There is plenty of scientific evidence for God’s existence. From Big Bang Cosmology, to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, to the inescapable implications of the origin and design of life itself. Each of these point us to the same conclusion — that God’s existence is a reasonable inference as the cause of it all.
That said, there is always a liability that comes with using scientific arguments like these to ground our case. Scientific conclusions can change. Fortunately, science isn’t all we have. There are also philosophical arguments for theism.
As soon as you say the word “philosophy,” many Christians recoil in horror. There are two reasons for this reaction. First, philosophy seems to be a ridiculous practice of talking about esoteric things that don’t have anything to do with the real world. I get that. I used to think that myself. But realize that philosophy is just two Greek words crammed together: phileo (the friendly form of love) + sophia (wisdom).
So, philosophy is nothing but the “love of wisdom.” And I think we can agree, we all need more of that. It’s certainly nothing to be afraid of.
Second, we’ve been led to believe that engaging in philosophy is anti-biblical — a “worldly” kind of thing we should avoid. There are even scriptural warnings against it!
But please read those scriptural warnings more carefully. The admonitions are not against philosophy itself. They are against bad philosophy. That’s what you’re supposed to avoid. When you do, you find that philosophy is a method of seeking truths about the world. And if we believe Christianity is true, that means philosophy will be on our side. So, let’s use it.
I’m no philosopher, but let me present a couple of compelling examples of how we can do just that.
A World in Motion
When you and I talk about “motion,” we think about physical things like baseballs transitioning from one point in physical space to another. But when philosophers talk about motion they mean something very different. Motion to a philosopher means change. This idea of motion includes objects like baseballs moving through space. But it also includes phenomena like leaves changing color and falling off trees, the water cycle, or the growth of even the simplest organism.
To a philosopher, motion includes the processes of life and everything else about the world around us. Our bodies form, grow, get old, and then die and decay. Things are constantly changing, so the world we observe is constantly “in motion.”
Actual and Potential
Philosophers describe this ongoing process by saying that things are always “actually” in some state but have the “potential” to move to another state.
Think of an ice cube. It is an “actual” block of frozen water but it has the “potential” to become a puddle, then steam, vapor, a cloud, a raindrop, part of a river that flows into a lake, and then something you pour in your glass … or put back in your freezer. There is a continuous chain of events during which actual things (with potential) change into other actual things.
Each step in the ongoing process of change must have a cause that drives it. Something makes the motion continue. Or, to put it another way, whatever goes from potential to actual must have a cause.
The motion always begins with something actual.
The Unmoved Mover
If we trace the chain of events back far enough, we find that the motion has to have started with something that not only did not move, but was unmovable. Aristotle called this the “Unmoved Mover.” He described it as “pure actuality” — something that never moved from potential to actual because it was the original, actual thing.
This thing did not require a cause because it was the First Cause of all the motion.
“And this,” Thomas Aquinas famously said, “is what we call God.”
This is a powerful argument for God’s existence. It leads us to a conclusion that may sound very familiar. That’s because the argument for an Unmoved Mover sounds an awfully lot like the inference we get from the Cosmological Argument that “beginnings need beginners.”
These arguments are linear and temporal. They are built on the idea that a chain of causation cannot go on forever. It has to have started somewhere.
But, wait. There’s more!
A God Who Sustains Existence
There is an even more powerful version of this argument that does not depend on when things began to exist. Instead, it offers proof that God exists based solely on the reality we experience in the present moment. This argument is not linear, but hierarchical. As philosopher Ed Feser explains:
... a hierarchical series is best introduced by thinking in terms of a sequence whose members exist at a single moment of time ... so when it is said that such a series must have a first member, the claim is not that the series has to be traced back to some beginning point in the past. Rather, the series could not exist in the first place unless there was something that did have the power to hold up intermediaries without having to be held up itself.
~ Ed Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (p. 23)
Back to our ice cube. It sits inside a glass, but the glass sits on a table, and the table on the floor, and the floor on a building’s foundation, and the foundation on the surface of the Earth ... and so on.
None of these things can just hold themselves up on their own. There has to be something at the “bottom of it all” that holds everything above it up without being held up itself. This something must have the ability to hold things up built into it in a non-derivative way (Feser, 27).
This [kind of] cause doesn’t need to have any potential for existence that needs to be actualized in the first place. It just is actual, always and already actual.
It’s the foundation on which everything above it rests. And it’s not time dependent. Time is irrelevant. It upholds everything at all times.
Once again, we are back to God.
The Power of Philosophy
These kinds of arguments are powerful because they do not depend on any scientific evidence. They come from the simple, thoughtful contemplation of the world we see around us every day. You should familiarize yourself with them and become comfortable discussing them. There are plenty more where these came from.
If you’re interested, Edward Feser outlines several in terms laymen like you and I can understand in his book, Five Proofs Of The Existence Of God. Feser is a master communicator. He is clever, insightful, and succinct. Here is a great (short) summary interview with Feser about the arguments discussed above:
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