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1
Does God Exist?
Christianity 101
Martin Ester
January 24, 2013
2
Does God Exist?
• Why is the existence of God important?
• The answer to many ultimate questions
depends on that question, e.g.
Why are we here?
What is the purpose of life?
C. S. Lewis
“ God is not the sort of thing one can be
moderately interested in.”
3
Does God Exist?
• Possible answers:
Yes: Theism
Don’t know / cannot know:
Agnosticism
No: Atheism
� (Keller 2008), chapters 8 and 9
4
What do we Mean by “God”?
A supernatural being
• Omnipotent
• Omniscient
• (Omnibenevolent)
5
Arguments For the Existence of God
• The Cosmological Argument
• The Fine-Tuning Argument
• The Moral Argument
�A lot more arguments have been discussed in
the course of the centuries, see e.g.
(Wikipedia 2013).
�These are arguments, no proofs.
6
The Cosmological Argument
(Craig 1979)
• Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
• The universe began to exist.
• Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Modus ponens
(A�B) and A
implies B
7
The Cosmological Argument
• Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Is the basis of the natural and social sciences.
Why did the bone break?
What caused the financial crisis?
8
The Cosmological Argument
• The universe began to exist.
• Big Bang theory (Wollack 2010) is the prevailing
cosmological model that explains the early
development of the Universe.
• The Universe was once in an extremely hot and
dense state (singularity) which has expanded
rapidly since then.
• The Big Bang occurred approximately 14 billion
years ago.
9
The Cosmological Argument
• What can we say about this cause?
• Must be uncaused.
• Must be changeless, timeless, immaterial.
� God
10
The Fine-Tuning Argument
• The laws of physics have fifteen constants that
need to be tuned very accurately to the actually
observed values to allow life in our universe.
(Collins 2006)
• The rate of expansion of the universe depends
on its total mass and energy as well as the
gravitational constant.
• The gravitational constant G is a parameter
involved in the calculation of gravitational force
between two bodies.
11
The Fine-Tuning Argument
17
10
1
• If the rate of expansion had been smaller by
, then the universe would have collapsed
again.
• If that rate had been greater by then stars
and planets could not have formed.
610
1
12
The Fine-Tuning Argument
• The strong nuclear force is the
force between two or more
nucleons, which is responsible
for binding of protons and
neutrons into atomic nuclei.
• If the strong nuclear force had been slightly
weaker, then only hydrogen could have formed.
• If that force were slightly stronger, all hydrogen
would have been converted to helium, and the
fusion furnaces of stars would not exist.
13
The Fine-Tuning Argument
• The observed combination of the fifteen
physical constants is extremely unlikely to
happen by chance.
• The “multiverse” hypothesis claims that there
is a very large number of universes with
different values of the physical constants.
• This hypothesis makes the existence of one
universe supporting life much more likely.
14
The Fine-Tuning Argument
• But the “multiverse” hypothesis postulates a
very complex model.
• Scientists prefer simple models over complex
models, that tend to overfit to the observed
data and not generalize well to unobserved
data.
� Occam’s Razor
15
The Fine-Tuning Argument
• The assumption of a Creator God can explain
the observed physical constants necessary for
life within a single universe.
• Stephen Hawking (Hawking 1988)
“It would be very difficult to explain why the
universe should have begun in just this way,
except as the act of a God who intended to
create beings like us.”
16
The Moral Argument
• Many people say “No one should impose their
moral views on others”.
• Moral relativism: moral views are relative to
cultures and individuals.
• But most people believe in the
existence of “human rights”,
absolute moral standards,
e.g. that nobody should be
killed.
17
The Moral Argument
• “Moral … is an orientation toward under-
standings about what is right and wrong, just
and unjust, that are not established by our
own desires or preferences but are believed
to exist apart from them.” (Smith 2003)
• Why do moral standards exist?
- Created by humans/society
- Result of evolution
- God-given
18
The Moral Argument
• Created by humans/society
• “Honoring individual dignity means that in the
long run everybody is better off.”
• What if the majority decides not to give human
rights to the minority?
�Nazis and Jews
• The Nazis had the majority, but today we
nevertheless “know” that the Nazis were
wrong.
19
The Moral Argument
• Result of evolution (Rutherford 2007)
• Altruism: selfless giving of oneself to others
with no expectation of receiving anything in
return.
• Altruistic individuals may suffer loss, injury or
death.
• Such behavior does not provide a selective
advantage.
20
The Moral Argument
• A community with altruistic individuals can still
have a selective advantage.
• But genes are inherited by individuals, and
selection operates at the level of individuals,
not populations.
21
The Moral Argument
• God-given
• If there is a cause of the Universe, a creator
who fine-tuned it, then it is plausible that he
has given all humans the same moral standards.
• C.S. Lewis (Lewis 1952)“If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could
not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe …
The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would
be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get
us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find
inside ourselves.”
22
Conclusion
• There is no proof for the existence (or non-
existence) of God.
• There are good arguments for the existence of
God.
• The existence of God provides a “unifying”,
compelling explanation of the cause of the
universe, the fine tuning of its physical
constants, and the existence of absolute moral
laws.
23
References
Francis Collins: “The Language of God”, Free Press, 2006.
William Lane Craig: “The Kalam Cosmological Argument”, Library of philosophy
and religion, Macmillan, 1979.
Stephen Hawking: “A Brief History of Time”, Bantam Books, 1988.
Tim Keller: “The Reason for God”, Penguin Books, 2008, chapters 8 and 9.
CS Lewis: “Mere Christianity”, Barbour and Company, 1952.
Matthew Rutherford: “The Evolution of Morality”, University of Glasgow, 2007.
Christian Smith: “Moral Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture”,
Oxford University Press, 2003, page 8.
Wikipedia: “Existence of God”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God,
retrieved on January 19, 2013.
Edward J. Wollack: Cosmology: The Study of the Universe, Universe 101: Big
Bang Theory, NASA, 2010.