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Now, here's today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory. Can we prove the existence of God? Today, we're going to look at four powerful arguments for the existence of God. Today, we're going to look at just the first one, and it's the cosmological evidence. I could summarize this argument this way.
Why is there something instead of nothing? Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress. You know, most Americans say they believe in God, but if we're honest, even devoted Christians occasionally experience moments of doubt.
It's difficult to have complete confidence in someone we can't see. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress helps us answer the most foundational question, how can I know there is a God? Now, here's our Bible teacher to introduce today's message. Dr. Jeffress?
Thanks, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. People tend to think that the clergy are shielded from normal human emotions. Well, I can assure you, as somebody who's served in ministry for many decades, that's a fallacy.
Pastors are really no different than you. For example, I'm not immune to temptation or even occasional feelings of doubt. And so today, you'll hear me continue a relevant series we introduced yesterday. This one is for doubters, which pretty much includes all of us at one time or another.
My series is called How Can I Know? Answers to Life's Seven Most Important Questions. Now, one of the seven questions we'll tackle is the one I'm addressing today. How can I know there is a God?
That's a relevant question, and gratefully, God has given us ample evidence to reinforce our confidence in His existence. I've written a full-length bestselling book for this series. It's also titled How Can I Know? And I'd be pleased to send you a copy today when you give a generous gift to support the growing ministry of Pathway to Victory. I have one more essential invitation to share before we begin today's message. I'm thrilled to be hosting the upcoming Pathway to Victory Journeys of Paul Mediterranean Cruise. The dates for this unforgettable trip are May 5th through 16th. Before you dismiss this exclusive opportunity as a dream vacation for someone else, I want you to seriously consider joining me for this once-in-a-lifetime vacation.
Please take a look at the impressive places we'll visit and reserve your spot today by going to ptv.org. Now, today's question may be the most fundamental of all. Let's spend the next half hour answering this one. How can I know there is a God? Today we're beginning with that most basic question. How do I know there is a God? I want to speak for a moment about five reasons people doubt the existence of God. There are five major sources of doubt about God. First of all, there's natural doubts. By that I mean it's very natural to doubt what you can't see. Secondly, there are philosophical doubts that lead some people to question the existence of God. And the most cited philosophical argument against God is the reality of suffering and evil in the world. Thirdly, there are experiential doubts.
You know we're all prisoners of our experience. If you grew up in a home that didn't believe in God, you're inclined perhaps not to believe in God. A fourth source of doubt about God is spiritual doubts. You know we most often think of atheists as these highly intelligent human beings who have examined all of the evidence that is out there and somewhere they discovered the smoking gun that proves there is no God. And we're intimidated by atheists. The reason most atheists reject God is not for intellectual reasons, it's for moral reasons, spiritual reasons. They do not want to admit there is a God to whom they're accountable. Finally, there are empirical doubts that cause some people to doubt the existence of God. Richard Dawkins is another one of those new atheists. He claims in his book, The God Delusion, that a survey in 1998 showed that only 7% of scientists in the National Academy of Scientists, only 7% believe in the existence of a personal God. That is, 93% of scientists reject the idea that there is a personal God. Now you know how most people react to that?
Oh no, I can't believe that, that's terrible. Scientists are smarter than I am, we conclude. Secondly, scientists reject the idea of God because of facts. Therefore, the only conclusion we can come to is our faith must be based on fable and not fact. That's a wrong conclusion.
Let me show you the problem with such reasoning. First of all, that study fails to identify the cause-effect relationship. You read that study, only 7% of scientists are people of faith, you must come to the conclusion that, well, the cause is being a scientist, the result is becoming an atheist. The reason scientists become atheists is because of the facts they've uncovered.
But think about it, the opposite could be true. It could be their atheism is the cause, the motivation of their being a scientist. That is, they begin with the assumption there's not a God, they don't want there to be a God, so they devote their lives to finding an alternative explanation for the origin of the universe. It's kind of the chicken or the egg, which came first, being a scientist or being an atheist? Secondly, this idea that you can't reconcile a belief in God with a belief in science is based on circular reasoning.
Let me explain what I mean by that. Everybody who's been to a basic science class in school knows about the scientific method. We're taught that the only way you can have a reasonable explanation for a hypothesis, it has to be based in observation of that which is visible over a long period of time. The only thing that is real is what I can see, what I can measure, and what I can observe over a long period of time.
That circular reason, let me illustrate what I mean by that. Let's just say, for sake of argument, that there is a transcendent being somewhere who created everything that we see. Wouldn't that be a scientific explanation? It's based on truth. That would be not only a scientific, but a spiritual explanation. It would be based in reality.
But here's what's happened. Scientists have allowed science to be as reality and religion, spiritual beliefs, as non-reality. Science belongs in the classroom because it's based on reality. Creationism belongs in the Sunday school classroom because it's based on the unseen. That is circular reasoning. Alvin Plantiga is a philosopher, and he nails it perfectly when he talks about the absurdity of such a circular argument. He said, it's like the drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys only under the street light on the grounds that the light was better there.
In fact, it goes the drunk one better. It would insist that because the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the light. To limit our search for the origin of the universe by only that which is under the light, that which can be seen, is to limit an honest exploration for the truth. Now, that leads us to a question. Can we prove the existence of God? The answer is no. You can't prove the existence of a supernatural, invisible being. But there's a difference between proof and evidence.
Let me illustrate what I mean. My faithful assistant, Carolyn, who's been with us for 17 years, I just imagine that I am typing in my office one day and working on my sermon when I hear next door the clacking of the computer keys. Now, I can't see who's in there. I can't prove who's in there, but I can assume it's Carolyn. Why would I assume it's Carolyn? Well, it may be because it's her office. It may be also because 30 seconds earlier, she called me on the extension in there. I saw it light up, and I knew she was in there.
It could also be because nobody else ever uses her desk, even when she's on vacation. Can I prove that is Carolyn in there? Could it be instead the emperor of China typing on those keys? Well, there is a possibility it could be the emperor of China.
It's not totally impossible, but the evidence leads to it's Carolyn. Now, it's the same way when we're talking about proving the existence of God. We can't prove God exists, but we can look at the evidence and see that the evidence points to the fact that there is a God.
And yet, even though there's such abundant evidence for the existence of God, people willingly reject it. Jimmy Williams is the founder of Probe Ministries, and he loves to tell the story about the man who went to a psychiatrist convinced that the man was dead. He said, doctor, I don't know what to do. I'm dead.
What can I do? And so the psychiatrist tried to convince him that he wasn't dead, gave him all the evidences that he wasn't dead. He still wouldn't accept it. And so finally, the psychiatrist said, do you believe dead men bleed? And the patient said, no, dead men can't bleed. And the psychiatrist took out his pocket knife and sliced the patient's finger and blood spurted everywhere.
The patient looked down and said, what do you know? Dead men do bleed. Many people use that kind of logic. Even when confronted with the evidence, they refuse to accept it. Now, it's true that we cannot prove the existence of God, but it's also true that the atheist cannot prove God doesn't exist. Mortimer Adler, the legal scholar, talks about the impossibility of proving a negative assumption.
He uses this illustration. Say there's a man who believes there's such a thing as a red eagle. A second man believes there's no such thing as a red eagle. All the first man has to do to prove there is a red eagle is to find one. He just has to find one red eagle, and his hypothesis is true. The second man, to prove there isn't such a thing as a red eagle, has to search and scour every inch of this entire universe to prove for sure there is no red eagle.
And that's an impossibility. Again, the real question is, as we look at the evidence, where does the evidence point for the existence of God? And today and next week, we're going to look at four powerful arguments for the existence of God. Today, we're going to look at just the first one, and it's the cosmological evidence.
I could summarize this argument this way. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why is there something instead of nothing? Look around you right now.
Look up from your notes. Look around. Why is there a pulpit?
Why is there a pastor? Why is there somebody sitting next to me? If we could look above, why is there a sun and moon and stars? Why is there something rather than nothing at all? The second question you ought to ask yourself is, why do I see anything at all? Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why do I see anything at all? And if you really want to blow your mind, ask yourself the question, why am I asking this question? How do you explain everything that we see or feel? Now, here's the atheist explanation for why we see something instead of nothing. The atheist says the answer is no one times nothing equals everything. No one times nothing equals everything. Out of nothing, because of no one, comes everything we have.
Now, think of what a silly argument that is. Look at the cosmos, the universe. Think for just a moment about the immensity of the cosmos. This is going to blow your mind. We live in the Milky Way galaxy.
Everybody knows that. We're in the Milky Way galaxy. There are over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
The average distance, and I looked this up last night to be sure. The average distance from one star to the next star in our galaxy is 30 trillion miles. Now, to give you an idea how far 30 trillion miles is, just imagine getting one of the decommissioned space shuttles.
They're going to loan it to you for a little while to take a journey by space. The space shuttle travels at 17,000 miles an hour, five miles a second. If you were to get in that space shuttle and take off and go to the next star, 30 trillion miles away, it would take you 201,000 years to get there, traveling at 17,000 miles an hour. To put it another way, let's say that you were to take off in the space shuttle on the day Christ was born in Bethlehem. From then until now, you've been traveling at 17,000 miles an hour. You would have only completed 1% of your trip toward that star by today.
You would still have 99% more of the trip to go. That would be to get you to the next star. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe, and our universe is expanding. How do you explain that? How do you explain that? You know what the atheist says? The atheist says there is no explanation. There doesn't need to be an explanation because the universe is eternal, and whatever is eternal doesn't need a beginning, and that's true. If it's eternal, it doesn't need a beginning, but guess what scientists have discovered? We have a beginning to our universe. The second law of thermodynamics says that the universe is running out of energy.
It's winding down. Now, think about this. If the universe is eternal, it has an eternal past, and if it has an eternal past, then it would have already run out of energy by now, and more and more scientists are coming to see that. In the 1930s, there was a Belgian priest who became an astronomer named George Lemaitre, and he theorized that the entire universe had been packed in a dense collection of matter that existed at temperatures of trillions of degrees, and then about 13.7 billion years ago, there was an explosion. He called it the cosmic egg that exploded the moment of creation. Sir Frederick Hoyle later changed that to the Big Bang, and it was the same theory that there was a mass of matter that suddenly exploded and became the universe. Respected astronomers like Edwin Hubble, for whom the Hubble telescope was named, confirmed that there had been a myriad of galaxies beyond our galaxy, the universe is expanding, therefore it had a beginning as well. Interestingly, on April the 23rd of 1992, a team of scientists released the findings from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, COBE, that confirmed what Hubble and Lemaitre said, that there had to be a beginning of the universe.
Could I add something here? Science is not the enemy of Christianity, as long as it's true science. True science will always lead you to the truth. Scientists have discovered there had to be a beginning of our universe, which then raises the question, where did this dense matter that suddenly exploded, where did it come from? And what is the cause of that explosion? What or who caused that explosion? There had to be some cause for it. Let me illustrate it this way.
James Emory White uses this illustration. Have you seen those elaborate displays of dominoes, maybe thousands of them that are in a form of a map or some other design, and somebody topples over that first domino, all of the other dominoes start collapsing, and sometimes it takes five or ten minutes for all of the dominoes to collapse. Now, just imagine your channel surfing one night, and you land on a channel, and one of those collapsing domino exhibitions is in process.
You get there about halfway through it. You don't know what happened at the beginning, but you can assume that someone or something caused that first domino to collapse, to fall over, causing everything else as well. And that's what scientists are saying to us. If there is a beginning, something or someone had to cause that beginning. Interestingly, even atheists are willing to concede that. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher that I told you about, an atheist said, quote, but allow me to tell you that I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a simple but profound truth. Out of nothing comes nothing. Anything that has a beginning has to have a cause. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're looking at me.
I can read your mind. You think, wait a minute, pastor, you've just said that the universe had to have a first cause, and you think it's God who created God. Where did God come from?
Now, don't miss this point. Both atheists and creationists agree on this one point, that if something is eternal, it doesn't have to have a first cause. They agree that if something is eternal, it doesn't have to be a first cause.
Here's the difference. The atheist used to believe that the universe itself was eternal. It didn't need a first cause. The universe was eternal, not demanding a first cause. But now science, true science, has led to the conclusion that there was a beginning of the universe.
And because there was a beginning, there now has to be a cause, a first cause for the universe, for the matter and for the energy that caused the explosion. Interestingly, that new atheist, Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion, concedes very much there could be a first cause. In an interview with Time Magazine, Dawkins said, quote, there could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.
When the reporter asked him if that something could be God, Dawkins replied, yes. But it also could be any of a billion gods. It could be the God of the Martians or the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of it being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small.
I love author Mark Mittelberg's rejoinder to Dawkins' statement. He said, you can call him what you want. The evidence from the origin of the universe tells us a lot about what he is like. And the description sounds amazingly similar to what the Bible tells us about one particular God, who actually is called Yahweh, the God of Jesus, the creator of the world. We often ask the question, and if there is a God, why hasn't he revealed himself? He fails to take into account all the ways he has revealed himself, starting with the cosmos, with nature.
The psalmist declared in Psalm 19, one, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the work of his hand. When famed astronaut John Glenn was given permission at age 77 to fly on the space shuttle, on that flight he looked out the window and remarked, to look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible. Now, let's conceive one thing atheist Richard Dawkins said.
It's a giant leap from a first cause of creation to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It's hard to get that out of the cosmological argument. But fortunately, that's not the only evidence God has left. There are three other sets of God's fingerprints we're going to look at next time that help us answer the question, how can I know there is a God? I hope you'll join us. There's a lot more I want to say on today's topic.
In fact, we'll spend several more days addressing this important question. How can I know there is a God? I'd like to remind you that I've written a bestselling book that complements this teaching series.
It shares the same title, How Can I Know? It's our featured resource today, and we're ready to send a copy to you right now. Look, whether you're struggling with doubts about God yourself, or you have a son, daughter, perhaps a grandchild, wrestling with this common doubt, I believe that the principles I share in this book will give you a sense of renewed hope and assurance. And when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory, I'd like to send a copy to your home with my thanks. In addition to the topic we addressed on today's program, I tackle questions like, how can I know how to start over when I've blown it? How can I know the Bible is true?
How can I know God is good with all the suffering in the world? Seven answers to seven very important questions. In closing, I want to thank you for giving generously so that others may benefit from Pathway to Victory, and especially those of you who have become Pathway Partners. A Pathway Partner is someone who agrees to give a gift every month, providing Pathway to Victory the strength and stability that's needed to amplify our message in the world. And as a Pathway Partner, you're empowering our ministry to broadcast the good news about Jesus Christ on radio, television, and online, addressing doubts, clearing confusion, and transforming lives through the bold biblical teaching of God's Word. Thanks so much for your partnership, David. Thanks, Dr. Jeffress. You know, you can become a Pathway Partner by following the easy steps online at ptv.org.
And this month, we're aiming to sign up 300 new Pathway Partners, and we need your help to reach that goal. Now, when you give your first monthly gift or when you give a one-time generous gift in support of Pathway to Victory, you're invited to request the bestselling book, How Can I Know? by Dr. Robert Jeffress. And when you give an especially generous gift of $75 or more, we'll also include the complete How Can I Know? teaching series on audio and video discs.
This recently updated series is perfect for listening in the car or maybe watching with your small group Bible study or Sunday school class. One more time, call 866-999-2965 or go to ptv.org. Now, if you'd prefer to write, here's that mailing address, P.O. Box 223-609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. One more time, that's P.O. Box 223-609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. I'm David J. Mullins.
There's more evidence to explore for the existence of God, so join us next time when Dr. Jeffress continues to answer the question, How Can I Know There Is a God? That's Wednesday, here on Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. You made it to the end of today's podcast from Pathway to Victory, and we're so glad you're here. Pathway to Victory relies on the generosity of loyal listeners like you to make this podcast possible. One of the most impactful ways you can give is by becoming a Pathway Partner. Your monthly gift will empower Pathway to Victory to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and help others become rooted more firmly in His Word. To become a Pathway Partner, go to ptv.org slash donate or follow the link in our show notes. We hope you've been blessed by today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory.
