I am not starting with “proof” of God. I don’t believe you can prove God to someone who is simply unwilling to believe. For whatever reasons, there are people who resist believing and there is not enough evidence in the world (or outside the world) to convince them.

The Scripture calls them fools in Psalm 14:1-3:

The fool says in his heart,
“There is no God.”
They are corrupt, their deeds are vile;
there is no one who does good.

In Psalm 10:2-5 David says of the fool:

In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak,
who are caught in the schemes he devises.
He boasts about the cravings of his heart;
he blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.
In his pride the wicked man does not seek him;
in all his thoughts there is no room for God.

I see two common themes in these Psalms. First, the rejection of God is a matter of the heart. It is motivated by the heart which is always a word for who we really are – our innermost being. It is the cravings of his heart that force out the desire for God. It is not merely the mind or the will but the whole nature of the person has no room for God. Aldous Huxley said it best when he wrote why he chose to be an anti-theist.

‘I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.’

I have met young people who doubt the existence of God. As I’ve told you before, I tried without success to be an atheist. I could not escape the love of God. This verse is not a description of those who have periods of doubt or a season of inability to believe. It is describing those who have determined in their heart over a long period of time that there is no God and life has no meaning. It is those who have found a convenient way to excuse their own sin.

And that leads us to the second common theme of the those who have no room for God – corruption and debasement. What does Paul say in Romans 1:21-25?

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator..”

The most common reason for disbelief is a heart deep motive for not believing and the most common result is thinking that becomes futile, hearts that are darkened and exchanging the truth for a lie. I love that image of an exchange. It’s intentional. It means someone has handed over something knowingly and received something in return. What do we hand over knowingly – not accidentally? Truth. What do we receive in exchange? A lie and a worthless life.

If that is the case for not believing, I would think it would be at least equally if not more reasonable to look at the case in favor of believing there is a God.

While whole libraries are filled with books on the existence of God, none of us have the time this morning for a thorough examination of that evidence. So, let’s just look at two of the basic arguments.

The Argument From Creation

That’s where Paul started in Romans. The whole creation is evidence for the existence of a Creator. Men could know God by what He had created. David expresses the same in Psalm 8 we quoted last week:

“When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?”

We are created beings and there is a Creator.

We also looked at the expanse and infinite complexity and size of the Universe – both outward and inward. How could that be random. How could there not be a Designer behind it all?

There is an organization called Intelligent Design that has documented all the things that have had to go right for the creation of life and for the universe to not fall in on itself. The list is long but if you just think of these few it will make it hard to believe there is not a Designer who more resembles a mind that a machine.

“The Earth is immense—8,000 miles in diameter and weighing roughly 6.6 x 1021 tons. If the Earth traveled much faster in its 292-million-mile-long orbit around the sun, centrifugal force would pull it away from the sun, and if too far, all life would cease to exist. If it traveled slightly slower, the Earth would move closer to the sun, and if it moved too close, all life would likewise perish. The Earth’s 365 day, 5-hour, 48-minute and 45.51-second-round-trip is accurate to a thousandth of a second! If the yearly average temperature on Earth rose or fell only a few degrees, most life on it would soon roast or freeze. This change would upset the water-ice and other balances, with disastrous results. If it rotated on its axis slower, all life would die in time, either by freezing at night because of lack of heat from the sun, or by burning during the day from too much sun.”

“If the Moon were much nearer to Earth, one result would be huge tides which would overflow onto the lowlands and erode the mountains (and with the continents leveled, it is estimated that water would cover the entire surface to the depth of a mile and a half)! If the Earth was not tilted 23° on its axis, but was at a 90° angle in reference to the sun, we would not have four seasons. Without seasons, life would soon not be able to exist here—the poles would lie in eternal twilight, and water vapor from the oceans would be carried by the wind towards both the north and south, and would freeze when close enough to the poles. In time, huge continents of snow and ice would pile up in the polar regions, leaving most of the Earth a dry desert. Eventually the oceans would disappear and rainfall would cease. The accumulated weight of ice at the poles would cause the equator to bulge and, as a result, the rotation of the Earth would drastically change.”

But, while I think the argument from design and “fine tuning” makes the case for a Mind and a Design, it does not really tell us much about what kind of Person that Mind is. In fact, if we just looked at creation we might not understand God as He reveals Himself in other ways. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis says, “We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe he has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend of man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place”).

The Argument from Natural Law

So, while creation may make the case for there being a Designer behind it, it may not say enough about what kind of person that Designer is. For that, I would like to spend the balance of time in Lewis’ argument based on Natural Law. This is not the natural law we think of as gravity or wave mechanics but the moral law that is common to virtually all people – except the rare few who have no innate sense of right and wrong.

First, there is something in us that recognizes right and wrong, fairness and unfairness. When someone does something against us we say he has “wronged” us. We don’t say he did something neutral. He did not do “right” by us. There is some kind of standard of behavior that even when we break it we admit it exists and we hold other people accountable to it in their actions toward us. Some standard of decent behavior. Otherwise, there is nothing that would be right or wrong – and we know instinctively there is. “Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all of the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five….Human beings all over the earth have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.”

Second, this rule of Right and Wrong must somehow be a real thing, a thing that is really there outside us and not made up by ourselves. If it were made up by us it would always be convenient or always be in our favor or always be far more forgiving of our breaking it but it is not. In fact, it is often inconvenient and not in our favor and sometimes just the opposite. So, there is something in us that witnesses to a moral law but that law is not of our making. There is a source for that law of Right and Wrong or Justice and Injustice or Fairness and Unfairness that none of us made but to which we feel accountable. “The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behavior. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else – a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.

In another passage Lewis says what we must have all felt. “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. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?…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. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. “Dark” would be without meaning.”

Third, if it is not creation alone that gives us the full picture of God’s existence and His nature then what does? It turns out that the very law we see inside ourselves but cannot be of our making is what points us not only to God but to the kind of God He is. “Now from this second bit of evidence we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct – in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honest and truthfulness.”

If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.”

So, there we have it. The reality of God made by our own evidence that condemns us or points us toward Him. We can choose to let our hearts and lives become dark and futile – exchange the truth of God for a lie or make the better choice. Not only accept the evidence for a God but a God who, as Peter says in 1 Peter 5:7 cares for us and asks us to cast all our anxiety on him.

He’s not Christian or even a theist but I like what the science fiction writer Philip Dick said about the nature of reality. “It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.”

Isn’t that a good way to end? God is that which, when you stop believing in Him, doesn’t go away. No matter what. He is, in the end, the only reality.