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How do you know that God exists? Maybe we had first better think about how you know anything. Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, in their excellent "Handbook of Christian Apologetics", suggest three different (but related) ways of knowing something: by authority, by reason, and by experience. Let's consider what each of the three mean, and how they relate to the question of God's existence.

ARGUMENTS FROM AUTHORITY

The weakest, but also most common, type of argument is the argument from authority. Most things we believe are true, we believe either because someone we trust told us they were so, or because many people all agree that they are so.

For example, when you are a child you trust your parents and teachers. When your teacher told you that there existed an island off the east coast of Africa called Madagascar you believed her, even though you hadn't, and probably still haven't, seen it with your own eyes. For an example involving many people, perhaps when you were in college many fellow students told you that professor X was a very hard grader. You believed them, and so you avoided professor X.

We can make analogous statements about the existence of God. I don't know whom you personally trust, but many individuals in history who have come to be respected as wise men believed in the existence of God. You can make your own list, but it includes people like Moses and Paul, Newton and Galileo, Rousseau and Kierkegaard, Washington and Jefferson, and many more.

Consider also that most of the humans who have ever lived have believed in some sort of God to whom worship is due. How likely is it that all of them have been wrong, that their worship had no real object at all?

ARGUMENTS FROM REASON

Arguments from reason are stronger and are just what they sound like, and I'll give you two examples. They are often related to experiences (which we reason about afterwards), but I'll handle arguments from experience more explicitly in a moment.

One argument from reason you might call the "why was there ever anything?" argument. Basically, every effect we observe has some cause. If we had a time machine, we could take any event we observe today and find its cause, and then find the cause of that cause, and so on all the way back to some first event in the universe. But what caused this first event? Apparently there must exist something outside of this universe not constrained by the laws of causality within it, an uncaused first cause - call it God.

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