Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: What is the cosmological argument for God's existence?
But people will argue theoretically, well, still, there must be some part beyond that realm of the scientific universe that we know of empirically that is self-existent and eternal. And we say, yes, there must be. And then we say, I wonder what it is. What would it have to be like in order to produce all the things that we're talking about here?
And it strangely will begin more and more to resemble the Christian concept of God, even though you call it by another name. But the thing that we've established here is the absolute necessity of postulating a self-existent eternal something. Then it gets more sophisticated to argue whether or not it's personal or impersonal, intelligent or non-intelligent, et cetera.
But the basic objection that we're facing in the modern age has already been solved. Those who would argue that the universe is self-created. Now I wanna spend a little bit more time on that. Two things, first I wanna respond to people who say that the universe is in and of itself, the material universe is eternal.
Again, I ask people, first of all, to produce evidence that would demonstrate that the physical universe is eternal, which puts them immediately, as I said, on a collision course with the collected data and monolithic results of modern science. Now they're on the defensive. Now they're in a minority at that point.
But there are two ways that they can still argue for the eternality of the material universe. One is by arguing that the universe as a whole, even though all of the individual parts that we have of the universe that we know of are contingent, finite, and temporal, there are those who argue, nevertheless, the whole, considered in and of itself, is greater than the sum of its parts.
That the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The other argument that you'll hear in response is that there is some aspect of the universe that is eternal and self-existent that we haven't discovered yet. Well, even if a person puts forth this argument... As soon as we say, well, first of all, you're arguing from silence.
You've given us no evidence that there is an aspect of the universe that is as yet unknown that will explain the presence of the universe that is finite that we know about. So we point out very quickly that their argument is an argument from silence with no evidence. That it's a leap of faith that they are establishing here.
but there's something even more devastating to bring to bear to this kind of an argument. And that is that if there is theoretically some aspect of the universe that is self-existent and eternal, why would we consider that aspect to be part of the universe?
because by its very nature it would be radically different from everything else that we consider as part of the universe by virtue of its being self-existent and eternal. It would certainly have to be differentiated from everything in the universe that is not self-existent, that is not eternal.
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