Wednesday 23 December 2015

Evidence for God – the Problem of Existence


At its most simple the problem is that we exist - we are here. Now most of us don’t regard existence as a problem…we might have thought it a problem that the bully at school exists or that our boss exists; but existence needs to be explained because things don’t simply happen by themselves.

In our family home things happen. A few years ago our house alarm went off inexplicably one night. I had just put the children to bed and had set the alarm and I was settling down on our bed to read when my peace was disturbed by the mournful wail of the siren. For once I was fairly sure ‘the bad guys’ as my children used to call them were not to blame. After turning off the alarm and assuring the security company that everything was alright I went and asked the children what had happened, they told me, “I don’t know. It wasn’t me.”
“Nothing,” said my very young daughter but I had seen her running down the passage heading for bed in panic at setting the alarm off.

Things don’t just happen by themselves. The toys did not fall out of the box by themselves; the paint did not get on to the wall by itself; Airbus A380’s do not get assembled by themselves; mathematics textbooks do not simply appear by themselves; hurricanes do not blow and leave behind them newly assembled nuclear submarines. Our universe is much more complicated than any of those simple machines…our bodies are much more complicated than those machines…something caused them to happen. We exist…that is the problem that needs an explanation…

There are only three possible solutions to existence…
  1. Everything happened by accident, 
  2. The universe created itself 
  3. Or a powerful being made it all…



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