It's rational to believe in God

“I didn’t do it!” “It was an accident!” “No, Mommy, I didn’t draw a purple elephant on the wall, it just happened by itself.” Ah, the sweet sounds of children trying to avoid responsibility. At the heart of this approach lies a concept of, shall we say, Biblical proportions. Does God exist? I’ll explain. Every little girl and boy knows that there are two root causes to every event, purple crayon elephants coming into existence on the wall, for example. Little Billy or Sarah is saying “I” didn’t do it, it “just happened.” In philosophical terms we call this agent causation, Billy or Sarah, and non-agent causation, the it-just-happened cause. In our purple elephant situation, we know that the existence of a purple crayon elephant on the wall must be the product of agent causation. We could go into a long discussion of how we know that, and could come up with all sorts of possible, yet extremely improbable, ways for a crayon purple elephant to exist without someone drawing it. But the real world gets in the way of our taking these other possibilities seriously because intuitively, we know better, and little Billy won’t get off the hook that easily.

But of course there are things that just happen due to the simple laws of physics and chemistry. If little Billy bumps into the kitchen table and a glass is nocked over, momentum may cause it to roll to the edge of the table where gravity will cause it to fall to the floor and shatter into a lot of tiny little pieces. In this case, Billy didn't break the glass, per se. He just bumped the table unintentionally.

So we see that for every event there are only two possible causes, agent and non-agent causation. There are a lot of events happening all the time. Yes, that is an understatement. And each one is being caused by some previous physical event or by someone deciding for it to happen. If we work backwards, we quickly run into a question. What started all the events? Our universe is expanding. I say “ours” because that is the only one we could ever hope to observe through science. Draw a few dots, galaxies, on a balloon, the universe, and you get an idea of what our universe is doing. Run time forward and they get farther apart. Run it backwards, deflate the balloon, and you get a very small dot. Cosmologists call it a singularity.

Ok, so what caused the singularity? Well, we know that every event is caused by either another non-agent caused event or an agent cause, but as the universe shrinks back to its beginning, we run out of non-agent caused events at the beginning. Einstein helped us know that time and space are basically the same thing, or at least you can’t have one without the other. They are internally related, to use some metaphysical language. If you ask me how far it is from LA to New York City, I could tell you it’s 2806.5 miles or that it takes about 40 hours driving. Semantically the first answer is correct, but we know that both answers are correct ways to answer the question. So if you don’t have space in which to have motion (or physical events), you can’t have measurable time through which something can move from a to b. So “prior” to the beginning of the universe, you don’t have anything physical for non-agent causation.

But what about agent causation? Can an event happen without a cause? No. Can an event happen without a physical, time-space dependent cause, by an unmoved mover? Not only is it possible, it is necessary. There must be a cause that is outside space and time, and because non-agent causes are event causes dependent upon space and time, the only cause left is an agent cause. We call this first, unmoved, non-physical, timeless, personal (agent) cause God. He, to use the Biblical personal pronoun, is not a big man in the sky with a long white beard and a robe zapping things into existence.

Also, once this universe began, its development into its current life-supporting form has progressed according to the boundaries of certain constants, such as gravity and electromagnetic force. Without these constants being in precise balance, you and I couldn’t be here to consider whether or not there was a God or not. Such precise fine tuning requires that the agent cause necessary for starting our universe to have life in mind, an ultimate goal and purpose, from the outset. In other words, our universe, because it is so precisely ordered, must have been made that way on purpose, not by accident.

You see, this is a rational, philosophical position based on what we know from science, intuition, and logic, not simply based on a superstition to fill in the gaps of what we don’t know.