Evidence For God (part 1)

Now, the last thing I want is to be accused of being “closed-minded” or having made my mind up without looking at the evidence. So I must state that when I first lost my faith in the God of Christianity, I searched – genuinely – to find some kind of “evidence” that would convince me that it was true after all. Needless to say, up until this point I have failed to find any such evidence. However for the purpose of this blog I will outline the possible “evidences” I considered.

One of the most common reasons people cite for believing in God is “the evidence of the world around us” and admittedly, at first glance, this seems to be a pretty compelling argument. However when you start to ask the scientific questions of how things came to be, you will find (at least, I did) that there is nothing about the natural world that cannot be adequately explained by science, and certainly nothing that indicates a perfect and benevolent creator.

The most striking feature of the natural world is the abundance of life on this planet, the sheer complexity and diversity of living organisms. Surely if anything pointed to a creator God it would be this? But, as it turns out, all of this can be satisfyingly explained by evolution - and without any of the philosophical problems of “why” a god would have created certain things.

The evidence that all life on earth evolved from a single common ancestor is overwhelming – so much so that it is no longer seriously contested within the scientific community. This video gives a fairly succinct outline of the evidence:

Having established this fact, many Christians (including myself, at this point in my journey) will say “but of course, God must have started the process! He must have created the first life form for evolution to act upon!” But as I searched, I found that the question of how life first began does not require a supernatural answer either. Here is one particularly useful video on the subject:

At this point I was left only with the fact that anything exists at all – that is, that something exists rather than nothing - in this line of evidence for the existence of some kind of supernatural creator... but as Lawrence Krauss explains in this fascinating talk, even this can be adequately explained by science. It’s a long video, but well worth watching:

This left me, (the world requiring no God for its existence,) with only the possibility of personal experiences, miracles and so on as evidence for the existence of God... I will discuss this in my next entry.