R.C. Sproul

We must live as if there's a God.

Why?

For ethics to be meaning.

I think we need to point that out to people.

See that they're living on borrowed capital.

That the humanist and secularist today wants to hang on to certain Christian values, certain Christian goals, certain Christian meaning without the only possible basis for it.

We have to get our borrowed capital back.

The notion of self-creation is what we would call formally absurd.

That is to say, it's a contradictory, absurd notion.

For something to create itself, it would have to exist before it existed.

The purpose for this brief series of lectures and Christian evidences is not to give us a technical approach to the science of apologetics, but to deal with practical methods of answering those questions that we most frequently hear raised and objections directed against the Christian faith.

The one I'd like to deal with this morning is the basic question of the existence of God.

Now, the particular dimension

of the Christian concept of God that comes into assault by secular man is the notion of God the creator.

Traditionally and historically, the most persistent argument for the existence of God in Western civilization has been the cosmological argument.

So-called because it involves a reasoning backward on the basis of the law of cause and effect, which we call causality, from the existence of the world or the cosmos, hence we call it the cosmological argument, to the existence of God.

We reason from the present order to the basis of an eternal first cause or creator.

Now that argument has come into enormous disrepute for all kinds of reason.

That is, at an intellectual and academic level.

For the most part, the philosophical institutions of this world, as well as the theological institutions of this world, have abandoned