Does God Exist?

There is a delicious set of ironies involved in the question of whether God Exists. This question; at least as it is conceived in modern society, arose within Christian culture as the byproduct of the scientific revolution. Prior to the scientific revolution there was no real alternative answer to the questions of creation and existence. The scientific method and scientists studying natural phenomena in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries finally posed alternative theories for most natural phenomena and hypotheses generated from these theories have been proposed and tested ever since.

The Scientific Conclusions

The overwhelming view of science is that the Earth is old. In fact, there is not a single piece of evidence that contradicts this proposition. Observations can be wrong, dating methods can be flawed, scientists can be biased, but none of this is actual evidence that the old Earth proposition is incorrect. It merely questions how scientists have arrived at this conclusion.

The old Earth theory opened up an entire realm of possibilities for evolution because time added a component the early evolutionary theories were crying out for. With ample time, natural selection could produce the complex organisms that are observed.

Early in the twentieth century, the young-Earth creationists focused their efforts on identifying the flaws among scientists and the sciences using the "flawed-alternative" proposition. If the science is flawed then alternatives are possible. What this proposition lacked was any evidence for these alternatives. As an explanation it gathered very little attention outside of fundamentalist churches.

Gradually a new approach was taken where the scientific evidence was accepted as valid, then taken apart and reassembled to support a creator postulate. Concepts such as flood geology and green-house canopy explanations emerged and produced two interesting phenomena. Fundamentalist Christianity created a bubble for itself. Inside its bubble reality the assumption of God was accepted as absolutely true. Only those scientific explanations that coincided with with this assumption were explored. It became a world within a world - a snow globe world. Inside the snow globe every piece of evidence demonstrated the existence of a creator. The scientists outside the snow globe were biased and gullible, chasing "pet theories" that produced false conclusions.

Initially, most scientists simply ignored the snow globe world. In fact, the confidence of mainstream science was bolstered by the meager Christian defense. If flood geology was the best they could come up with mainstream science felt it was on solid ground. Paradoxically, the growth of creation science explanations tended to contradict other Christian propositions such as the gap and day-earth models held by other creationists. This produced mixed reviews from within Christianity. Those arguing for the irrelevance of science methodologies were uncomfortable with the way flood geology embraced some of those methodologies, even it the conclusions were different.

Within the snow globe the battle went on as theologians sought ways to dismiss evolutionary science to the satisfaction, at least, of those within their world. What gradually emerged in the middle of the 20th century was a world view that evolution was statistically impossible. This drew from the work of noted physicist Fred Hoyle who stated the odds of cellular life evolving were about one-in-1040000, the equivalent of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 for the materials of the junkyard. Among evolutionary biologists this is known as "Hoyle's Fallacy" because it ignore all intermediary steps critical to cellular evolution. Besides this, the odds on a creator God pre-existing the universe are even more astronomical. If everything in the universe shows traits of a designer and a creator, then who created God? God always existed as a lone deity? What are the odds on that?

None of this, though is particularly ironic. That creationists base their hopes on the flaws of science and the assumption of an intelligent designer simply demonstrates an ignorance of evolutionary theory. That people all over the world experience personal feelings they attribute to the supernatural may be testimonial evidence of something but what that something may be is as mysterious as the notion of a creator. That the Big Bang theory runs amuck of physics at the point of the singularity and may leave room for a creator is an interesting, if untestable notion.

The irony is that in almost all instances it is Christians that are making all of these arguments yet none of their arguments actually describe the Christian God. Even the very existence of an intelligent designer says nothing about the three form God that Christians pray to before football games. It is the description of a God that created things; not the description of a God that rules in Heaven, dictated his laws directly to humans, and decides on the fate of the prayers children make before going to bed.

In fact, the testimonial evidence of people all over the world experiencing some form of spirituality does more to contradict the Christian belief system than support it. Many of these people are experiencing something they would not describe as Holy Spirit of Christianity. Therefore, they are either wrong or experiencing some other form of deific inspiration.

The true irony is that the only supernatural explanations that are consistent with Christianity are those of the pre-modern fundamentalists that reject all notions of the scientific method. Christianity depends on Adam and Eve created by God as complete entities as described in the Book of Genesis. This is the only way it has any relevance as it is based on the concept of original sin. Christ's mission to Earth would be pointless if there was no original sin for which he was to provide salvation.

Modern science has not completely destroyed the notion of some form of supernatural. It is highly improbably and not a testable proposition; but not entirely ruled out. What is ruled out by every piece of evidence and even the most basic components of science is the Christian description of God.