Absolute truth has to exist. There is a reality. Once in a while, in conversation, I have to establish absolute truth more than a basic belief. Absolute truth is essential to any conversation about belief in God. The easiest way to establish the fact, truth does exist, is to just ask the person if absolute truth exists. If they say, “no”, then you ask, “ Is your answer absolutely true?”. This shows the error in their thinking and they are left with the only reasonable option, to accept that there is truth or could be an absolute truth. Let’s get plugged into leadership and look at this topic in more detail.
Once, I have established absolute truth exists with someone, I will move on to presenting arguments for the existence of God to be true. All arguments for God’s existence are inductive in nature. Looking at nature, the conclusion is far more likely to be true. God exists.
In R.C. Sproul’s “Defending the Faith” series, Sproul lays out that there are only 4 possible explanations for the existence of all physical things. From here on out, I will use the term, universe, as the meaning of all physical things.
- Reality outside your mind does not exist; you are in a dream or a brain in a vat.
- The universe created itself.
- The universe itself is eternal.
- God is eternal and God created the universe.
The idea that there is no reality outside your mind is not reasonable at all. If there is no reality outside your mind, then who are you having this discussion with? If this first point is true, it could only be yourself.
The second option of the universe creating itself is logically impossible. In the light of things that are reasonable, this is not even in the game of reasonable. This statement can be dismissed, as it is impossible by its very nature, because something can’t come from nothing.
The universe is eternal. There are a number of issues with this view. The first is, it is a well-established fact that the universe had a beginning. We can remember the scientific evidences that support this by using the acronym, S.U.R.G.E., used by Frank Turek. I will just list them for now.
S- The Second Law of Thermodynamics
U- The Universe is Expanding
R- Radiation from the Big Bang
G- Great Galaxy Seeds
E-Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity
With this scientific evidence pointing to the beginning of the universe, it rules out it being eternal. But if this isn’t convincing enough, there is still the question of what changed or caused the change in the state of the universe from whatever it was before the beginning to what it is now? There is no explanation.
This leaves us with God creating the universe. We know from an exercise in logic that the cause of the universe must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, personal and free. These are necessary attributes of God. Therefore, God is the cause of the universe.
The second argument I would use for the existence of God is the moral argument. The argument can take many forms. This is the one William Lane Craig uses:
- If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
- Objective moral values and duties do exist.
- Therefore, God exists.
People generally don’t question the truth of premise one. Most of the problem with this argument comes with premise two. As a support for premise two, we need to point to our moral intuition. The humanist philosopher Peter Cave gives the following example:
Whatever skeptical arguments may be brought against our belief that killing the innocent is morally wrong, we are more certain that the killing is morally wrong than that the argument is sound. . . . Torturing an innocent child for the sheer fun of it is morally wrong. Full stop. – 1 Peter Cave, Humanism (Oxford: OneWorld, 2009), p. 146.
In the absence of any reasonable evidence to defeat the position of it being morally wrong to torture an innocent child for the sheer fun of it, we can conclude that objective moral duties and values do exist. Therefore, with no logically viable reason to object to any of the 3 premises, our conclusion of God existing is reasonable.
Plugged into leadership 