Timothy Keller from his book ‘The Reason for God’ wrote (starting this chapter (eight) with a couple of quotes shared:
. . . . I once met regularly with a brilliant young scientist who was haunted by the general sense that God existed. Much of what I’m writing in this chapter and the next I discovered during my conversations with him. He looked at one argument for God after another, and though many of them had a great deal of merit, he found that ultimately every one of them was rationally avoidable at some point. This troubled him greatly. “I can’t believe unless I find at least one absolutely airtight proof for God,” he said to me. I pointed out to him that he was assuming “strong rationalism” and he got some relief when together we realized he had no proof for that. Then he began to go back and review the lines of reasoning that he had been calling “proofs” and began to look at them instead as clues. When we went about it with that perspective he began to see that, cumulatively, the clues for God had a lot of force behind them.
The philosopher Alvin Plantinga believes that there are no clues of God that will convince all rational persons. However, he believes there are at least two or three dozen very good arguments for the existence of God.1 Most readers who take the time to think through Plantinga’s list will find some items compelling and others not. However, the accumulated weight of the ones you find compelling can be very formidable. I will trace out just a handful of them.
The Mysterious Bang: Those of a more rational mind-set have always been fascinated by the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing? This question has become even more interesting to people in wake of the Big Bang theory. There’s evidence that the universe is expanding explosively and outwardly from a single point. Stephen Hawking wrote: “Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang.” 2 Scientist Francis Collins put this clue in layman’s language in his book The Language of God:
We have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin, the Big Bang. Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing. I can’t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could ever have created itself. And the very fact the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature.3
Everything we know in this world is contingent, has a cause outside itself. Therefore the universe, which is just a huge pile of such contingent entities, would itself have to be dependent on some cause outside itself. Something had to make the Big Bang happen—but what? What could that be but something outside of nature, a supernatural, noncontingent being that exists, a supernatural being that exists from itself.
Sam Harris, in his review of Francis Collins’s book, makes the classic objection to this line of reasoning. “In any case”, he writes, “even if we accepted that the universe had to be created by an intelligent being, this would not suggest that this is the God of the Bible.” 4 That is perfectly right. If we are looking at this as an argument proving the existence of a personal God, it doesn’t get us all the way there. However if we are looking for a clue—a clue that there is something besides the natural world—it is very provocative for many people. ~Timothy Keller, ‘The Reason for God’, Penguin Random House LLC, New York, NY 10014, 2008, 2018) 132-33 . . . continued
