Hints of God’s Existence

Although there are no deductive proofs that God exists—proofs that follows inexorably from premises everyone accepts—there are clues everywhere to God's existence. But they are only apparent to those inclined to notice them. People not so inclined will miss them entirely.

A Christian may sense Christ’s presence throughout creation, "Look! I'm here,” they hear Christ saying, “asking you to experience life in and through me. My desire to to share my life with you and embrace you as my own." Someone who has concluded there is no God will not hear this.

There is something illogical about reaching the conclusion that God does not exist, and it is summed up in the phrase, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. To claim to know for certain that there is no God is to imply you have all relevant evidence, to claim what in principle you could not possibly know. It makes logical, but perhaps not intuitive, sense to be agnostic, to acknowledge that you do not know whether a creator brought the universe into existence. Or, if you believe there was, to say you do not know if that creator is still involved in human history. But to assert that you are an atheist, and have no doubt that you are right, is preemptively to cut yourself off from all possible information to the contrary, and there’s a lot of it. It’s to lapse into closed-mindedness.

You may believe there is no God because of the enormous amount of evil in the world, which there almost always has been. The existence of evil may, in fact, be the strongest argument against God’s existence. But if you conclude on the basis of this that there is no God, you do this only inductively, or as some might say, intuitively. The nature of induction is that it is always based on the probable, never on the certain.

Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century Christian mathematician, suggested that evidence for God’s existence is only convincing to those who already believe. Perhaps this is true, at least for those inclined to believe or disbelieve. But universe gives us clues to God’s existence.

When astrophysicists reached the conclusion that the universe instantaneously came into being, and beyond that were able to calculate that this occurred 13.8 billion years ago, some of them were astonished. This is because it supported what theologians believed but contradicted what most scientists believed. Even Einstein resisted the idea of a Big Bang but eventually conceded he had been wrong.

There are many other hints that God exists, including all the precise fine-tuning required for life to exist on earth, or even for the universe to continue to exist. If a large number of the delicate balances resulting from this fine-tuning were changed by even infinitesimal amounts, neither we, earth, moon, sun, or stars would exist.

Consider how, if earth were closer to or farther from the sun, all water on earth would either evaporate or freeze and we would die. If either the mass or density of the universe were altered even minutely, no stars or galaxies would exist. The four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravity, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force) continue to operate in an absurdly precise balance, without which the universe would never have come into existence in the first place. Nor could it continue to exist now.

The size of the earth is significant. If it were slightly smaller, its magnetic field would be too weak to protect us from solar winds, and our atmosphere would have little or no oxygen and water. Slightly larger and earth’s gravity would be so strong that methane and carbon dioxide could not leave our atmosphere, and our air would be unbreakable.

Our moon has sufficient mass to allow it to stabilize earth’s axis, provide it with climates mild enough to sustain human existence, significantly affect tides and therefore its critically important coastal ecosystems. Much more mass would change all this. Earth’s location in relation to the planets Jupiter and Saturn, and indeed the location of our entire galaxy, protects us from certain catastrophe.

Strong hints of God’s existence come from the complexity of life itself. The information contained in a single bacterium is staggeringly complex, and many celebrated scientists suggest that the idea this all came about by chance is untenable. Its various functions and processes are strikingly more complex and intricate than biologists thought likely even a decade ago.

One well-known professor and scientist computed that the probability of even a small virus having emerged spontaneously was something like 1 out of 10 to the two-millionth power, about as unlikely as having a tossed coin come up heads six million times in succession. A Nobel laureate has suggested that the emergence of life in its present form, even after billions of years, was improbable.

Turning to morality and ethics, it is possible that people behave altruistically because caring for others is part of human DNA, but philosophers and psychologists have never been able adequately to explain why, in view of our strong desire to survive as individuals coupled with human intelligence, some people take extraordinary risks or sacrifice their lives for strangers. Arguments that some are socialized by society to do so do not fare much better.

There is also the fundamental mystery of consciousness, and within this, of self-consciousness, our awareness of ourselves as persons, which enables us to reflect on the nature of experience and our relationships with other people. To argue that consciousness can be reduced to and explained by events in the brain, say by the firing of neurons across synapses, explains nothing. It merely advances a hypothesis that obscures the difference between mental and physical phenomena. If everything were ultimately physical, we would still be left with questions like, what are the physical dimensions of an idea or the weight of love? Sex, in particular orgasm, may be a specific form of consciousness that provides us with a giant clue to the existence of the transcendent. Aside from pleasure, it briefly provides us with a one-of-a-kind and mysteriously unfathomable state of mind.

Eternity and infinity also provides clues. whenever you suggest time began, was there not a moment before that? Wherever space ends, is there not a point beyond that? The Big Bang suggests that both time and space came into existence at a precise moment, but this leaves us with an imponderable puzzle. If God has always existed and is infinite, might God be, as theologians suggest, beyond time and space?

It is natural to ask why God didn’t make divine existence clear to us. Why the mystery? Perhaps it is because God wants people to love their creator from the heart and not out of fear. God seems to have built considerable ambiguity into the fabric of life, including our inability to understand why God allows evil. How we respond to such questions may well be tests of faith.