The Existence of God

While I prefer to use original material in our bulletin I occasionally come across items I want to share with everyone.  This is such an occasion.    Brad Harrub has written a series of articles on the existence of God and over the next few weeks I will be sharing those with you in this space—In His love, Thomas.

Any logical person would be hard pressed to defend that nothing exists today. The very fact that you are reading this article indicates that something exists. (Some might contend that this is all a hallucination—but I would still ask where did the hallucination come from, and exactly how do you know it is a hallucination? In order for something to be a hallucination indicates that you can know reality.) Since it is an absolute truth that something now exists, it demands that something has existed forever. Otherwise, one would be forced to argue that something came from nothing—a position that is weak and illogical. It is a self-evident truth that something can’t come from nothing, thus something has to have existed forever. This truth does not prove a Supreme Being, but rather it establishes that something has “eternal” properties. The essence of being eternal can be defined as existing without a beginning or end—sometimes considered to be outside of time. Since something exists today it is a reasonable scientific observation to then go one step further and deduce that something has existed forever.

But how do we go about identifying that eternal “something”? This is where naturalistic science meets philosophy. All of our scientific observations exclude anything being “eternal” in nature. Everything in which man is currently aware of obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that things are running down and wearing out (a concept also shared by writers of the Bible; see Hebrew 1:11; Isaiah 51:6; Psalm 102:26). Eternality would indicate that something is not running down and had no beginning. Consider the following equations:

1. Something Exists Today—THUS—Something Must Be Eternal and Has Always Existed

2. Something is Eternal (Doesn’t Wear Down and was not created)—THUS—Something Violates Scientific Laws (specifically the Second Law of Thermodynamics)

3. Something Violates Scientific Laws—THUS—Something exists outside the observable laws of naturalistic science

From this we can conclude:

4. Something eternal is THUS outside the observable laws of naturalistic science!

While many may not like this “math,” it is inescapable. To argue otherwise would be to deny our very existence. We can logically conclude that something has existed forever—something that is not explainable by naturalistic science. Over the next few weeks we want to examine Who (or what) that something is.

Thomas Sneed

Pond Church of Christ