So many people today get emotional…well – very emotional….okay, sometimes irrationally enraged…whenever the subject of the existence of God comes up. You have to wonder why! I mean, it should be common sense that God exists (and if you’ll read to the END of this little blog I’ll explain why). But to recognize that means asking all sorts of uncomfortable questions like: okay, what is God like? How does His existence affect my life? And if He exists, why do penguins have such ridiculously short legs and what was He thinking when He invented hormones? Come on God – this is a BIG question that pretty much half the human population on this planet thinks about at least once every 28 days!
But the one question people REALLY don’t want to answer – if God exists, then does that give God any right to tell me what to do?
I think that that’s the big one. Folks want to do whatever they want to do and they don’t want anybody – even God – to have anything to say about it. Okay, okay, okay, I get it – no one wants human religious leaders who are themselves flawed (and that includes me) to have any power over their lives (and FYI, as a religious leader – I don’t want any power over your life. Some do, I don’t).
But God isn’t human – He’s God, the Creator, the Maker and we little humans still want what we want when we want it. We bristle and fuss and protest over even the hint that whatever lifestyle we are pursuing, whatever selfishness we are indulging in, is in any way – unacceptable. How dare anyone suggest that I am not the captain of my soul? How dare anyone imply that I am not the chief judge of what is good or acceptable?
So – it’s so much more convenient to grasp at straws about the existence of God (even in California where the secret straw police are likely currently planning raids on underground kindergarten apple juice sipping societies). It’s so much easier to throw up the hands in frustration – “there are so many religions, so none of them are right (but that’s arbitrary – they can’t all be right because they contradict but since truth is that thing which corresponds to what is real, then there can be one that corresponds – that’s at least possible)…No, no, no…there are so many unanswered questions so there can be no conclusions (but making this statement is, in itself, a conclusion so asserting it is self-defeating)…and besides, there’s not enough compelling evidence to believe in the existence of God.
Oh really?
Look, we can skip the arguments about someone’s scientific opinion of the bible, the Qur’an, the Vedas, or UFO’ology or whatever. We can ignore side issues like how old the earth is too. The bottom line – right at the very beginning, right down to the last dregs of rational discussion – is that you CAN’T GET SOMETHING FROM NOTHING.
This is the most proven, most obvious, most intuitive logical law of science known to humankind. More evidence supports this conclusion than for any other scientific law. Nothing cannot DO anything. Nothing cannot PRODUCE anything. Nothing cannot EXPLODE into something in a great Big Bang for no reason – and explosions do not produce order and complexity and specified, purposeful information and programming and planning and people. Explosions produce chaos…period…
No…the truth is = Nothing is nothing. No space, no time, no matter, no energy, no laws of physics, no laws of gravity or electromagnetism. No quantum dust, no uncertainty principles – NOTHING. Nothing at all. And from this state you can only get…wait for it…nothing. And that’s all you’ll ever get. If there was ever a state of true nothingness then all could only ever be…nothing. No…things (things are something)…
So how did we get everything? Physicists, astronomers, mathematicians…the conclusions are overwhelming and all actual evidence in the universe points backwards to a time when there was…nothing.
That means we either accept the idea that the most proven law understood in human thought – that nothing cannot produce anything – is somehow, someway, some inexplicably unobservable way – UNTRUE…or there is something (or someone) who is eternal – somone’s whose Necessary existence is beyond matter itself. The material universe cannot be eternal because it is breaking down, running out of steam, losing energy (the 2nd law of thermodynamics shows this)…
But someone eternal! Someone who does not owe His existence to anything or anyone. Someone truly eternal. From Him, everything can be formed, everything can be sustained. Such a Being would, by definition, be able to create it all. That makes sense.
And it’s common sense too.
I mean – if you hold a book in your hand (and this is Ray Comfort’s point) you would think it silly to imagine that all the colors simply fell from nowhere into the patterns you recognize as pictures. It would be ridiculous to think that random sprays of ink just happened to fall into coherent words (not to mention figuring out where the colors and the ink and the paper came from in the first place). You would think it stupid to imagine that all the elements simply fell into place – the pages, the binding, the words, the pictures…but the complexity of DNA and life is a trillion or more times more complicated than any book every written in any language. Even our most sophisticated computers cannot begin to devise the complex interaction of specified, purposeful information that interacts within DNA and between DNA and the epigenetic information encoded elsewhere in the cell to code for ants and apes and armadillos and aardvarks and antelope and…you!
Nothing cannot DO anything…YOU are anything except nothing…there is more information in your DNA than can be found in half a million pages of small print, a code more than three billion letters long all organized and perfectly folded and necessary for you to even have had a pimple when you were a teen.
So – yes…it’s common sense…common knowledge that you can’t get something from nothing…common sense to acknowledge that God exists.
We can talk about who He is…what He had to say, and how to know if He really said it on some other day. Just start at the beginning…
He exists…He just does…and you’re not an intellectual ninny to nod your head and say “it’s true”. You would be believing nonsense otherwise, believing that nothing can do everything…let’s just start there. We’ll get to Jesus by the by…
patrickcmarks 