you know ain't true;” and “[The Bible is] a mass of

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GOT PROOF? Teaching #1

Pastor David Staff

GOD, CAN YOU PROVE YOU EXIST? The man that Americans know as Mark Twain (1835-1910) – his pen name -- history remembers as both “an adventurer” and a “wily intellectual.” Born “Samuel Clemens” in Florida, raised on the Mississippi [River] in Hannibal MO, a young Samuel saw too much of life’s under-belly.    

At 9 he witnessed a local man murder a cattle rancher, at 10 he witnessed an owner beat his slave to death with a piece of iron, at 12 his father died, at 12 Sam laid his own father in the grave Learning to fend for himself, his life experiences were multi-colored: a riverboat pilot, a miner for gold, a journalist, author, explorer, entrepreneur and inventor. He traveled everywhere; life threw at him a lot of stuff And when Samuel Clemens (as Mark Twain) wrote, his observations about people, life and the claims of organized religion were blunt, satirical, cynical.

As Twain aged, his finances failed and his experiences even more bitter. Increasingly pessimistic, his “deep down feeling [was] that human existence was a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God.”i Which may explain why he penned the following: Strange…a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! — Mark Twain A God who makes human existence a cosmic joke, and chuckles all the way. Though raised in a strict Christian home, Twain became one of those Americans who rejected Christianity, and had tough questions for Christians. Famous for saying “Faith is believing something you know ain’t true;” and “[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology;” and

“If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian.” This morning launches the GOT PROOF? Teaching series: Can God answer the tough ones. Why this and why now? Because more and more people (including our kids) – like 1 | P a g e God’s Existence-Got Proof #1

Twain – are abandoning a Biblical and Christian world view. Some contend the Bible has outlived its usefulness, that science has trumped the day, that talking about objective rightand-wrong is no longer relevant. Do Christians—and the God they claim to represent—have any answers for the tough questions which come our way. Over the next 9 weeks, I want to challenge you love God with your mind as well as your heart, soul, and strength. To take your Bible, square your shoulders and dig…so that we can say together, “You know, we’ve done some prayerful and careful thinking, and we’ve discovered that we know a Great God who has great answers for the toughest questions. So here’s Question #1 we’ve stated simply: God, have You proven You exist? We might put it like this: Has a Supreme Being – an intelligent, powerful, and personal being – clearly and sufficiently provided proof that He exists? Can evidence for His existence be comprehended? And (more personally) can this Supreme Being be known? In the time we have today, let’s tackle this question. To do this, let’s key on 3 key realities. #1

Let’s remind ourselves about HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW. Of all the non-living and living entities that populate the universe we live in, there is no doubt

that human beings are the most remarkable. Recently, David Russell Schillingii reported on a lecture given by

Harvard University neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman, who is attempting to map the human brain. [Lichtman] has calculated that several billion petabytesiii of data storage would be needed to index the entire human brain. The numbers involved are astounding especially when considering the size of the human brain and the number of neurons in it.…[which means] that even though human knowledge is doubling every 13 months, and someday will double every 12 hours, there is still plenty of space in one human brain for all of it….and more. We know things because we have the incredible capacity of observing and concluding. We see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, and we process the wealth of our experiences rationally, logically, drawing conclusions about what is real. We express all that we’ve discovered and concluded through in thousands of intelligible languages. 2 | P a g e God’s Existence-Got Proof #1

Every day we draw countless, valid conclusions about what is real (what is actually there) and what is not real, what is true and what is not true. We understand cause and effect. When we see order, we conclude that something or someone made the arrangement; when we encounter design, we rightly conclude there is an intelligent designer…and there always is. And even though we are capable of illogical thinking or mistaken perception, we can and do reject those conclusions, and replace such things with what accords with more careful observation and a better explanation for what we saw or experienced. Our processes of discovery—what we might call SCIENCE-can catalogue the WHAT – what goes on in our world and universe, how physical things work. What causes what…and we can use those discoveries to manage the physical and (hopefully) make living better. But our SCIENCE can never tell us HOW all that exists came into being in the first place. Something is here rather than nothing. And all physical things – we’ve discovered – are contingent. They resulted from a sufficient Cause. So, Who or What is the sufficient Cause for all that we see? This points to the beauty of what a brilliant man wrote to the Roman world. Paul insisted that the WHAT clearly and compellingly pointed to a WHO (cf. Romans 1:19-20): What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things which have been made. So, they are without excuse.

Here’s a 2nd reality #2 The truth is that God (a Supreme being) has OPENLY DEMONSTRATED HE IS THERE. The EVIDENCES (of a Supreme being’s existence) are clear and compelling. You may or may not (at this point) accept the Bible as the WORD of a Supreme Being, but the Bible does describe what we see. Psalm 19 is that description: The heavens declare the glory of God, And the sky above proclaims His handiwork. 3 | P a g e God’s Existence-Got Proof #1

Day to day pours out speech And night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, Whose voice is not heard. Their measuring line goes out through all the earth, And their words to the end of the world.

Like Romans 1:19-20, this is a remarkable claim by King David. David had his royal choir sing that there is no paucity of proof for any human being to see. The truth is that there is a 24-7 proclamation, a constant flow of speech, of revelation, which extends to every place on the planet, of the glory of God. There is a Being whose glory proves His existence. The evidence could not be more profuse nor more pervasive. In his helpful book, THE REASON FOR GOD, Timothy Keller offers a great word: How can we believe Christianity if we don’t even know whether God exists…I once met a brilliant young scientist who was haunted by a general sense that God existed. 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”iv and he got some relief when together we realize that he had no airtight proof for that. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga believes that there are no rational proofs of God that will convince all rational persons…yet there are at least two to three dozen very good arguments for God’s existence…and their accumulated weight can be very formidable.v Keller cites some of the best (here are just 2). THE MYSTERIOUS BANG – “Everything we know in this world is “contingent,” has a cause outside of itself. This universe—a huge pile of contingent entities—must be dependent on some cause outside of itself. Francis Collins (The Language of God) says it simply – The universe had an origin—the Big Bang…it began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point…which implies that there was nothing. I can’t imagine how nature/the universe, could have created itself. The very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that Someone – outside of nature – was able to begin it.vi THE EXISTENCE OF ORGANIC LIFE ON A SINGULARLY UNIQUE PLANET – Again, Keller quotes Collins: When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew (note the language of intelligence) we were coming…If any one of the constants [we’ve observed through physics] was off by even one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter itself would not have been able to coalesce, there would be no galaxy, no stars, no planets, no people.vii Nathaniel Scharping recently reported in Discover,

A new study (astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden) suggests that there are around 700 quintillion planets in the universe, but only one like Earth. It’s a revelation that’s both beautiful 4 | P a g e God’s Existence-Got Proof #1

and terrifying at the same time. It’s a staggering figure — a 7 followed by 20 zeros — with the aid of a computer model that simulated the universe’s development following the Big Bang. Zackrisson found that Earth appears to have been dealt a fairly lucky hand. In a galaxy like the Milky Way, for example, most of the planets Zackrisson’s model generated looked very different than Earth — they were larger, older and very unlikely to support life.viii Guillermo Gonzales and Jay W. Richards offered powerful evidences and proof in The Privileged Planet. The only reasonable conclusion, the only compelling conclusion, is this: An intelligent, powerful being especially caused this universe and uniquely designed this planet, and life on this planet. Like no other. Stephen Hawkingix himself said it, “The odds again a universe like our emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous…it would be very difficult to explain [allt this] except as an act of God who intended to create beings like us.x As Norman Geisler says it, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”xi The realities are these: We are capable of observing and knowing what is real and concluding on what is true. Most human beings do not live in an agnostic world of speculation, unsure, or insisting that nothing truly can be known. We understand cause and effect, that there must be a sufficient cause for the effects we see. And when we reasonably think about a sufficient cause for all that we see and continue to discover, the most reasonable and rationale – indeed compelling -- conclusion is a supremely intelligent, creative, and sufficiently powerful being. Reality #3 Let’s (also) RECOGNIZE WHY PEOPLE DOUBT GOD’S EXISTENCE. God’s “large picture” answer/Biblical reply is this: the skepticism and fallenness of sin have resulted in a confusing array of doubt and rebellion. A. Some deny because of “foolishness” – “The fool has said in his heart There is no God” (Psalm 14:1) B. Some doubt because of “confusion” – many gods or other gods, many non-congruent ideas (Romans 1, Acts 17)…lack of humble thankfulness leads to creating gods we can make/control C. Some doubt because of “hurt” – a good sovereign God, to his/her way of thinking, would not permit the world to inflict this kind of hurt in my life, people’s lives (Job 2:9, Habakkuk 1:1-4)

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D. Some deny because of prideful independence – “the kindness/goodness of God” has been reinterpreted into “I am the captain of my own ship; I determine my own fate.” (Psalm 10:4, 73:4-11, Acts 26:27-28) WHY THIS MATTERS

Tim Keller is correct, and he wrote this book because of a correct conviction. Just before he writes Chapter 9, “The Knowledge of God,” Keller surprisingly says this: In the next chapter (Chapter 9, “The Knowledge of God”), I don’t want to argue why God may exist. I want to demonstrate that you already know that God does exist. I’d like to convince [the reader] that, whatever you may profess intellectually, belief in God is an unavoidable, “basic” belief that we cannot [absolutely] prove but [we] can’t not know. We know God is there. That is why even when we believe with all our minds that life is meaningless, we simply can’t live that way. We know better.xii Inside, inside we know. It’s as clear as can be, because God made it so. “In the beginning, God…” Copyright 2018 © David A. Staff All rights reserved

https://www.biography.com/people/mark-twain-9512564 - biographical material for Twain from this website. http://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-months-soon-to-be-every-12-hours/3950 The Internet is currently estimated to be 5 million terabytes (TB) of which Google has indexed roughly 200 TB or just .004% of its total size. iii 1024 terabytes, or a million gigabytes. https://www.google.com/search?q=Dictionary#dobs=petabyte. One gigabyte can store 3,400 books of information. A terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) can store 3,400,000 books of information. A petabyte is 1024 terabytes – over 3 billion books of information. And the brain has capacity for several billion petabytes of information. iv Keller explains that “strong rationalism” insists on the “verification principle,” (quoting Keller) “namely that no one should believe a proposition unless it can be proved rationally by logic or empirically by sense experience. What is meant by the word proved? Proof, in this view, is an argument so strong that no person whose logical faculties are operating properly would have any reason for disbelieving it. Atheists and agnostic ask for this kind of proof for God, but are not alone in holding to strong rationalism. [Yet] The great majority of philosophers (even the atheistic ones) think that strong rationalism is nearly impossible to defend. To begin with, you can’t live up to its own standards. How could you empirically prove that no one should believe something without empirical proof? You can’t, and that reveals it to be, ultimately, a belief. Strong rationalism also assumes that it is possible to achieve the view from nowhere, a position of almost complete objectivity, virtually all philosophers today agree that is impossible. We come to every evaluation with all sorts of experiences and background believes that strongly influence our thinking and the way our reason works. It is not fair, then, [Keller continues] to demand an argument that all rational people would have to bow down to.” REASON FOR GOD, pp.122-123. v Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an age of Skepticism (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), in Chapter Eight, “The Clues of God,” pp.131-132. vi Keller, 133, citing Francis Collins in The Language of God. vii Keller, 134. viii http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/02/22/earth-is-a-1-in-700-quintillion-kind-of-place/#.WseoAUxFy3A ix Quoted in Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist presents evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006) p.75., Cited in Keller, The Reason for God, 134. x In addressing the “It’s not impossible, it’s just statistically improbable,” Keller (pp.135-136) cites philosopher John Leslie’s illustration. “He imagines a man who is sentenced to be executed by a firing squad consisting of 50 expert marksmen. They all fire from 6 feet away and not one bullet hits him. Since it is possible that even expert marksmen could miss from close range, it is technically possible that all 50 just happened to miss at the same moment. Though you could not prove that all 50 had conspired to miss, it would be unreasonable to draw the conclusion that they hadn’t.” xi His book title by the same name. xii Keller, 147. i

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