The existence of God is an enduring and popular philosophical problem. Many arguments claiming to prove the existence of God have been proposed througout the centuries, often on the basis of some feature of the natural world. There have also been attempts to disprove the existence of God, which is a more complex task. Consider how much easier it is to establish that there is a black swan somewhere on the Earth compared to establishing that there isn’t one. G.K. Chesterton made this point: “Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative.”¹

Popular arguments for the existence of God include the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the moral law argument, and the argument from Design. The argument from Design is a more general version of the narrower perspective about irreducible complexity that forms the core of the Intelligent Design movement. Each of these arguments supports a certain belief in a creator. The response to many of these arguments, however, is: 

“If God created the world, what created God?”

This is a reply that requires serious consideration. It suggests that certain arguments for God’s existence only push the question of beginnings one step farther back. It also suggests that any God complex enough to account for all of creation would necessarily be complex enough to require an explanation.  Richard Dawkins is one of the strongest proponents of this argument.

An Answer From Doctrine?

In many faiths, God’s origin is straightforward. Christian doctrine teaches that God is eternal and thus had no beginning. The Psalms speak clearly about God’s eternal nature, affirming, but never defending God’s existence:

“Before the mountains were born or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.” ²

“For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night.” ³

These verses, and many others like them, highlight the complexity of God’s relation to time. Theologians have debated the relationship of God to time for centuries and no doubt will continue to do so. It is a question that we probably cannot answer. In one thoughtful response, God is the creator of time itself, and thus exists outside of time seeing all of history at once. Verses like those above are often used to support this view. On the other hand, this view is often critiqued by Biblical scholars including Clarke Pinnock, John Sanders and Gregory Boyd⁴, who point out that God is portrayed in scripture as acting in time. For example, when God is negotiating the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah with Abraham (Genesis 18), or lamenting having created humans at the time of Noah (Genesis 6:5-8), God certainly seems to be in time and responding to the unfolding course of events. But of course, given the difficulty our time-limited minds have in grasping this philosophical problem, there is no compelling reason that God could not be both outside of time and capable of acting within it.

An Answer From Definition?

Answers from religious doctrine are rarely adequate for nonbelievers. In fact, many fervent believers in God reject the argument about God’s timelessness because even timeless beings need explanations for their existence. But if God is the creator of all things, and yet also requires cause, we face an infinite regress of causes. The only way to avoid this infinite regress problem is to state — as Christian theology has always done — that God is the first cause and is entirely self existent, meaning the reason for God’s existence is contained within the very definition of God.

While this viewpoint certainly may be attractive, it still fails to convince skeptics who are more likely to favor the idea that the universe contains within itself the reason for its own existence. If that could be true of God, why couldn’t it be true of the universe? There is certainly reason to be skeptical about the common sense intuition that everything must have a cause or that everything must have a reason to be as it is. This perennial assumption has been challenged by the physics of the 20th century that uncovered a mysterious quantum world where things often do not appear to have reason to be the way they are.

The common sense assumption that everything must have a cause or a reason to be as it is also suffers from what is called the fallacy of composition. This fallacy comes about when we assume that properties of the parts apply to the whole. For example, just because every member of the human race has a mother, we cannot infer that the human race itself has a mother. Similarly, a collection of spherical things would not itself have to be spherical. In discussions about the origins of the universe, we would say that just because every individual part of the universe has a cause, that does not mean that the entire universe has a cause.

The realization that our universe had some sort of beginning has opened up exciting new conversations about origins. In some ways, a universe with a beginning seems to beg for a cause. But if the universe came into being from nothing , it becomes deeply problematic to speak of anything having caused the universe to exist. Some cosmologists would argue that our universe is the result of an uncaused quantum fluctuation. Such fluctuations do not have causes in the traditional sense, so they argue this does away with our universe needing a cause. But there is a significant problem that  the vacuum that fluctuates is not nothing. Quantum vacuums — which are what you get when you remove from space all the particles and energy — are real. They have activity, laws and rules. Our universe may have fluctuated into existence from such a vacuum, but the vacuum remains unexplained.

Cosmologist Lee Smolin suggests in Life of the Cosmos, that black holes can give birth to new universes.⁵ He proposes that our present universe emerged out of a black hole in some other “meta-universe.” And perhaps our universe is presently birthing new universes. Such a process, while clearly speculative, provides a caution against extrapolating from common sense notions of causality to philosophical conclusions about the nature of all of reality.

An Answer From Plausibility

The difference between the theist and atheist positions on this topic is that by assuming that everything — including the universe — has to have a cause, then the atheist is left with a dilemma of what or who that first cause might have been. For the theist, the answer is God, but a satisfactory reason must be found why God should be exempt for the need for a cause. Such a response is available through the Augustinian concept that God is not limited in space and time, and  therefore the argument of needing a first cause loses its power.

On the other hand, if not everything needs to have a cause, the theist and atheist have no grounds for arguing this part of their case.

But the argument can be reframed in a way that is more sensitive to postmodern intuitions about causation and the importance of starting points. Suppose as a religious believer you ask the question, “What kind of a universe is most compatible with my belief in an eternal God?” In this case the response affirms but does not prove the reality of God. The universe that we experience appears to have had a beginning; it appears to be finely tuned for life; it appears to have a place for love and purpose. These appearances affirm as plausible your prior belief in God.

See "What is the 'fine-tuning' of the universe, and how does it serve as a 'pointer to God'?"

 

Now suppose you start from the atheist assumption. In this case the universe must not really be as it appears. It cannot have a real beginning, be tuned for life and love, and purpose can’t be anything other than illusory epiphenomena — the curious byproducts of chemistry and physics. The whole picture has a claustrophobic bleakness.

Bertrand Russell, one of the most brilliant and ruthlessly honest atheists of the 20th century, captured this sense of despair in A Free Man’s Worship:

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's salvation henceforth be safely built.“ ⁶

In contrast to this view, the theist can affirm that the wonders encountered in the world are real, that they belong, and are a reflection of the glory of the creator whose mysterious power upholds everything.

Conclusion

The world disclosed by modern science is far subtler and nuanced than the world in which philosophers and theologians have lived for the past few centuries while formulating their arguments about the mysterious relationship between God, the physical world, time and causality. Nevertheless, no development in contemporary science poses a particular challenge to the view that God is creator. And some developments, like the discovery of fine-tuning in the physical laws, are supportive of traditional affirmations. The common-sense assumptions that have historically undergirded this entire discussion, however, need reconsideration in the face of recent scientific developments. We must be intellectually humble in making claims about God as creator. But we can also state confidently that denials that God is creator are fraught with even more unresolvable difficulties and ultimately provide a far less satisfactory grounding for a worldview in which meaning and purpose play important roles.

The BioLogos view holds that both Scripture and modern science reveal God’s truth, and that these truths are not in competition with one another. While there are varying views within the BioLogos community of how to reconcile the truths of science and Scripture on particular issues (for example with regards to a historical Adam¹), we believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired and authoritative Word of God. BioLogos accepts the modern scientific consensus on the age of the earth and common ancestry, including the common ancestry of humans.

See more on Scientific Evidence

Evolutionism

While BioLogos accepts evolution, it emphatically rejects evolutionism, the atheistic worldview that so often accompanies the acceptance of biological evolution in public discourse. Proponents of evolutionism believe every aspect of life will one day be explained with evolutionary theory. In this way it is a subset of scientism, the broader view that the only real truth is that which can be discovered by science. These positions are commonly held by materialists (also called philosophical naturalists) who deny the existence of the supernatural.

The BioLogos view celebrates God as creator. It is sometimes called Theistic Evolution or Evolutionary Creation. Theism is the belief in a God who cares for and interacts with creation. Theism is different than deism, which is the belief in a distant, uninvolved creator who is often little more than the sum total of the laws of physics. Theistic Evolution, therefore, is the belief that evolution is how God created life.

Because the term evolution is sometimes associated with atheism, a better term for the belief in a God who chose to create the world by way of evolution is BioLogos. BioLogos comes from the Greek words bios (life) and logos (word), referring to John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

See "What role could God have in evolution?"

Intelligent Design

Contrary to some interpretations, Intelligent Design, or ID, makes no specific theological claims. Instead, proponents of ID argue that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection,"² and that the existence of this intelligent cause is a testable scientific hypothesis. Furthermore, ID theorists attempt to show that intelligent causation is the best explanation for certain phenomena such as irreducibly complex systems (e.g. bacterial flagella) and the complex specified information in DNA.

Those who hold the BioLogos view also believe in intelligent causation. The universe and all that is in it has been created and is being sustained by God:

…in [Christ] all things in heaven and earth were created, things visible and invisible…all things were created through him and by him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col 1:16,17 NRSV).

BioLogos differs from the ID movement in that we have no discomfort with mainstream science. Natural selection as described by Charles Darwin is not contrary to theism. Similarly, we are content to let modern evolutionary biology inform us about the mechanisms of creation with the full realization that all that has happened occurs through God’s activity. We celebrate creation as fully God’s. We marvel at its beauty and are in awe that we have the privilege of experiencing it.

BioLogos celebrates the reality of miracles, including the miracles of Scripture, but also those we experience in today’s world through answered prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit in our own lives. However, the demonstration of such supernatural activity in the history of the natural world is, we think, unlikely to be scientifically testable.

See "Is there room in BioLogos to believe in miracles?"

To summarize, BioLogos differs from the ID movement in three respects:

1. We are skeptical about the ability of biological science to prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer (whom we take to be the God of the Bible), while ID advocates are confident.
2. We find unconvincing those attempts by ID theorists to scientifically confirm God’s activity in natural history, while ID theorists believe they have sufficiently demonstrated it.
3. We see no biblical reason to view natural processes (including natural selection) as having removed God from the process of creation. It is all God’s and it is all intelligently designed. Those in the ID movement for the most part reject some or all of the major conclusions of evolutionary theory.

Creationism

BioLogos affirms that the earth and the universe were created. Creationism, however, generally refers to the belief that life on earth is a result of a direct flurry of supernatural intervention in a manner that is concordant with a highly literal view of Genesis 1-3. There are two main varieties of Creationists, those who believe the earth is young and those who believe it is old.

Young Earth Creationists (YECs) hold that the earth is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, a figure derived from the genealogies presented in the Bible. YECs believe the most faithful way to read Scripture is through the lens of a literal six-day creation as presented in the first chapter of Genesis, and they further believe that a literal worldwide flood as depicted in Genesis 6-9 is responsible for geological features of the earth and the fossil record. YECs also reject the common ancestry of all species, believing that life was created as it presently appears by supernatural action. They view “macro-evolution” (as distinct from within-kind or within-species “micro-evolution”) as incompatible with Scripture and some even argue that it is a direct threat to Christianity.

BioLogos disagrees with the YEC viewpoint. This view rejects the discoveries of almost every modern scientific discipline to arrive at its conclusions and overlooks the revelation of God’s work in creation as uncovered by science. We also maintain that the YEC viewpoint stems from a particular interpretation of Genesis that ignores the rich cultural and theological context in which it was written.

See more on Scripture Interpretation

Old Earth Creationists (OECs) accept that the earth and universe are billions of years old, but maintain that these findings are in concordance with a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis (often by interpreting the days of creation as long periods of time, or by understanding large gaps between the days of creation). OECs hold that modern science tightly corresponds with biblical accounts and assume that God included modern scientific ideas in the Bible, sometimes through secret language that would have been lost on the original audiences. OECs do not accept macro-evolution and the common ancestry of all life forms.

BioLogos disagrees with the OEC viewpoint. While accepting the scientific consensus for an old earth, this view rejects the findings of modern genetics, paleontology, developmental biology, evolutionary biology and many other biological sub-disciplines that make little sense apart from macro-evolution and common ancestry. Furthermore, we believe that God chose to reveal himself within the worldview, culture, and language of the biblical authors.

Where Christians Agree

Despite these differences, all Christians agree that the God of the Bible is the creator of the heavens and the earth. We agree on the authority of the Bible, even though we disagree on the best interpretation of particular passages. We agree that God is continually active in his sovereign governance of the universe, even though we disagree on how much God acts through natural law versus miracles. We are unified in our rejection of evolutionism, even though we use different strategies to counteract it (some reject the science of evolution, while BioLogos rejects the atheistic spin put on the science). We agree on the fundamentals of our faith: that all people have sinned and that salvation comes only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We agree that the God of our salvation is the same God we see in the wonders of his creation. Whether we ponder the intricacy of DNA, the beauty of a dolphin, or the vastness of the Milky Way, we can lift our hearts together in praise to the divine Artist who made it all.