Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?
So what does that tribesman see? We are back to the illiterate tribesman of Part 1 (see link above), who has no need of the Bible to find God. Somehow, wherever he is and whatever faculties he is equipped with, he has enough information to infer that God is real. What is this information?
Again, we are all “without excuse”—meaning the information pointing to God must be so plain that every human being, without exception, could be counted on to face it and experience it, no matter how limited her life, health, senses, or circumstances might be. The evidence for God must be inescapable within our lives.
What are the inescapable realities that every human can experience? We might be able to list several, but the full list includes at least these two:
1. Existence exists. There is something instead of nothing, and we are part of that something.
2. Things change. Everything we experience in the world has a beginning and an end.
These two facts about earthly human life are so basic that we have forgotten there was ever a time that we learned them. They were certainly among the very first truths we learned, long before we even had spoken words with which to define our thoughts. Neither of these truths would necessarily have to be true, given that it is not difficult to at least abstractly conceive of a universe (perhaps “nulliverse” would be a better word for it) in which neither of these facts is true.
Yet these two facts are indeed observable characteristics of our world—pointing to a series of conclusions not only about the nature of our world, but also about the nature of God.
So what does that tribesman see? We are back to the illiterate tribesman of Part 1 (see link above), who has no need of the Bible to find God. Somehow, wherever he is and whatever faculties he is equipped with, he has enough information to infer that God is real. What is this information?
Again, we are all “without excuse”—meaning the information pointing to God must be so plain that every human being, without exception, could be counted on to face it and experience it, no matter how limited her life, health, senses, or circumstances might be. The evidence for God must be inescapable within our lives.
What are the inescapable realities that every human can experience? We might be able to list several, but the full list includes at least these two:
1. Existence exists. There is something instead of nothing, and we are part of that something.
2. Things change. Everything we experience in the world has a beginning and an end.
These two facts about earthly human life are so basic that we have forgotten there was ever a time that we learned them. They were certainly among the very first truths we learned, long before we even had spoken words with which to define our thoughts. Neither of these truths would necessarily have to be true, given that it is not difficult to at least abstractly conceive of a universe (perhaps “nulliverse” would be a better word for it) in which neither of these facts is true.
Yet these two facts are indeed observable characteristics of our world—pointing to a series of conclusions not only about the nature of our world, but also about the nature of God.
* * *
Existence exists. Everything in the world had a beginning. From these two observations, one of the conclusions is that there must have been a time when the very first thing, or the very first set of things, came into existence.
If this never happened, then there would be non-existence instead of existence, and this is not what we have. Existence must have begun with the first thing in the world that existed. And this in turn points to God, because for something to come into existence, there must be something outside the material world to cause this existence to begin.
After all, it couldn’t have been something inside the material world that caused this first thing, because then this cause would have been the “first thing” instead.
You might still be inclined to say that “chance” caused existence to begin—as in, some wrinkle in the fabric of nothingness that is theoretically possible but so vastly unlikely that the odds against it are something like one in ten quintillion raised to its own power. That is why existence feels so special and unique.
However, what then caused or created this “wrinkle”? Or what created “chance” itself? What created the march of time proceeding in such a way that it allowed enough duration for this vastly unlikely event to occur? All of these things must have their beginnings, too—or else they would be eternal.
You might say instead that creation occurred because of energy leaking in from some other world, some other dimension of reality. But how did the other dimension begin? This hypothesis does nothing except expand the borders of the material world to let them include other dimensions. In fact, for this very reason, we know that the Creator does have to be eternal. If not, then he is simply an extradimensional entity, and we would have to ask what it was that caused the Creator to begin.
Here then is where reason begins to show us the nature of the Creator. Not only is he eternal, but there are other things that we can know about him as well.
* * *
For example, we know that the Creator must be entirely self-contained. He is able to exist independently, without relying on anything else. If this was not true, then something else would have had to exist eternally alongside the Creator, and what would have created this other thing?
We also know by observation that the Creator has the ability to create. Since existence exists, he apparently exercised this ability. Furthermore, the Creator is alive and conscious, and has the ability to choose to create. If this was not so, if the Creator was somehow nonliving or unthinking, then only random chance could be responsible for directing where its creative energies went—and we would be stuck again with asking where this random chance came from.
So it turns out that we can recognize quite a bit about the nature of God from some of the most basic facts about the world. The facts that (1) our world exists, and (2) everything in it has a beginning, together point to all of these conclusions:
A. The world began with the very first thing or set of things.
B. Something outside the world created this first thing.
C. That Creator is eternal.
D. That Creator is independent.
E. The Creator is powerful enough to create the world.
F. The Creator has a will and makes choices.
All of this can be seen and known by the tribesman—not from the words of any person or scripture, but from the implications that are written upon reality.
And there is even more. There is still more that the tribesman can know, thanks to an additional truth that is also apparent in every human life. Points 1 and 2 were among the first truths we learned as self-aware beings, but before these came a “point 0” that was the very first thing that each newborn human being experiences. It was a shock to experience it for the first time, and I am convinced that it continues to be a shock for us in the first subconscious millisecond of each new day when we awaken to it again. The simplest statement of this most fundamental experience is also a name we have already cited, a name the Creator gives for himself. That is: I am.
Next: The Audacity of Identity
