1 SERIES: The Reason for God SERMON: The Clues of God PREZI LINK: http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3a%2f%2fprezi.com%2fns4564z_mk6%2f%3futm_campaign%3dshare%26utm_medium%3dcopy%26rc%3dex0share&sa=d&sn tz=1&usg=afqjcngwswphgtpfliivbzhvpj3iqwxrla INTRO: We have stated that there is no such thing as an unbeliever everyone has beliefs. We have attempted to dig under doubts to the Christian faith by examining these alternate beliefs which are also faith-based statements unprovable assumptions about how things are. We ve examined the beliefs behind the seven biggest objections or doubts people in our culture have about the Christian faith. Hopefully you ve come to appreciate much of the reasoning against Christianity and not just dismissed it. These are serious, passionately held beliefs which we should be able to answer in our own hearts and those of our neighbors. I hope too you ve grown to see the validity for the Christian faith that it is indeed reasonable, probable, and intelligent. I expect too that you ve matured in your ability to defend Christianity as well as come to grips with the process of doubting God not that you ve answered all your questions but that questions are OK, these are not simplistic matters but beautifully complex, and that here at our church you have a place to intelligently and honestly bring your questions in a community that will listen to you and help you find answers. Now we find ourselves on a new mission. We have disassembled reasons for disbelief in Christianity. We have cleared the ground to make the case for Christ. Our big goal was to equip you to start the conversation and keep people in the conversation. Now we need to argue there are sufficient reasons for believing it. So let s start with a question OPENING QUESTION: Can you prove god? With someone not in your small group prove or disprove him with 2-3 reasons. STRONG RATIONALISM & CRITICAL RATIONALITY: Books and websites are calling for Christians to provide proofs for their beliefs which are concrete physically observable and logically rock solid. The call is that they won t believe in God until they get proofs which are rationally acceptable and empirically verified by the senses. This is called strong rationalism and is the position many pop-celeb atheists like Dawkins, Dennet, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have taken and which litter so many youtube assaults and rants against Christianity. Yet, even non-christian critics and the great majority of
2 thinkers note that strong rationalism is nearly impossible to defend as it can t live up to its own standards. How can you empirically prove that no one should believe something unless they have empirical proof? Remember to examine statements by testing them against themselves does the logic of a statement stand up to its own logical tests? Strong rationalism also assumes that there is a position from nowhere a position of complete objectivity without any background assumptions or beliefs. Nearly all philosophers today though know this is simply not the case we all come from experiences that strongly influence our thinking and the way our reason works. Philosopher Thomas Nagel is an atheist but admits that he can t come to the question of God in a detached way. He confesses that he has a fear of religion : I am talking of the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true it isn t just that I don t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I m right in my own belief. It s that I hope there is no God! I don t want there to be a God: I don t want the universe to be like that I am curious whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn t particularly want either one of the answers to be correct. All of us are deeply interested in seeing the case for God go one way or another. But if strong rationalism isn t viable if for many things we cannot produce proofs that are unable to be rationally attacked or avoided what then? Many have moved into relativism which is to say that we have no real way to judge one set of beliefs from another. So there is no real right or wrong let s agree to disagree and not fight. This is very appealing in a pluralistic culture such as ours you re free to believe whatever makes sense to you because heck, who really knows. There is a third way. Even though there is no argument that will be persuasive to everyone regardless of viewpoint we can assume that there are some systems of beliefs, some views, which are more reasonable than others. We can call this critical rationality. Even science is able to test theories and finds some more empirically verifiable than others even though it won t say it has clearly proved a theory. A theory is considered empirically verified if it organizes the evidence and explains phenomena better than any conceivable alterative theory. That is, if, through testing it leads us to expect with accuracy many and varied events better than any other rival account of the same data then it is accepted though not (in the strong rationalist sense) proved.
3 I think belief in God can be tested and justified if not proven in the same way. The view that there is a God leads us to expect the things we observe that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains humans with consciousness and an indelible moral sense. The theory that there is NO God would not lead us to expect any of these things. Therefore, belief in God actually offers a better empirical fit it explains and accounts for what we see better than any alternate account. I hate to disappoint some of you but no view of God can be proven in the way some people want but that does not mean there is not clear evidence which when examined, sifted, and weighed gives us reasonable grounds to believe in God. When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported rather ignorantly that he hadn t found God, C.S. Lewis responded that this is like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle to look for Shakespeare. If there is a God, He wouldn t be another object in the universe or confined within His creation but would be more like a playwright or author who has left His fingerprints and signature (where we get the word design) on the pages of the text. We know about the author as He has chosen to reveal Himself putting information into the book or play. Christians do not claim to be omniscient only our Lord is. We do claim that the Christian account of things the creation, fall, redemption, restoration makes the most sense of the world. Today and in the next few weeks we should put on, as Tim Keller says, Christianity as a pair of glasses and look at the world with it see what power it has to explain what we know deep in our hearts and what we observe when we look around our world at the way things are. CLUES FOR GOD I. GOD IS NOT HIDDEN So if God exists we cannot find Him as we would find a unicorn or a leprechaun or even a galaxy or atom. We must find clues to His reality that He has written into the universe, including into us who are rational beings, made in His image. Something in our own experience should resonate between our minds and His. But as we will see reason won t be enough we need revelation how has the Author of life decided to personally show Himself in His Word, our Bible? Let s take a look at our main Scripture for today: Romans 1:16-23 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, [a] for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, The just shall live by faith. [b]
4 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, 21 because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. The Bible takes for granted that God exists and that His existence is boldly displayed across the universe and across you. PSALM 97 (one of our Thanksgiving passages) His lightnings light the world; The earth sees and trembles. 5 The mountains melt like wax at the presence of the LORD, At the presence of the Lord of the whole earth. 6 The heavens declare His righteousness, And all the peoples see His glory. 7 Let all be put to shame who serve carved images, Who boast of idols. Worship Him, all you gods. 8 Zion hears and is glad, And the daughters of Judah rejoice Because of Your judgments, O LORD. 9 For You, LORD, are most high above all the earth; You are exalted far above all gods. The Psalmist declares that the earth knows God and has a reaction it trembles. It says the heavens declare His righteousness His glory is proclaimed loud and clear, writ large across creation, and for all people to see His glory. Notice too it says there is a reaction a purpose all people who have ignored God, who have given their hearts to other things should turn back to Him, for He alone deserves our worship. Psalm 19: titled in the NKJV as the perfect revelation of the LORD : 19 The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork.
5 Speaking of the angelic seraphim, Isaiah 6:3 reads: 3 And one cried to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; The whole earth is full of His glory! Through Creation God has said, I am here, my Glory is displayed, you know this. The Bible makes very unique claims not just that God created the world, but the world nature, angels, humans, reveal and respond to God. When the Bible talks about Glory, it literally is meaning weight that God s presence is felt. That s why in the Bible whenever you see God coming into our dimension there are earthquakes and big things happening His presence in our world is hard to miss. The Bible claims too that God did not create and then abandon like the clockmaker metaphor but has actively been involved, continually revealing, showing His hand and letting us know who He is through miracle, prophets, and most profoundly in Emmanuel, God with us as John 1:14 shows us: 14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. The Christian claim is that God is knowable, He chooses to be known, He has ordered and reordered His creation, and He has shown Himself, He showed up Himself, stepping inside His creation and people have seen Him! Isaiah 49 goes on to say that kings and princes will see and worship God. It also says that through Israel, through God s people, His glory will be known. These are amazing statements. Psalm 78 points this out again as well as humanity s sad refusal to see what God has revealed Starting in Verse 26 He caused an east wind to blow in the heavens; And by His power He brought in the south wind. 27 He also rained meat on them like the dust, Feathered fowl like the sand of the seas; 32 In spite of this they still sinned, And did not believe in His wondrous works. 33 Therefore their days He consumed in futility, And their years in fear. 34 When He slew them, then they sought Him; And they returned and sought earnestly for God.
6 This is amazing it says that Israel saw the met God, knew God, saw God, had His revelation and still chose to disobey out of disbelief. They did not think His wondrous works were so wondrous. In Matthew 29:17 we are told that seeing the resurrected Christ, some worshipped but some doubted. Our main verse says this: For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, 21 because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. II. GETTING INTO THE CLUES But let s step back a minute from those ideas sin, redemption, worship and idolatry. Assume your friend doesn t take a word of the Bible to be for real quoting it won t help. But let s take the Bible for what it says that God should be revealed to all of us He has already given us enough revelation to be without excuse. The late Oxford professor, Antony Flew, spent more than fifty years of his life promoting atheism. He was long considered the world s most influential atheistic philosopher, debater, and author. That changed in 2004. He announced to a surprised world that he had abandoned his atheism and now believed that God must exist. He said that it was compelling new scientific evidence that changed his mind. What evidence was Antony Flew talking about? Let s go over some of these clues: Clue #1-Creation the Origins of the Universe. In 1948 the famed atheist Sir Bertrand Russell debated the Jesuit Father Frederick C. Copleston on whether the created order is evidence for a Deity. At that time is was concluded Russell won, holding the idea that the universe just is, and that it always has been and always will be. After the theory of the Big Bang had been confirmed, showing that the universe is not in a state of constant flux, but had a beginning, we can no longer draw such a conclusion, which of course brings us to the question of who or what existed prior to the beginning of the created order. The debate was restaged in 1998, with apologist William Lane Craig arguing for the theistic side, and Sir Anthony Flew arguing for the atheistic side. As part of his presentation, Craig used the argument: a. Whatever begins to exist has a cause; b. The universe began to exist; c. Therefore the universe has a cause.
7 Flew was unable to satisfactorily dismiss this argument. He had actually known C.S. Lewis but had remained unpersuaded by Christianity. It was after this debate that the famed atheist started to become a believer in God, though not exactly a Christian. This scandalized the philosophical world their leader had in the end found atheism bankrupt. Francis Collins, the Christian scientists and head of the Human Genome Project reflected on the Big Bang: We have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin, the Big Bang. Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing. I can t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature. Of course the Bible speaks of the stretching out of the universe thousands and thousands of years before scientists ever came to this conclusion. But the origins of the universe tell us something more it is contingent it has a cause outside of itself. Something had to make the Big Bang happen. Again this is a clue a clue that there is something besides the natural world. As a curious note, Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Roman Catholic priest Monseigneur George Lemaître, a brilliant Belgian who was an accomplished astronomer and a talented mathematician and physician who earned degrees at Cambridge and MIT. Clue #2 - Evidence we live in a fine-tuned universe. In his book Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees, Royal Astronomer of England, discusses how precisely our universe is tuned and how the slightest deviation in any of them would make the universe and life as we know it impossible: These six numbers constitute a recipe for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if any one of them were to be untuned, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator? I think a video is very fittinsg here
8 Even atheist scientist Fred Hoyle, who coined the term Big Bang, found the evidence for finetuning unsettling, or if you prefer, convincing. He said the evidential case is as if a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and... there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. Again Francis Collins is helpful: When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe; it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear forces, etc. that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million-million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets, or people. Clue #3 - Order - The structure of the physical world - We should not take for granted that the universe is regular in its processes and functions, and that we have an innate capacity to perceive this regularity it is intelligible to us. Acclaimed Theoretical physicist and ordained Christian minister John Polkinghorne points out: We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality which was inaccessible to us.... There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without (101). Biblical faith makes sense of things, explaining why science works. It is interesting to remember that modern science as we know exploded into history in Western Europe, in what was termed Chirstendom it emerged precisely because Christians claimed the world was rational, explainable, and knowable, ordered and regular because it had a Creator who made it thus. Clue #4 - Desire A Homing Instinct for God All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. - Andre Breton, Surrealist writer and poet Blaise Pascal famously said The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand. The argument from desire is one of those reasons that which pulls the human being in a direction perhaps undiscerned by the intellect. Pascal s argument from desire is briefly this: We have a
9 longing for something transcendent, a sense of helplessness that points to a true absence, which is really a sense of the absence of God. In other terms, this is a God-shaped void. Pascal argues that it is Christianity which offers an interpretation of this experience of longing and helplessness. St. Augustine opined a similar thought, You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, He described these unfulfilled longings in his Confessions as clues to the reality of God. We have a longing for joy, love, and beauty that no amount or quality of food, sex, friendship or success can satisfy. We want something that nothing in this world can fulfill. Isn t that at least a clue that this something that we want exists? This unfulfillable longing, then, qualifies as a deep, innate human desire, an that makes it a major clue that God is there. (p.139) Clue #6 - The Argument from Beauty What does Leonard Bernstein mean by heaven, rightness? He s not an orthodox religious person. If God does not exist, and the world in which we live happened by pure accident, then what we refer to as beauty is only a neurological hardwired response to data, nothing more. We can take this further and apply it to what we refer to as love, rendering it a simple bio-chemical response, passed down from our ancestors who capitalized on it to survive. We may, therefore, be secular materialists who believe truth and justice, good and evil, are complete illusions. But in the presence of art or even great natural beauty, our hearts tell us another story, says Keller (p.138) The created order displays self-evident beauty, pointing beyond itself to its Source. Our passage in Romans speaks of this and condemns paganism for worshipping and serving the created order rather than the Creator. Why would such things exist in a mechanistic universe coughed up my mere chance and brute mechanics? Beauty is not a product of mere mechanics: the aesthetic dimension points beyond itself to a Creator who made the world and called it good. The world was not merely made it was made perfectly and that resonates in our hearts.
10 CONCLUSION If you don t believe in God, not only are all these things profoundly inexplicable, but your view that there is no God would not lead you to expect them to be so. As we move to examine these clues for ourselves and for our friends, we must first come to a place where we are seeking answers to 4 major questions every human has to resolve. Origin, Meaning, Morality, and Destiny How did we get here? What it the purpose of life? How are we to live while here? And where are we all going? We need to get the hearts and minds of our friends to examine these questions and then ask, What theory best explains all of these in a cohesive, comprehensive way? Reality is studded with clues concerning human nature and identity In all of this, God s existence is not proven, but rather it is affirmed and demonstrated as being reasonable. This is similar to the accumulation of evidence in the courtroom not proof, but evidence, and sometimes, beyond a reasonable doubt. My faith is that when I look around at the world and into my own heart, Christianity is by far the best answer for all of these probing questions. Where are your answers pointing? 14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 (John bore witness about him, and cried out, This was he of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me. ) 16 For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. [d] 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God; the only God, [e] who is at the Father's side, [f] he has made him known.