The Necessity of God, Part I

I might as well confess from the start that I can’t prove logically that God exists. He seems to have deliberately designed things that way. The best I can do is show that if God doesn't exist, then we are not the beings we believe ourselves to be. Truth, knowledge, right, wrong, good, bad, morality, logic, reason thought, significance, consciousness, motivation, free will, and even our very selves cannot exist without Him. We may each hold a different opinion about God, but we all—even “atheists”—behave as if He exists.

How to start? Imagine that the universe is a closed system inside of which every event is caused by some other physical event, and no events occur that are not caused by another event. Everything inside this universe we can call “Nature” and everything outside of the universe would therefore be “Supernature,” as in “above or beyond Nature.” Now, any entry into the system by forces outside of the system would bring about apparently uncaused events because there would be no way to determine the cause of the event from inside the system. It would appear as magic or, more appropriately, a miracle.

Godless Evolutionists or Atheists claim that nothing exists beyond Nature, that there is no Supernature. The first problem with this proposition is that we clearly observe events happening around us, and those events appear to have causes. In fact, we are so accustomed to this cause and effect sequence that we assume any observable physical occurrence has at least one physical cause. This is why science works, computers can be programmed, and cars can be repaired. Events have causes. And our observations tell us those events are always finite, that is they have a beginning and an end. So, when faced with a universe filled with finite caused events ricocheting off of each other, a thoughtful person might project the whole soup back in time and ask the obvious question: “What was the first event, and what caused it?” But that question makes no sense, for if it had a cause it would not be the first event. What we need is an uncaused event, and we have to leave the universe to find it. (The Big Bang does not adequately serve as the first cause or the first event because the question still arises: “What caused the Big Bang?” Instead of giving us a satisfactory answer, the Big Bang merely obscures the problem behind a veil that atheist cosmologists can declare to be invincibly impermeable, thereby diverting attention from the “permanently unanswerable” question. But the question remains, for it cannot be answered with any cause from within the physical universe.)

Bertrand Russell said that the need for this first cause moved him from being an atheist to a deist. But then someone suggested to him that having God supply the first cause then raised the question, “Who made God?” which moved him back to being an atheist. That’s a stupid question, really. He apparently never considered the possibility—the requirement—that the Creator of the Universe exists outside of and separate from the universe He created, and would therefore not be subject to its laws. After all, He could not be a native of the universe and its Creator, for a thing cannot create itself. And in that realm outside of the universe, in Supernature, uncaused events and eternal beings might be commonplace. And in fact, they seem to be.

“But,” you say, “wouldn’t it be simpler to take Carl Sagan’s route and skip the extra God step, assuming instead that the physical universe is self-existent—that it has always been and will always be here? If God can be self-existent, then why can't the same be true of the universe?” The answer: because the universe is confined to the realm of caused events and God is not.

“But isn’t it a stretch to attribute the universe to a miracle? I mean, we just don’t observe uncaused events taking place around us every day.”

Ah, but we do.

We just don’t recognize them for what they are because uncaused events are so commonplace that we seldom even notice them. We rarely consider them as evidence of Supernature. What are these uncaused events? You’ll have to wait until the next installment to find out.