Does God Exist?
On 16th April 2009, Alex debated with Richard Dawkins in Charlestown Academy, Inverness. These are the notes which he used.
Introduction
The recent ad campaign on London buses read: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
But is God's probable non-existence a cause for not worrying? One of the greatest intellectual atheists of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, had to read a detective novel every day to take his mind off his fear that mankind was going to destroy the world.
Is the belief that human life and the universe are going to be extinguished in darkness for ever a cause for not worrying!
1. Two arguments against God's existence
Science and God are antagonistic to each other - either science has disproved God in some way, or belief in God is anti-science
But ignores the origin of modern science
Joseph Needham, explained why modern science did not start in China: "There was no confidence that the code of Nature's laws could ever be unveiled and read, because there was no assurance that a divine being, even more rational than ourselves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read."
Philosophers of science, such as Alfred North Whitehead and Robert Oppenheimer, stressed that science was born out of a Christian worldview - this is the generally held view by historians
C S Lewis - "Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator."
Galileo actually defended the compatibility of Copernicus and the Bible: "Holy Scripture and nature equally proceed from the divine Word, the first as dictated by the Holy Spirit, the second as the very faithful executor of God's commands"
Leading scientists were/are Christians
Three greatest names in Physics are Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Einstein - Newton and Clerk Maxwell both committed Christians
Present-day scientists - Francis Collins who was Head of the Human Genome Project.
True relation between science and faith is not antagonism but complementarity - Boy Scout and physicist both see a light flashing out at sea ... Morse Code - SOS
Science is limited to the physical - danger of "nothingbuttery"
Science and theology are complementary, not contradictory
The central objection to existence of God in The God Delusion - "Who designed the designer?" -
Who made God? Mistake in the question - a created God is not the God of the Bible - he is uncreated, eternal
It is an argument against a straw man
2. Arguments for God's existence
Reason - human rationality
Naturalism is the belief that everything can be explained by natural cause and effect - nothing exists apart from physical nature
The eminent evolutionary biologist, Professor J B S Haldane clearly pointed out the problem for human rationality: "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."
Interestingly Darwin applied similar doubt to his belief in God - (Could he trust a brain evolved from lower animals?) but of course, the argument would apply to all his ideas including evolution and natural selection!
Naturalism is self-contradictory
As pointed out long ago by C S Lewis, at least one thing does exist apart from the physical - the human ability to reason
Where does our ability to reason come from?
The Bible's account is that we are made in the image of God - we reason because God made us personal beings like himself - with rational minds
Morality
Dostoyevsky - in The Brothers Karamazov: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted"
Professor Dawkins in River out of Eden: "In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."
What effect will these ideas have? On perfectly decent and respectable middle class academics, probably very little. But what if there was an atheist experiment on whole societies and nations? But wait a minute! We did have such an experiment - it was called the 20th century! Communism and Naziism - both rejected Christian truth and values
But in fact we know that everything is not permitted - universal moral values. But here's the strange thing, as C S Lewis pointed out, we all know the Law of Human Nature, but we break it!
I find myself under a law, but one I rebel against. This is exactly what God reveals in the Bible is the position - we have an awareness of the moral law because he made us as moral beings - in his image - but we rebel against His law.
Jesus
Bible - Gospels - Myth?
C S Lewis (who was an expert in literature) demolished this position in "Fern Seed and Elephants" (1959) - criticism of John's Gospel: "I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this." Only two possibilities - either reporting what happened, or else someone nearly 2000 years ago suddenly invented modern, novelistic, realistic narrative.
Jesus never lived? -
Historian Michael Grant (was Professor at Edinburgh) termed the hypothesis that Jesus never lived an "extreme view." He says: "If we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned."
Tacitus - Roman historian - Nero blamed Christians for the Fire of Rome: "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus..."
Accuracy of New Testament
Sir William Ramsay, professor of Archaeology at Oxford, then at Aberdeen, in his travels in Greece and Turkey showed that Luke was a thoroughly reliable historian in the Book of Acts.
But the most famous example concerns Gallio whom Luke says was proconsul of Achaia (Acts 18) - well known brother of Seneca - doubt - no record of him being proconsul. But an inscription found at Delphi proves that he was indeed proconsul and gives the date - 51-52 AD!
Jesus' life - remarkable self-giving love - to the despised, the rejected, the outsider - beggars, lepers, Legion, Samaritan woman, thief on the cross
But he claimed to be God - Mark 14:62 - "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" - "I am" - "I and the Father are one"
Trilemma - Mad, Bad or God? Deluded, deceitful or divine? CS Lewis -
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Suggestion that Jesus could have made a simple innocent mistake! Some mistake!! Why would a monotheistic Jew make such a mistake? It beggars belief.
But why would God become man? Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1100 AD, wrote a book Cur Deus Homo (Why did God become Man). In it he shows that man had to render satisfaction to God for his sin, but that only God himself could adequately make amends - therefore the need for the incarnation - Jesus the God-Man.
That's why God became man - to pay the price of our sin - this is not an intellectual game - it is about reconciliation to God - peace with God - freely offered to us in the gospel.
But what's the proof of all this? Interestingly enough the Apostle Paul used just that word "proof" of Jesus rising from the dead.
Historian Michael Grant states that "the historian . . . cannot justifiably deny the empty tomb" because normally applied historical criteria indicate that, "the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty."
Investigation of the evidence - Who Moved the Stone - Frank Morrison
Lord Darling (a former Lord Chief Justice) - "In its favour as a living truth there exists such overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in the verdict that the resurrection story is true."
For these and many other reasons, I believe that God exists.