How Do We Know God Exists?

How Do We Know God Exists: 5 Key Points

1. The complexity and interconnectedness of the natural world suggests the existence of a creator.
2. The Bible is a source of understanding God’s character and purpose.
3. Belief in Jesus can be seen as evidence of God’s existence.
4. Belief in God is a personal and complex subject, with individual reasons and doubts.
5. The video encourages further reading and exploration of the topic of God’s existence.

Transcript

One of the most basic questions of all when it comes to spirituality or faith or religion is the huge question of how do we know that God exists?

Now obviously people have written very, very long books on this subject.

Philosophers, theologians, prophets, and poets have all written about this and we’re going to try to deal with it in just a couple of minutes.

There’s plenty of further reading and study you can do if you want to do more.

Why do I believe that God exists?

Well, I would back up first of all and say, well why does anything exist?

• Why is there anything at all?
• Why is there a universe?
• Why is there a Milky Way galaxy?
• Why is there our solar system?

Why is there one particular planet that we know of that has the exact conditions to sustain life? Just the right mix of hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and all these elements, in just the right amounts, for life to exist?

How is that possible?

Well, one of the way reasons why people come to believe in God is they just don’t think life as we know it on the planet Earth could have come into being in all of its complexity, and the web of life and how life is so interrelated and interdependent.

The idea that this all just happened by accident is hard for some of us to believe.

And in fact, in the Bible in the letter to the Romans the Apostle Paul says the first thing that gives evidence to believing in God is the natural world, the earth, and all of Creation, the stars, the sun, the moon.

All that we see gives evidence to a Creator who made it.

And so the mere existence of creation implies or suggests the idea that there is a Creator behind it.

If you look in almost any culture anywhere in the world, all throughout human history people have sought to understand why things are the way they are.

And there’s this impulse it seems, whether in people who lived in Africa, or Papa New Guinea, or Scandinavia, or North America, to connect with a larger presence.

I think for many of us there is a sense of feeling led, guided, touched by a presence that we just can’t explain fully.

For those of us who are Christians, we believe in God in part because we have the Bible which we consider God’s word, which tells the story of God’s interaction with first one particular family, the family of Abram and Sarah, and one nation is Israel, which is to be a light and a guide to all the other nations, to tell the story that there is a God who created the universe who wants to be in relationship with every human being and that God both loves us and has expectations.

And as Christians, we believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the embodiment, the Incarnation, the infleshment if you will, God in human form, who shows us how human life is to be lived on this planet: with love and compassion and courage and generosity and service and gentleness… all the fruit of the spirit we see in Jesus.

And Jesus, we believe as Christians, not only died and forgave those who killed him, but he was raised from the dead. And the resurrection of Jesus is a significant reason why some of us believe in the existence of God, that God did something dramatic and World altering in raising Jesus from the dead.

One of the ways, if you’d like to explore this question further, is to do some reading in the Bible for yourself and to see what the Bible says about who God is, the nature of God’s character.

And we believe that the God we believe in is a God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and a God who desires to have a personal relationship with each and every person. And who also has a deep, deep concern for all of creation, the whole world that God made and called good.

Well, that’s a beginning introduction into why I believe in the existence of God.

What would be some of your answers to why you believe?

And what are some of the questions that make it hard for you to believe?

This is all part of thinking deeply about a very important subject. Keep pursuing your questions.