The Search For Truth - 3
How do we know God Exists?
I. Introduction.
A. We are in a series called the Search for truth and we are looking at the six greatest questions that people struggle with in their lives. On Easter, we asked the question, “Can I Handle the Truth?” Last week, with Dr. Jay we saw through his ministry that God knows that you are alive. Today, I want to answer the question, “How do I know that God really exists?” And next week, we will be looking at the question, “Doesn’t science refute the Bible? You won’t want to miss next week!
*How do I really know that God exists?
B. Let me start off by saying that There is a big difference between the truth and belief. You can believe something that is NOT the truth and you can believe what you want to, but that doesn’t make it true.
>In 1997, there was a cult in San Diego called “Heaven’s Gate.” Marshall Applewhite (Slide1) , the head of the cult Heaven’s Gate told his followers that they if they drank poison-laced kool-aid, they could take a ride on a spaceship that they believed was hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp which Applewhite said was really carrying Jesus.
*The question we have to always ask is: Why should I believe what you’re saying is true? Where is the evidence?
If those 38 people had done a little research, they would have found:
-That Marshall Applewhite had spent a lot of time in mental hospitals.
-He met his wife, Bonnie Nettles, while undergoing treatment in a mental hospital.
-They abandoned their human names, instead calling themselves Guinea and Pig, then Bo and Peep, before finally settling on Do and Ti.
-Ti died of cancer in 1985 but Do, claiming he was Jesus returned to Earth, said he continued to communicate with her.
*There was no evidence that he was Jesus, no evidence that he was in his right mind, and no evidence that anything he said was true.
D. When it comes to religion, people often say facts and evidence don’t matter. The Bible and the God of the Bible is so different from any other religion on this planet because God throughout the Bible shows us that our faith must rest on evidence and truth.
*Jesus said that John 8:32 you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
*Throughout this series, you will see that our faith rests on evidence and truth. We are not simply believing things that have no ability to be proven true. In fact, I would say it this way: we as Christians believe the truth, not because it is easy or convenient, but because it is true. And as we look at hard questions about God and the Bible, you will see that the foundation of our beliefs is fact, truth, and the evidence.
*The question you will have to ask yourself is do I really want to know that truth or do I want to believe what I want to believe?
*Today, we are looking at the existence of God. And as we look at the evidence for God outside the Bible, you will see that many of the leading critics of God and the Bible are people who have a reason for not wanting to believe in God.
>Christian Astrophysicist Hugh Ross (Slide 2) spoke to a group of 300 atheists at an event sponsored by Atheists United about the evidence of God and before he presented his scientific evidences for God, he asked the audience these two questions:
1. How many of you would believe in God if you saw compelling scientific evidence for His existence and saw that evidence increase as we learned more about the universe and the record of nature?
2. How many of you here would not believe in God until the scientific evidence eliminated all other alternate conceivable explanations for the universe and life?
*Do you see the difference in these two questions? What do you need to demonstrate the existence of God- do you need compelling scientific evidence or do you need me to show that every other explanation will not work?
*The ones that want every other evidence eliminated will never have enough evidence for them.
>Like in Dumb and Dumber, when at the end of the movie Lloyd asked Mary what their chances were to end up together? He asked one in a hundred? She said, no like one in a million. So what did Lloyd say? So you’re telling me there is a chance. And for most atheists, even if every other solution was impossible, as long as there was a one in a billion chance that someday there might be a way to explain life without God, they would not consider God.
*However, if you want to see compelling scientific evidence for the existence of God, you will see it today!
*Interestingly, 1/3 of the atheists he talked to were open to believing in God if he could show them compelling evidence. The other 2/3s would never have enough evidence and that is probably true everywhere.
*Let me ask the question, why would someone not want to believe in God even though there was overwhelming evidence that there is a God? There are two common reasons why people even when given the evidence don’t want to believe that there is a God: the first reason is because if there is a God they would have to change their lifestyle-they loved their sinful lifestyle and didn’t want to believe in God because of that. The second reason is that many of them were abused by people who said they were Christians and so they have a grudge against Christianity and God because of the people that said they represent Him.
John 3:17 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.
*But the good news is that if you are here today and you have an open mind, there are tremendous, and I would say overwhelming proofs of God’s existence.
II. Today, I want to look at just five of the many great evidences for God outside the Bible.
A. Evidence #1: the evidence of cosmology (astrophysics).
Science is the study of God’s universe and its laws and is God’s general revelation to humanity. The Bible itself says that we can understand God’s existence, His handiwork, His power, and His divine nature just by looking at the universe and the creation.
Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
*So, can you determine that God exists just looking at the universe? Is that really true? (YES!)
1. Einstein’s theory of Relativity (1916) showed that the universe is simultaneously expanding and decelerating. The only thing in nature that behaves that way is an explosion.
Einstein’s theory proved that the universe is the aftermath of an explosion, thus there must have been a beginning to the explosion- a moment at which the pin was pulled. By the simple law of cause and effect, it must also have had a beginner or creator. One of the things that Einstein struggled with was the fact that his own theories led him to believe in a God that he didn’t want to believe in.
2. Because of the implications of Einstein’s theory, it led to hundreds of experiments and research over the last hundred years to determine how the universe began.
*And now we know conclusively that the entire physical universe—all the matter and energy, and even the four dimensions of space and time—burst forth from a state of infinite, or near infinite, density, temperature, and pressure. The observable universe expanded from a volume infinitesimally smaller than the period at the end of a sentence, and it continues to expand.
*There was a time when there was nothing and out of that nothing, everything was created.
*Let me read it from Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg (Slide 3) from his book The First Three Minutes: In the beginning there was an explosion. Not an explosion like those familiar on Earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle. Within the tiniest split second, the temperature hit a hundred thousand million degrees Centigrade. This is much hotter than in the center of even the hottest star, so hot, in fact, that none of the components of ordinary matter, molecules, or atoms, or even the nuclei of atoms, could have held together. Interestingly, there were also photons: The universe was filled with hot light.
In three minutes, wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything, ninety-eight percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.”
Or as the Bible says: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.
Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
>As Stephen Hawking wrote in his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time (Slide 4) , “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.”
>On page 127, he says: “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”
>Paul Davies (Slide 5), who as a scientist used to write articles promoting atheism, said that “the laws of physics seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design.” And “There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all…It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe…The impression of design is overwhelming.”
>Allan Sandage, winner of the Crafoord Prize in astronomy (equivalent to the Nobel Prize), remarked, “I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.”
>Robert Griffiths, who won the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, observed, “If we need an atheist for a debate, I go to the philosophy department. The physics department isn’t much use.”
>Robert Jastrow (Slide 6), a self-proclaimed agnostic, best described what has happened to his colleagues as they have measured the cosmos: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” He goes on to say “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.”
*The evidence of creation out of nothing has no naturalistic answer. It points to a creator.
B. Evidence #2: The Evidence of Physics: The universe is fine-tuned for life.
*The fundamental laws and parameters of physics have precise numerical values that could have been otherwise. That is, there’s no fundamental reason why these values have to be the way they are. Yet all of these laws and constants conspire in a mathematically incredible way to make life in the universe possible.
*Evolutionary theory and teaching for the past 100 years has given rise to the principle known as the mediocrity principle. It asserts that humanity is not special in any way and that human origin and development have likely been duplicated on billions of other sites throughout the cosmos. This principle is the dominant view of Hollywood movies and the media.
*But in spite of that, After more than a century of astronomy and physics research, an unexpected observation has arisen that scientists call the “anthropic principle:” that the universe appears "designed" for the sake of human life.
>Example 1: Fine tuning of cosmic density (slide 7): Astronomers have determined through the Hubble space telescope that the observable universe contains 50 billion trillion stars. That’s massive- and yet the universe is more massive by far. The observable stars only account for just one percent of the universe’s total mass. Why is the universe so big? Great question! To have life in our universe, the universe has to have a very specific amount of density of protons and neutrons. There has to be a specific density for hydrogen to fuse into heavier elements that are necessary for life. If the universe were just a little denser, only elements heavier than iron would exist, and life would be impossible. If the density were just a little lower, nothing heavier than helium would exist, and life would also be impossible. Either way, the important elements for life such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous would not be able to form if the density were a little different.
>Example 2: Fine Tuning of Cosmic Mass: Another reason the universe must be so massive is that the cosmic mass critically influences the universe's expansion rate. If the mass density of the universe were smaller, the influence of gravity would be too weak for stars like the Sun and planets like Earth to form. On the other hand, if the mass density were greater, only stars much larger than the Sun would form. Either way, the universe would contain no stars like the Sun or planets like Earth, and life would have no possible home. The required fine-tuning is so extreme (one part in a quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion[60 zeroes]) that if one were to remove or add a single dime's (Slide 8) worth of mass to this vast cosmos, the balance of the observable universe would be thrown off and physical life would not be possible. Such amazing fine-tuning suggests the involvement of a supernatural, superintelligent Creator.
>Example 3: Fine Tuning of the cosmological constant (Slide 9): One more example: the cosmological constant discovered by Einstein (which controls the expansion speed of the universe) refers to the balance of the attractive force of gravity with a repulsive force of space. It must be very close to zero, that is, these two forces must be nearly perfectly balanced. To get the right balance, the cosmological constant must be fine-tuned to something like 1 part in 10120. If it were just slightly more positive, the universe would fly apart; slightly negative, and the universe would collapse.
*As with the cosmological constant, the ratios of the other constants must be fine-tuned relative to each other.
*We now know that there are over 150 different constants that have to be just right for life to exist anywhere in the universe.
>English Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (Slide 10) said, “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”
>Physicist Paul Davies: “The impression of design is overwhelming.”
>Stephen Hawking admitted: “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers [the constants of physics] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”(A Brief History of Time, p. 125)
*So we see in the fine-tuning of the universe the existence of God.
C. Evidence #3: The origin of Life points to an intelligent creator.
1. According to evolution, all life started in a primordial soup of chemicals (Slide11). Charles Darwin said that life might have originated when a protein compound formed in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present. Supposedly, these compounds accumulated in the primeval oceans, creating a nutrient broth, the so-called prebiotic soup. Then over millions of years, these organic compounds assembled into macromolecules, protein, and nucleic acids. Eventually, over more millions of years, combinations of these macromolecules were endowed with the property of self-reproduction and driven by natural selection, became more efficient and complex self-reproducing molecular systems until one day a first simple cell system emerged.
*To bolster this assertion, let me quote from the Biology textbook (Slide 12) used in Fairfax County, page 357: “in 1953, Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, designed an experiment that simulated conditions on early Earth. Miller placed gases in a flask to represent Earth’s ancient atmosphere. He used electric sparks to represent lightning as an energy source. The experiment produced a variety of small organic molecules that are essential to life, including amino acids-the building blocks of proteins. Many scientists have since repeated and extended this research. They have tested a variety of assumptions about available atmospheric gases and energy sources. Under many different conditions, these experiments have produced all 20 amino acids, several sugars, lipids, the nitrogenous bases found in DNA and RNA, and even ATP.”
*The only problem with this is that just four years after this experiment, scientists found that the atmosphere of early earth was nothing like the gases used in the Miller’s experiment.
>Jon Cohen wrote in Science 1995, that many researchers now dismiss the 1953 experiment because “the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.”
This is significant because when scientists redid the experiment using the gases that were actually part of early earth, no amino acids, and not one building block to life formed.
>Heinrich Holland noted in 1984 that the new mixture yields no amino acids at all.
>Fox and Dose in their 1977 experiment found that no amino acids are produced using the real mixture of gases that were on the early earth and concluded: “The inference that Miller’s synthesis does not have a geological relevance has become increasingly widespread.”
*Widespread- except for our textbooks that keep alive a false experiment.
>Chemist Robert Shapiro wrote: “We have reached a situation where a theory has been accepted as fact by some, and ‘possible contrary evidence is shunted aside…This is mythology rather than science.”
>Biologist Michael Denton writes: “Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence. And even if we were to assume that the prebiotic soup did exist, there would have been significant problems with cross-reactions.”
*What they don’t tell you about Miller’s experiment is that after producing amino acids, they reacted to one another leaving a brown sludge at the bottom that would have killed any life.
*Here’s the crazy thing: the conditions on early earth were not able to produce the building blocks we need for life, yet from the very beginning-yes, I said it, the very beginning, life was found throughout the earth.
>American Physicist and Information Theorist Hubert Yockey said: “The significance of the … carbon 12 in the very old … rocks in Greenland (Slide 13) is that there never was a primordial soup and that, nevertheless, living matter must have existed abundantly on Earth before 3.8 billion years.
>New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade reported in June 2000: “Everything about the origin of life on Earth is a mystery, and it seems the more that is known, the more acute the puzzles get.”
*The nucleotides that form DNA and RNA don’t interact with each other in any way: which means there is no natural way to put together nucleotides to form DNA. The only way to do that is to have some intelligent being assemble them.
*As one prominent scientist stated: “life is consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry but is not derivable from them…I have no scenario to explain the origin of life.”
*This leads me to my next evidence:
D. Evidence #4: The origin of information points towards an intelligent creator.
Darwin believed that the smaller you went, the simpler things got. He believed that the cell was made up of a protoplasmic goo. And then we invented microscopes that could actually look at the cells.
*We now know that even the simplest cell has 600 molecular machines and if even one is missing, the cell won’t function. You are walking around with 22 quadrillion molecular motors working 24/7.
*Each cell in our body has encoded information inside it called DNA. One strand of DNA if stretched out molecule on molecule would be six feet tall. If you put all the DNA molecules in your body end to end, the DNA would reach from the Earth to the Sun and back over 600 times.
Each cell has 3 billion bits of information encoded in its DNA. Your DNA has the ability to create over 20,000 different proteins needed for cellular function. It was recently discovered that there is a second, hidden language in DNA that is used by your genes.
>Geophysicist and professor Steven Meyers says that DNA is more like a library. The organism accesses the information that it needs from DNA so it can build some of its critical components.”
>George Sim Johnson said “human DNA contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia Britannica. If the full text of the encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, most people would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But when seen in nature, it is explained as the workings of random forces.
>Bill Gate said that DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we’ve ever devised.”
*So here we have an information library in each and every cell-even in the smallest single-cell bacteria on our planet. We know to get a software program at Microsoft, Bill Gates hires hundreds of intelligent programmers who spend thousands of hours on each program. Here in even the smallest cell, we have information more complex than anything that could ever be created by humans.
*The only way to get information is to have an intelligent designer. DNA argues for the existence of God.
In fact, the famous atheist, Antony Flew when he studied the DNA of the simplest bacteria changed from being an atheist. In his famous book, “There is a God” said that the “question that has not been answered in origin-of-life studies is this: How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self-replication capabilities, and 'coded chemistry'? Here we are not dealing with biology, but an entirely different category of problem"
*So far, we have looked at four strong evidences outside the Bible for the existence of God. The first is the creation of our universe out of nothing. The second is the fine-tuning of over 150 different parameters without which no life could exist. The third is the pervasive origin of life all over the planet without any building blocks for it and so early in its creation that it could not have arisen through natural processes. The fourth evidence is the super complex coded information found in every living cell on this planet. We have no natural explanation that can explain it. But my fifth evidence is an experiential one.
5. Evidence #5: Experiential Evidence: God gives us a down payment that we can sense when we invite Him into our lives.
*The God of the Bible doesn’t believe in blind faith. He believes in faith based on evidence and facts. And one of the things that God does is give us something when we step out to trust in Him.
Ephesians 1:13-14 And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.
*When we invite Jesus into our life, a change takes place inside that you can feel. God calls it the down payment of eternal life. What He does inside us is the proof that there is not only an afterlife, but a place that God prepares for us after this life is over. And the best thing is that it is something that you can feel and is life-changing. That’s why Jesus called it being born again.
*A change so radical inside you that your spirit being inside you is literally born and alive where before it was dead and empty.
*We all sense that emptiness- if you came today and haven’t asked Jesus into your life, you know what I’m talking about because we feel that emptiness all our life…
