Good News Tucson - A Family Values Publication

Real Questions Real Answers

by Prof. Christy Smalley and Pastor Carl Springhower with American Institute for Biblical Studies.

Q: How Do We Know God Exists?

A: "A God comprehended is no God." - Tersteegen.

This might be a good place to start in our understanding of the existence of God, but in concrete terms the reality of proving God's existence in a lab experiment is not possible. Belief in God requires more than our scientific evidence. It requires a combination of philosophy, testimony, spirituality, experience, science, and theology. However, there are a couple of good foundational arguments about God's existence: intelligent design and human conscience.

Intelligent Design states the world around us is filled with both order and complexity -- "ordered complexity," if you will; and such ordered complexity could not have arisen by accident. Therefore, there has to be an intelligence who designed this world. One scientist often cited by defenders of Intelligent Design is Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box. The "fine-tuning" of life on earth, in fact almost everything about the basic structure of the universe, from fundamental laws and parameters of physics and the initial distribution of matter and energy, is balanced on a razor's edge for life to occur.

The second basic argument deals with the conscience, moral laws, and a basic desire for God innate within mankind. All men of all cultures within all nations of all time have always had signs of worshiping some type of higher being. Without fail, after discovering a worship system within a culture you will also discover a moral code. God has given mankind a conscience - that inborn knowledge of right and wrong. Once a person has accepted Jesus Christ, his conscience is guided by the Holy Spirit and right and wrong is weighed in the light of God's precepts.

"Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3)

Christy Smalley is the President of American Institute for Biblical Studies and is a member of American Association of Christian Counselors. Pastor Carl Springhower is the Theology Professor at the seminary. www.americanbiblicalstudies.com.