Evidence for the Existence of God
It was a warm summer day, and I decided I would do a little weed eating at the bank where I worked once the lobby closed. I changed into some old jeans and grabbed the weed eater out of the back of the pickup.
I was making my way down a curb on the backside of the bank when I heard a low grumble coming from the ground. I paused and tried to locate the noise. As soon as I cranked the weed eater back up, I heard the same noise again. This time I was committed to finding where the noise was coming from.
Through the freshly mowed grass, I saw a black cylindrical tube rising from the ground. The bank was merely a few hundred feet from the Field Artillery School of the US Army and my first thought was, “This is it; missiles are going to start coming out of the ground.”
I slowly took a step toward it, trying to figure out if I should run or if just accept my fate. I knelt down to get a closer look at the object. Just as my face was a couple of inches from the tube, it sprayed me with some of the foulest smelling water in the world.
That is when it hit me. It wasn’t a missile. It wasn’t an alien spacecraft. It wasn’t a mysterious tube. It was a sewer sprayer. The area behind the bank was prone to flooding and a sewer pump had been installed in case of a leak in the septic tank.
What happened was not random. It was a calculated, part of a plan, designed by someone and intentionally placed in the exact spot it needed to be. The only luck involved was the bad luck I had by being a few inches from the sprayer when it decided it was time to release pressure from the rain the night before.
As funny as that moment was, it is a great illustration for the evidence for the existence of God. My sewer moment made one of the most famous arguments for the existence of God obvious, the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Dr William Lane Craig formulates this argument into three key points: “Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause.”[1]
Atheists and skeptics often try to wiggle around this argument by appealing to things like random chance, the multiverse, or a cyclical universe. However, any attempt to subvert this reality falls flat. The more we learn about the universe the more it becomes apparent that the universe began to exist.
Additionally, the sewer spraying my face reminded me of another important argument for the existence of God, the teleological argument. In my case, the location of the sprayer, the way it operated perfectly, and its intricate craftmanship demonstrated to me that it was designed by someone with a mind. The universe takes this illustration to a whole new level.
Astrophysicist Hugh Ross explains the finely tuned nature of the strong nuclear force and expansion rate of the universe by describing stacking dimes across a billion North Americas all the way to the moon, then blindfolding yourself, and picking one exact dime. If any other dime is picked the universe couldn’t exist.[2] Just imagine the odds of that happening. You are more likely to win the lottery every day than for the universe to accident be like it is.
It is not just Christian thinkers that acknowledge the fine tuning of the universe. Even Stephen Hawking admitted, “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”[3] In other words, it appears that the universe is designed perfectly for life. The universe is not some cosmic accident; it had a designer and purpose.
Knowing all of these things, where does the evidence point? If the sprayer had spontaneously popped out of the ground and shot me in the face that would have been a miracle. However, the evidence instantly made me realize that it was designed, placed there for a purpose, and someone was behind its installation. Creation does the same thing. The evidence points to a Creator, we only need to be open to the possibility of God for puzzle pieces to all come together.
The question then becomes not is there evidence for God, but what are we going to do with the evidence? Scripture tells us, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” (Psalm 19:1 ESV). Creation is crying out that there is a designer behind all of what we see. God is trying to get our attention with every cosmological discovery, advancement in physics, and every time you set on your back porch and watch the sunset.
[1] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 111.
[2] Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries Reveal God, 4th ed. (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2018), 115–116.
[3] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), 125.
