Lindsay Harold
If someone asked you why you are a Christian or asked for evidence for God, what would you say? If you only had a few minutes to give the big picture of why the Christian faith is true in hopes of giving a person something to ponder, could you do it? Here’s one way I would answer that question.
Something had to always exist
If there ever was a time when there was nothing, there would always be nothing. There would be no first cause to begin anything. So something had to be there from the beginning.
It had to be eternal and uncreated.
If you posit that the universe is eternal and uncreated, then you run into a problem because science shows us that the universe had a definite beginning. It can’t be eternal if it had a beginning. Something had to cause it. It can’t cause itself to exist. Something outside the universe had to be eternal and uncreated.
We call that God.
There are several things we can deduce about this God from observation. The universe is huge and contains large amounts of space, matter, and energy. It would take a massive amount of power to create the universe. Thus, God must be tremendously powerful.
The universe includes time. Our study of physics indicates that time is affected by gravity and thus is an integral part of the fabric of our universe. Scientists speak now of “spacetime” precisely because space and time are deeply connected and form the fabric of the universe in which matter and energy are placed. Thus, God must be outside time and space. God created them.
Matter is a part of this universe as well.
Thus, God must not be made of matter.
The universe began at a specific point. It was started in some definite act. This suggests that the universe began according to the decision of God. This means that God is a person, not an impersonal force.
Impersonal forces do not make decisions.
The universe exhibits profound design. It shows many evidences of having been designed for complex, intelligent life. The many physical constants that define our universe and set our physical laws as they are could have been any other value, but the value they are is the only one that works to produce a universe capable of life.
Thus, God must be a very intelligent person.
The universe is extremely orderly. The physical laws are consistent. The objects in the universe each have a purpose. The living things in the universe fulfill useful functions. God must be an orderly and consistent person.
These are just some of the observations and conclusions we can make about God from what we observe.
If we want to know more about God, we need Him to reveal Himself to us in a more direct way.
Lucky for us, He did that in the Bible. We can know this because of several lines of evidence.
For one, the God described in the Bible fits the description of God we can deduce from nature. Some religions have gods that are not powerful creators of the universe. Those could not be the God we are looking for. Some religions have gods that had a beginning. Those could not be the one we deduced from nature.
The Christian God fits the description. He is eternal, uncreated, all-powerful, all-knowing, outside time and space, personal, intelligent, and orderly. This all fits.
Another line of evidence is that the Bible has several marks of divine influence. One of the most powerful of these is fulfilled prophecy. Mere humans are stuck in time and cannot see the future.
Only a being outside time could see the future. Thus, when a book shows evidence that a detailed prediction of the future was made at one point, and then fulfilled at a much later date, this is evidence for God’s intervention to reveal the future.
The Bible also records events in which God intervened supernaturally in history.
The most notable of these is the resurrection of Jesus. From the known historical facts, we can show that Jesus really did die, the tomb was later found empty, the disciples of Jesus who knew Him well believed that He had appeared to them bodily after His death and all went to their deaths making these claims. We can determine Christianity arose in the 1st century AD in Jerusalem and the surrounding area where people were most capable of verifying these claims for themselves.
The best explanation for these facts is that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. This forms evidence of supernatural activity that verifies the authenticity of the Bible as revelation from God to mankind.
It is because of these various lines of evidence (of which this is a very brief summary) and others that we can be confident that the Christian faith is true and that the Bible gives us accurate information about God and how to be accepted by Him.
