Is There Evidence for God and Scripture?

The Kalām argument runs as follows: (1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause. (2) The universe began to exist. (3) Therefore, the universe has a cause. The first premise is a bedrock principle of reason — things do not pop into being uncaused out of nothing. The second is confirmed by both philosophy and modern cosmology: the Big Bang represents an absolute beginning of space, time, matter, and energy.

The cause of the universe must itself be uncaused (to avoid infinite regress), timeless (since time began with the universe), spaceless (since space began with the universe), enormously powerful, and — critically — personal. Only a personal agent can freely choose to initiate an event at a particular moment. An impersonal cause operating from eternity would produce an eternal effect. A personal will explains why the universe began when it did.

Leibniz asked: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Everything we observe is contingent — it exists, but it did not have to exist. Your chair, your planet, the atoms in your body — all could have failed to exist under different circumstances. If every single thing in the universe is like this, what explains the existence of anything at all?

A chain of contingent explanations cannot explain itself. Imagine every book in a library was copied from another book in the library — this explains where each copy came from, but not where the original text came from. There must be something that exists necessarily — that cannot not exist — which grounds the existence of everything contingent. This Necessary Being matches what theists call God.

Mathematicians distinguish between potential infinities (processes that could go on indefinitely) and actual infinities (completed infinite sets that exist in reality). While potential infinities are unproblematic, actual infinities in the real world generate paradoxes — Hilbert's Hotel being the famous illustration. An actually infinite past would mean we could never have arrived at the present moment, since arriving at any point requires traversing all prior moments.

This philosophical argument converges with the scientific evidence: the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us the universe is running down toward heat death. If the universe were infinitely old, it would already have reached maximum entropy. The fact that it hasn't is further evidence that it began a finite time ago.

Physicist Paul Davies writes that the numerical values of the fundamental constants "seem to be the result of careful fine-tuning." The cosmological constant — the energy density of empty space — is fine-tuned to 1 part in 10¹²⁰. The ratio of electromagnetic force to gravity is fine-tuned to 1 part in 10⁴⁰. If these were even slightly different, the universe would either collapse immediately or expand too fast for any structure to form.

The probability of all these constants being within the life-permitting range by chance is incomprehensibly small. There are three possible explanations: chance, physical necessity, or design. Physical necessity has no mechanism — there is no law requiring constants to take their actual values. Chance strains credibility beyond reason. Design — a transcendent intelligence who calibrated the universe for life — is the most reasonable conclusion.

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, admitted that the origin of life appears "almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going." The simplest living cell contains thousands of precisely specified proteins, all of which must be present and functional simultaneously for the cell to survive. This is irreducible complexity — remove any one component and the system fails.

The information encoded in DNA — billions of precisely ordered base pairs — exhibits what philosopher of biology Stephen Meyer calls "specified complexity." This pattern is the universal marker of intelligent causation in every context where we know the origin. When we see a message, we infer a mind. DNA is a message incomparably more sophisticated than any human language.

Philosopher David Chalmers named the "hard problem of consciousness": even a complete physical description of the brain — every neuron, every synapse, every electrochemical reaction — does not explain why there is any subjective experience at all. Why does physical processing feel like anything? Why are we not philosophical zombies — beings that process information but experience nothing?

Mind is the one thing we know most directly. It is the lens through which all physical knowledge is acquired. A worldview that cannot account for the existence of minds — that reduces consciousness to nothing but matter — is self-undermining: if minds are merely matter, we have no reason to trust the reasoning of those very minds. The theistic framework — that a Personal God created personal beings in His image — provides the most coherent account of the reality of mind, free will, and rational thought.

The moral argument does not claim that atheists cannot behave morally. Atheists can and often do. The argument is about the ontological grounding of moral values — what makes something objectively right or wrong, independent of opinion. If the universe is purely physical — matter in motion — then "good" and "evil" are not features of reality but expressions of preference, like liking chocolate or vanilla.

Yet we speak about the Holocaust as being objectively evil — not merely culturally disapproved of. We say slavery was wrong even when entire societies approved of it. These moral intuitions carry the weight of objective truth. This objectivity requires a transcendent, personal moral standard — which is exactly what the God of Scripture provides. His nature — perfectly loving, just, and holy — is the unchanging standard against which all actions are measured.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood what a godless universe entails with brutal honesty: "There are no moral facts." Without God, "human dignity" is a useful fiction — a social contract that stronger parties can revoke at will. The 20th century's atheist regimes — Stalin's gulags, Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields — demonstrate what happens when human worth is grounded in the state or ideology rather than in God.

The values that drive human rights movements — that every person matters regardless of race, ability, class, or gender — are the fruit of the Judeo-Christian conviction that all people bear the image of God. Secularism has borrowed this capital from its theological inheritance without acknowledging the source. Remove God and human dignity is a sentiment, not a fact.

In his autobiography "Surprised by Joy," C.S. Lewis traces his conversion through what he called "Joy" — a bittersweet longing that struck him unexpectedly, pointing toward something greater than any earthly object. He wrote: "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."

This argument does not prove God from logical necessity, but it is powerful existential evidence. Blaise Pascal articulated it as the "God-shaped vacuum" in every human heart. Every culture in human history has expressed this same transcendent longing in worship, ritual, and art. The universality of this impulse and the inability of any finite object to satisfy it points toward a transcendent God who alone can fill it.

Historian Gary Habermas has identified a set of facts that are conceded by virtually all critical scholars — including those who reject the resurrection: (1) Jesus died by crucifixion. (2) His tomb was found empty shortly after. (3) His disciples genuinely believed they saw Him alive afterward. (4) Paul — a persecutor of Christians — was suddenly converted by what he claimed was a direct encounter with the risen Christ. (5) James, Jesus's skeptical brother, became a leader of the church after claiming to see the risen Lord.

These facts demand an explanation. The hallucination theory fails — hallucinations are private experiences, not shared by 500 people; and hallucinations don't produce empty tombs. The "wrong tomb" theory fails — the authorities could simply have produced the body. The "disciples stole the body" theory fails — men do not die for what they know to be a lie. The resurrection is not accepted as a miracle because of credulity — it is the only hypothesis that explains all the evidence.

Classical scholar John Warwick Montgomery noted that to be skeptical of the New Testament's textual reliability is to be skeptical of all ancient history — since the NT is better attested than any other document from the ancient world. Textual scholars estimate that the original text is preserved to a degree of 99%+ accuracy across the manuscript tradition, with no central doctrines affected by any textual variants.

The Rylands Papyrus (P52), a fragment of John's Gospel, dates to approximately 125 AD — within 30-35 years of the original composition. The Chester Beatty Papyri contain most of the NT and date to around 250 AD. This extraordinary proximity to the originals — combined with the massive number of manuscripts — gives us confidence in what the NT actually said.

Noted archaeologist William F. Albright wrote: "There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of Old Testament tradition." Key finds include: the Tel Dan Inscription (confirms the House of David as a historical dynasty); the Pilate Stone (confirms Pontius Pilate's exact title as Prefect of Judaea); the Ossuary of Caiaphas (the high priest who tried Jesus); the Pool of Siloam (where Jesus healed a blind man, John 9); and the destruction of Jericho's walls.

When the Bible can be checked against external evidence — geography, political structures, names, customs — it consistently proves accurate. While archaeology cannot confirm miracles, it confirms that the people, places, and events described in Scripture are historical. This track record gives significant credibility to the supernatural claims made in the same texts.