Why am I suffering so much?
What is my purpose?
Do I even exist?
Is love real?
Is there life after death?
Is there such thing as right and wrong?
Does my life even matter?
Will I ever meet my loved one again?
How should I treat others?
How should I treat those who hate me?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
What is the meaning of life?
What is consciousness?
What even is the point of all this?
Everybody has pondered these issues at least once in their lives, either while looking upon a starry night sky and holding the hand of a loved one, or while enduring terrible suffering or loneliness. You have probably asked them yourself, as all of us have, more than once.
These questions have been at the core of human thought for millennia. They are implanted deep in our souls; we cannot shrug them off, and we cannot ignore our desire for good answers. Unfortunately our society tends to throw them off as merely theoretical, as if it was impossible to reach a conclusive answer, because as your college professors will tell you; the answers are completely subjective. But I completely disagree.
These are the most important questions you could ever ask; they mean the difference between life and death; hope and despair; between a life well lived and a life wasted. Just as we can examine an atom and discover its reality, so can we examine these questions and their components and come to the most reasonable answer, and thus to the most reasonable way of living. We deserve better than a superficial existence of constantly chasing numbing pleasures to drown out our deepest desires. We deserve better than a life of barely and aimlessly surviving through life, with no idea of who we are or where we are going.
I’m here to tell you that you deserve better, and you can get better. You can have a fulfilling life with pervasive meaning, with the light of the divine pouring through your every action in work, family, and life.
Just like you, I have examined these same questions and dedicated a good amount of thought to them. I want to write this article for you, to save you the hours of reading and talking and listening. As you already know and suspect, there is one question that, if answered positively, solves all of these with satisfactory answers. A sort of master key; a “master question”: does God exist?
In this article, I give you three quick arguments for the existence of God: the Cosmological argument, the Moral Argument, and the argument from Design. Keep in mind that God won’t just appear to you magically as you read these, and you won’t therefore be magically convinced of His existence -though that would be awesome- instead this will give you a foretaste of the Truth, a quick introduction into the stolid case for Theism, which has been and continues to be part of the most popular religions of all human history.
But first, a story: a good-willing but misguided Christian once told me that faith is like jumping off a cliff without asking any questions; trusting that you will be okay, and falling into safety. But this seemed like absolute stupidity to me. How can I just get in the car and pray I get to the right place without having the actual directions? How can I invest all my money into something I have absolutely no clue about? That’s stupid and irrational; no one acts this way. Thankfully, I was not the only one to think this, and if you’ve asked yourself the same question, neither were you. It’s a very common criticism of Christianity. How can Christians blindly and irrationally trust whatever their religion tells them? Freud himself asked the same when he said that Christianity is simply a coping mechanism for the weak. According to him, and other such critics, theists are just so afraid to face reality and the deep suffering of the world that they made up this ‘Bearded Sky Daddy’ to feel better about themselves, making their faith no more than basic psychological wish-fulfillment. Dawkins, Harris, and most college professors adhere to this very basic misunderstanding; they hate whatever they think Christianity teaches, but never know what it actually does teach. Their counterarguments seem sophisticated, but they do not hold water against the bulk of the evidence for Theism, and the three arguments in this article -as well as the twenty more listed in the end- will show how misguided this idea of blind faith really is.
Belief in God is a process: the more you read and learn and are convinced of, the more you admit that you can’t ignore reality. You cannot ignore the truth. In a similar way, you won’t be automatically convinced after reading this article, but a seed of doubt; of the philosopher’s noble pursuit of truth, will be planted in your soul and the more you read and explore, you will find yourself convinced. I would not be surprised to hear back from you a year from now, and you saying “I get what you meant now, I can’t just turn away, I can’t ignore this and keep living like I used to”.
In Christianity, faith and reason work together. As the philosopher Peter Kreeft often says: reason is the vehicle that takes you to the beach, but after lots of thinking and more than enough evidence, you have to make the decision and just jump into the sea of faith once and for all. Instead of just blindly jumping into the sea without knowing anything about anything, you make the rational decision after examining the case for Christianity, to trust in God because there’s no better explanation for the universe. There will always be some arguments you won’t know, or some aspect of God that you won’t understand… If you did, He wouldn’t be God! At some point, you have to trust and decide to live your life this way. The Divine Gift of Reason allows you to think through these arguments, and Faith is the decision to trust, as you do a friend. There is no courage, no admiration, in remaining lukewarm and in the sidelines, never daring to jump into the breach. What kind of life would that be?
The moment you say “I can’t ignore all this, this is the most reasonable explanation for the universe”; that is when you decide to jump into the sea of faith. And man, it will feel good.
Without further ado, let’s get in our Ferrari of Reason, rev up its divine engine, and get going to the beach of Faith. In the same way that you can hire a personal trainer but you still have to do the pushups yourself; I can help you start the car and give you directions but you’re gonna drop me off whenever you stop reading this article, and you will be the one who continues the trip. This vehicle of reason; these three arguments will only help you get closer to the sea, but only you can freely choose to dive into it when you acknowledge the existence of God. He gave us free will so we can freely choose to love Him; if not we would be pre-programmed machines, and what kind of love would that even be? On the other hand, when you admit, after careful examination of the evidence for and against Theism, that God is the most reasonable explanation of the Universe, there’s merit to that. So, with this in mind, here is our first stop. Read it carefully and examine its truth:
The Cosmological Argument
Whatever begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe has a cause
Premise A: This premise is most reasonable; everything that you see around yourself right now has a cause. Being cannot come from non-being; out of nothing, nothing comes. The computer or phone you are using right now was made by somebody, it did not just pop into existence.
In the same way, if you were hiking through the forest and found a nice wooden cabin in the middle of nowhere, you would automatically assume that someone had built it. You would not say that throughout the years the storms and the wind and the lightning strikes caused each log to be cut at the right measure and fall into perfect position, that would be ridiculous. Or when you take a trip to the museum and sit in admiration of a beautiful artwork; you do not say that it had no painter or that it was created by random forces of nature, rather you automatically assume that it had a cause; that there is a painter.
The most common counterargument to this premise is:
“But who created God? You’re conveniently cheating the system by saying that everything has been created except your God.”
But this has already been dubbed “the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought” because it fails to understand the very definition of the terms used. By God, we mean the First Cause, the Unmoved Mover, the Cause of all Being; the being who is outside of space, time and matter. If God was bound by space, time, and matter, he could not be their creator because he would be part of the creation. It is not cheating the system, because God never began to exist; he is the cause of existence. For the universe to begin to exist, you need something outside of it to create it. It is not cheating the system to say that someone had to push the first domino for the domino chain to begin! If anybody is cheating the system, it is those who admit that everything around us had a cause, but that the entirety of our extremely complex, ordered and beautiful universe somehow did not. Ultimately, this counterargument is a contradiction in terms. It is like asking “Who created the uncreated?”. It is like the infamous, middle-school gotcha question: “If you God is all-powerful, can he create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it? This is simply another contradiction, in reality, it is illogical: can an all-powerful being be not all-powerful? Can back be white? These are logical impossibilities; they are self-defeating.
Premise B: This is where some find issue: they argue the universe did not begin to exist, that it has existed forever, infinitely into the past. This is called the theory of infinite regress.
When matched up with the scientific and philosophical evidence, however, this counterargument does not hold up. Science has shown, through the controversial Big Bang cosmology developed by Fr. George Lemaitre -a close friend of Alfred Einstein- that it is most likely that the universe had a definite beginning approximately 13.8 billion years ago. As the physicist P. C. W. Davies explains, “the coming into being of the universe, as discussed in modern science . . . is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organization . . . upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming-into-being of all physical things from nothing.”
A bit of common-sense philosophical questioning also points to the flaws of infinite regress theory: can an infinite event ever be done or completed? If, in order to reach a certain event, infinitely many steps had to precede it, could that event ever be reached? Of course not! Not even in an infinite time. For an infinite time would be unending, just as the steps would be. The task would never -could never- be completed. If the universe has existed infinitely in the past, it would have been impossible for us to get to today, to the present day. In other words, someone has to have pushed the first domino that resulted in the chain of events that we see today. When you see the domino effect taking place around you, it is because someone already pushed the first domino! It is impossible for the present domino effect to go infinitely into the past because this means it could never have gotten to the present.
It is also worth mentioning that infinity is an immaterial concept, like π or the imaginary unit i in mathematics. It is not a physical reality. There is nothing physical that is infinite, everything that we see around us has had a definite beginning.
Conclusion: If the universe began to exist (which is the most reasonable conclusion in view of the scientific and philosophical evidence) then it necessarily follows that God exists. Since the universe has a cause, and the cause must be whether we like it or not, because this is a deductive argument.
The Moral Argument
If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
Objective moral values do exist (rape, murder, and genocide are objectively wrong)
Therefore, God exists.
This first premise is often misinterpreted. By objective moral values, we simply mean “mind-independent”. Regardless of what I think in my mind, the reality is that I am typing this on a computer. The opposite of mind-independent or objective would be a subjective personal preference, like whether pineapple on pizza is better than no pineapple on pizza, or what your favorite color is. We have some objective, mind-independent statements, like “murder is wrong” and some subjective personal preferences like chocolate being better than vanilla ice cream.
With this in mind, the premise says that objective moral values do not exist if God does not exist. This is getting at an idea expressed multiple times by many famous philosophers: that without God, there is no objective standard upon which moral judgements can be grounded. If God does not exist, moral judgements are nothing more than subjective preferences like pineapple on pizza. If God does not exist and we are nothing more than the accidental byproduct of cosmic farts, then saying “murder is wrong” is simply my personal taste, because biology does not determine morality. Many atheists like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and more contemporary ones admit the absurdity of life and the complete lack of morality if atheism is true. As Dostoievsky put it: "If there is no immortality then all things are permitted." However, some atheists like Kai Nielsen and Sam Harris argue that objective morality still exists without God if only we focus on “human flourishing”; that we know that we should be helping each other because this is evolutionarily advantageous, since we can work together, gather more food, and live better. But Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Castro thought that the way to help people live better, to help humanity flourish, was to eliminate specific groups of people for the benefit of humanity, for a greater cause, leading to tens of millions of deaths. When Hitler sought to purify the Arian race by the killing of Jews and Blacks, that was his understanding of “human flourishing”. Who is to say that their understanding of human flourishing is wrong? They are doing what was, in their minds, helpful for their people! They are living out their truth, their experience of the world. If God does not exist, what they did is just the expected result of evolution, of survival of the fittest, no different than a chimpanzee eating another primate. There is not blame to be cast towards them, just as we don’t consider it “wrong” for a lion to maul a zebra. However, if God exists, they have committed one of the greatest crimes against humanity by violating the sanctity of each individual human life and their actions cannot be justified under any pretext. The conclusion is simple. If objective moral values of right and wrong really do exist and are not social constructs but objective realities, then God exists. In the same way that one plus one equals two; “killing an innocent human being is wrong” equals “God exists”.
The Argument from Design
The universe displays a staggering amount of complexity, order, and fine-tuning which fills even the most casual observer with awe.
This fine-tuning can either be the result of chance or of design.
Not chance
Therefore, design.
The first premise is undeniable, since order, complexity, organization, intelligibility, and beauty are the norm in the universe, not the exception. We only “complain” to God when we find injustice and chaos; everything else we blatantly take for granted. Many recent scientific discoveries have identified several cosmological constants that show this fine-tuning. The force of gravity, for example, is measured by the following gravitational constant.
If the gravitational constant had been out of tune by just one out of 10 to the 60th part, then the universe would either have expanded and thinned out so rapidly that no stars could form and life couldn't exist, or it would have collapsed back on itself with the same result: no stars, no planets, and no life, no you.
You can also consider the expansion rate of the universe, driven by the cosmological constant: a change in its value by a mere one part in 10 to the 120th parts would cause the universe to expand too rapidly or too slowly.
In either case, the universe would again be life-prohibiting; we would never have existed. Or, yet another example of fine-tuning: if the mass and energy of the early universe were not evenly distributed to an incomprehensible precision of one part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd, the universe would be hostile to life of any kind.
The fact is, our universe permits physical, interactive life only because these and many other numbers have been independently and exquisitely balanced on a razor's edge. We could not have existed at all, but we do. We are not the products of a cosmic fart, and we are not forced, as Bertrand Russell and Nietschze and others thought, to build our lives on a "foundation of unyielding despair." To the contrary, you have been personally willed by God from all eternity, He has placed you into existence out of love and maintains you in existence for love, giving you free will so that you might choose to do the good, and granting you the necessary grace to do it in your specific life circumstances. Far from being the unintended byproduct of “blind, pitiless indifference” as Dawkins would also say, we are the Sons and Daughters of God the Most High, and are Heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven; where we will hopefully return at the end of our earthly pilgrimage, and finally our constant desire for perfect happiness will be fulfilled.
Those the three short arguments I wanted to share with you. I am convinced that the more you read and think and study, the more you will find theism to be true. I have added a few resources here that will be key in your search for the Truth. I hope this very very short glance into the discussion opened your mind to the great possibility of His existence, or confirmed your faith if you are already a Believer. As you might have heard, “Fides quaerens intellectum”, “faith seeks understanding” and the other way around. The more you trust someone, the more you learn about them, and the more you learn about someone the more you trust them. Faith and Reason work in this same way. The more you learn about God, the more you will trust Him. And inevitably, after learning and trusting so much, you love more, which is the goal. One act of charity is worth more than any of these arguments in the eyes of God.
If you felt that these arguments were inconclusive, I would leave you with this simple question, similar to Pascal’s Wager: What kind of life do you want to live? Where are you going to place your bet? Wouldn’t you rather live as if God exists, losing nothing but gaining everything? Why not live exceptionally, going against the current, and walking on the narrow path of righteousness?
Why not join the world’s most popular religion? The one that extinguished the inhumane gladiator games, created the university system, caused the Carolingian Renaissance, instituted the controversial concept of inherent human dignity and founded our law system, preserved the knowledge of the Ancients through monasticism, gave women unprecedented rights and status unheard of in other contemporary cultures, inspired the Scientific Revolution, and later motivated the eradication of slavery in the West at a time when all other civilizations had it? If you’ve been to any Catholic Church in Europe, you know what I’m talking about. Why not join the Church that has been throughout its history and continues to be the single largest non-governmental provider of medical care and research facilities in the world? Why not join the religion with the lowest divorce rates in the country? Why not become part of the religion that enjoys higher life satisfaction, positive emotion, and sexual satisfaction in the country? Of those who on average are more financially stable and donate the most to charity? Why not become part of this worldwide brotherhood and a sisterhood of sinners who strive towards sanctity together? Why not join ranks with the most renowned intellectual minds of all history, including but not limited to Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Charlemagne, Bonaventure, Descartes, Buridan, Oresme, Boethius, Linnaeus, Dalton, Faraday, Pascal, Leibniz, Heisenberg, Berkeley, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Newman, Lincoln, Pasteur, Lamark, Bacon, Boyle, Edison, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Dante, Chesterton, Lewis, Solzhenitsyn, Darwin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tolkien, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mendel, Lemaître, T.S Eliot, Dickens, Spencer, Bach, Mozart, Mother Teresa, Reagan, John Paul II, and not to mention a certain Jesus of Nazareth?
You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
About the writer: Justino Russell moved from Argentina seven years ago with his family and now lives in Houston, Texas. He studies Psychology at the Lone Star Honors College and is transferring to TAMU.
He has a deep interest in anything political, philosophical, theological, and anything in between. He was raised Catholic but never quite cared about it. During his teenage years, he tried to question it and disprove it, only to find out what his parents already knew: that Catholicism is the most reasonable explanation for our existence and for the entirety of the Universe.
Can God's Existence be Demonstrated? (William Lane Craig)
Where does God come from? (Kent Hovind)
That's my brother!! ;))