Weekend Reads: Arguing the existence of God

Marshall Brain’s How “God” Works: A Logical Inquiry on Faith (Sterling Publishing, 2015) shook my faith. Hard.

Chalk it up to background, if you like. I grew up reading HowStuffWorks.com, and I maintain a soft spot for its founder, Brain (yes, his real name) to this day. That site taught me a lot, using clear step-by-step exposition of all kinds of scientific topics. How “God” Works takes the same eminently reasonable approach.

Why is it that so many people believe in Traditional Chinese Medicine when medical science has shown it doesn’t work? Brain argues that it’s for the same reason that so many Americans believe in God. America has 350,000 churches—that’s three times the number of gas stations. Clearly Americans are a religious bunch.

But consider this: God frequently promises to answer prayers. Christians explain unanswered prayer by saying that God gives one of three answers: yes, no, or wait. Brain says this is shoddy thinking. Pray to your dining room table, or to Zeus, or to anything you like, he says, and any and every request made to any and every deity will by definition be answered with yes, no, or wait. In short, Brain believes all answered prayer is coincidence. Period. If you pray for something that demonstrably could not be a coincidence, you will find that God does not answer that prayer. For instance, pray that a coin would come up heads 10 times in a row. Or pray for a wounded veteran to regrow his amputated arm. Nothing happens, right? As Brain insists, we don’t observe two laws of probability, one for Christians and one for everyone else. In short, God gives us no reason to believe He exists. Now, Brain adds, a belief without evidence is rightly deemed false. In other words, God is a figment of the human imagination.

Nonetheless, Brain rejects the label “atheist” for the same reason he rejects the title “aleprechaunist.” He refuses to believe without evidence, provided on his terms.

Frank Turek provides mountains of evidence in Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case (NavPress, 2014). Turek presents his signature “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” show at hostile college campuses across the country. He has honed his use of the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments for the existence of God. Add the scientific evidence from genetics alone, and Stealing from God makes a powerful antidote to Brain’s quibbles.

Without God, causality, reason, information, morality, evil, and science simply could not exist. Atheists may claim we can know these things without God. That’s not the point. The point is that they could not exist without Him.

Say the clouds formed the message, “Hey Mr. Brain, this is God”—26 characters arranged to represent information. Couldn’t happen naturally, right? Well, asks Turek, who arranged the 3 billion–plus characters of an atheist’s genetic code?

Or consider the universe itself. Virtually everyone, atheists and believers alike, agrees that nature had a beginning. But that by definition means that nature could not cause itself. If nature began, something supernatural must have begun it.

Henry Ford cannot be found in the internal combustion engine. Does that show he didn’t exist? Of course not. Ford stands above and outside a motorcar. God stands above and outside the universe. He does everything on His own terms—not ours. Fundamentally, Brain’s problem is theological. The Triune God cannot be subject to my terms, for of Him and to Him and through Him are all things (Romans 11:36). In short, as Turek has it, “Your best reasons to doubt God prove that He exists.”