Is There A God?: by Sinclair Ferguson

Is There a
God?
by Sinclair Ferguson
Answer the question “Is there a God?” in around 775 words? Is this perhaps the easiest
assignment Tabletalk has ever commissioned, since the answer is so clear? There are no consistent
atheists, only people hiding from God. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above
proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). God is the inescapable given who undergirds all things.
Or, is this the hardest assignment Tabletalk has ever commissioned? A comprehensive answer might
fill an entire library. What follows, then, is only a stray fragment from one chapter in a book in
that library.
➝ 1 God the Creator is the only solution to Gottfried Leibniz’s and Martin Heidegger’s ultimate
riddle: “Why is there something there, and not nothing?”
Ex nihilo nihil fit—“Nothing comes from nothing.” Let us note that nothing is not a “pre-something”;
it is not “something reduced to a minimum.” Nothing is NO thing, no THING. Nothing—a concept
impossible for the mind to comprehend precisely because nothing lacks “reality” in the first place. To
transform Rene Descartes’; famous dictum Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) we can
say, Quod cogito, non cogito de nihilo (Because I am, I cannot conceive of nothing). That leads to
another Descartes-esque thought: Quod cogito, ergo non possibile Deus non est (Because I think,
therefore it is impossible that God does not exist). The cosmos, my existence, and my ability to
reason all depend on the fact that life did not and could not come from nothing, but requires a
reasonable and reasoning origin. The contrary (time + chance = reality) is impossible. Neither time
nor chance is a pre-cosmic phenomenon.
➝ 2 This God must be the biblical God, for two reasons. The first is that only such a God adequately
grounds the physical coherence of the cosmos as we know it. Second, His existence is the only
coherent basis, whether acknowledged or otherwise, for rational thought and communication.
Consequently, the nonbeliever of necessity must draw on, borrow from, indeed intellectually steal
from a biblical foundation in order to think coherently and to live sanely. Thus, the secular humanist
who argues that there are no ultimates must borrow from biblical premises in order to assess
anything as in itself right or wrong.
I have recently tried a simple but unnerving experiment, directing my mind to think its way into the
assumption that there is no God, and then to explore the implications. I strongly discourage
performing this mind experiment. It leads inexorably to a dark place, a mental abyss where nothing
in life makes sense, indeed, where there is no possibility of ultimate “sense.” Here, all that we think
of as good, true, rational, intelligible, and beautiful has no substructure to give these concepts
coherence. Thus, the nature of everything I am and experience becomes radically deconstructed and
disconnected from my consciousness of them. That “consciousness” that seems intelligible is then an
unjustifiable fabrication of my own imagination. And then that imagination ceases to have coherence
in itself. In essence, then, my highly complex consciousness becomes merely an inexplicable series of
intricate chemical reactions grounded in no rationality and having no inherent meaning. “Meaning”
itself in any genuinely transcendent sense is itself a meaningless concept.
As experimenters in the pilgrimage of consistent atheism, we will then conclude that it is the
“atheists” who are driven to despair, as they yield to the unbearable conclusions of their premises,
who are the only consistent atheistic thinkers with the courage of their convictions. Those who
calmly claim to be atheists are unmasked as in fact refusing the conclusion of their professed
convictions, repressing what they know deep down to be true (that God is)—the very point Paul
makes in Romans 1:18–25.
The novelist Martin Amis recounted a question that the Russian writer Yevgeni Yevtushenko asked
Sir Kingsley Amis: “Is it true that you are an atheist?” Amis replied, “Yes. But it’s more than that. You
see, I hate Him.” Far from being able to deny the existence of God, he confessed both God’s existence
and his own antagonism toward Him.
Amis was not alone. Neither a knight of the Realm, nor any of us, can escape being the imago
Dei (however mutilated). We can therefore never deny the Deus of whom we are the imago. For God
has placed a burden on us: “He has put eternity into a man’s heart” (Eccl. 3:11). As Augustine said,
our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Him.
Why then does the Bible not ask the question, “Is there a God?” Because its first sentence answers it:
“In the beginning, God… .”

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