Is God Real?
Can faith in God be reasonable? Is He really there and is this His universe? These are the bedrock questions of human existence. The answers to these questions set the course of one’s life. If God doesn’t exist, there is no external source of hope, no external source of morality, and no ultimate meaning. But if God does exist, then life has purpose, direction, and soul-satisfying fulfillment.
Here at Forestgate, we believe not only that God is real, but that He has revealed himself so that He can be known. This is a bold claim. But if you’re a skeptic, what reasons can we offer to show you why we believe this?
We’re so glad you asked. Questioning one’s faith is crucial, deepening our understanding and building confidence in a biblical worldview. Given today’s cultural messages that emphasize the supposed infallibility of evolutionary theory, the foolishness of religious people, and the dominance of a secular view point, it may be surprising to discover the flimsiness of atheist arguments and the robust evidence there is for rational and well-grounded belief. Here are just a few thoughts to consider on why you can be confident in the reality of God.
Evolutionary theory both fails to explain our world and inescapably leads to harmful conclusions. The theory of evolution, or natural selection, explains all life as the result of genetic mutations across billions of years. Charles Darwin proposed that every species of life we can now observe resulted from nature selecting the best mutations. In other words, all life began from a single-celled organism and over vast stretches of time, this became swallows and giant squid, honey bees and elephants, great white sharks and humans. But there is a fundamental and devastating defect in Darwin’s theory: the fossil record thoroughly rejects it.
Think about the chart we all saw in our biology textbooks on how a monkey gradually becomes a human being, walking more upright with each successive species variation. If Darwin’s theory is true, the fossil record should be crowded with multiple variations in between the species of monkey and human. There have been many well-publicized discoveries and claims about finding the “missing link,” but these have been debunked. These disproved finds include Java Man in 1891, Nebraska Man in 1922, Nutcracker Man in 1959, and Lucy in 1974. Besides this gap between man and monkey, the fossil record should be overflowing with transitional forms in between all the species. But the uncomfortable truth for evolutionists is that there are very few fossils they can refer to as transitional, and more importantly, those examples are unable to demonstrate any sequence from one species to the next.
Due to its assumption that only the best mutations continue to propagate themselves — “survival of the fittest” — Darwin’s theory logically leads to racism and genocide. This view is present even in the title of Darwin’s book. Most authors prefer to not acknowledge this ugliness and typically refer to the book as simply The Origen of Species. The full title is in fact The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin made his racial theories explicit in a later book, The Descent of Man, where he affirmed that, “The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.”
Darwinism offered an intellectual justification to racial segregation in the southern United States, genocide against Australian Aborigines, Cecil Rhode’s conception of Anglo-Saxon supremacy used to brutally colonize Africa, and Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. If God isn’t real, the only other coherent option to understanding our universe is Darwinism, which is both fatally flawed in evidence and fatal to the human race itself.
The human concept of morality is clear evidence of God, and without God, there is no such thing as morality. Why do nearly all of us speak in terms of right and wrong, just and unjust? How is it that those categories even exist in every human culture? If there is no God, there is no logical basis for having these categories of thought. We should only be striving to survive, and using any means to achieve that end. Right or wrong would be irrelevant since any means would be acceptable insofar as they support that all-important end, our own survival. But since we all think in this manner, it is a rather clear manifestation that there is indeed a Creator who imbued us with that nature.
The concept of right and wrong — morality — is impossible to sustain without a real, infinite, and personal God. Without God, right and wrong are only perceptions. It may seem wrong to you that someone stole your car, but to him it seemed right because he needed the money. Multiply this one example across the range of possibilities in a society, and it becomes clear that no society can function without an external sense of morality. Some may say that our laws function as our own self-derived external morality. Would that same person insist that it was morally acceptable for Stalin to kill millions of his own people since it was the law of that nation? On what moral basis would that person argue that a certain nation’s laws are moral while another nation’s are immoral? Without God, we are only left with our individual instincts.
It was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who proclaimed, “God is dead,” and yet his life serves as a warning for those who would attempt to actually live according to that principle. He ended up insane and died in an asylum. For Nietzsche understood that if there is no God, then the ideas of purpose, beauty, love, and morality are baseless. Life without these concepts is meaningless.
The human search for meaning indicates that there is One who gives us meaning. Another trait found across humanity is the search for meaning. This common feature cannot be explained by any evolutionary process. The ability for us to ponder our own existence, to wonder why we are here on this planet at this specific time, and to seek that which brings meaning into our lives are absolutely at odds with the notion that we are products of blind chance. Rather, these human tendencies are the expression of our given nature, that One with eternal purpose created those in His image so that they too would seek and have purpose.
C.S. Lewis captures this peculiar aspect of our condition by explaining, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We can come back from the best vacation but there is still a lack of complete rest. We can experience success or meaningful familial relationships, but yet we find within ourselves the sense that we are still missing something.
This plight is not new. Augustine of Hippo, writing around 400 AD, confessed that “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” The restlessness we all sense is on purpose — it is a guidepost for us, telling us to seek meaning in the only One that can fully provide a rationale for our existence and our purpose.
There is much more to say about the reality of God. If this has caught your interest, if this has sparked questions with which perhaps you’ve never wrestled, please know that Forestgate is a safe place to explore this topic without any pressure. Any of our leaders would love the opportunity to sit down and engage with any questions you have.