Does God Exist?

Question 2000.

God’s existence is not something I can prove to you the way I could prove that the kettle is boiling, by pointing at it and letting you see the steam, but that does not mean the question is unanswerable or the evidence is thin. Every person alive already lives as though something ultimate is either there or not there, and that assumption shapes how they read the universe, their conscience, and their own existence long before they ever sit down to argue about it philosophically.

I want to walk through why I find belief in God not simply comforting but rational, why the alternative carries a heavier burden of explanation than most people realise, and where Scripture itself locates the starting point for this whole conversation.

Why Belief in God’s Existence Is the Most Reasonable Starting Point

Romans 1:19-20 tells us that God’s invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, so that people are without excuse. This is not a claim that everyone will believe, but a claim that the evidence is genuinely there, woven into creation itself, and that unbelief is therefore a moral and volitional problem as much as an intellectual one. I do not start from neutral ground and build up to God as a conclusion. I start from the reasonable observation that a universe with a beginning, a finely tuned physical order, and creatures who reason about morality and meaning is far better explained by a personal, powerful, intelligent Creator than by the accumulation of chance over time.

The Universe Had a Beginning

Modern cosmology, for all its disagreements about the details, is remarkably united on one basic fact: the universe began to exist. It is not eternal. Whatever begins to exist has a cause, and the cause of the entire physical universe, including time and space themselves, cannot itself be a physical, temporal thing, because it has to exist logically prior to the very categories of space and time it brought into being. That points toward a cause that is timeless, spaceless, immaterial, and enormously powerful, which is a fair description of the God revealed in Scripture long before modern physics arrived at the same conclusion by a different road. I have written more fully on this reasoning in the piece on the cosmological argument for God, and I would encourage you to read it alongside this one.

The Universe Is Precisely Tuned for Life

The physical constants that govern our universe, the strength of gravity, the rate of cosmic expansion, the ratio of electromagnetic force to gravitational force, sit within a window of values so narrow that a tiny shift in any one of them would make the formation of stars, planets, or life itself impossible. Scientists across a wide range of worldviews acknowledge this fine tuning even when they disagree fiercely about what explains it. I have set out the details of that argument in the article on the teleological, or design, argument for God, but the short version is this: a universe this precisely calibrated for life looks far more like the product of a mind than the product of chance.

The Argument From Contingency

Alongside the argument from the universe’s beginning, itself a strong pointer toward God’s existence, sits a related but distinct argument from contingency. Everything we observe in the physical world is contingent, meaning it could have failed to exist, and its existence depends on something outside itself. A tree depends on soil, sunlight, and seed. A galaxy depends on the physical laws that allow matter to cohere. Even the whole physical universe, taken as one contingent totality, depends on something to explain why it exists rather than not existing at all. A chain of contingent things explaining other contingent things, however long, never actually answers the question, because contingent things by definition cannot explain their own existence. Eventually the chain of explanation has to terminate in something that is not contingent, something that exists necessarily, by the very nature of what it is, rather than depending on some further cause. That is precisely the kind of being Theology Proper has always described God to be: self-existent, dependent on nothing, the necessary ground of everything contingent, described in Hebrews 11:3 as the one by whose word the universe was framed out of what does not appear.

The Argument From Reason and Consciousness

A further line of evidence for God’s existence, less discussed than the cosmological or design arguments but no less significant, comes from the sheer existence of reason and consciousness themselves. If the human mind is purely the accidental product of unguided physical processes, shaped by natural selection to aid survival rather than to track truth, it becomes genuinely puzzling why we should trust our reasoning faculties to deliver anything like objective truth about mathematics, logic, or the structure of the universe at all, let alone about God’s existence. Survival does not require true beliefs, only useful ones, and the two are not the same thing. A universe created by a rational God, who made human beings in His image with minds capable of genuinely tracking truth, described in Genesis 1:27, gives a far more coherent account of why reasoning works at all than a universe that produced reason as a side effect of the struggle to eat and reproduce.

The Reality of Objective Moral Law and God’s Existence

Every human being, whatever their professed worldview, lives as though certain things are actually wrong rather than simply unpopular: torturing a child for entertainment, betraying a friend, breaking a promise for no reason. These moral convictions carry a weight of obligation that mere social convention cannot supply. If morality is only the product of evolutionary usefulness or cultural agreement, then it is not really binding on anyone who disagrees with the consensus, yet nobody actually lives that way. An objective moral law is best explained by an objective moral Lawgiver, a point I unpack further in the piece on the moral argument for God.

The Argument From the Origin of Life

Alongside the question of the universe’s origin sits the narrower but equally difficult question of life’s origin. Even the simplest self-replicating cell requires an extraordinarily precise arrangement of information-bearing molecules, DNA carrying coded instructions comparable in density and specificity to a written language, packaged inside a functioning membrane with the machinery needed to read and execute those instructions. Decades of origin-of-life research have not produced a naturalistic explanation for how this specified, functional complexity could have arisen from purely undirected chemical processes, and the deeper problem is not just complexity but the presence of genuine, symbolic information, the kind of thing that in every other context we know of only arises from a mind. A universe capable of producing information-rich, self-replicating life looks far more plausible as the product of a Creator than of unguided chemistry left to itself over billions of years.

Why Denying God’s Existence Is Rarely Just an Intellectual Position

In my experience, and I think Scripture bears this out, unbelief is rarely a purely intellectual conclusion reached after weighing evidence with cold detachment. Psalm 14:1 says the fool says in his heart there is no God, and that phrase "in his heart" matters. It suggests a moral and relational resistance underneath the stated intellectual objections. People often reject God’s existence because accepting it carries implications they are unwilling to live with, not because the arguments genuinely fail. That does not mean every honest doubter is being dishonest. It does mean that apologetics alone rarely closes the gap; only the Holy Spirit working through the truth of Scripture actually opens blind eyes.

What the Bible Assumes Rather Than Argues

It is worth noticing that Genesis 1:1 does not open with an argument for God’s existence. It simply states it: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Scripture treats God’s existence as the given from which everything else follows, not as a conclusion to be proven from more basic premises. I find that instructive. The arguments I have sketched here are genuinely useful, and I think they are sound, but they were never meant to replace the self-authenticating testimony of Scripture and the witness of creation described in Psalm 19:1, where the heavens themselves are said to declare the glory of God.

So, now what?

If you are wrestling honestly with whether God exists, I would ask you to notice what your own life already assumes. You trust your reasoning faculties as though they were built to track truth. You believe some things are actually right and others actually wrong. You look at a sunset or a newborn child and sense that you are looking at something more than atoms in motion. Follow those instincts rather than suppressing them, and read the Gospels with an open mind rather than a closed fist. God has not left Himself without witness, and He is patient with honest questions, however long they take to work through fully.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Psalm 19:1