Does God Exist?
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Can we prove that God exists?
Can you prove that God exists? Stay tuned for today's episode of Renewing Your Mind.
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.
Bringing up that you're a Christian can be intimidating, can't it? We can be scared that someone will bring up an opposition to the Christian faith that we can't answer, even a fundamental objection like the existence of God Himself. This is the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and this week, you'll hear messages from R.C. Sproul's series, Christian Evidences. It's a series recorded in the early days of the Ligonier Valley Study Center, with students in attendance and, of course, Dr. Sproul's iconic chalkboard. This series hasn't been featured on Renewing Your Mind for almost two decades, so you won't want to miss an episode. And when you donate this week to support this daily outreach, you can own this series for life.
Plus, to further help you to be equipped to defend the faith, we'll send you the 32-message series, Defending Your Faith, and the immensely popular book, A Field Guide on False Teaching, which covers topics like deism, the prosperity gospel, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Islam, New Age spirituality, and much more. Simply give your donation and request this significant offer at renewingyourmind.org before midnight Thursday. So, does God exist? Here's a young R.C. Sproul.
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 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.
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