God Exists

God: An immaterial being that transcends all space and time, a supernatural being that defies our current laws of physics. The astrophysical evidence indicates that the universe began to exist about 15 billion years ago at the Big Bang. Physical space and time were created in that event, as well as all the matter and energy in the universe. Atheists usually claim that it popped into being out of nothing, but surely that doesn't make sense! Out of nothing, nothing comes. Everything that has a beginning, has a cause, so there must have been a cause which brought the universe into being. As the cause of time and space, it must be timeless and transcend space. As the origin of all the matter in the universe it must also be immaterial - not physical. It must be uncaused because there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must also be personal. For how else could a timeless cause give rise to a temporal effect like the universe? If the cause were an impersonal set of sufficient conditions, then the cause could never exist without the effect. If the sufficient conditions were timelessly present, then the effect would be timelessly present as well. The only way for the cause to be timeless but for the effect to begin in time is if the cause is a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions. Thus, we have scientific evidence that the cause of the universe possesses attributes unique to what Christians call God - being uncaused, timeless, immaterial, personal, and of course must be very powerful in order to be the source of all the energy in the universe. Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe's expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball. (Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 123) P.C.W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for star formation is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes. (P. C. W. Davies, Other Worlds (London: Dent, 1980), pp. 160161, 168169) There are around 50 such constants present in the Big Bang itself which have to be finely-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. What's more, their ratios to each other must also be finely tuned. In the absence of any physical reason why these values should be fine-tuned in this way, it is obvious that the universe is designed. This alternative makes a lot more sense to me than the atheistic interpretation that the universe, when it popped into being, uncaused, out of nothing, just happened to be, by chance, finetuned for intelligent life with an incomprehensible precision and delicacy. On the atheistic view, rape may not be socially advantageous, and so in the course of human development has become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. For the theist, there's nothing really wrong with your raping someone. Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience. So I'll leave it up to my opponent to choose. Either he must show me where objective morals come from in the absence of God, or admit that there is no objective morality, and therefore there is nothing wrong with rape. Finally, the evidence for God comes in the facts concerning the resurrection of Jesus. There are four facts that are universally agreed upon by New Testament scholars, both Christian and non-Christian. 1, His honorable burial by Joseph of Aramethea. As a member of the Jewish Sanherin that condemned Jesus, Joseph is unlikely to be a Christian invention. 2, The fact that his empty tomb was found empty by women in a time and place where women's testimony was considered worthless testifies to the honesty of the writers. It was embarrassing but they recorded it anyway, even recording the unbelief the apostles themselves when the women gave their testimony. 3, On separate occasions individuals and groups of people saw Jesus alive from the dead. These appearances were physical, and lasted over a period of 40 days, longer than any hallucination could. Finally, 4, the original disciples came to believe in the resurrection despite their having every reason not to. Their leader was dead, and Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone rising to eternal life before the end of the world. Scholars have tried in vain to explain away these four facts, but since no one has come up with a rational, naturalistic explanation, we are perfectly justified in saying that we believe God raised Jesus from the dead. That entails, that God exists. So my opponent has to tear down all the scientific evidence for God's existence, plus the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Then he must erect a case of his own to show that God doesn't exist. Until he does that, then the evidence stands that God exists.