to the above question. [That question: Did the whole Universe come into being, all in a moment, about ten billion years ago?] ... One could then dismiss cosmologies of finite age because they were offensive to basic logical consistency.

In further support of his semantical proof for “God is identically equal to the universe” (i.e. God is the universe, and the universe is God), Hoyle points out that oppression, suffering, and death are expected, even guaranteed, if strictly natural biological evolution operates, but not if an all-loving, all-powerful God is in charge. There must not be, then, an independent, transcendent being. Like Einstein, he rejects Almighty God for want of a solution to the paradox of sin and suffering.

Hugh Ross, The Fingerprint of God; Promise Publishing Co., 1991, pp. 76-77.

• The Fingerprint of God, Hugh Ross, Promise Publishers, 1991, pp. 121ff.
• Leadership, IV, 3, p. 95.
• Dualism, C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 21.

• What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know. - Bertrand Russell
• All utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical. - A. J. Ayer
• The world is a kind of spiritual kindergarten where bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks. - E. A. Robinson

Source unknown

Imagine a family of mice who lived all their lives in a large piano. To them in their piano-world came the music of the instrument, filling all the dark spaces with sound and harmony. At first the mice were impressed by it. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was Someone who made the mice—though invisible to them—above, yet close to them. They loved to think of the Great Player whom they could not see.

Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful. He had found out how the music was made. Wires were the secret; tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths which trembled and vibrated. They must revise all their old beliefs: none but the most conservative could any longer believe in the Unseen Player.

Later, another explorer carried the explanation further. Hammers were now the secret, numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. This was a more complicated theory, but it all went to show that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world. The Unseen Player came to be thought of as a myth.

But the pianist continued to play.

Reprinted from the LONDON OBSERVER

It is possible for a person to contend that a poem is nothing but black marks on white paper. And such an argument might be convincing before an audience that could not read. You can examine the print under a microscope or analyze the paper and ink but you will never find something behind this sort of analysis that you could call “a poem.” Those who can read, however, will continue to insist that poems exist.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line …Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense.

Christian Theology in Plain Language, p. 95

G. K. Chesterton once said that it is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, they believe in nothing. Alas, it is worse than that. When they stop believing in God, they believe in anything.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Christian Medical Society Journal, Winter 78

Almost 50 years ago Elie Wiesel was a fifteen-year old prisoner in the Nazi death camp at Buna. A cache of arms belonging to a Dutchman had been discovered at the camp. The man was promptly shipped to Auschwitz. But he had a young servant boy, a pipel as they were called, a child with a refined and beautiful face, unheard of in the camps. He had the face of a sad angel. The little servant, like his Dutch master, was cruelly tortured, but would not reveal any information. So the SS sentenced the child to death, along with two other prisoners who had been discovered with arms. Wiesel tells the story:

One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all around us; machine guns trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains—and one of them, the little servant, the sad-eyed angel. The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the Lagercapo refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him. The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. “Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. “Cover your heads!” Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. but the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive...For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.” That night the soup tasted like corpses.

Elie Wiesel, Night, Bantam, 1982, pp. 75-6, quoted in When God Was Taken Captive, W. Aldrich, Multnomah, 1989, pp. 39-41.