by GCBourque

Created on: February 04, 2011   Last Updated: February 06, 2011

Someone tells you they don’t believe in God. Do you wish that you had a convincing comeback? Or maybe you don’t believe in God yourself and might be interested in an argument you’ve never heard? Here’s a simple, logical approach to demonstrating that God, even the God of the Bible, must exist.

The Universe Must Have Had a Cause 

We live in a physical universe which obeys physical laws. There are only three possible explanations for its existence. One of them must be true:

1) It created itself.
2) It has always existed and so needed no creator.
3) A Prime Mover (God) created it.

We are trying to prove the third explanation. The first and second we are trying to refute. Since one of these three explanations must be true, refuting the first two will prove the third.

Did the Universe Create Itself?

The first is easy to refute. There are causes and there are effects. By definition the cause comes first, then the effect, otherwise the words are nonsense. So if the universe created itself that means it is both its own cause and its own effect. But that means that the universe both did exist and did not exist at the same time. This is an absurdity and therefore cannot true. Therefore, the universe did not create itself. The first explanation has been refuted.

Has the Universe Always Existed?

How about the second explanation—the universe has always existed? For this to be true that means that time regresses infinitely into the past, like the negative numbers on a number line. But if there are an infinite number of days in the past we could have never reached today because we would never have gotten to the end of the days which come before today. As an illustration, imagine a white domino with an infinite number of black dominos lined up behind it. When will the white domino get knocked over? The answer is never because since the dominos before it are infinite, they will never be used up. By the same reasoning, if the universe had always been here, there would have been an infinite number of days before today and today never would have been reached. But it has been reached. Therefore, the universe has not been here forever. The second explanation has been refuted.

The Prime Mover

So since the universe did not create itself and has not existed forever, the third explanation must be true. There must be some Prime Mover which created the universe. We have proved the existence of a Prime Mover. But we are not yet to the God of the Bible.

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