The Existence of God #1

Before asking whether the Bible is reliable or whether Jesus rose from the dead, a prior question has to be settled: does God exist at all? Christian apologetics has never treated this as something to be taken on unexamined authority. Scripture itself assumes that the created order points beyond itself — “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1) — and that this evidence is available to everyone, “so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

The Argument

Philosophers and theologians have offered several converging lines of reasoning. The cosmological argument observes that the universe began to exist and asks what caused it, since something cannot come from nothing by nothing. The fine-tuning (teleological) argument notes that the physical constants governing the universe fall within an extraordinarily narrow range that permits life, which many find better explained by design than by chance. The moral argument (treated in depth elsewhere) points to the reality of objective moral obligations as evidence of a moral lawgiver. None of these is offered as ironclad mathematical proof; each is a cumulative-case argument meant to show that theism is the more reasonable explanation of the evidence.

Common Objections

The strongest objection is that these arguments, even if successful, establish only a generic “first cause” or “designer,” not the specific God of the Bible — a further argument is needed to bridge that gap, and apologists generally acknowledge this rather than treat it as settled by the cosmological or design arguments alone. Skeptics also point to the problem of evil and to the sheer difficulty of empirically verifying a transcendent being. Genesis 1:1 simply asserts God’s existence and creative act as the starting point of the biblical narrative, leaving the philosophical defense of that claim to reason and experience working together, as Hebrews 11:6 suggests faith and evidence are meant to.