R.C. Sproul

the use of the cosmological argument on the basis that it cannot produce evidence for the existence of a creator God.

The man who's perhaps most responsible for demolishing the effectiveness of the cosmological argument historically is Immanuel Kant.

whose classic work, The Critique of Pure Reason, gave a thoroughgoing analysis of the traditional arguments for the existence of God.

And his critique sought to indicate that we cannot move intellectually from this world to some kind of transcendent, supernatural, self-existent, eternal being.

Not all of Christendom has rolled over and played dead at the feet of Kant.

Others have maintained that Kant's critique misses the point and that Kant's critique can be leveled by a careful analysis.

But those who have sought to maintain some notion of the cosmological argument have done so at the risk of alienating themselves from the whole mainstream of contemporary philosophy and theology.

and they represent a very small group and their arguments are at best a minority report.

I'm looking forward to the day when that's not the case because I haven't been participating in that minority report, and I think that it's a disastrous thing for Christians to roll over and play dead at the feet of God.

But I don't want to get into the technical dimensions of the cosmological argument this morning.

I want to deal with this in a very practical way.

People come up to me and they say, you know, how do you believe in God?

How should you answer them?

I heard on the radio a few weeks ago, one of these talk shows,

And the talk host had somebody on the phone who was berating modern man for still clinging to vestigial remnants of primitive thought patterns and still believing in the existence of God.

And this man was saying, in light of modern science and modern discoveries of the origin of the universe, et cetera, et cetera, there's no excuse for anyone still clinging to this antiquated notion of God as creator.

And then, of course, somebody else phoned in, and the woman who called in spoke with very, very poor grammar.

She obviously was kind of a washerwoman, grassroots, gutsy type of person, but she was outraged by this heathen attack on the existence of God, and she says, I just have one thing to tell that lady who was in here saying there ain't no God.

I just want her to go right outside and just look at that sky out there and just look at them trees and all that stuff.

And I just want that woman to tell me how they got here and where they came from.