Tough Questions Christians Shouldn’t Dodge - Part 1
How Do I Know that God Exists?

1 John 5:1-5 – 2nd March 2008
Andrew Lim

Increasingly / Christians are being asked to account for the beliefs they hold
people out there want to know if what we say we believe makes sense
some people find what we believe to be outdated
in the light of this almost total abandonment of the belief
in any form of an absolute truth / we look like dinosaurs
others find them offensive
I mean isn’t it such blatant arrogance in the light of other faiths
to still insist that Christianity is definitively
the only one true religion
still others find Christianity incompatible
with the findings of evolutionary science
- I mean do we have a reply to Richard Dawkins
who in his book The God Delusion
assert that Christians have all been deluded?
still others find the teaching of Christianity absurd
because of all the immense grievous suffering in the world
- little children are abused
- young girls abducted / put in secret dungeons made sex slaves
- plane crashes killing hundreds
If God is loving and powerful / how is it that there’s so much evil

Sometimes the questioner is angry / sometimes bitter/
frustrated / disappointed.

So there are some deadly serious questions out there
and I am personally happy that people are asking them

And people who asked those tough questions are in some ways
searching investigate to see if Christianity could be true

And I think that’s great
I rather people be asking them than not asking them
and any conversation is good conversation
as long as people are looking for God

Christianity is not a hot-house religion
and Christians shouldn’t be house-plants
- coddled and sheltered from the harsh winds outside

No! 1 Pet 3:15 / “Always be prepared to give an answer
to everyone who asks you to give the reason
for the hope that you have”

Truth is never afraid of scrutiny

So beginning from this week / for the few Sundays
I want for us to answer some troubling questions people are
asking out there
- and I refer to them as tough questions Christians should not dodge!

So here goes / the very first question / “How do I know God exists”

There are classical arguments for the existence of God
such as the cosmological argument for God’s existence
teleological argument for God’s existence
ontological argument for God’s existence
moral argument for God’s existence

I would take that approach if I was giving a lecture this morning
But because I am not giving a lecture here / but preaching a sermon
I want to take a very different approach

I want for us to take a look at a number of human experiences
common to the any average human person

These pointers / if I may call them
are not logical or philosophical proofs for God’s existence

And we are not embarrassed that they are not proofs
Because relationships simply aren’t open to proofs
You can’t even prove your mother loves you
O yes, you can give reasons your mum loves you
but You can’t prove she does
Just like you can’t prove historial events.


We don’t have proofs that Ed Hillary was the first to ever climb Mt Everest
- who knows in absolute scientific mathematical terms
that he was the first
-It could well have been that a local sherpa /
perhaps decades before Hillary
have reached the peak without ever knowing the significance of it
- I’m not saying I believe that plausibility
- I’m saying that you can only talk about proofs in the absolute sense
in only two areas if discipline / mathematics and geometry
- In all other areas of life / you will have to be content
with arguments that go beyond reasonable doubt

And people have been sent to the gallows to be hung
simply on arguments that go beyond reasonable doubts.

So the atheist cannot reasonably ask for proofs for the existence of God
because he too / can’t provide irrefutable proofs
for the non-existence of God

I believe that there are some very strong pointers to God’s existence
These are hints / fingerprints if you like / left behind for us to trace

Peter Berger in his book A Rumour of Angels
speaks about “signals of transcendence”
- there are certain indicators / “signals” within the human experience
that should point us / to God’s existence

What then are some of these signals / or pointers to God’s existence
I have time this morning to explore only 6 of them.

First / Our Great Human Desire for Order

Every human society is burdened with the task
of creating some semblance of order

We all strive for order / we somehow believe that if things have order
and if things are in order
only then would human existence be meaningful

We look for order / like we’re looking for a sacred canopy over us
We somehow believe
that order gives us a protective structure for existence

Have you ever wondered / why is it
that no human person can rest or be content with a raging state of chaos

The psalmist cries out
“Deliver us from noisome pestilence”

Which one of us can feel at home
when things all around us are in a constant whirl of turbulence
Why is it that half-an-hour inside a deafening clanging mental asylum
and you want to get out of that place as soon as you can
in fact when you finally make a successful exit
you’ll probably refer to that places / as “hell” / or a “hole”

There is deep inside every human person / a desire for order

And it is this natural desire and propensity for order
that leads us to invent rituals / and have them surround our lives

Rituals are human attempts to give order to our lives
We seem to need some markers to mark out the milestones of life
- birth celebration / anniversaries / new year / Bar Mitzvah
- circumcision ceremony / burial ceremony
and all sorts of rites of passage
from very primitive tribes to sophisticated people

These are little attempts / to give our lives some semblance of order
just so our inner souls can be at peace
Symphony has got to replace cacophony

When a child wakes up in the night from a bad dream
in a thunderstorm / surrounded by darkness / and all alone
she’ll cry for her mother

Now / what does the mother do ?
She will do / what any good mother will do
She will take the child and cradle her
and no matter which part of the world / that mother happens to be
whether in the deep jungles of the Amazon / or in Vancouver
whether she’s black / or white / or yellow
the mother will reassure the child
and with almost the same words / universally
“Its all right / its OK / everything is all right / all is well”

You’ll never get a mother / in such a situation saying
“Yes! You’re right to cry! / Its all so terrifying!!”

Berger says that it is no exaggeration / to say that at in such a moment
the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order
It is she / who has the power to banish the chaos and restore order

The vital question we need to ask is this:
“From where does this propensity for order come?”

This question stimulates a kind of an intellectual restlessness
which looks for a reasonable explanation

Perhaps the most basic question one could ask
in the light of this human propensity for order
is summarized in a single word / “Why”

It raises questions beyond science to explain

The central question we need to consider is:
“Where does the ordering of the world come from?”

We believe that it serves as a “signal” that we were created
for a world of ultimate order and peace
- a place where the terror of chaos will be forever banished


Second / The Argument from Damnation:

There are times when our sense of what is morally, humanly permissible
is so violently outraged
that the only adequate response to the offender
seems to be a curse of some supernatural dimension

How do you feel watching Schindler's List
- especially that part where the Nazi officer
sits on an easy chair on a balcony
presumably after he had made love to a woman
and using a high-powered rifle
he begins taking pot-shots on who he fancies
- putting a bullet through that person's head ?

You can’t watch that without being deeply provoked

Or take those troubling photographs / smuggled out of Viet Nam
over the My Lai massacre of 1968
showing an American soldier / holding a rifle
against the head of a helpless woman /her face lined with anguish

Why do we feel a deep sense of outrage in the face of such evil?

Because there are deeds / that are not just evil / but monstrously evil

When Eichmann was condemned to be hanged
for his part in killing 6 million Jews
there was a general feeling that “hanging is not good enough”

But what would have been enough ?
If he had been tortured to death
in the most lengthy and cruel manner imaginable
would this have been “enough?
Surely not! / No human punishment is “enough”
for deeds as monstrous as those Eichmann committed

The crux is this: There are deeds that demand not only condemnation
but damnation / in the full religious sense of the word

There are crimes so gross and so inhuman / that the perpetrator
not only puts himself outside the community of humans
he actually invokes upon himself
a retribution that is far more severe
than that which humans can dispense
he’s asking to be put outside God’s grace


There are certain deeds that cry out to heaven
Deeds that cry out to heaven / cry out for hell

This human capacity to be so engagingly outraged against such evil
that you cry out to the heavens
is a powerful “signal” that there must be transcendent God out there
to Whom your cry will reach

For only a transcendent Being / can serve the kind of ultimate justice
that even the highest human court of law cannot dispense

And this Transcendent Judge
is what we have construed to be God Almighty
“Shall not the Judge of all men do right?” (Gen 18:25)

Third / Our Sense of Right and Wrong / Morality

A sense of right and wrong is fundamental and pervasive
in the human experience / regardless of culture /colour / creed

Lewis asks us to imagine a country where
every person felt proud of double crossing
all the people who had been kindest to him.

Imagine a society in which this behaviour
is consistently and unconditionally thought of as being a virtue.
- there would be anarchy

Have you not seen that at the mention of the name Adolf Hitler
everyone would say he ought not to have done what he did
universally / pervasively / consistently / all over the world
that / is the reaction you get when his name is mentioned

But why shouldn’t Hitler do what he did / Who say he shouldn’t
If not / why not? / If he were guilty / before what tribunal is he guilty

We hear the word “ought” popping from people’s mouth easily
“She ought not to have done that” / “They ought to have done that”

What is this “oughtness” really about
Some call it ethics / morality / common human decency

The point is this / Basically people know what is right and wrong

When people say: “How do you like it if someone did the same to you?”
or “That's my seat / I was there first”
or “Leave him alone / He isn't doing you any harm”

When people argue
they are making an unconscious appeal / for moral standards
When people disagree about moral issues
they behave as if there is an underlying agreement
about what is right and what is wrong

Take such a basic everyday human experience as quarrelling
Quarrelling is simply an attempt
to show that the other people is in the wrong

But there is no sense trying to quarrel
unless the two people / had some sort of unspoken agreement
on what constitutes right and wrong

There seems to be a core of moral constants underlying the human race

And it looks like the standard of right and justice we appeal to
is not simply a description of how people behave
so much as a prescription of how people ought to behave

Morality is not simply a law of nature like gravity
It doesn’t describe how things happen
It prescribes for us how things ought to happen

We ought to be kind / good / honest / truthful
We ought not to be unkind / selfish / dishonest / deceptive

You know something?
We didn’t invent these norms / we discover them

If we came from animals / if we evolved from the primeval soup
then / from where did this universal persistent sense of morality come?

Wouldn’t it be far more natural to conclude
that our sense of morality
must have come from the Mind that lies behind the universe
- a Moral Being

Vox populi / vox dei / “The voice of the conscience is the voice of God”

If God exists / then we would naturally expect
a world with a sense of morality / built into his creatures

But if there is no God
then the deep sense of morality is a strange inexplicable brute fact
For why should there be an objective law
when there isn’t a lawgiver ?

On the other hand / if there is a God
what better “calling card” could He leave behind
than the consciousness of the moral order

So / in the light of our deep sense of morality
belief in the existence of God / is not unreasonable

Fourth / Our Startled Reaction to the Flow of Time

Lewis who made the observation
that we humans have a hard time trying to make sense
of the fact that time seems to fly by so quickly

We seem to find it hard to reconcile with the flow of time

So much so that we are astonished by it

When an aunt opens the door and sees a nephew
she hasn’t see in years what does she say? “O how he's grown”
- as though something so natural and universal
were again and again a novelty

Lewis writes:
“It is as strange as if the fish were repeatedly surprised
at the wetness of water
And that would be strange indeed
unless of course the fish were destined / one day
to become a land animal”

And it is not strange why we are so little reconciled to time
For we are not made for time / but for eternity

And that / is another “signal” / for God’s existence

Fifth / Our Existential Sense of Dread and Loneliness

The Germans called this “angst”
There seems to have been a basic flaw in human existence

When you stand before the wreck of some ancient civilization
now long buried and forgotten
you wonder what purposed was served
by the mammoth labours of millions of people ?

And I’m sure you’ve wondered if after 50 years
anyone will care about anything you’ve done
or even know that you existed

After only a few generations / most gravestones lie forgotten
That brings an existential dread to many people

Theatre of the Absurd / Beckett / Eslin / Ioenoesco
George Santayana “There is no cure for birth or death
except to enjoy the interval”

We find ourselves wanting more
but we do not know what is the more we want

As Aldous Huxley once said: “There comes a time when one says
even of Shakespeare / even of Beethoven / ‘Is that all?’”

You sense / quite innately / that there is more to life than we find here
There is an ache in all our hearts
for something we can’t find in this world

C.S. Lewis had a line / which we in our generation loved to quote
and happily made popular in this generation by Brooke Fraser
she calls it C S Lewis Song
The line goes this way: “If I find in myself a desire
which no experience in this world can satisfy
the most probable explanation
is that I was made for another world”

Have you ever experienced the feeling
that here on earth we'll never truly happy
even when we have deep experiences love and beauty ?

Have you never experience such great happiness that your tears flow?
I mean / in a wedding / what should have been the happiest day
its always the mother of the bride / who cries
Surely happiness and tears do not go together!

Now what's happening here?
Its as if in those wonderful moments of life
someone intrudes into your enjoyment and whispers to you saying:
“Even this / will have to go”
“In the day you eat of the fruit / you will die”

So even in the midst of the fragrance of life / there is often a stench of death
And we begin to suspect
that all this is far too wonderful to be true / and we cry

And what we’re craving is really eternity / where love lasts forever
- Eccl 3:11 / also Rom 2:14-15

So this spirit of loneliness even in the midst of love and beauty
is another pointer / that there is a place where God is
and that place alone / can satisfy the longing of the human heart


Sixth / Our Revulsion Over Death

Have you noticed
that compared with the rest of the lower forms of the animal world
we humans treat death with something like shock and revulsion

Death may be universal / it may is pervasive / it is recurring
and yet we never could get used to its reality

We flinch from it
We may believe in life after death
but we seem obsessed with a denial of death
- by the way we embalm and dress up the dead

Ernest Becker The Denial of Death - modern Western culture
is obsessed with its attempts at evading death

But really / we should not be too hard on ourselves
for treating death with revulsion

It is natural that we find death repulsive for death IS unnatural
We were created to live and not to die

The theme song for Fame has a line in its chorus
that says “I want to live forever”

Little wonder why part of the seduction of humanity
is linked with the false hope of immortality
“Erut sicut dei”
– “You will not die / You will be like God” Gen 3:5

Isn’t it the case that we all yearn for immortality
The trauma of impermanence is unbearable

Death is an oddity / an intrusion
and our revulsion of it may be yet another “signal of transcendence”
to remind us that this cannot be the end

And when so many people die / with all that music in them
you become convinced / that there has to be a realm
where death is no more

There are more signals / pointers that I don’t have the time to address here

But how do I tie all this up?

I like to put it this way
That in the light of what I have spoken
shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the skeptics
to demonstrate for us / the non-existence of God

In other words / why should it be that we are the ones
who forever have to come up with reasons for belief in God
when the atheist don’t have to account
for their belief in the non-existence of God

Unbelief is as much a faith-position / as belief

So in the light of what I have spoken
the atheist or agnostic or skeptic have a lot to answer

The atheists have many questions / but they have no answers
They offers no rational argument for the non-existence of God

From the beauty and functionality and purposefulness of creation
it is more reasonable to believe
that this has come from the Mind of a creative and loving God

The argument that the universe has come about by chance
takes greater faith to believe / than believe in God

Its like asking you to believe
that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters
over millions and millions of years
eventually turned out this great novel

Or its like asking you to believe
that an explosion in the printing press / has resulted
in the 24 volume Encyclopedia Britannica

You’ll have to work yourself up really hard / to believe that

Is it possible?
Of course it is, but highly, highly improbable.

This is why many people have rightly said
that they do not have the faith to be an atheist

On the other hand / the Bible says / “The heavens declare the glory of God
the skies proclaim the work of his hands
Day after day they pour forth speech
Night after night they display knowledge
There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard
Their voice goes out into all the earth
their words to the ends of the world” / Psalm 19:1-4

God is speaking to us every day through the sun / moon and stars
He is showing himself in the wonder of nature

To miss the fingerprint of God on this world is to overlook the obvious

Laurence Peter once said: “The atheist cannot find God
for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman”

If you cannot see God in the world
it could well be that you do not want to see him

Not only are you not looking for him
you may be purposely avoiding him

The Bible says / “What may be known about God is plain to them
because God has made it plain to them
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities
his eternal power and divine nature / have been clearly seen
being understood from what has been made
so that men are without excuse
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God
nor gave thanks to him / but their thinking became futile
and their foolish hearts were darkened
Although they claimed to be wise / they became fools” Rom 1:19-22

Augustine put it this way:
“Lord, you have made us for yourself
and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you”

Pascal wrote / “There is a God-shaped vacuum in every human heart”

Or / to borrow the words of Bruce Springsteen
“Everybody’s got a hungry heart”

God’s Word say
“Ask and it will be given to you / seek and you will find
knock and the door will be opened to you” / Luke 11:9

God lives at the center of the universe
There is a reason and purpose for your lives
Even the difficult places in your lives / are a part of a plan
The greatest proof of God’s existence
is when you allow yourself to experience Him





















People try to explain away / the human sense of right and wrong

Some say it is a product of culture
If that is true / a number of problems arise

One / how come there are such strong similarities
between what people regard as right and wrong

Two / if cultural norm is the final order of the day
- why is it that we can’t help comparing cultures
and make judgements
that some cultural practices are culturally deficient
- why do we decry child-sacrifice in some countries
- why frown upon female genital mutilation
- or suti / widow of dead man must throw herself
on the funeral prye to go with him / to the next world

And when we do this we seem to be appealing
to what we believe is a “higher” sense of right & wrong

People who think this way have really rejected cultural relativism
though they insist they are embracing it

Anyone who is morally critical / of any aspect of a culture
has made a tacit agreement
that there is a higher standard than local cultural norms

Other people argue that ethics and morality
are simply a kind of social contract

In societies where people care only for themselves
life is “nasty / short / and brutish” to use the words of Thomas Hobbs

We all need help others sometimes
and if we’re not willing to help others
they are not likely to be willing to help us

They say its the good old “Golden Rule”

But this is not ultimately an adequate view

The social contract theory says that I should be moral
because in the long haul
I’d be better off embracing that policy

But the trouble is this:

The sly and selfish part of us says that just because all of us as a group
will be better off / if we’re all moral
it does not follow from this
that I / as an individual / will be better off

I might be better off as an individual / if while everyone acts morally
I / on selective occasions / when I’m not likely to be caught
disregard morality / and simply do what will benefit me most

Social theorists call this problem the “free-rider” problem
E.g. Many viewers watch public TV
without ever paying the yearly fee
And so long as there are enough people paying
to keep the station funded
it would seem better to the “free-rider” that he not pay

At this point morality has been abandoned

And if you argue that the free-rider is morally wrong
then it must be the case
that morality has a deeper foundation / than mere self-interest

No / the social contract view is not fundamental enough
to be the foundation of morality

Because the basic moral principle
that we ought to keep the contract
is in the first place presupposed / by any such contract