Does God Exist?

For most of my life I was considered agnostic.  I didn’t know if God existed, and I didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it.  My attitude was like “I’ll either find out one day or I won’t”.  To me this meant that when I die, if there is a God and an afterlife and all that, I would find out for sure, because I would see it for myself.  If there wasn’t, well then I would simply cease to exist, and I wouldn’t find out anything. 

I must admit that I really hated the concept of not existing anymore.  That would suck, I thought.  I mean, what’s the point of even being here if we just disappear in the end?  And it’s virtually impossible to “imagine” not existing, because to not exist means that you are no longer capable of imagining.

I would sometimes reason with myself, if I was created by God, then he was the one who gave me this scientific mind that required proof of basically anything.  Why would he do this to me? I wondered.  Why not just show himself, and then I would have my proof. 

As I got older, I started to wonder about “God” more and more often.  I started talking to friends, some of whom were spiritual but not religious.  I slowly started becoming convinced that there was something to all this, and that spirits existed, and that we are in fact spirits ourselves.  I started to feel that there must be a higher power of some kind to have created all this.  I started using the term “the Universe”, rather than “God”, since the term “God” has clearly religious overtones, and I wasn’t religious. 

And then one day, God showed himself.  Okay, he didn’t just walk up to me on the street and say “Hi Michael, I’m God” or anything.  What I mean is that he revealed himself to me in a deeply personal and unmistakable way.  There was no doubt left in my mind whatsoever.  Why did he do that?  I can’t say for sure.  But I do know that when it happened, I was seeking answers.  I really wanted to know.  I had been exploring spirituality.  I had been talking to friends.  I had started to believe that there must be a higher power somewhere.  I had been seeking God.

I can’t give you proof that God exists.  I wish I could.  The only proof I have is that he revealed himself to me, and it was a personal experience.  I could tell you about the experience, but that would still not “prove” anything to you, it’s only my words, and you would choose whether to believe them or not.  If you are looking for rock-solid evidence, then I suspect the only one who can give you that is God himself.  But if you are looking for at least some “reasons” to believe in God, here are a few to consider:

How Did the Universe Get Here?

That’s great; I can’t really argue that theory, since I have no background in astrophysics, and I wasn’t there 13.8 Billion years ago to see what happened.  But the question they always seem to overlook is this: how did the Big Bang get there in the first place?  If that’s what happened, then WHAT CAUSED IT?  Just some random “singularity” appeared out of nowhere, for no particular reason, and BANG, there’s your Universe?  Kinda seems like there should be more to it than that.  

Did the Universe Create Itself?

It should be an obvious statement that the Universe did not create itself.  In order to do that it would have had to exist before it existed, which is clearly impossible.  By the same reasoning the Universe must have been created by something that was outside of the Universe.  What’s more, whatever created the Universe had an enormous amount of power, because it created all of the power in the Universe.  Just think about the amount of power in our Sun.  Then think that there are billions of other stars in our galaxy.  Then think that there are billions of other galaxies in the Universe.  That’s an inconceivable amount of power.

So in a nutshell, the Universe was created by something outside of the Universe which had an unbelievable amount of power.  Sounds a little bit like God, doesn’t it?

Coincidence or Design?

One of my favorite TV shows is called “How the Universe Works”.  It has many very interesting facts and theories about the workings of the Universe, the Earth, how things were created, and so on.  Over and over again, a common theme is the amazing coincidences that enabled life on Earth.  For example, the existence of the Earth’s magnetic field, which protects all life from the Sun’s harmful radiation and without it, life would likely not exist. 

Another example is the presence of water on the Earth.  Scientists believe that water could not have existed on Earth during its initial formation, the Earth was too hot and too close to the Sun, so all the water would have evaporated into space.  The theory on the show is that the Earth was bombarded with Comets after its formation which “delivered” the water after the Earth had cooled. 

The ongoing list of examples on the show is quite staggering, and when taking them all into account, there is an incredible (one could almost say “miraculous”) number of “coincidences” that had to take place for us to be here.  So many, in fact, that it would seem unreasonable to think it was all coincidence.  One could easily argue (and many people do) that the Universe is here by design.

Fine Tuned Universe

The odds of such a thing happening by accident, one claim is to be the equivalent of winning “10,000 lotteries in succession without a single failure”.  Yet for every book or internet article saying that this is essentially proof of God’s existence, there seems to be another claiming that it proves the opposite (try Googling “fine-tuned universe fallacy”).  Obviously both sides can’t be right.

So is any of this “proof”? No, it isn’t. Science can’t prove the existence of God, any more than it can prove the non-existence of God. So where does that leave us? Basically it means that Science is useless as far as “proving” God’s existence, but there are at least some pretty strong hints that God exists.

Let’s Just Argue About it then

There are a seemingly endless supply of “logical” and “philosophical” arguments, both for and against the existence of God. I sometimes get a kick out of reading them. Let’s face it, God either exists or he doesn’t, and there is no amount of arguing that will change the fact. It’s almost as if some people think that if they argue their point strongly enough, they can make God disappear.

Can anyone honestly say that they know that God doesn’t exist? No, and here’s why. Have a look at the following diagram, I’ll call it the “Knowledge Diagram”:

The Black circle in the diagram indicates All Knowledge, in other words, all the Knowledge that exists anywhere. Do Humans as a whole posses All Knowledge? Obviously not, because we still research things. So the Red circle indicates Human Knowledge, which is less than the total of All Knowledge. Further, the Blue circle indicates My Knowledge, which is less than all Human Knowledge, and the Green circle is Your Knowledge. Notice that there is some overlap between yours and mine, because we both share some knowledge, like being able to read, for example. But there is knowledge that I have that you don’t, and likewise you have knowledge that I don’t.

The existence of God is a single piece of knowledge, i.e. if he exists, that is a piece of knowledge, and if he doesn’t exist, that would also be a piece of knowledge. However, only one of those two pieces of knowledge can exist, because they are mutually exclusive, God either exists or he doesn’t.

So let’s say that God exists, and the knowledge of his existence is at the point labelled with the number 1 in my Knowledge diagram. This would mean that his existence is unknown to Humans, because that point of knowledge is outside of All Human Knowledge. Furthermore, the only way for someone to know for certain that point 1 of knowledge does not exist is for them to possess All Knowledge!

So if someone says that they know that God does not exist, they are basically claiming that they possess All Knowledge, even more than all Humans put together! Sounds a little arrogant, doesn’t it?

However, I happen to know that God exists, because he revealed himself to me. And there are a lot of other people who also know that God exists. So therefore the knowledge of God’s existence is at the point labelled with the number 2 in my knowledge diagram. The knowledge is inside Human Knowledge, and is also inside My Knowledge. I’m not sure if it’s inside your knowledge yet.

Conclusion

I can tell you for a fact that God exists. I know this because he has revealed himself to me, and he continues to do so on a regular basis. And as I have shown you, it is clearly not possible for anyone to know that God doesn’t exist.

So if you’re not sure whether God exists, I’d say the best way for you to know for sure is to experience God yourself. How can you do that? To start, please read my next post.