3. Is there a creator? Is there a God? What can be known about a creator? How do we know things?

Okay, so we know the universe had a beginning. And we know there must be at least one non-material thing that created it. What else do we know about non-material things?

 We know for instance that whatever created the universe has more power than all the power in the universe and that it is intelligent, capable of thinking on levels infinitely beyond our own abilities.

How do we know those things?

 It's not difficult. We know that whatever force produces an effect must be sufficient to account for all the force within the effect; an effect cannot be greater than its cause. If an effect were greater than its cause, then there would be some part of the effect that was uncaused‑that would have come from nothing. But since nothing comes from nothing, an effect cannot be greater than its cause.

Now for intelligence. Matter and energy are not capable of ordering themselves. Left to themselves they tend toward maximum disorder. It takes intelligence  to bring about order in our material world. When you see a powerful computer, you don't suppose it just happened by accident, you ask who designed it, who built all its parts, who put those parts together. When that computer functions, you don't assume it does that by accident, either; you ask who wrote the program that guides it.

The universe has much more design than any computer in it (the computer is, after all, part of the universe, and the part cannot be greater than the whole). Human brains are thousands of times more complex than any computer. The scientific mind will ask the same questions about the order in the universe that it asks about the computer: who designed It, who gave it the program by which it processes so much information, who built its parts? If it didn't design itself, then its designer must be non‑material and must have intelligence  greater than that in the universe.

Okay, but that doesn't prove that God exists.

 You're right. We Christians believe much more about God than that He is more powerful and has more intelligence than the universe. But tell me-what would God have to do to prove to you that He exists?

I don't really know what it would take to convince me that God exists. But I'm willing to listen to any reasons you have.

 That's great. Now, one more question: If God proved to you that He exists, would you trust Him?

I'm not sure I'd be willing to trust God, but perhaps I would. You'd have to give me some good reasons to do it. How can we know that God exists?

 There are three basic ways we know things: reason, experience, and authority-and we Christians add a fourth, revelation, which is really another kind of authority.

Pure reason-logic and mathematics-affords absolute or 100% proof of things. Experience and authority only afford approximate proof.  But we don't denigrate experience and authority simply because they don't give absolute proofs. We still trust them a great deal-sometimes we trust them 100% even though they don't give us 100% proof.

For instance, experience  might tell you it's safe to cross the street. But you don't have absolute proof. Still when you cross the street you take 100% of yourself across; you trust yourself 100% to the answer experience gives to the question, "Is it safe for me to cross the street now?” Every day we make decisions like that trusting ourselves 100% to things we cannot know with 100% certitude but that we can know with varying degrees of certitude.

Sometimes we trust ourselves completely to something even when there is a fairly high degree of certitude that the thing will turn out to fail us. If we can only see two options, and one of them will almost certainly bring us disaster and the other has even a very low degree of certainty of saving us, we might well trust ourselves—100%—to that highly uncertain option that could mean deliverance.

Imagine, for instance, that you are standing in a sixth floor room of a burning building. You're convinced that if you stay there you will burn to death. You're also pretty sure that if you jump, you'll break your leg or kill yourself, or at least knock yourself out and die when the building collapses on top of you and burns you. What will you do? Quite probably you w1l1jump despite the danger, because you consider the slight chance of your survival by that means to be more attractive than the high chance of death if you stay in the building.

You would never have jumped had the building not been burning and had there been no other life-threatening situation leading you to make that decision. The stakes involved in a decision, then, can justify our trusting some things on little evidence that we would not ordinarily trust even on much greater evidence.

When we approach the question, "How can you prove that God exists?" we're dealing with a question that cannot be answered by pure reason alone-mathematics and logic. It must be answered by some combination of reason, experience, and authority. The evidence given must always fall short of absolute proof, but it is not insufficient for commitment. As with any other question of this sort, we must make our decisions based on degrees of probability. Naturally our decisions will be affected in part by the stakes in the matter.

All this is fine, and I can go along with it. But you still haven't given me any reasons to believe God exists. Are there any?

 Yes, I think so. First, experience and reason have led us to believe that the universe was created/Christianity says that the Creator is God. Second, experience and reason have led man to believe that the universe must have been designed by some intelligent being; Christianity says that the Designer is God. Third, Christians say we believe God exists because He has told us so‑that's "revelation," that special kind of authority I mentioned. Fourth, Christians believe God exists because we believe He appeared in human flesh, He became a man in Jesus Christ.

Wait a minute! Why should I believe all these things?!

 You've already agreed to the first two. I'm just telling you that from the Christian point of view, when we say "God" we're referring to that non‑material Creator/Designer. After all, we might as well use some term to designate the Creator/Designer, and throughout history philosophers have used the term "God."

Suppose the universe does have a creator. Where did that creator come from?

 In any chain of cause and effect, there either is or is not a first cause‑a cause uncaused by any other cause. The chain of cause and effect cannot be circular, because then each effect would have to be both before and after its cause.

Nothing tells us that the universe's cause cannot itself be an effect-nothing in reason and experience alone, that is, though Christians believe God tells us so by revelation. But something does tell us that there must be some cause that is not an effect at all.

We're talking about the principle of contingency, i.e., that effects do not explain themselves, do not give the reasons for their own existence. If everything were contingent then nothing would be explained  at all. But we know there must be a reason for the existence of the universe, since once it did not exist and later it did. If there is a reason for anything to exist, then something must not be contingent. Something must be uncaused.

No matter how many links we might think are in the chain of cause and effect, there either is a beginning to the chain, or there is no chain at all. But we believe there is a chain, so we must believe there is a beginning to it. This beginning is what the great philosophers, like Aristotle and Plato, called the "uncaused Cause." When we Christians speak of God, we mean the "uncaused Cause"‑though we mean much more than that: that the uncaused Cause is persona  intelligent, loving, good, just, and other such things.

Okay, so there's an uncaused Cause that's powerful and intelligent. But what about your two other reasons for believing God exists?

 At this point we're really asking not whether God exists, but what God is like. Fair enough?

Yes.

 We know what God is like because He has told us by revelation and because He became a man in Jesus Christ to demonstrate to us what He is like. So if we really want to know what God is like, the best way is to meet Jesus. The Bible tells us about Him.
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4. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely good, why is there evil?

Wait a minute. Before we get to Jesus, I just realized a problem with the whole idea of God Himself. You tell me that God is all-powerful and I know you believe He's good. But then, what about evil? An all-powerful and all‑good God wouldn't permit evil to exist, and even if it did exist temporarily, He would destroy it. If God exists—the God you believe in-then why is there evil?

 That's a good question. Actually, Jesus has a lot to do with our answer to this problem. But for the moment, let's handle it just on the logical  level.

What we Christians must show is that the proposition "God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good" is logically compatible with the proposition "There is evil in the world." One way to do this is to show that there is some third proposition that is compatible with the first and that implies the second. In other words, we can show that A is compatible with B, no matter how incompatible they at first appear, if we can show that C is compatible with A and implies B.

What I'd like to suggest as that third statement is, "It would be morally better for God to create a world containing morally free beings than for Him to create a world without them."

I don't see how that ties the first two together at all.

 I don't blame you. It isn't immediately apparent how this works. Let's look into this proposition, "It would be morally better for God to create a world containing morally free beings than for Him to create a world without them," and see just what is implied in it.

The key question is, 'What is a morally free being?" The answer is that a morally free being is a being that is free to do either good or evil at any given  time—nothing forces him to do one thing or the other. This means it is always possible for a morally free being to do evil.

So, if it is truly better for God to create a world with morally free beings, then it is better for God to create a world with the possibility of evil than a world without that possibility.

Okay, but why is it better to be morally free than not?

 
You tell me. You're morally free. That means people can praise you for doing good and blame you for doing evil. A hammer isn't morally free. If someone uses it to do something evil, no one condemns the hammer; if someone uses it to do something good, no one praises the hammer, either. Now, which would you prefer: to be yourself, capable of right and wrong and so susceptible to praise or blame, or to be the hammer, capable of neither right nor wrong, and so susceptible to neither praise nor blame?

Okay, I’d rather be myself than a hammer. I’ll grant it's better to be morally free than not.

 Good. Now, if God is morally good, and if it is better to create a world with morally free beings than without them, then if God creates anything He should create a world with morally free beings. But such a world is a world in which evil is possible. That means that our first proposition (Gods exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good) is compatible with a third (It is better to create a world with morally free beings than without them) which entails at least the possibility of our second proposition (There is evil in the world). This means God's existence and the reality of evil are not logically contradictory to each other. They are compatible.

But why doesn't God destroy all evil and prevent its returning?

 He could, of course, but in so doing He would be destroying morally free creatures. And God could have created a world in which evil was impossible; but then He would have to have created a world without morally free creatures. The only alternative to a morally good world that contains evil is not a morally good world that contains no evil but a morally neutral world that contains neither good nor evil. Such a world, of course,  wouldn't contain us. So which do you prefer: a world that contains you, or a world that doesn't?

A world that contains me. I see your point. I guess God and evil are compatible. But just why would God have permitted evil? What purpose is there in it?

 First of course it was the only way to create a morally good world. But what was His purpose for evil? Christians believe evil serves a number of purposes, all consistent with God's plan for the world and, especially, for individual people.

One purpose is to occasion certain moral goods that could never come about without evil. One can never forgive someone without someone's doing something evil, right? Forgiveness is one of the highest moral goods, but it is a moral good that could never come about without evil. One could not have mercy without someone's doing something evil that deserved punishment. One cannot have compassion for those who suffer without someone's suffering, and compassion is also a very high virtue. These and other goods all depend for their existence and expression on the existence of evil. So God permits evil in part so that greater goods can occur than could ever occur without it.

Christianity says there is one even higher good that could never have occurred without evil: God's voluntary sacrifice of Himself to bear punishment for us. Think what kind of act gets the highest praise among men. Isn't it when someone voluntarily sacrifices his life in order to save the lives of others? Such self‑sacrifice is a tremendous good. The greatest such sacrifice was when God sacrificed  His life in the Person of Jesus Christ to save the lives of all who believe in Jesus.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why was such a sacrifice necessary? What do you mean by God's having saved the lives of those who believe in Jesus? What did they need to be saved from?

 They needed to be saved from two kinds of evil: sin and suffering. Christianity says all men are sinners-we all do evil. The possibility of our doing evil is entailed in our being morally free. The reality of it we see in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Justice requires that evil be punished. Punishment involves suffering. But suffering is a kind of evil—an evil of one kind brought on by another. So the problem for God was how to satisfy the demands of His justice and, at the same time, to deliver people from suffering His punishment upon evil. This He did by becoming  man  in Jesus and then suffering for our sins in our place.

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