The Debate Over the Existence of God

I looked up from my cup of coffee and across the table. Just two feet of wood separated us, me and my atheist opponent. The same scene has played itself out in coffee shops around the world for the past three hundred years. The stage was set for the classic God debate all over again.

The first salvo: “There is no scientific evidence for God.” There is no way to prove that God exists as we can prove that other things exist in nature. Over time science has come to explain countless things that people once attributed to God or other supernatural causes. It is only inevitable, my opponent claimed, that the superstitions that have led to belief will someday pass away. Yes, there was an evolutionary benefit to belief in a higher power. That and brain chemistry can account for why belief in God persists, but these phenomena are more easily explained by science than by appeals to a supernatural being. He leaned back in his chair, satisfied that the first blow had been struck.

I could see he meant business. Time to get some of the standard arguments on the table. Since the Middle Ages, religious people have most frequently relied on two basic arguments to support their belief in God. The first, the so-called cosmological argument, states that there has to be some beginning to it all. Matter, the universe, causality, they all have to originate with something before. That thing must be a supernatural God. The other set of common proofs are the so-called teleological arguments or arguments from design. These claim that the universe is so perfect that it is impossible that things came about simply by chance. There must have been some architect to the universe, i.e. God.

My opponent was well schooled so I knew we could go through the counter-arguments quickly. The fact is that these “proofs” don’t prove anything. They simply indicate the possibility of a creator or creative force. Just because we do not know the origins of the universe does not mean there has to be a God. Moreover, we might think the universe is too perfect to come about through unguided causality but we do not know any other reality. Any set of current circumstances is the result of endless prior circumstances. The unrepeatability of those circumstances proves nothing. But the biggest problem with relying on the cosmological argument or the argument from design is that neither comes close to proving that the God of the Bible exists. Is an “Unmoved Mover” or “First Cause” the same as the Lord of hosts? Deists are not necessarily Christians.

Thankfully, this ground has been well tread. In the early 20th century, the arguments for God took a radical turn, thus making all of the prior debates virtually irrelevant. All of the debates about God presume that God is an object whose very existence can be debated. God is like a subatomic particle or a philosophical concept, with the right logic or scientific procedures we should be able to resolve the debate once and for all. The problem with this logic is that it forgets entirely that we are talking about God and not an object of any sort. If God exists, if there really is a supernatural entity that created the entire 15 billion year old universe, then God is the ultimate subject, the ultimate actor. God is before, above, and beyond anything that is created. As a short-lived creature in some random corner of the universe, I can only come to know about God because God chooses to reveal Godself to me or to other humans. This is basic epistemology, however frustrating it may seem. We are humans and are limited in what we can know. For us to make grandiose pronouncements on God’s existence is, well, laughable.

The famous British philosopher Bertrand Russell scoffed at this notion with his famous analogy of the orbiting teapot. Russell said that there was no way to disprove that a teapot was orbiting the earth, but you could just as easily see how unlikely it is. Of course, this is precisely where Russell and other atheists miss the point. God is not a teapot. God is nothing like a teapot. No definition or conception of God has any analogous properties to a teapot or a flying spaghetti monster or any other creation. God is not a being alongside other beings. God is God.

Across cultures and for as long as civilization has existed, humans have attested to divine revelation. The nature of these revelations varies out of necessity. As created beings we can never come to know God completely but only through the lens of our culture and language. The Christian tradition represents one stream of these revelations, one continuous record of God working in our lives. People come to the faith, not by rational arguments, but by experiencing truth, by experiencing God within the context of religious practice and proclamation.

My atheist friend was not convinced and we parted company agreeing to disagree. But I could not help by sing to myself the words of the 18th century hymn writer William Cowper, “Blind unbelief is sure to err/ And scan His work in vain./ God is His own interpreter/ And He will make it plain.”