What is your favorite Reason for Believing in God?

What is your favorite reason for believing in God?

Ross Douthat states his reason—and I have mine

I admit upfront that I borrowed the title for this video from Ross Douthat a columnist for the New York Times. Douthat is one of the Times’ token conservative voices in the midst of a large gaggle of Leftwing Progressives. But give the Times credit for having anyone remotely conservative at all.

Douthat writes often about religion and how it affects public policy. He is a believing Roman Catholic. He is thoughtful, insightful, and most of the time I agree with him.

Before I get to his argument let me make a couple of introductory comments:

The Bible does not spend a lot of time defending the existence of God. There are a few passages that do. Psalm 19:1-4; Romans 1:18-20. The Bible has no patience with atheism. Psalm 53:1: “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” I love Spurgeon’s comment on this verse: “If the Bible calls such a man a fool we dare call him no less.” In Romans 1:21 Paul says the man who rejects God thinks of himself as wise, but he’s a fool. The Bible does not mince words in denouncing atheism.

Interestingly, in the history of the world there have been very few atheists and there are very few today. Statistically, they are small in number and there has never been a society or a culture built by atheists as I argue in a recent video. However, in America and the West today atheists occupy a disproportional influence in our cultural institutions.

Now, let’s look at Douthat’s favorite reason for believing in God. He begins by looking at three traditional reasons for belief: First, “The evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; Second, the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; third, people’s religious and supernatural experiences.

“Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously…But it’s the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them…that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.” That’s a good argument; God makes better sense of these things than if there’s no god.

Then he arrives at what—I surmise—is his favorite reason: human intelligibility. It is clear that the universe is fine-tuned to produce life in general and human beings in particular. But more important, human beings have the ability to know all this. “We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.” In other words, the power and abilities of the human mind can only be explained by the existence of God.

C.S. Lewis once said the place in the universe where matter and spirit most closely intersect is in the human brain. This is what Douthat is arguing and it is a powerful argument.

It got me to thinking about other arguments for the existence of God. When I was a college student the most famous atheist in the world was Anthony Flew, a professor from England. I remember in a philosophy class reading his clever arguments for atheism. Then in 2004 Flew shocked the world by announcing he had come to believe in God and was renouncing atheism. He said he was persuaded by three basic reasons: First, nature obeys laws that are mathematically precise and universal. These laws must come from a lawgiver. Second, the universe is fine tuned for a purpose—the reproduction of life. Third, why is there something instead of nothing? The universe had a beginning. The best explanation is that there is a God who brought it into existence. With regard to the beginning of the universe let me bring in a very clever quote from the brilliant young apologist, Wesley Huff. In discussing the virgin birth with Joe Rogan Huff said, “many scientists who deny the possibility of the virgin birth of Jesus believe in the virgin birth of the universe.”  Scientists now believe that the universe was born out of nothing. It had no father. Very good.

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis argues for God’s existence from the presence of moral thinking in human beings. “Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.” Lewis goes on to argue that this universal awareness of the moral law argues for the existence of God.

Aristotle had a fairly simple argument. If everything we observe has to have a cause then there must be something that does not have a cause. An uncaused cause if you will. This argument has been reworked many times but is still powerful. C.S. Lewis once said that when he was an atheist he was made very uncomfortable by the fact that his two favorite thinkers—Aristotle and Plato—both believed in God.

For a long time if you took an Intro to Philosophy class in college you studied St. Thomas Aquinas and his five proofs for the existence of God and they are to this day well worth considering.

Let me conclude with my personal favorite. I believe in God because there is no other way to explain Jesus Christ. He believed in God—whom He called his heavenly Father—and I trust Jesus to tell me the truth. If He believed in God, I had better believe in God. History proves the truth of His message. It is by far the most powerful in the history of the world.

It's your turn. Put your favorite reason for believing in God in the comments below. If you are an atheist give your best reason for denying the existence of God. Douthat actually followed up the above essay with a column on that question and I have linked it below.

Thank you for listening. May the God who is there bless you this day in a mighty way.

More: “Is there a God?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhMrySSH34Y

Douthat’s original column on his favorite reason for believing in God:

Douthat on faith:

Pascal famously chose to wager: “I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.”

That’s why Douthat opts to “start with religion’s intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.”

Douthat, How I lost my faith in atheism:

World magazine reviews Douthat’s book on why people should be religious

Mere Christianity is probably—after the Bible—my all-time favorite book. Get it at Amazon

Douthat on the best reason for denying God’s existence