Grosey's Messages

How Can I Know God Really Exists?   (Romans 1:18-20)

Romans 1:18 Ἀποκαλύπτεται γὰρ ὀργὴ θεοῦ ἀπ' οὐρανοῦ ἐπὶ πᾶσαν ἀσέβειαν καὶ ἀδικίαν ἀνθρώπων τῶν τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀδικίᾳ κατεχόντων, 19 διότι τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ φανερόν ἐστιν ἐν αὐτοῖς, ὁ ⸂θεὸς γὰρ⸃ αὐτοῖς ἐφανέρωσεν. 20 τὰ γὰρ ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασιν νοούμενα καθορᾶται, ἥ τε ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης, εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτοὺς ἀναπολογήτους, 21 διότι γνόντες τὸν θεὸν οὐχ ὡς θεὸν ἐδόξασαν ἢ ηὐχαρίστησαν, ἀλλὰ ἐματαιώθησαν ἐν τοῖς διαλογισμοῖς αὐτῶν καὶ ἐσκοτίσθη ἡ ἀσύνετος αὐτῶν καρδία· 22 φάσκοντες εἶναι σοφοὶ ἐμωράνθησαν, 23 καὶ ἤλλαξαν τὴν  δόξαν τοῦ ἀφθάρτου θεοῦ ἐν ὁμοιώματι εἰκόνος φθαρτοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ πετεινῶν καὶ τετραπόδων καὶ ἑρπετῶν.

Romans 1:19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,7 in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.  And, Romans 2:14 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.

Psalm 19:1-6 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. 2 Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. 3 There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. 4 Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, 5 which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. 6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

Just like the sun shines on all, all know, and there are none hid from the responsibility of their knowledge of God.

Isaiah 40: 25-31 To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One. 26  Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power not one is missing. 27 Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, "My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God"? 28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. 29 He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. 30 Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; 31 but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

Psalm 14:1 The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good.

 

1.       God has placed within our understanding the knowledge of Himself.

It is to be noted that there is a difference in English translation; ESV and NIV do not make apparent the two-fold revelation, "in them" and "too them" i.e. ESV Romans 1:19 "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them." NASB Romans 1:19 "because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them." My own translation of verse 19 would be "because that which is known of God is manifest in them, for God manifested it to them."

This speaks of an inward sense of the divine.

This is both a presuppositional argument and also a rational argument at the same time.

Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor and Reformed scholar Deane-Peter Baker (2007)[i] both develop a concept of the sensus divinitas the inward sense of the divine that Paul expresses. This inward sense of the divine is thought to be a properly basic belief, something that is imbedded within the consciousness of every person, a Grundnorm. This sense of the divine is thought to be an incontestable understanding of the existence and being of God; a sense that there is a God who is there. Being "properly basic" means that this understanding is part of a person's ontology understood both rationally and supra-rationally. Because people are created beings they are aware of their creation and their Creator. The apostle Paul in Romans 1 expresses the concept that God has made Himself known to all people in two ways; firstly by an inward sense of himself (the sensus divinitas), and secondly by observation and interaction with the created things around them that provide rational support to the inward revelation of the sensus divinitas. The concept of a sensus divinitas carries with it the attendant concepts of:

the possibility of relationships with both the Creator and the creation;

the possibility of achieving that relationship;

the possibility of purpose and meaning for life;

the possibility of a sense of a higher good in life;

the possibility of a sense of the possibility of fulfilment as these are achieved.

Many theologians and philosophers throughout the ages have articulated this concept in terms of a "natural theology."

The Westminster Confession of Faith makes the distinction between autopistia (self-authenticating knowledge) of the divine, or the divine nature of scripture and the rationally authenticating nature of the evidences that affirm and confirm this innate knowledge:

Westminster Confession of Faith [ii]

1.1. Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable;….

1:4. The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, depends not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God,

1:5 . We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts,

1:6 The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture:

The Knowledge of God is  both something we have as an internal thing that God has put in us, and also a rational agreement of that inward sense of the divine with the outward senses and rationality.

Antony Flew, former atheist, There Is A God: How The World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind "I have said from the beginning that I would always move to where the evidence was and now the evidence is overwhelming that God must exist.  So, I have changed my mind." 

GOD HAS DEMONSTRATED HIS EXISTANCE AS THE UNCAUSED FIRST CAUSE.

Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein. "The inescapable inference is that everything had a beginning: somehow and sometime the cosmic processes were started, the stellar fires ignited, and the whole vast pageant of the universe was brought into being." [iii]

The 1^st Law of Thermodynamics implies that matter cannot just pop into existence or create itself.  Therefore, if the universe had a beginning, then something or someone external to the universe and unbound by its laws must have caused the universe to come into existence.

Paul Davies "(The origin of the universe is) the one place in the universe where there is room, even for the most hard-nosed materialist, to admit God."  

So, what does creation tell us about God?  He is transcendent, meaning He stands apart and separate from His creation; He has unimaginable intelligence and power and He intended to reveal Himself to His creation. That is the point of Romans 1:20  For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities–His eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

 GOD HAS DEMONSTRATED HIS EXISTENCE THROUGH THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE.

When the first spacecraft landed on the moon this picture became burned into our memory.   The beautiful blue and alive earth seen just above the horizon of the barren, lifeless moon.  The Anthropic principle states that in our own universe, there are an overwhelming number of seemingly arbitrary and unrelated values in physics that have one common denominator: They are precisely the values needed to produce a universe capable of supporting life.  Together, they demonstrate that the earth was fine tuned for life just as the Bible says.  We are here on purpose not by accident.

Dyson Freeman "The more I examine the universe…the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." [iv]

Francis  Crick "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."[v]

Heinz Pagels, physicist   "If the universe appears to be tailor-made for life, the most straightforward conclusion is that it actually was tailor-made, created by a transcendent God." 

Patrick Glynn, Director at George Washington University,  "The mainstream scientific community has in effect shown its attachment to the atheistic ideology of the random universe to be in some respects more powerful than its commitment to the scientific method itself." [vi]

What does Patrick Glynn's statement mean?  When the evidence disagrees with the atheistic ideology, many atheistic scientists will ignore the evidence.

GOD HAS DEMONSTRATED HIS EXISTENCE THROUGH THE AMAZING DESIGN OF DNA.

Stanley Miller "Computers are being programmed to simulate the whole process Darwin described and they are finding that no matter how much time is given, the chance that what is now being discovered to be the complexity of the single cell just happening, is essentially zero." [vii] 

 Antony Flew, There Is A God "The DNA material has shown by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting those extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.  It's the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together…(that demonstrates intelligence)." [viii]

Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer who recognized that mere chance cannot be the answer to the existence of life Astronomer Fred Hoyle compares the chance of life just "happening" to be equal to 10 to the 50^th power number of blind people, (ten with fifty zeros after it)  all being given a scrambled Rubik's Cube, and finding that they all solved the cube at the very same moment.[ix]

Paul Davies remarks that  "Doing science means figuring out what is going on in the world – what the universe is "up to," what it is "about." If it isn't "about" anything, there would be no good reason to embark on the scientific quest in the first place, because we would have no rational basis for believing that we could thereby uncover additional coherent and meaningful facts about the world. So we might justifiably invert Weinberg's dictum and say that the more the universe seems pointless, the more it also seems incomprehensible… It seems to me that there is a genuine scheme of things – the universe is "about" something. But I am equally uneasy about dumping the whole set of problems in the lap of an arbitrary god or abandoning all further thought and declaring existence to be a mystery." [x]

Davies acknowledged a "nostalgia for a theistic worldview in which humankind occupies a special place." "Yet", he writes, "I do believe that life and mind are etched deeply into the fabric of the cosmos, perhaps through a shadowy, half-glimpsed life principle, and if I am to be honest I have to concede that this starting point is something I feel more in my heart than in my head. So maybe that is a religious conviction of sorts."

Thomas Nagel writes quite similarly:

"The world is an astonishing place. That it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it. If contemporary research in molecular biology leaves open the possibility of legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account of the origin and evolution of life, dependent only on the laws of chemistry and physics, this can combine with the failure of psychophysical reductionism to suggest that principles of a different kind are also at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic "[each] of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking and becoming aware of itself. I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn't."

In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel argues that the widely accepted worldview of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. The phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value, lead to the conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.[xi]

The New Yorker summarises Nagel's position: "Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology — the concept of evolution — can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. But then he goes further, into strange and visionary territory. He argues that the faculty of reason is different from perception and, in effect, prior to it — "an irreducible faculty." He suggests that any theory of the universe, any comprehensive mesh of physics and biology, will need to succeed in "showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it." [xii] And this, he argues, would be a theory of teleology — a pre-programmed or built-in tendency in the universe toward the particular goal of fulfilling the possibilities of mentality. In a splendid image, Nagel writes, "Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself."

Nagel affirms that a non-theistic teleological view would allow for "a more unifying explanation than the design hypothesis" because it does not appeal to anything beyond nature. Nagel's attempts to provide "an alternative to the consolations of religion… Having, amazingly, burst into existence, one is a representative of existence — of the whole of it — not just because one is part of it but because it is present to one's consciousness. In each of us, the universe has come to consciousness and therefore our existence is not merely our own."[xiii]

However, one might question whether such a universe coming to consciousness or rather having consciousness does not of itself constitute some form of theism, albeit panentheism. Alasdair MacIntyre (1998, 2011) warrantably asserts that "The only type of teleologically ordered universe in which we have good reason to believe is a theistic universe."[xiv]

2. God has placed a God-informed moral conscience in each person.

It is not surprising that Taylor (1989) expresses his hunch that the most illusion-free moral sources involve a God.

Mulhall concludes: "If secular moral sources are parasitic on theistic ones and incapable of bearing the burden of empowering the full range of modern moral ideas, whereas theistic sources can bear this burden and can also acknowledge versions of the sources on which secular moral visions exclusively rely, then we have strong reason for thinking that the cultural transition away from theistic sources amounted to a significant epistemic loss. In short, theism is our best available moral account." [xv]

Taylor and his critics acknowledge that the strong evaluations and hyper goods necessary for a robust morality are found primarily in theistic sources. Or as Preece asserts "The secular is parasitic on the theistic and cannot bear the full burden of modern moral ideas."

Taylor informs us that with the disenchantment of the secular age, there has been a consequent loss of the pre-modern idea of a publicly available cosmic moral order in which individuals found their place and function, and that there is subsequently a corresponding loss of a sense of a higher and larger purpose for human life linked to "a centring on the self."[xvi]

This centering on the self devalues relationship with God, others and the universe. Among non-theist philosophers, this purposive relationalism may not be recognised. Williams asserts that the "first and hardest lesson of Darwinism" is "that there is no such teleology at all, and that there is no orchestral score provided from anywhere according to which human beings have a special part to play."[xvii]

And such non-religious ethics seem to lack the intensity of feeling that allows such ethics to be a moral force in the community. Phenomenlogically it doesn't cut it. Or as Bix notes "legal rules do not make the same sort of (implied or express) claims as do moral rules: that they reflect universal and unchanging moral truths, and that they are integral aspects of the Good.

The consequences of violating this 'sensus divinitas', whether it is a true representation of reality or not, is seen in the poverty of our social relations and in our confusion over moral values. Taylor asserts that there is in our post-modern age a cognitive dissonance between moral ontology and moral phenomenology, a dissonance which proceeds with a similar cognitive dissonance affecting the sense of purpose that pervades the human predicament. Rather than just experiencing the outcome of fuzzy thinking when ontology and phenomenology conflict, Taylor asserts that there is a problem of greater consequence that arises as a sense of 'melancholy', 'ennui', or 'spleen' in which "we lose a sense of where the place of fullness is, even of what fullness could consist in; we feel we've forgotten what it would look like, or cannot believe in it any more. But the misery of absence, of loss, is still there, indeed, it is in some ways even more acute." We are "spiritually out of joint."[xviii] The most extreme sense of this loss of purpose and meaning in life is seen in the completely disenchanted life. Not only is it perceived that without God all things are permissible (in the moral realm): without God nothing is meaningful in the existential realm.

Jean Paul Sartre (1957)[xix] expresses this existential distress: "The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevsky said, 'If God didn't exist, everything would be possible.' That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can't start making excuses for himself." "We point out that man will fulfill himself as man, not in turning toward himself, but in seeking outside of himself a goal which is just this liberation, just this particular fulfillment."[xx] From the secularist position, Sartre recognises the deep values, the cry for meaning and the urge towards fulfilment: "That God does not exist I cannot deny; that my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget."

Atheists Are Angry Because Their Arrogance Is Diminishing Them

Atheists Are Angry Because Their Advocates Are Deserting Them

Atheists Are Angry Because Their Arguments Are Dividing Them

Atheists Are Angry Because Their Adversaries Are Defeating Them

Atheists Are Angry Because Their Amnesia Is Discrediting Them

Atheists Are Angry Because Their Assessments Are Deceiving Them

From an evangelical Christian perspective, Alister McGrath describes his experience of conversion in similar terms: "At Oxford — to my surprise — I discovered Christianity. It was the intellectually most exhilarating and spiritually stimulating thing I could ever hope to describe — better than chemistry, a wonderful subject that I had thought to be the love of my life and my future career. I went on to gain a doctorate for research in molecular biophysics from Oxford, and found that immensely exciting and satisfying. But I knew I had found something better — like the pearl of great price that Jesus talks about in the Gospel, which is so beautiful and precious that it overshadows everything. It was intellectually satisfying, imaginatively engaging, and aesthetically exciting."[xxi]