IS THERE EVIDENCE FOR GOD?
IS THERE EVIDENCE FOR GOD?
ARGUMENT 1 - FINE TUNING
In 2007 I was in Washington D.C. filming a discussion with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett for a program that would be entitled The Four Horsemen. These were four of my heroes then–the leading men of atheism with bestselling books such as The Good Delusion, The End of Faith and God Is Not Great. I was a starstruck, 26-year-old atheist filmmaker, scooting back and forth between two cameras in my socks, trying to not to make too much noise in Hitchens’ dining room on a bright September evening.
This video now has over 3 million views on YouTube, and is available as both a DVD and a book.
Near the 51-minute mark in the conversation, Sam Harris asks the others if there are any arguments that challenge their atheism. Richard Dawkins chimes in, saying that the only thing that comes close for him is the idea that “the fundamental constants of the universe are too good to be true.”
What he’s referring to is known as the “fine-tuning argument.”
You see, there are certain constants of nature that are unchanging values. These are things like the “force of gravity, electromagnetic force, and the subatomic “weak” force,”
The fact that these forces stay constant is really, really important, so much so that if they changed even a little bit, life in this universe would become entirely impossible. And yet they don’t need to be that way–they could be different. And so it seems like someone set them to be just right for a stable, life-producing universe.
And just how finely-tuned are these constants? Craig explains:
The so-called weak force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, which operates inside the nucleus of an atom, is so finely tuned that an alteration in its value by even one part out of 10100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe!
…
The fine-tuning here is beyond comprehension. Having an accuracy of even one part out of 1060 is like firing a bullet toward the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light-years away, and nailing a one-inch target!
YouTube has been recommending Bob Ross marathons to me lately. I love watching him and his frizzy hair as he brings a new painting to life. As I watch, I can observe the painter, and know he created it. But if I were only shown the finished painting, I’d see the brush strokes, scraping, dabbing, layering—I could be certain, beyond any reasonable doubt, that it didn’t just appear out of nowhere, but that a painter created it.
The finely-tuned constants of our Universe are like those painted brush strokes, helping us see the existence of the painter—in the case of our Universe, a Creator.
Now atheists have thought about this, of course. Some, such as the late philosopher Victor Stenger, believed that a “multiverse” could be the answer to the problem of fine-tuning. He proposed that this universe could be just one ‘bubble’ of space and time with these constants, and that countless other universes exist in other ‘bubbles’ with all of those not-so-finely-tuned constants.
The only problem is that there’s no evidence for this—it’s just a hypothesis. Which, in this instance, is just a fancy word for ‘guess’. It’s a “Hail-Mary” attempt to diminish the statistical improbability of the fine-tuning. Atheists would rather propose a multiverse with near infinite universes, where we just so happen to be in the work that works, rather like the idea that infinite monkeys bashing on typewriters could eventually turn out the complete works of Shakespeare. Or, in our case, our finely-tuned constants.
ARGUMENT 2 - THE EXISTENCE OF THE UNIVERSE
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that our Universe had a beginning. That means, however hard it may be to wrap our heads around it, that there was a start to time and space. So what does that mean?
Well, logically, we can state that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Something made it exist. Nothing in our Universe has ever existed that didn’t have a cause.
Because time and space came into existence with the universe, the Universe had to have a cause outside of time and space. That would mean the cause needs to be timeless, eternal, and not in space, not made of stuff, or you could say immaterial. God is outside of time and space, he is eternal and immaterial.
And that’s not just a nice little jump to the end: these are necessary qualities to satisfy a cause for our Universe. If we try to say there is no God, we can find a cause that has a cause that has a cause that has a cause (etc, on and on, and is called the ‘infinite regression problem). But eventually we have to find something that has always existed and is not made of stuff, that has the qualities of God, that started it all off.
Now this doesn’t tell us everything about God that we believe as Christians. But basic evidence is an important, foundational piece of our understanding. What we can see is that the existence of God is logically necessary as the ‘first cause’ that brought our Universe into existence, and who was able to fine-tune the Universe to be able to produce life. We can see, just from these logical arguments, that an intelligent, powerful creator is necessary.
THERE ARE MORE ARGUMENTS
There are many other areas where we can see that this world has been designed--in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology.We should all look out our window each morning and be firmly convinced of God’s existence in an instant. Yet secularists will dismiss this evidence, and hold on to the hope of a purely materialist, godless universe.
THE EXISTENCE OF LIFE
For instance, the process of life coming from non-life, known as abiogenesis, has never been observed or replicated. Evolutionists claim that historical time on Earth was so immense, that it just had to happen at some point. They gloss over this gaping hole in the atheist picture, ignoring the question of how life came to be, one of the most important anyone can ask when trying to understand our world. The existence of life on earth is strong evidence of a Creator.
CONSCIOUSNESS
And not only do we have life, we have minds. The fact that you and I are conscious at all right now, exchanging these words and ideas as self-directed minds, is staggering. We get so comfortable inside the experience of our minds that we can forget that they didn’t have to exist. Could creatures roam the earth without consciousness? Absolutely. Yet you and I are here. Minds that can think, love, remember and hope should feel as statistically improbable as it gets in this Universe.
THE ARGUMENT THAT GOT ME
These were some of the arguments that I heard many times before I came to faith. And yet, knowing all of this, I still coasted through a good chunk of my life as an atheist. I accepted secular explanations for all of it. What actually put a crack in my atheism was Jesus Christ.
After experiencing so much evil at work in the world around me back in 2020, I opened myself up to the possibility that some of that evil could have a supernatural origin. And if supernatural evil could exist, so could supernatural good. This kicked in the door to my comfortable atheist worldview.
From that jolt, I dove into studying the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Two books that really impacted me were J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity and Lee Strobel’s The Case For Christ. I came to understand that there is solid evidence that the accounts of Jesus found in the Bible really happened. And if they really happened, I had to grapple with who Jesus said He was: The Son of God.
I came around to accepting that Jesus is who He says He is. That was the toehold for my worldview overhaul. It didn’t happen overnight, but with that toehold, I started to re-analyze those other evidences of God that had always been present, even back with The Four Horsemen in Christopher Hitchens’ apartment, where a group of atheists decided to dismiss God’s fine-tuning of our Universe.
Click here to hear Josh share what it was like working for the world's leading atheist, and how he finally came to believe in Jesus.
ARGUMENT 1 - FINE TUNING
In 2007 I was in Washington D.C. filming a discussion with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett for a program that would be entitled The Four Horsemen. These were four of my heroes then–the leading men of atheism with bestselling books such as The Good Delusion, The End of Faith and God Is Not Great. I was a starstruck, 26-year-old atheist filmmaker, scooting back and forth between two cameras in my socks, trying to not to make too much noise in Hitchens’ dining room on a bright September evening.
This video now has over 3 million views on YouTube, and is available as both a DVD and a book.
Near the 51-minute mark in the conversation, Sam Harris asks the others if there are any arguments that challenge their atheism. Richard Dawkins chimes in, saying that the only thing that comes close for him is the idea that “the fundamental constants of the universe are too good to be true.”
What he’s referring to is known as the “fine-tuning argument.”
You see, there are certain constants of nature that are unchanging values. These are things like the “force of gravity, electromagnetic force, and the subatomic “weak” force,”
The fact that these forces stay constant is really, really important, so much so that if they changed even a little bit, life in this universe would become entirely impossible. And yet they don’t need to be that way–they could be different. And so it seems like someone set them to be just right for a stable, life-producing universe.
And just how finely-tuned are these constants? Craig explains:
The so-called weak force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, which operates inside the nucleus of an atom, is so finely tuned that an alteration in its value by even one part out of 10100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe!
…
The fine-tuning here is beyond comprehension. Having an accuracy of even one part out of 1060 is like firing a bullet toward the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light-years away, and nailing a one-inch target!
YouTube has been recommending Bob Ross marathons to me lately. I love watching him and his frizzy hair as he brings a new painting to life. As I watch, I can observe the painter, and know he created it. But if I were only shown the finished painting, I’d see the brush strokes, scraping, dabbing, layering—I could be certain, beyond any reasonable doubt, that it didn’t just appear out of nowhere, but that a painter created it.
The finely-tuned constants of our Universe are like those painted brush strokes, helping us see the existence of the painter—in the case of our Universe, a Creator.
Now atheists have thought about this, of course. Some, such as the late philosopher Victor Stenger, believed that a “multiverse” could be the answer to the problem of fine-tuning. He proposed that this universe could be just one ‘bubble’ of space and time with these constants, and that countless other universes exist in other ‘bubbles’ with all of those not-so-finely-tuned constants.
The only problem is that there’s no evidence for this—it’s just a hypothesis. Which, in this instance, is just a fancy word for ‘guess’. It’s a “Hail-Mary” attempt to diminish the statistical improbability of the fine-tuning. Atheists would rather propose a multiverse with near infinite universes, where we just so happen to be in the work that works, rather like the idea that infinite monkeys bashing on typewriters could eventually turn out the complete works of Shakespeare. Or, in our case, our finely-tuned constants.
ARGUMENT 2 - THE EXISTENCE OF THE UNIVERSE
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that our Universe had a beginning. That means, however hard it may be to wrap our heads around it, that there was a start to time and space. So what does that mean?
Well, logically, we can state that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Something made it exist. Nothing in our Universe has ever existed that didn’t have a cause.
Because time and space came into existence with the universe, the Universe had to have a cause outside of time and space. That would mean the cause needs to be timeless, eternal, and not in space, not made of stuff, or you could say immaterial. God is outside of time and space, he is eternal and immaterial.
And that’s not just a nice little jump to the end: these are necessary qualities to satisfy a cause for our Universe. If we try to say there is no God, we can find a cause that has a cause that has a cause that has a cause (etc, on and on, and is called the ‘infinite regression problem). But eventually we have to find something that has always existed and is not made of stuff, that has the qualities of God, that started it all off.
Now this doesn’t tell us everything about God that we believe as Christians. But basic evidence is an important, foundational piece of our understanding. What we can see is that the existence of God is logically necessary as the ‘first cause’ that brought our Universe into existence, and who was able to fine-tune the Universe to be able to produce life. We can see, just from these logical arguments, that an intelligent, powerful creator is necessary.
THERE ARE MORE ARGUMENTS
There are many other areas where we can see that this world has been designed--in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology.We should all look out our window each morning and be firmly convinced of God’s existence in an instant. Yet secularists will dismiss this evidence, and hold on to the hope of a purely materialist, godless universe.
THE EXISTENCE OF LIFE
For instance, the process of life coming from non-life, known as abiogenesis, has never been observed or replicated. Evolutionists claim that historical time on Earth was so immense, that it just had to happen at some point. They gloss over this gaping hole in the atheist picture, ignoring the question of how life came to be, one of the most important anyone can ask when trying to understand our world. The existence of life on earth is strong evidence of a Creator.
CONSCIOUSNESS
And not only do we have life, we have minds. The fact that you and I are conscious at all right now, exchanging these words and ideas as self-directed minds, is staggering. We get so comfortable inside the experience of our minds that we can forget that they didn’t have to exist. Could creatures roam the earth without consciousness? Absolutely. Yet you and I are here. Minds that can think, love, remember and hope should feel as statistically improbable as it gets in this Universe.
THE ARGUMENT THAT GOT ME
These were some of the arguments that I heard many times before I came to faith. And yet, knowing all of this, I still coasted through a good chunk of my life as an atheist. I accepted secular explanations for all of it. What actually put a crack in my atheism was Jesus Christ.
After experiencing so much evil at work in the world around me back in 2020, I opened myself up to the possibility that some of that evil could have a supernatural origin. And if supernatural evil could exist, so could supernatural good. This kicked in the door to my comfortable atheist worldview.
From that jolt, I dove into studying the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Two books that really impacted me were J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity and Lee Strobel’s The Case For Christ. I came to understand that there is solid evidence that the accounts of Jesus found in the Bible really happened. And if they really happened, I had to grapple with who Jesus said He was: The Son of God.
I came around to accepting that Jesus is who He says He is. That was the toehold for my worldview overhaul. It didn’t happen overnight, but with that toehold, I started to re-analyze those other evidences of God that had always been present, even back with The Four Horsemen in Christopher Hitchens’ apartment, where a group of atheists decided to dismiss God’s fine-tuning of our Universe.
Click here to hear Josh share what it was like working for the world's leading atheist, and how he finally came to believe in Jesus.
