This I believe, pt 2 - There is a god

Note that I used a lower case 'g' on that title. At this stage of my apologetic, it can't be said that I'm necessarily talking about the Jehovah, the God of the Bible.

But, in my thinking, the fact that there is a supreme being of unimaginable power and intelligence is abundantly clear from the world around us. The only ones who can possibly deny that are those who have taken as a presupposition that there is no god.

Let me clarify what I mean by that. In any kind of logical reasoning, you start from some point, with some set of "givens", and construct your argument from the implications of those givens. They may be called axioms, or assumptions, or presuppositions. But within that sphere of logical reasoning, nothing can be permitted to contradict those givens.

One of the arguments heard in the evolution debate is that Christians accept God on "faith", the implication being that faith somehow contradicts reason. But the evolutionists have "faith", too - faith in their assumption that there is no god. And I conclude that it takes a great deal more "faith" in that assumption to reach the evolutionary world view than it does to accept the position that there is a god, and he created the world we live in.

I am NOT saying that one needs to start with the assumption that there is a god. One merely needs to eliminate the assumption that there is NOT a god. If you have that assumption, then you must bend and twist and look at the evidence from all manner of cock-eyed angles in order to avoid the conclusion that there is a god, because that contradicts your assumption. If you eliminate that assumption, than you are free to look at the evidence straight on, and my conclusion is that the evidence overwhelmingly points to the existence of a creator-god.

I remember some years ago hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, and looking up in awe at the majestic rock formations towering hundreds of feet above me, and thinking, "And this was merely an afterthought of God's creative efforts." Okay, you can argue that that's merely the force of nature at work. But there are other arguments that suggest it is more than that.

I remember hearing one time (sorry, I can't remember the source) a man pick up a shoe, and saying "This shoe proves the existence of God."
And his listener replied "How?"
The man replied "Who made the shoe?"
"The cobbler."
"And who made the raw materials that the cobbler used to make the shoe."
"The cow."
"And what did the cow eat go grow?"
"Grass"
"And who made the grass?"

and so on, and so on. Eventually you get back to the "prime mover", the "first cause", something or someone made it all happen. Even if you subscribe to the "big bang" theory, where did this energy and matter that went into the "big bang" come from? Now the evolutionists at that point will say "Now you're getting out of the realm of science and into the realm of religion, and we can't answer that question." Well, duh, that's the point. You can't answer that question without violating your assumption that we there is no god, and that therefore we live in a closed universe free from anything that has to do with the supernatural.

But the thing that they miss is that the entire discussion is outside the realm of science. Evolution is not science. Science deals with the observable, the reproducible, the testable. You observe facts, you propound theories, you construct experiments to test your theories, and others can reproduce your work to verify it. Evolution does none of those. It cannot observe the origin of life, it cannot reproduce it, it cannot conduct experiments to test its theories. And just because 90%, or whatever the percentage is, of people accept a theory, does not mean that it is not still a theory.

So I believe that nature shows us that god exists, and that he is being of unimaginable power and grandeur.

But I believe nature also shows us that he is a being of supreme intelligence. I cannot understand the huge brouhaha over "Intelligent Design". It appears to me so obvious. If you're hiking in a desolate area, and you come upon, let's say, a watch, you don't pick it up and say, "My look at how these elements randomly assembled themselves into this watch." No, of course not. You conclude that someone was there before you and dropped the watch, because it's obvious that it was designed by an intelligence. [I know this is the age-old watchmaker analogy which has been "refuted", but all the "refutations" that I can find simply say, "no, natural selection can explain that design." Well, in my mind, it's a matter of which explanation makes more sense. Again, the natural selection argument is viable only if you start from a position that absolutely denies the possibility a god.] Nature in general, and the human body in particular, is of unimaginably complex design. To believe that it came about by mutations or other transformations happening randomly is beyond ludicrous. I remember someone once saying that's about as likely as an explosion in a type-setting factory producing the Encyclopedia Brittannica (obviously from a far earlier time when we still had encyclopedias!).

There is far more within the sphere of "Intelligent Design" than I want to go into here that, to my mind, clearly demonstrates that, not only is the god I believe in a god of supreme power, but also one of incredible intelligence.

And thus, I believe that god exists.