Know God: No God? Why Should I Believe At All? with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

We're in week one of a brand new series called Know God.

We started MetaChurch a little over three years ago to be a community where anyone can come from any part of your faith or life journey and wrestle with life's biggest questions.

Now, from time to time, we go into a series like this where we tackle these questions head on.

And the Christian faith is like screaming for these questions to be answered.

Here's how the Bible opens up the first book, first chapter, first verse, Genesis 1:1 says, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

That's how it starts.

No, like, thanks for picking this book up.

Hope you're doing well.

It doesn't ease you into it, it makes the biggest claim of all time.

That in the beginning there was nothing, and out of nothing, an all-powerful God created the entire universe.

It's the miracle of all miracles, and it's been the dividing line of faith for pretty much all of human history.

And what we see right now going on in the world is every year more and more people are claiming atheism.

More and more people are saying I have no spiritual or religious affiliation.

Every year, thousands of churches are closing their doors permanently to never open again.

People are checked out.

Many people grew up in the faith and are leaving their faith behind.

They're getting out into the real world where there are real pushback to their faith claims, the claims of Christianity.

And so, what we're gonna do in this series is we're gonna look at these big, big questions like does God exist?

And is the resurrection reasonable?

And if there is a good God, why do so many bad things happen?

Those topics and so much more.

And really, this series is for everyone.

If you are agnostic or you do consider yourself atheist, this is to really challenge you on some of those beliefs and to see if you have really, really wrestled with the facts that are out there to come to your conclusion.

If you are like a seasoned believer, you've experienced God and nothing is going to ever change your mind.

This series, if you stick in and stay with it, it will help give you a more reasoned faith so that you can stand up to people who come against it with their arguments.

And if you're someone who's on the fence, maybe you haven't really believed in Jesus, but you're curious, or maybe you grew up in the faith, but you're on your way out.

I hope that this will give you something to think through and to wrestle with.

In the beginning, the biggest claim that God created all that is and ever was in our universe.

Now, we are coming at this from a biased angle, and you probably assumed that because you're either streaming a church service or you're sitting here in a church service.

I do believe that there is a God, the God of the Bible, who created and sustained the universe, who knows who you are, created you, and has a plan and purpose for your life.

And generally, there are two broad paths that lead people to faith.

A lot of this breaks down by personality.

Some people come through simple experience.

They have an experience of God and it changes their life forever.

Other people are wired a little more skeptical, like me, where I came about it from a more reasoned perspective.

And what I think we need is whatever extreme you might fall on, is a more balanced approach to how we view our faith.

What we're gonna be doing in this series is formally called apologetics.

Now, this doesn't mean that we are going to apologize for our faith.

Apologetics is from the Greek word apologia, which means to give a defense of, we are going to give a defense of a theistic worldview, of a belief in God.

Today we're gonna start in the beginning.

My message is no God, why should I believe at all?

You know, Christians and the church at large have been so hesitant to take on any of these big questions.

And one of the great tragedies of the modern church is that people have come to the people who claim faith in God and asked these big, bold questions, and what they've been told is you just need to have more faith.

Many kids have grown up like this.

Maybe you were one of those kids and you got a little bit older and wondered like why we're here and where this all came from, and lots of other big questions.

And you asked religious parents who told you to quit questioning God.

And let me just tell you, if you're raising your kids that way right now, they're gonna grow up, leave your house, go to college or the workforce, and meet some people who have real arguments against their faith, and they will leave their faith behind because there's no reason behind it.

This is just a misunderstanding of faith in two ways.

The first way is that biblical faith is not blind faith.

That is not what we are called to as followers of Jesus or believers in God.

As a matter of fact, the word faith in scripture, it's written in Greek, and it comes from the Greek verb pasteo, which means to be convinced by argument.

Biblical faith is a reasoned faith.

We see Peter, one of Jesus' disciples and an apostle who planted churches, he wrote to one of the churches he started and said, This in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy.

That's a faith claim.

And then he goes into reason, ready at any given time to give a defense, an apologia, to give a defense to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in you.

Christians in the room, are you ready to give reasons for your hope?

The first misunderstanding is that faith is just blind belief.

That's not what it is.

It is a reasoned and convinced faith.

The second misunderstanding is that only Christians or theists, which means those who believe in God, have faith.

For years and years, atheists have won the argument about the existence of God by saying, we have the facts, you have faith, facts beat faith.

And if you don't learn anything else today, I hope you will see that everyone, atheists and theists alike, are relying on faith when push comes to shove.

Everyone has faith in their worldview.

The question isn't who has faith, the question is who has the most reasonable faith.

I'm convinced that faith in God is far more reasonable than faith that there is no God.

And today I hope to be able to show that.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you, and I just thank you.

I thank you for MetaCurch.

I thank you for this series.

We're covering a lot of content, so I just I pray for clarity.

I pray that we would be open, that whoever is is watching or listening, streaming this online, that we'd be humble enough to lay down any ideology, any presuppositions.

We'd lay down our religious baggage that might keep us from hearing the truth today.

I pray that we would be honest to take the evidence presented and to be reasonable with it.

I believe that's what you've asked us to do.

We're gonna try that today.

We love you, and we pray this in Jesus' name.

If you're ready to go, say amen.

Amen.

Today I'm gonna present three defenses for theism.

Now, I want to make sure we know what that means.

Today I am not going to try and defend the Christian God.

That's gonna take week one and week two.

We're gonna have to get to the resurrection.

Today I want to defend theism, which means belief in God.

To do that, I'm gonna go through three arguments for the existence of God.

Now, there are so many great arguments from so many different disciplines.

I've studied this for years and years.

Picking just these three kind of felt like picking my favorite child.

All right, this was really, really difficult.

But I think these three will be a great use of our time.

Now, just to warn you, I always talk fast, but I normally write a six-page script and I've got an 11-page script in front of me.

So I'm gonna be like the micro machine man today, and we're gonna have to hang in there.

You can watch it back on YouTube and slow it down.

We've got a lot of ground to cover, and we're gonna dive into some kind of complex topics.

And so I know not everyone wants to make an A plus on their heavenly report card, so not everyone takes notes.

But today might be the day to get out the note app on your phone and to write some stuff down.

Even though we're gonna get into some big words and a little bit of complexity today, I wanted us to have a very simple foundation to fall back on.

And so the way I'm gonna present these three arguments will be the same for every argument.

I'm gonna present them in a logical argument that's called a syllogism.

Ooh, we're learning in church today.

A syllogism says if premise A is true, if premise A, so we're gonna make a claim, if premise A and premise B, so if both of those claims are true, then conclusion C, and here's what really matters.

If A is true and B is true, then C is necessarily true.

Not that it could be true sometimes, but if A and B, then C has to be true.

This is how you make an airtight logical argument, and we're gonna seek to do that today.

But before we dive deep, let's go through some examples that we can all understand together so we make sure we understand what a syllogism is.

Here's an example of one that is airtight.

Premise A, all humans are mortal.

That means someday we die.

Premise B, Pastor Ryan is a human.

And conclusion C, therefore, Pastor Ryan is mortal.

He will die someday.

Now, all we have to do is examine claim A and claim B and see if the conclusion follows.

Claim A, all humans are mortal.

We know this.

We know it biologically, historically, philosophically, experientially.

We know that one out of every one person dies.

Claim A is verified, fact-checked, true.

Claim B, Pastor Ryan is a human.

Pastor Ryan is right here.

And like we can see him.

We know that.

He has human children, which only humans produce.

If you're still not convinced, first off, rude, but also we could DNA test him.

You could go to great lengths and verify he is in fact human.

And because premise A and premise B are both true and follow from each other, premise C is necessarily true.

The conclusion is necessarily true.

Ryan has to be mortal.

Now let's look at a syllogism that is not true because you can do these and make these and they look good, but they're not true.

Something like this.

All people in Texas say y'all.

That's premise A.

Premise B is Pastor Ryan is in Texas.

Therefore, Ryan says y'all.

Now, premise B is true.

Pastor Ryan is in Texas currently, and he lives in Texas, and I know that because I've been to his house a bunch of times.

I know premise B is true.

However, and unfortunately, premise A can be easily refuted.

All you have to do to debunk premise A is find literally one person in the state of Texas who doesn't use the word y'all in their vocabulary.

And with all of you Californians moving in, it's not that difficult to do.

What that means is that one of the premises is not true.

So even though Ryan could say y'all, it doesn't mean he necessarily has to say y'all because the syllogism is broken.

Worse news: Pastor Ryan is from Indiana and says, you guys.

Pray for him.

When a syllogism is accurate, it creates an airtight argument.

We're gonna give you three arguments.

Each of them will have a syllogism.

We have limited time, but we're gonna dive as deep as we can.

And we wanna resource you guys.

So we're gonna do a couple of things.

We're gonna sell one of the books that I've studied and referenced throughout putting this series together, and I've read many times.

This is a book I read every couple of years called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.

We also have a website for you, metachurch.tv slash know God, and we're going to do midweek content.

We're gonna stream on our YouTube channel and social media, something called overtime.

Because trust me, this 11 pages was about 31 pages, and we had to pare it down, okay?

So we got some other content we're gonna hit y'all with in the middle of the week.

We're we've got three arguments that we're going to go through today.

The first is an argument from creation.

This is called the cosmological argument.

Cosmology is the study of the universe, including the beginning of the universe, the argument from creation.

Second will be the argument from design.

This is called the teleological argument.

Telos just means purpose or design.

And last, we will look at morality, the argument from morality.

First, creation.

One of the best mathematicians to ever walk the earth, the co-discoverer of calculus, said this the first question which should rightly be asked is why is there something rather than nothing?

Why is there something rather than nothing?

In other words, where did all of this come from?

How did we get here?

Why does the universe exist?

These are some of the fundamental questions of philosophy, some of the fundamental questions of life.

Now, this also breaks down by personality.

Chances are there's about half of you in the room who think about these kinds of things all of the time.

Sometimes you think about them so much you feel like you're losing your mind.

And then there are some of you who have thought about this for a grand total of seven minutes, and it started at the beginning of my sermon today.

You never think about this.

These are important questions, though.

And the argument from creation gets right to the heart of them.

I mentioned earlier, no one's off the hook.

We all require faith for our worldview.

And I think the argument from creation, why is there something rather than nothing, highlights an atheist's need for faith more than anything else.

Here's our simple argument for creation, simple logical argument.

Premise A, everything that begins to exist has a creator.

Premise B, the universe began to exist.

And conclusion, therefore, the universe has a creator.

Again, everything that begins to exist has a creator.

The universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a creator.

Now we don't have time to do this in all three arguments, but I want to break down both of our premises in this syllogism.

The first is that everything that begins to exist has a creator.

You might be surprised to find out that there's actually not much pushback against this first premise, even in the scientific and even in the atheistic community.

And here's why.

Because for this to be wrong, the world would be absurd.

A simpler way to say premise A is that something cannot come from nothing.

Everything that begins to exist has a creator because everything that begins to exist has to have a cause.

That's called the law of causality.

It's something that governs our world.

If something could come from nothing, then there would be no logical reason that a hippopotamus could not manifest in the air right above y'all's section and fall down onto your heads.

There would be nothing guarding against that.

Things could just pop into existence and manifest themselves at at random.

Think how bad traffic would be if there were all the cars and then cars just showed up every once in a while.

This doesn't happen.

We know it doesn't happen because of the law of uniformity.

The law of uniformity is why we can even do science in the first place.

What it says is that the natural laws and constants that guide and govern our world are uniform, which means they are predictable.

And if the laws of nature, math, and physics are not predictable, you cannot do science at all.

You cannot discover anything in the world.

It would be impossible.

Science requires repeatable experiments.

And if you had five subjects that you were studying, and at any given day, seven more could auto-populate from nothing, your experiment would be ruined.

If the law of uniformity were broken, there'd be no reason that gravity would work tomorrow the same way that it works today.

There'd be no reason that the laws of mathematics would work tomorrow the way that they work today.

Everything that begins to exist has to have a cause and creator, and if not, the world would devolve into absolute chaos.

If you asked a friend where they got their outfit, you you really thought they looked fresh that day?

You said, Hey, where'd you get this fit from?

And they looked at you with all seriousness and said, Craziest thing, got out of the shower, dried off, and all of a sudden I just had these clothes on.

Out of nowhere, they manifest themselves around my body.

Hey, where'd you get that outfit from?

It came from nothing, out of nothing, from nowhere.

You would roll your eyes so hard you would see the back of your skull.

Like, no one's buying that.

We can't buy that for a shirt.

Think of how simple a t-shirt is.

It's just a few raw materials.

You can make the whole thing just out of cotton, process it, turn it into fabric, stitch it together.

You got a shirt.

That's easy money.

That's easy.

And yet, there is no scenario someone could put hand to God on their mama, you are not gonna believe that that shirt just came out of nowhere, out of nothing.

And yet, on atheism, that is exactly what we believe, not about a simple creation like our t-shirt, but about the entire spance of the universe itself.

This leads to premise B.

Premise B says the universe began to exist.

Christianity stood out for hundreds of years because of its belief in creation ex nielo.

That means creation out of nothing.

In the beginning, God created.

There was nothing.

There were not atoms floating around, there was not a space vacuum, there was nothing.

Aristotle says nothing is what rocks dream about.

There was nothing.

Then the Enlightenment came, and philosophers came up with the idea of a static universe.

What that means is the universe is unchanging and therefore it is infinite.

Millions of people became atheists because of belief in a static universe.

If the universe is infinite, it's infinite, it's a huge problem for Christianity because you cannot have an in the beginning if there is no beginning.

Over time, as science progressed and astronomy progressed, and cosmology progressed, and biology progressed, and all of the sciences and all the disciplines progressed, slowly there was some doubt that was shown onto the static universe theory.

I wish I had time to go through all of the things that led to this, but I want to give kind of a brief history, and so indulge me.

One of the key factors was Einstein.

Remember Albert Einstein, genius, crazy hair, German guy, right?

Greatest mathematician, probably that ever walked the earth.

He came up with the theory of general relativity, and this theory of relativity is one of the greatest achievements of humankind.

And when he came up with it, it came to a conclusion.

The theory led to a conclusion that the universe itself was expanding.

Einstein didn't like that.

He had an ideological belief, not a scientific, not a mathematical, an ideological belief in a static universe.

He didn't like the conclusion of an expanding universe because an expanding universe means it hasn't existed forever.

And so Einstein fudged the numbers, the greatest mathematician to ever live, did something that we all learn not to do in third grade.

He divided by zero in order to get a static universe.

At the end of his life, he would call it his greatest blunder and his most embarrassing moment.

If you think that science and philosophy isn't still held back by ideological constraints, then you're not paying attention.

It was a few years later that Edwin Hubble, who the Hubble telescope is now named after, was looking through that telescope, trying to see the very outer edge of the known universe.

And when he finally got it in focus, he saw something that blew his mind.

He saw that the universe was actually expanding at a constant rate from a single point.

What that means, he could not possibly miss.

It meant that if you were to rewind the tape on the universe, eventually the tape would run out.

The universe expanding at a constant rate from a single point means that at one point there was no universe.

Edwin Hubble called Albert Einstein and said, You have to come look through my telescope.

In the 1920s, Albert Einstein came out, looked through it, and had to go back to his original general theory of relativity.

He was once and for all proven wrong that the universe did, in fact, begin to.

Exist and it began to exist out of nothing.

The scientific community was in an uproar.

I mean, they they were like, this is one of the biggest discoveries ever, and so they started making these hypotheses like, you know, if the world just like leapt into existence, then we should be able to see evidence of that somewhere in the universe.

And they began to scan for radiation, and it wasn't long until a couple of scientists found the radiation afterglow from the very beginning of the universe.

Something they began to call the Big Bang.

How many of you grew up in church where the Big Bang was a four-letter word?

You weren't allowed to talk about it?

It was like, man, this is the atheist trying to creep in and get us all out of here.

Look, we believe in the Big Bang.

We just know who banged it, alright?

The radiation afterglow is the evidence of what was expanding out into what is becoming.

It was an unbelievable find.

So they put together another hypothesis because there's all these galaxies that we had mapped in astronomy, and they said there should be significant and unique ripples in that radiation afterglow where the force of gravity and other elements of nature pulled in galaxies across the universe.

In other words, in that radiation, we should be able to find a mapping of all of the galaxies that started from the Big Bang.

In 1989, not long ago, they sent up the Kobe satellite and they detected the exact, exact ripples in the radiation afterglow that they expected to find up there.

The leader of that mission, George Schmoot, said, if you're religious, looking at those ripples in the Big Bang afterglow, in the evidence of the beginning, looking at those ripples is like looking at God himself.

You see, we didn't like the Big Bang because at the beginning, people used it to posit that we no longer needed God to explain creation.

And yet, as theists, people who believe in God, we should cling tightly to the Big Bang.

Number one, because it is the best available evidence.

At this point, it is scientifically conclusive, and it is the greatest defeater to a static universe.

You know what the Big Bang tells you?

It tells you that we can have an in the beginning, because there was, in fact, a beginning.

Stephen Hawking, and I'm gonna quote quite a few people throughout here, physicists and astronomers and mathematicians, and I've purposely chosen today to only quote people who claim atheism.

Stephen Hawking, probably the most famous theoretical physicist of all time, said, Almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.

In other words, before the Big Bang, there was nothing.

There was no space, there was no time, there was no matter.

There was nothing.

This was an incredible, incredible discovery.

And so everything that begins to exist has a creator, and the universe began to exist, which begs the necessary conclusion that the universe must have a creator.

Here's the options that you're left with.

On the creation argument, why is there something instead of nothing?

Everyone has faith.

It's just a question of how reasonable your faith is.

On theism, which means belief in God, we have faith in a God who created something, the universe, out of nothing.

Not two atoms that collided together.

Atoms are material, there was no matter.

Not a space-time vacuum, there was no space or time.

Out of absolutely nothing, let's put our cards on the table.

This is called a miracle.

We're outside the realm of science and data for a minute.

Creating something out of nothing is called a miracle.

Everyone requires faith.

And for me, a miracle is far more reasonable than madness.

On theism, someone created something out of nothing.

On atheism, no one created something out of nothing.

Something was created, we know that because we're here living in this universe.

We can trace the scientific data back to the nothing that it all sprang from.

And the question is, was that guided by someone, or was it unguided?

Did something come out of nothing from nothing by no one?

This is a miracle.

This is worse than magic.

In magic, a magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat.

On atheism, you have no hat, no rabbit.

Worst of all, you don't have the freaking magician.

The question is what is reasonable?

And if you're here and you cling to atheism or you're agnostic or you're on the fence or you're on your way in or you're on your way out, these are questions we have to deal with.

And I know we're busy and we're Instagramming and we're going to sporting events, we're doing the whole thing, but maybe it's worth slowing down and saying, at one point there was nothing, and now we're here.

What's the most reasonable explanation of exactly how that happened?

On theism, belief in God, we can't prove the Christian God out of the cosmological argument, but we can find many attributes of God at being there was no space, there was no time, and there was no matter, which means this God must be spaceless and timeless and immaterial.

Not only that, but we can look at the universe around us.

It'd be worth your time to go home and Google the scale of the universe.

There are videos and there are websites that will blow your mind at just how large our universe is.

Creating something out of nothing, much less this incredible universe, take someone who is all powerful.

Not only is this creator timeless, faceless, immaterial, and all-powerful, but they are personal because it is a personal decision to go from nothing to the act of creating something.

The truth is, if someone is unwilling to believe in God, they cannot be convinced.

And you see, even in the scientific and philosophical communities, people who, no matter what, will not believe in God are beginning to speculate about other theories to get away from the conclusion that either someone created something out of nothing or no one created something out of nothing.

This is where you hear things like simulation theory, you know, we're just all in the matrix right now, or things like the multiverse, which works great in Marvel, doesn't work so great in the natural laws of physics.

And there are even people who believe in panspermia or the galaxy seeds, which means that there were actual aliens who came and seeded all the different galaxies.

And it's like, that's really interesting.

Tell me more about these aliens.

Well, they'd have to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, all powerful, and personal, I guess.

People will go to great lengths to not call something God.

Robert Jastro is one of the most famous astronomers of all time.

He founded NASA's Institute of Space Studies.

He said, This astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world.

Says that an agnostic astronomer, he said the essential element in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis is actually the same.

Even this non-theist had to be intellectually honest about where the evidence took him.

Our first argument is that if everything that begins to exist has a creator and the universe began to exist, the universe itself must have a creator.

Our second argument is a little different.

It's the argument from design.

Our world is unbelievably fine-tuned.

There's something called the anthropic principle, which basically means we're here, and so we retroactively figure out what it took to get us here.

It turns out there are over a hundred constants in the anthropic principle that have to be fine-tuned to such a phenomenal astronomical degree that to assume that we are here by chance would take a leap of faith far greater than anything any religion has to offer.

Here's our syllogism.

It says, every design has a designer.

The universe has a highly complex design, therefore, the universe itself has a designer.

We're gonna look at two parts of design.

The first is the universe itself, and the second is the life inside of it.

First, I want us to get a baseline understanding because we're about to deal with some numbers that are truly described as astronomical numbers.

They are numbers bigger than we will ever use in our everyday life.

And I want us to get some sense of scale for these numbers.

First thing I want to look at is the number of seconds in the entire history of humanity, not minutes, not hours, not days, the number of seconds in the history of humanity is estimated to be 10 to the 17th power number of seconds.

That is 10 with 17 zeros after it.

That's how many seconds there are going all the way back to the proposed beginning of humanity.

The number of subatomic particles in the entire known universe is 10 to the 80th power.

That's one with 80 zeros after it.

With those unbelievable numbers in mind, let's go to just a handful of the constants that had to be fine-tuned, exactly precise for the universe to exist.

Again, Stephen Hawking said this: if the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in a thousand million million, a thousand million million, a second after the Big Bang, the universe would have collapsed back in on itself or never developed galaxies.

The weak force is one of the four constants in nature.

It operates inside the nucleus of every single atom.

If it was changed by a factor of one to ten to the one hundredth power, you're talking about beyond a microscopic change in the weak force, humanity would never have sustained and the universe would implode back on itself.

If the force of gravity was changed by one in ten to the fortieth, we would either instantly be squashed down into a puddle or float off into outer space to our depth.

To understand that, if you stretched a tape measure across the known universe and set that as your scale, if you were to move gravity by one inch, life would not be permittable.

Stars would not exist, and neither would we.

If Jupiter were not in our solar system and in its exact place and exact orbit, Earth would not exist.

Jupiter is a giant cosmic vacuum cleaner, sucking in all of the meteors and asteroids, many of which would have already made life on Earth extinct long ago.

If the Earth was just a little bit closer to the sun or a little bit further away, would either heat or freeze to our death.

There are over a hundred of these constants.

And you have to decide when you see design, do you see a designer?

When you see direction, intentional direction, is there usually a director?

When you see a message, is there a mind behind it?

On atheism, belief that there is no God, the world is fine-tuned to a complexity we cannot even understand, it has evidence of design that we cannot replicate, and yet we do not believe that it has actually been designed.

If you have on your fridge those magnetic letters that make all the alphabet, if you came home and your wife was out and the magnetic alphabet was arranged to say, honey, do the dishes before I get home, and you took the atheist approach to the fine-tuning of the universe and just assumed that those letters had evolved to be there by no intervention of any kind, went, sat on the couch, turned on Sports Center.

Your wife's gonna get home and you're gonna have a problem.

That excuse isn't going to hold.

If you come down and see a letter written to you on your counter, you know there's a mind behind the message.

There's design behind a designer behind design.

That's just the universe.

What about life?

All life is guided by the genetic code called DNA.

It has an alphabet just like ours, it's only four letters long.

It makes all of us different, all living things.

DNA is unbelievably complex.

It's a code, it's a message, and messages come from minds.

Even the simplest one-cell amoeba has enough DNA in it to equal 1,030-volume Encyclopedia Britannicus.

I just lost half the room.

A single cell amoeba has so much information in it, it would be like reading the Twilight books 10,000 times.

Okay, is that closer?

It's unbelievable.

And if someone handed you a novel, it was bound together in leather, you opened it up, you read a few chapters, it told a cogent story, the letters made words, the words made sentences, sentences made paragraphs, paragraphs made pages, pages made chapters, chapters told a story, a real novel.

If they handed you that, you said, Where was this from?

And they said, craziest thing.

The print shop exploded yesterday morning, and this book came out of it.

And yet that is infinitely more likely than all of the design in the universe and in life itself that we see, and on atheism believe, has been a completely unguided process.

The design argument asks how is our world so meticulously fine-tuned?

And on theism, belief in God, we have faith that the universe and life inside of it are designed by a purposeful designer.

The kind of design you would expect if there was an immaterial, spaceless, timeless, all-powerful personal creator.

On atheism, how the world is so fine-tuned and shows so much evidence of design, has to come to the conclusion that the universe and the life inside it only appear to be designed through blind natural forces and astronomical chance.

And the question today is not who has faith, it's whose faith is more reasonable.

We have one more argument.

It's the argument from morality.

And this shifts gears.

This isn't really existing much in the realm of science, it's more in our lived experience.

Morality is how we decide what is right, wrong, good, bad, and evil.

That is morality.

The argument is not that an atheist cannot act morally or know what morality is.

It's kind of a sad state, actually, that it's often easier to find an atheist who is kind, loving, non-judgmental than it is in many churches.

There are many atheists who are living a lot more Christ-like than a lot of Christians.

Anyone who makes the argument that an atheist cannot act morally or know morality is just wrong.

We see that in our lived experience.

The argument is that an atheist cannot justify their morality, and here's why.

Here's our argument.

Every law has a lawgiver, every objective, real law has a lawgiver.

There is an objective moral law.

We experience that in our lives and on our hearts.

Therefore, there must be a moral law giver.

I don't know if any of you have noticed.

They've put these signs up all around town.

The word offensive is kind of strong, so I don't know.

They're definitely frustrating to me.

Um, they've cost me a lot of money.

I don't know if you've seen them, they're called speed limit signs.

Have y'all seen them?

Here's the thing.

Um, if you don't think that that's an objective law, try this on your way home.

Just wait till you know those cars with the really cool lights over the top?

Just wait till you see one of those and go as fast as you can go, alright?

You will find out quick, trust me.

I have found out many times.

An objective law has a lawgiver.

In that sense, it's the city of San Antonio backed up by the state of Texas, backed up by the federal government of our nation.

Every objective law.

Now, there are societal norms that are not laws.

For example, there's no law that says you can't belch over and over and over again on an airplane.

You will not get arrested for that.

I know, because I had a really long flight from Fort Lauderdale to DFW one time.

I was wishing it was a law.

Now everyone agrees you shouldn't do that, but there is nothing outside of society to enforce it.

It's not objective, it's just a social norm.

Morality requires a standard to know what is wrong and what is right, to know what is good and what is bad.

And this matters because you cannot actually legislate morality.

You can make laws that are immoral, like slavery at the beginning of our nation, or like what was happening in Nazi Germany, immoral laws.

You can have things that are immoral that aren't legislated at all.

But you can't actually pass morals.

You can only pass laws.

And so the question is: where does the standard for morality come from?

On theism, we say that God is the perfect objective standard for morality.

It doesn't mean there aren't disagreements about what is good, bad, right, wrong, or evil.

It means that we look to the revelation of something outside of us to decide those disagreements.

If there is no God, the standard for morality is just us.

And if it's just us, that means that morality is not objective, it is subjective, which is another way of saying it's just a matter of opinion.

Honest atheists will admit this.

Charles Dawkins said in a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are gonna get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.

The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil or no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Charles Dawkins is one of the world's most famous atheists.

What he is saying is that in a world without God, the universe doesn't care about you.

You cannot find morals in the physical laws, you cannot find right or wrong in mathematics, you cannot find justice under a microscope.

Those are things that either just exist in us and are up for debate, or real right, real wrong, real good, and real evil are in something outside of us, that's the only way to make them objective.

Again, this doesn't mean that an atheist cannot act morally.

This doesn't mean that an atheist can't know what is moral.

What it means is they can't justify it because there's nothing to cement it in outside of themselves.

We can all agree that what Hitler did was objectively wrong, objectively evil, but Hitler didn't think so.

As a matter of fact, he had millions of people following him who didn't think so either, and so what makes our opinion higher than theirs?

Do we have something that we can ground our morality in that actually shows outside of us there is a standard that Hitler and Nazi Germany fell short of?

This is really, really important.

Things like antebellum slavery, like child abuse, like rape, like genocide, the things that on our hearts, scripture says the law of God is written on the hearts of mankind.

We know it's wrong.

And what if Hitler would have won?

You know what winning means for Hitler.

It means his perfect Aryan race.

It means no one there to object to what he did.

In a world where Hitler wins, is what he did still wrong when everyone on earth believes it's right.

Objective morality says some things are just wrong, some things are just right, some things are good, some are bad, some are evil.

It doesn't matter where you are, when it happened, the context, or the consensus, like Southern slavery that had the consensus of the South, that it's just objectively wrong.

If you believe in even one thing being wrong, really wrong, not your opinion, objectively wrong, you need a God to back that claim up.

Morality is big because every law has a lawgiver and there is an objective moral law.

And if you deny premise B, then the most heinous sin ever committed against you, the worst you've ever been hurt or abused by someone, you have no claim that it was wrong.

It was simply a difference of opinion.

It's a worldview that cannot hold up.

How do we know what is right and what is wrong?

On theism, there exists a standard outside human humanity that objectively grounds moral duties, virtues, moral values, duties, and virtues.

On the atheism, there is no objective morality.

Right, wrong, good, and evil are just a matter of your opinion.

And you'll hear famous atheists like Sam Harris who will write about the moral landscape and say, on atheism, we can have a standard of morality, but pay attention to what he's really writing.

He's not writing about what actually is concretely justified, he's writing about how we should live in a world without standards.

There are three really powerful arguments.

And you may be here and you go, look, you've made a case for a God.

But that doesn't mean the Christian God.

It certainly doesn't mean Jesus is God.

And you're right.

Today we haven't made that.

Next week we'll look at whether or not the resurrection is reasonable, and if Jesus really did rise from the dead, then we probably need to lean in to the rest of the things that he said.

You may think you haven't proven God, you've just made some arguments, and you're right.

You can't prove God.

At a certain point, it requires faith.

But your worldview does as well.

The question is, which worldview is more reasonable?

We have an argument from creation.

Either there is a God who created something out of nothing, or there is no God and no one created something out of nothing.

What is more reasonable on the fine-tuning of the world with God?

The universe and life inside of it are designed by a purposeful designer on atheism with no God.

The universe and life inside of it only appear to be designed by blind physical forces and astronomical chance.

If there is a God, there exists a standard outside of us that objectively grounds morality, virtues, and duties.

We really can decipher what is right, wrong, good, bad, and evil.

If there is no God, there is no objective morality, it's your opinion versus the world's.

I don't think this will convince any atheists to drop a knee and confess God today.

If it did, I would love it.

What I hope is that you'll be intellectually honest enough to know you have some arguments to contend with.

And these are the most important questions of life.

Because if we're right and there is a God, everything, including your eternity, is writing on this.

And if we're wrong and you search and search and search and come to that conclusion, there are few things that would be a better use of your time than knowing why we are here, where it all started, how the world exists, and how we function inside of it.

If you're on the fence because you grew up in a church that taught you blind faith, I hope you will lean back in to the teachings of Jesus and a God who loves you.

Here's the truth we can't prove God.

But my desire in this series is that you might crack open the door to spiritual curiosity.

If you will seek God, get a New Testament and begin reading it.

Pray.

You don't have to know the these and now's and shouts and wonts.

All you gotta do is talk to God like you would talk to a friend.

If you will seek God, you won't have to prove God.

I'm confident God will prove Himself to you.

Would you pray with me?

God, we are here seeking you.

We're not afraid of these questions because you're bigger than all of them.

I pray that we would go on this adventure of finding out who you are, why you made us, why we're here, why we exist, what our purpose is.

Pray that today would be step one.

We love you and we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.