The Case for God’s Existence
To purchase the entire Summit Lecture Series, Vol. 2 on DVD, visit summit.org.
I could spend a day on this section we’re going to spend 40 minutes on. The distinction between what’s possible and what’s reasonable is very important in legal trials. Very important. Anything is possible. That’s why you can’t trust it. How do you know you’re even here right now? You think you’re in this classroom. You went out for a break after Noble’s talk. You came back in the classroom. You think it’s the same classroom. Really? How do you know?
You know what we gave you for breakfast, right? You eat those bacon. It was great bacon by the way. Wasn’t that great bacon? Yeah, right. Well, it was laced with our alien drug which we gave you, to make you believe this is a classroom. You’re actually now on the mothership. We’ve got you, we’re going to take you away. You think you’re in a classroom listening to my talk, when in fact you’re being examined on a table right now by aliens who have got you in this deep trance coma, where you think you’re experiencing this. And in fact, when you wake up tomorrow morning, you’ll realize it was all an illusion.
Now, while you’re in the alien illusion right now, how do you know you’re not in an alien in illusion right now? Isn’t this at least possible? How would you be able to test it? No we know that’s stupid. Possible doesn’t matter. Only thing matters is what’s reasonable. Guess what? In criminal trials, this is also true. There are lots of things that are possible. I’m in the third week of a criminal trial in downtown Los Angeles. I’m on the ninth floor of their criminal courts building. I’m in the room that they tried O.J. Simpson in. And I’ve got pretty much … Robert Shapiro is the defense attorney on this case also.
It’s a 1979 murder. It’s in all the papers. It’s online. You can Google it. And they want us to focus on possibilities. We have to keep the jury focused on what’s reasonable, what’s a reasonable inference from evidence. How do you determine what’s reasonable? By the way, the standard in trials is not beyond a possible doubt. We convict people beyond a reasonable doubt. If you had to get beyond a possible doubt, you would never convict anybody. There’s always unanswered questions in every case. We got to get beyond a reasonable doubt, but you could never get beyond a possible doubt. That standard’s just too unrealistically high. Make sense?
So, how do we know the difference? Well, I’m going to show you how to get from possible to reasonable. I’m going to do it using a death scene. Not every death scene’s a murder. Here’s a guy laying dead on the floor. Okay? Now there are lots of ways to die. This may not be a murder at all. As a matter of fact, there are always different explanations. You could die naturally, you could have a heart attack, you could die accidentally, you could fall and hurt yourself, or you could die through a suicide or you could die by way of a homicide. How do I know which of these four I have in front of me? Right now you can say all these are possible, but possible doesn’t count. Reasonable is what counts.
So given the evidence I have in the room right now, which is pretty slim, I got a dead guy laying face down, that’s it. Which of these four can I rule out as impossible? Which one? What if he took pills? Overdosed on purpose. Which one? I can’t take out a homicide, what if somebody choked him? He would look like that. What if he accidentally took too many pills? He would look like that. What if he had a heart attack? He would look like that. Do you see, right now I cannot rule out anything. Because not only is everything possible, everything’s still reasonable. This could be any of those four things.
Let’s change the scenario a little bit. What if I came in this room and I discovered him in a pool of his own blood? Centered around his center torso. Well, now if I look at the possibilities, I think I can cross out one. I can probably cross out natural. Let me change this scenario again. I’ve got this additional piece of evidence. And this is what allows me, this additional piece allows me to rule out the natural. Didn’t have it before, couldn’t rule it out, but now I can.
Okay, what about this? What if I changed the scenario? Now, he’s got a knife in his back. But it’s in his low back, to be fair. Let’s go back to our explanations. Look at our evidence again, we have one more additional piece. Kind of hard to accidentally … I mean, you could somehow, it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s reasonable. We can rule that out. What about suicide though?
No.
I mean, I can still reach it. see myself kill myself. Let’s leave it in. But now what if I had a guy laying in a pool of his own blood with knife in his back and he had multiple stab wounds. That would change things I think. Let’s go back. Our evidence now is one deeper. We’ve got multiple stab wounds. Can I rule out suicide now? I mean, unless this guy’s incredibly flexible and he can reach the … I couldn’t even reach there. He’s got a super, super high tolerance for pain. He could’ve just stabbed himself. I’m not done yet, it’s about, guess about right. No, I don’t think he’s doing that. So I think it was reasonable now for us to rule out suicide.
And of course, I could go one more level. What if we had the same crime scene and we actually had bloody footsteps leading away from his body. How are you able to stab yourself in the back multiple times then walk away in your own blood? That’s tough. So I think given this additional piece, now, we’re really confident that we can rule out suicide. We have a homicide here. Now I got to stay and work it.
Do you see what we did to get from possible to reasonable? This is an important process. This is a skillset that detectives use every day. By the way, this is Jimmy before he went in the academy. He was working at Trader Joe’s, and the last week he shaved his head getting ready for the academy. I said, “Get on the floor before going to be gone. I want to take a picture real quick, so I can do this Photoshop.” So anyway, the point is, no one was killed in the production of this Power Point. That’s the important thing.
Now this is called abductive reasoning. And what abductive reasoning is when you make two E lists, the first E list is all of your evidences, the second E list is all of your explanations, and then you have these two lists that you’re able to look at. Evidence on one side and explanations on the other. You’ll be able to toggle back and forth between these two E lists, you’re going to be able to eliminate some of these, because the don’t make sense in light of these evidences. That’s called abductive reasoning. Got it?
Now you’ll notice something here. The first three ways you can die, you can die by yourself from inside the room. Nobody has to come in that room other than you. All the evidence I should find for the first three should have originated in the room. In other words, if I killed myself, if I accidentally died, if I naturally died of a heart attack, all the evidence for this death will be found … I can do that alone. I don’t need anybody else to help me with those things. The only evidence I’m going to have is evidence from inside the room. Make sense? Those first three, I’m going to find evidence from inside the room. But if I have evidence that somebody came from outside the room, I have to at least consider the possibility of a homicide. Because if the cause came from outside the room, then I can’t be the cause. If I’m the cause, the evidence stays from inside the room.
Now, why is that important? Because we’re going to turn a corner. We’re going to take a look at a much bigger crime scene. We started off with this one, now we’re going to go into the universe. If the universe is our crime scene, we can do the same process of abductive reasoning. We have to form two evidence lists. I mean, two E lists rather. The first will be a list of evidences, we’re going to cover one in the next 30 minutes. This one. We have a universe in which there’s a beginning. But I think there are seven more, and I’m writing a book right now, I’m about right here in writing this book. But I think there are eight pieces of evidence in this big room.
Now, if these pieces of evidence can be explained from within the room, like a natural or an accidental or a suicide, then we don’t have any intruder. If I can get these things by staying inside the room, using just natural forces, which means just matter, physics and chemistry, then there’s no sign of an intruder. On the other hand, if I have to go outside the room to account for any of these, then I’ve got a problem with naturalism. Because if I have to go outside the natural order to get those, now I’m describing something supernatural. Make sense? Same exact process we use in a crime scene to determine if we have an intruder.
Let’s take a look at the first one, a universe with a beginning. This is evidence for God’s existence from cosmology and it’s sometimes called the cosmological argument. Well, it’s always called the cosmological argument. But it starts with the principle of causality. If you were the first person in this room this morning, the very first person, nobody else is here, and when you walked in, you saw this soccer ball rolling across the room, what’s the first thing you’re going to look for? Yeah, who kicked it. Why are you going to look for a kicker? Because the ball doesn’t just start moving on its own. Bingo. That’s the law of causality. And in science, we know there are several things that cause other things. We know if we’ve got an effect, it has a cause. The effect here is the rolling ball. Well, if I’ve got a rolling ball, I’ve got something that started it. Something caused it to roll.
Also, anything that begins has a cause. If the ball began to move, there was something or someone who began it to move. Also, things that change over time have a cause. If the ball’s position in the room is changing over time, I’ve got good reason to believe there’s something that initiated those changes. Also, anything that’s finite is caused, anything that is limited has a cause. If the ball’s always been rolling, then it needs no cause, but if it’s a limited time of rolling, it has to have a cause.
You can’t do science without these truths. Even in quantum physics, where we’re not sure actually, if things at that level are uncaused or if we just don’t know how they’re caused. Is it an ontological problem or is it epistemological problem? We’re not quite sure. But still, causality, if you don’t have cause, if you don’t believe any of this stuff, you can’t do science. As a matter of fact, one of the most important skeptics in history, David Hume was quick to say, “I don’t even reject causality. I never asserted so absurd proposition as that anything he might arise without a cause.”
How do we apply this to the beginning of the universe? Well, it’s called the cosmological argument, and this is what it looks like. If you can’t write it all down, don’t worry, I’m going to send it to you. But cosmos basically means the whole universe. The whole universe. So this argument involves the existence of the whole universe and how it began. Here’s what it looks like. One, the universe has a beginning. Two, anything that has a beginning must have been caused by something else. That’s the principle of causality. Three, well, if that’s the case, then the universe has a cause. If it had a beginning and everything that has a beginning has a cause, then the universe has to have a cause.
Okay, Well, what could cause it? Well, whatever caused it, it can’t also be caused because if it’s also caused, we’re going to look for the cause of that thing. As a matter of fact, every atheist, physicist is looking for the same thing. We’re looking for the first uncaused cause. What is that thing that is eternal, that has caused this thing, the universe, that’s not eternal? We’re all looking for it. What could it be? But whatever it is, it cannot also be caused or we have a problem called infinite regress.
Follow Christian Podcast Central on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to see our ongoing discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers regarding worldviews.
(This podcast is by Summit Ministries. Discovered by Christian Podcast Central and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Christian Podcast Central.)