If God made everything, who made God?
It sounds logical, doesn't it? Everything was made by something else. You never get an effect without a cause. So if God made everything, he must have been made, too. Who did it?
But wait a minute. If God had to be made by somebody... then somebody had to create whoever created God. And someone had to make whoever made whoever made whoever made whoever made... You see? There's no logical stopping point. It goes back and back, and you never get any ultimate answer.
Try it. Start asking the question: 'Who made God? And who made whoever made...?' You'll still be feebly repeating 'whoever made whoever made...' three days later when they cart you off, tired and emotional, to the mental hospital.
There has to be somebody, or something, to put the whole thing in motion. Nothing just 'happens'. It all comes from somewhere. Everything going on in the universe right now demonstrates that the universe is running down, like a clock that was once wound up. Somebody - or something - must have wound it up...
It makes sense to me to believe that a planning intelligence created what I see around me. That when you reach the ultimate point from which everything started, you find a God, outside space and time, who has always been there (except that 'always' doesn't mean much outside space and time!) and who designed reality the way it is. It doesn't not make sense to believe everything just happened by accident...
The idea of evolution does away with the need for God
Now why should you think that? Probably you're making one of two wrong assumptions. You could be thinking, 'Evolution contradicts the Bible'; or you could be thinking, 'Evolution explains how everything happened without needing to drag God in'. Let's examine both ideas.
First, the Bible. You'll notice that Genesis (where the Bible's creation story occurs) is not subtited A Scientific Treatise: How I Made the World, By God. It doesn't claim to be giving a scientific account - and to critisize it as science would be like critisize the yellow pages (Melbourne's telephone directory) for not having much of a story line.
If Genesis had been written in scientific terminology, nobody in history until now would have been able to understand it. And - judging by the rate at which scientific knowledge is increasing - it would be out of date again twenty years from now! Instead, God has put his statement in the timeless form of a simple story anyone can understand, in any civilization - a memorable picture of a man, a woman, a garden, a snake...
(So does that mean evolution happened? I haven't a clue. All I'm saying is that scientists are exploring how things happened, and the Bible is telling us why - which is a different question. It does so in remarkably simple, dignified language.
Second: does evolution explain everything away? Wrong, and wrong again. It offers no explanation of where matter came from in the first place. Of what happened to cause the primordial explosion which formed the galaxies and solar systems. Of how the most complicated changes could possibly have come about by chance. (Darwin himself confessed, 'When I think of the eye, I shudder.' The delicacy and complexity involved in the human eye seems to prove that we aren't just accidential.)
Go ask a good scientist what are the chances calculated of the raw materials in life 'just happening' (they'd probably tell you it's almost an impossibility something 'just happens'!). And you think evolution explains everything away? Pull the other one.
There are lots of different religions which could be just as true as Christianity
'All right, I'll buy the idea of God. There has to be something out there... something bigger than us... But how can you be sure you know the truth about it? Why the Christian God, rather than any other one?'
Let me give you three reasons to think about. First, the Christian idea of God satisfies more of the real needs of human beings than any other. The Eastern religions talk about a God who is ultimately impersonal - a force, like electricity or the wind. The traditional Western (Greece, Rome) religions talk about gods who are human all right - but they're not very divine: they lie, cheat, fornicate, brawl, and fall out of heaven. Only in Christianity do you find a God who is both transcendent and personal - and who has come so close to human beings that he was actually born as a human baby.
Second, Christianity fulfils people as nothing else can. "I know that Jesus is the only Way. In other religions people are always seeking, always looking at what man has written about God... Now I love God out of thankfulness for what he has done for me."
Third, and this is the clincher, Christianity lays itself open to verification as no other religions does. The Bible insists that you can prove to yourself, in your own experience, whether Jesus' claims were true or not - by inviting him to take charge of your life and transform your experience. 'If anybody is Christian,' claims the Bible, 'he is a brand new person inside.' If you give your life into Jesus' control, and nothing happens, you've disproved Christianity. But as millions have found, Jesus never lets people down - he keeps his promises. And the experience of Jesus' reality and friendship leaves no room for doubt. He is the Way!
The idea of 'God' is philosophically meaningless, emotional language
Here's an idea that appeals to a lot of people. Perhaps the debate about whether God exists of not is a waste of time - because the whole idea of 'God' doesn't make sense anyway! If that's true, you cut through a lot of complicated arguments, and sweep the problems out of the way at a stroke. What a time-saver!
To many, no statement is truly meaningful unless you could carry out tests to verify it (the Verification Principle). So 'grass is green' is a meaningful statement (you can test it by looking at grass to see); but 'Jesus loves me' isn't. For how on earth can you test a statement like that?
This means that any talk about 'God' is just emotional, wishful language; because God can't be tested out. Hence Christian beliefs are not statements of fact. They just reflect the concealed wishes of the person who chooses to believe them.
It sounds like a death-blow to all religion. Until you reflect that there are lots of statements that that kind of belief doesn't cover. 'Too much poison is deadly', for instance. You could test that assertion only by sampling every trace of poison in the world. But if the first bit killed you, you'd never make it through the test... So it's an assertion that can't be tested; yet we know it's healthy to believe tht it's true!
In fact, if you apply the Verification principle strictly, all the concepts of art, ethics, music, love and beauty have to be written off as 'meaningless'. It sounds as if you're reducing 'real life' to a pretty negligible area.
When you have disposed of God as meaningless,there's not much left of life. So the Verification Principle doesn't help us much to make sense of life. And one more thing. The Verification Principle is a statement. A statement that can't be tested. So, according to itself - it must be meaningless!
If God wants us to believe in him, he should make himself visible
But do you believe only in what you can see? Obviously not. The reason you don't walk out of a fifth-floor window is that you believe in gravity - which you have never seen. The reason you don't thrust your fingers in a power socket is that you believe in electricity - which you have never seen. You don't see these things, but you feel their effect in your life. Maybe it could be the same way with God too? That while he stayed invisible he could nonetheless affect your circumstances so unmistakeably that it made sense to believe in him?
'Well, maybe,' you might say. 'But why doesn't he come out of hiding from time to time? Surely everyone would believe if they could just see him.' Really? If God appeared in front of you, he'd either look like everybody else you'd ever seen - in which case you'd have a hard time believing he was special - or else he'd appear in all his power and glory, which would blow your mind so comprehensively tht you wouldn't be sure if it was a trick, or if you were hallucinating, or if you'd gone mad, or... The experience would be so unlike everything else that normally happened t you, that you'd find it hard to believe. At the time it might be convincing. Half an hour later you'd start thinking, 'Did that really happen or did I imagine it?'
The reason God does not manifest himself visibly more often is that he has come as close to us already as he possibly can. When Jesus Christ was here on earth, human beings saw God. Jesus was the perfect representation of what God was like (Hebrews 1:3). And the response of evil human beings was to nail him to a cross. Would we treat him any better today?
But the cross wasn't the end. Jesus rose again and now offers a new life of freedom from evil to anyone who will believe in him and accept him as King. 'We have not seen him,' said the early Christians, 'but we love him' (see 1 Peter 1:8). And one day, the Bible promises, Christians will see Jesus for themselves. So God isn't playing hide and seek behind the clouds, keeping us guessing. He is available and can be real to anyone prepared to make contact with him through Jesus.