We Know God By His Effects

We Know God By His Effects
by Frank Turek

How do we know God exists? By God’s effects — we reason from effect back to cause. Here are three of God’s most important effects:

1. The Universe: Even atheists today admit that the universe is an effect. In other words, it had a beginning — space, time, and matter literally came into existence out of nothing. As the late Stephen Hawking put it, “Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.”

The only question is, what could have caused space, time, and matter to have come into existence out of nothing? Atheists can cite no viable cause. Instead, it seems that the cause must transcend space, time, and matter. That is, the cause appears to be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial, powerful enough to have created the universe out of nothing, personal enough to have chosen to create, and intelligent enough to have been able to make a choice. We're getting close to God.

2. The Fine-Tuning of the Universe: We’ve discovered in recent decades that our universe is precisely fine-tuned. If any one of a number of attributes were slightly different about our universe, either the universe wouldn’t exist at all or it couldn’t support life. For example, if the gravitational force were different by 1 part in 1040 compared to the strong nuclear force, we wouldn’t exist. That’s 1 part in 1 with 40 zeroes following it!

To grasp that level of precision, imagine stacking dimes across the entire North American continent to the moon (that’s over 238,000 miles). Do the same on a billion more North American continents. Mark one dime red, mix all those huge piles of dimes together, blindfold a friend, and ask him to pick one dime. The chance that he would pick that one red dime is 1 in 1040. And that’s only one of about a dozen super-precise numbers related to the laws of nature. If any one of them were different, we wouldn’t exist. The cause of these effects must be extremely intelligent and precise.

3. The Moral Law: We have an effect inside of us that causes us to believe that we have certain moral obligations and moral rights. As the Declaration of Independence explains, these rights are “self-evident” and come from our “Creator.”

Without our Creator, there would be no objective moral law or standard beyond ourselves. Therefore, we couldn’t justify why the Nazis were wrong and the allies were right. Unless God exists, the criminality of the Holocaust is just a matter of human opinion. But since we know it was wrong regardless of anyone’s point of view, there must be a moral law giver that we are obligated to obey. That moral law is an effect that comes from God.

Adding up the attributes of the cause behind these three effects, we have a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent, and moral Creator. Sure seems like God to me! And we don’t need any kind of scripture to know this. We just follow the effects back to their cause.

Dr. Frank Turek is a former US Naval Aviator and award-winning author or coauthor of five books: I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, Hollywood Heroes: How Your Favorite Movies Reveal God, Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God to make their Case, Correct, Not Politically Correct, and Legislating Morality.