by Carissa Johnson

Created on: December 17, 2010   Last Updated: December 25, 2010

The problem with asking about the existence of God is that the answer cannot be proven to be one hundred percent on either side. Deists can assert that they have evidence for God, and atheists can provide their own evidence for the lack of a God. Either way, however, there is no way of knowing whether God exists without inserting a degree of faith into the equation.

That being said, I believe there is significant evidence for the existence of God. Two of the most outstanding reasons include the intelligent design argument and the moral argument.

The intelligent design argument is  best described with an analogy of a watch, developed by British philosopher William Paley. This argument is used to explain the nearly impossible probability that a chance occurrence brought all the detail of life into being.

Those who argue that there is no God say that the world has become increasingly complex over millions of years. However, waves beating on the sand on a beach will not, over time, sculpt something more intricate than what was already there, such as a gold pocketwatch.

If one were to find a pocketwatch lying on the beach, with detailed, functional mechanisms and gears, one would not assume that it seems to have been created by the sand over the past million years. Instead, one would instantly acknowledge that a pocketwatch had to have an intelligent designer, the watchmaker, with a purpose for that pocketwatch.

Adamant atheist Charles Dawkins phrases this idea well in his book The God Delusion when he says, “You’ll never see a spear making a spear-maker. You’ll never see a pot making a potter” (117). One will also never find a watch making a watchmaker, and in the same way, many Enlightenment thinkers, including Isaac Newton, found that after significant experience in their fields of study, overwhelming scientific evidence shows the world cannot be a result of random chance because of the detailed intricacies it contains – instead, it has a supreme designer. It is logical to assume that this designer is transcendent, ultimately making the designer God.

Along with the argument stating that there is a designer, there also has to be a creator of the inherent moral system that man is born with.

The very idea that man can acknowledge that there is evil in the world implies that there is a system of morals by which he is measuring evil by and an ultimate truth that can be determined. Augustine presents a syllogism that states that because God is, by definition, ultimately superior, and because truth exists with nothing above it and is superior as well, God must be the source of truth, and he must also exist. Augustine writes in a discussion with a friend, “If there is something more excellent than truth, this is God.”

Therefore, man has an inherent moral code that he understands without being taught. It is not taught to him by culture because many cultures have very different beliefs, but still hold to the same basic moral standards. If the universe cannot explain where man gets his moral system, the explanation must lie in something transcendent of the universe, which is God. 

Because there is such an intricate, intelligent design in the universe and man is encoded with a specific set of morals, there is significant evidence for the existence of God.

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