Arguments for God

Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist.

Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Premise 1 is the most reliable intuition in science, the common objection, that quantum events are uncaused, is weaker than it sounds. Those events occur within existing quantum fields and follow physical law; whether they have a fully determining cause is debated, but they are not cases of something coming from literal nothing, which is what the premise is about. The principle "something from nothing" is not even coherent as a physical description, because quantum fields are not nothing.

Premise 2 is supported by two lines of evidence: (a) the Big Bang, the universe had a beginning approximately a finite time in the past; all matter, energy, space, and time came into existence together. General relativity models break down at t=0 but consistently point to a beginning. I hold that God created as certain; the precise age I hold with more care, and the argument here only needs that the universe began, not a particular date. (b) The impossibility of an actually infinite past, an infinite regress of past events cannot be traversed to reach the present moment.

What must the cause be? It must be: uncaused (otherwise it too needs a cause); timeless (time began with the universe); spaceless (space began with the universe); immensely powerful (created all energy from nothing); and personal, because the only known way to get a temporal effect from a timeless cause is a free choice by a personal agent.

Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth", describes exactly this: a beginning, caused by a personal Agent outside of time and space. The physics arrived at what Moses wrote.

Common objection: "What caused God?" The argument only requires a cause for things that BEGIN to exist. An eternal, uncaused God is the conclusion the argument points to, not an exception to it.

The universe has around 26 fundamental physical constants, numbers not derived from any deeper theory but simply measured. A number of them turn out to be strikingly fine-tuned for a life-permitting universe, the cosmological constant, key values of the nuclear forces, and the balance between the fundamental forces among them.

The cosmological constant (the energy density of empty space) is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120, if it were slightly larger, the universe would expand too fast for galaxies to form; slightly smaller, it would collapse. The balance between gravity and the other forces is strikingly delicate. Martin Rees points out that if the ratio of electromagnetism to gravity were substantially different, stars could not burn steadily for billions of years, and stable, long-lived stars are what a life-bearing universe needs. The exact tolerances vary by source, so I cite the result rather than a single decimal.

There are three responses to this: chance, necessity, or design. Chance requires a mechanism, merely saying "it happened to work out" is not an explanation. Necessity (these values had to be what they are) has no scientific support. The multiverse attempts to invoke chance at scale, if enough universes exist, one might land on these values, but the multiverse is not observable, not falsifiable, and requires its own fine-tuning to generate life-permitting universes. Design is the inference that fits what we observe: a universe that looks, as physicist Freeman Dyson wrote, "as if it knew we were coming."

Colossians 1:17, "In him all things hold together." Paul was not making a physics claim, but the universe does in fact hold together by fine-tuned constants in a way that points beyond itself.

Premise 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.

Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

Premise 2 is the one people resist philosophically but cannot resist in life. When someone objects "Christianity causes harm," they are making an objective moral claim, that harm is actually wrong, not just personally distasteful. The moment someone says "that is unjust," they are appealing to a standard that exists outside any individual or culture. Atheism has no grounding for that standard.

Evolutionary morality (moral beliefs are survival mechanisms) explains why we HAVE moral intuitions, not why any of them are TRUE. If morality is just evolutionary fitness, then torturing children for fun is "wrong" only in the sense that it doesn't help the species, which is not what anyone means when they say it is wrong.

The Christian answer: moral facts exist because they are grounded in the character of a morally perfect God, and moral duties exist because we are created beings accountable to Him. Romans 2:15, the law written on the heart, the conscience bearing witness.

Key move in conversation: when someone raises a moral objection to Christianity ("the Crusades," "God commanded genocide"), they are borrowing moral capital from a worldview they claim to reject. Ask them what grounds their moral indignation. The objection to God's existence becomes an argument for it.

If the human mind is nothing more than the product of blind, unguided evolutionary processes, then there is no reason to trust that our cognitive faculties produce true beliefs, only that they produce survival-useful beliefs. As C.S. Lewis argued: naturalism undermines itself. If I reason my way to naturalism using a brain that natural selection built purely for survival, I have no basis for trusting the reasoning that got me there.

The Christian worldview, by contrast, holds that human reason is meaningful because we are made in the image of a rational God (Genesis 1:27; John 1:1, the Logos, the rational principle underlying all creation). Our capacity to do mathematics, logic, and philosophy, to engage with abstract truth, makes sense if minds were designed by Mind. It does not make sense if minds are emergent accidents.

Pragmatically: the person who says "there is no truth, only evolution" is making a truth claim. The statement defeats itself.

You do not need to win every argument. You need to remove the intellectual obstacles that keep someone from seriously considering Christ. Use the Columbo method (from Greg Koukl's "Tactics"): ask questions instead of making speeches. "What do you mean by that?" and "How did you come to that conclusion?" take the conversation deeper without putting the person on the defensive.

The Kalam is the strongest single argument because it is deductively valid and both premises have solid support. The fine-tuning is the strongest scientific argument. The moral argument is the most personally confronting, it turns every moral objection into a reason to consider God.

Practice all three with Dave at /apologetics/train.