By Vin Sparks
If this is something you’re saying, you’re right.
I knew a guy in high school who had a souped up F85 Olds, a real muscle car. It was generally regarded as the fastest car in school. There were challengers all the time, but a trip down to where the road went through a tunnel under the airport runway would set the challengers straight – I’d never seen him lose.
The F85’s signature move was to peel off a few doughnuts right in front of the entrance to school. It let everyone know that F85 was still king. He’d get called in to see the principal, get suspended and be back to do it again once he put down another challenge.
My question to you: Were all those skid marks in front of school from the F85? I’d never seen another car pull doughnuts on the pavement like that and I didn’t even know of a car that was capable of doing so.
There are a few possibilities allowing for someone else to have laid some rubber down on that spot: it could have been done while I wasn’t there, maybe they burned rubber straight from the stop, but didn’t have enough HP to pull doughnuts, etc. For these reasons, I could never say that the F85 was the only one to do it, there is no evidence of that.
I’ll confess to you that sometimes Christians hold to ideas as though they are evidence, proof for the existence of God. We present them in debate just to find what we said to be rationally avoidable. I think we must concede that there is no proof of the existence of God that will satisfy everyone with a rational head on their shoulders.
Let me give you an example: the argument from design says that a watch found in a field indicates the existence of a watch maker. To many, that is as simple as it can be. To others, when that logic is applied to the existence of the universe, evolution rationalizes it – that billions of years and the laws of nature resulted in our existence. So, that one “proof” is rationally avoidable by many and struck down, never to be revisited.
I’m reading Timothy Keller (The Reason for God, Riverhead Books, New York, c. 2008) and he had something interesting to say. Rather than presenting our lines of reasoning as airtight “proofs”, may we present them as clues?
When I googled “arguments for the existence of God” – in .052 seconds, 18.1 million results were returned. My point here is that there have been many arguments advanced since Plato and Aristotle introduced the subject nearly 500 years before Christ.
Most anyone, looking objectively, at these “clues”, would find some to be compelling and others not so much. Keller said that the accumulated weight of the ones you may find appealing can be very formidable. It could just change the complexion of our discussion.
This blog has several posts in the “Apologetics” category that could end up on your “compelling” list – others, maybe not so much. However, if you are genuine in your search for arguments that would assure you of the existence of God, please keep clicking. You may find a few answers. Here’s what I’ve Got:
A series dedicated to the scientific “clues” to the existence of God beginning with a discussion about The Preponderance of Evidence. Other posts you may find interesting are:
Sketches on the way 