Questions for Reflection - "Conversations: Sharing Our Faith with a Skeptical World"
Is There a God?
Psalm 19; Romans 1:20; Hebrews 11:3
- Are you skeptical about the Christian faith? Why? Why is it important to be in touch with your own questions as you talk with others about the Christian faith?
- How do you answer the question, "Is there a God?" How about, "Can we know that there is a God?"
- A definition of knowledge: "We have knowledge of something when we are representing it (by thinking about it, speaking of it, treating it) as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience." Dallas Willard in Knowing Christ Today.
- How can we know that there is a God?
- First, there is no reason in the nature of things why God could not or should not exist. There is nothing in the realm of nature that renders God impossible, improbable or implausible. No one has ever disproven God.
- Second, the biblical as well as classical sources from which we take our contemporary ways of thinking about God arise from the physical universe that we observe and experience.
- Third, based on what we observe, our physical universe had a beginning.
- Fourth: How did the universe get there? There are two possibilities. One is that the physical universe was not produced by anything or it was produced by something that is not physical. So if something caused the universe to be here that something is not nothing, it's that it is not physical. We can use another word. We can say that this something is spiritual.
- Fifth, nothing can happen without a cause.
- Sixth: There is something more that we can call "spiritual" that is the source of the physical world, who also has the capacity to initiate causes while not being caused to act.
- What if there really is a God? What if this God really cares? Check Psalm 8.
For further reflection:
Tim Keller. Reason for God. Penguin Books, 2008.
Dallas Willard. Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge. Harper Collins, 2009.
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Westminster Presbyterian Church |