What Are the Arguments for the Existence of God?

Some people claim that faith in God is contrary to reason. Is that true? Today, Stephen Nichols highlights the primary ways Christians have defended the existence of God over the centuries.

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: What are the arguments for the existence of God? I'm here on the Ligonier campus with our chief academic officer and one of our teaching fellows, Dr. Stephen Nichols. So, Dr. Nichols, what are the arguments for the existence of God?

DR. STEPHEN NICHOLS: Well, first of all, I love a question that the answer begins with, "As Thomas Aquinas has said." So let me just quote Thomas Aquinas here: "When the effects of a thing are known, but the cause is not known, then you use the effects to know the cause." So what we have in this world is effects. We have us existing as human beings. We have the world itself. This is all an effect.

And one thing we know, the law of causality, every effect has an equal or greater than cause. So the world is an effect; it had to have a cause. And this has been an argument. It goes back beyond Aquinas, goes back to Aristotle. This is called the cosmological argument for the existence of God, and it boils down to this: you need an explanation for the world. And the only rational explanation for the world is that it had a cause; it had a beginning; and that cause was personal, and that cause was intelligent. And so, we say as Christians, it is perfectly reasonable to consider God as the cause of the world. It's actually irrational to think chance created the world or chance resulted in everything that we see, not just that the world exists, but the complexity and the beauty of the world. Chance caused all this? Or did a personal cause? That's the main argument. It's called the cosmological. Sometimes we put a twist on that and call it the teleological argument, which points to the order in the universe.

There's also the moral argument. People like C.S. Lewis raised this in the twentieth century. The idea that it's not just that we have laws but we have a sense of justice. And we have a sense of justice that transcends cultures and times and genders and people and age groups. How do you account for that? And so, it is perfectly rational to see the existence of God, given the existence of the effects that are around us. The effects point us to the cause.