An epiphany on the existence of

God
The skeptics usually begin by doubting everything. They even doubt
our very existence. In his Discourse on the method, Rene Descartes
dispelled their skepticism with just one pithy sentence. “I think,
therefore I am.” With it he laid the foundation for Rationalism. But
skepticism persisted and they doubted if anything else can be known
apart from our own existence. Once again Isaac Newton dispelled their
skepticism with just three short equations and all was light. Our
universe became comprehensible and Science was born.
It has become a kind of fashion these days for skeptics to question the
existence of the very God which both Rene Descartes and Isaac
Newton believed in. The following three simple logical statements
below will prove them wrong once again.
I think, therefore I exist.
I exist, but I did not create myself.
Therefore, there exists an entity that created me.
One may merely point to their parents as the cause for their existence
or think that they are “nothing but” the result of some materialistic
processes. But such answers would merely be passing the buck (who
created my parents or the materials at hand? And so on…) and are
trivial and myopic to say the least. Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos
admitted: “If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first
create the universe.”
When we look deeper into nature for the ultimate answers, science
now reveals that it takes power, order and wisdom to make a universe
like ours. It needs enormous energy (power), laws of physics (order)
and fine tuning (wisdom) of those laws to create a universe that is fit
for life to exist. As a bare minimum one has to concede that the
universe (space-time, atoms and the laws that govern it) created us.
This is the very definition of Pantheism and not Atheism. From time
immemorial this power, order and wisdom have always been
attributed to our Creator. This is Spinoza’s conception of “Nature as
God” that Einstein believed in. Scientists have inadvertently become
the high priests of this pantheism. Since “wisdom” is one of the
properties of conscious entities and is needed to fine-tune the laws of
physics, our Creator must necessarily be a conscious being.
Pantheism or Panpsychism may have been okay if the universe was
eternal. But science now reveals that the universe began ex-nihilio with
the Big Bang. This has led some to believe that a transcendent first
cause outside of space and time brought our universe into existence.
But they insist that this transcendent entity does not intervene in the
subsequent workings of the universe. This again is the very definition
of Deism and not Atheism.
Robert Jastrow reflecting on the origin of the universe, in his book God
and the astronomers has this to say: “For the scientist who has lived by
his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He
has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the
highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a
band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” And he
further notes: “Far from disproving the existence of God, astronomers
may be finding more circumstantial evidence that God exists.”
One can possibly remain a Pantheist or a Deist if the universe was
capable of bringing about life on its own. Unfortunately, this has still
not been shown by science to be true. Even in the eighteenth century it
was known that spontaneous generation could not be true and it was
Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century who decisively falsified it.
Current research has shown that life does not come about in warm
little ponds either as Darwin envisaged it. Of course, there are many
speculative theories out there among scientists today but we simply
cannot accept them until they are demonstrably proven.
Two facts are clear to us today. Firstly, we do not see life arising in
nature on its own and secondly, if life has to be created in the lab, it
definitely seems to need intelligent planning and intervention. Noble
laureates like Francis Crick have struggled to create life in the lab and
have admitted that it is almost a miracle of chance. The problem is that
those who appeal to blind chance depart from the scientific method.
Science tries to comprehend order in the universe and could not exist if
the universe were chaotic. Those who appeal to chance for good
fortune do not belong to a science lab in Oxford but to a casino in
Dallas. Paul Dirac, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of
the twentieth century proposed the “origin of life” problem as a
possible basis for believing in the existence of God: “…if physical laws
are such that to start off life involves an excessively small chance so
that it will not be reasonable to suppose that life would have started
just by blind chance, then there must be a god,..”
It was also assumed that life was simple to begin with, but experiments
are showing exactly the opposite. The deeper we probe, the more
complex it is getting. It is even throwing up typical chicken-and-egg
problems that cannot be easily resolved. Proteins are required for
transcription of the genetic information, but their synthesis itself
depends on transcription. As a result, if we look at the current scientific
data without a bias, it definitely points to intelligent causation. Even if
in the future life were made in the lab, that would still be QED for
intelligent causation! William Paley’s argument for the existence of a
watchmaker is back with a vengeance in context of the origin of life.
The origin of life conundrum then can potentially be used to effectively
to transition Deism to Theism. One might argue that it is “Theism of
the gaps.” But again, using such smart quotes is not scientific
methodology either. Instead, I propose a different approach by opening
up Theism to falsification and shifting the onus on those who are doing
the origin of life research to show that life can arise naturally and does
not need intelligent agents working in a lab. Theism is thus rationally
and scientifically justified until it is falsified.
In all this, please note that Atheism is not even an option. This should
be an epiphany even to a school kid. We don’t need sophisticated
arguments to prove that our Creator exists, but a humble realization
that we did not create ourselves. There are two ways one can falsify the
above deduction. Either by claiming they don’t exist or by claiming
that they made themselves. Both of which are absurd to say the least.
This rational deduction of the existence of our Creator looks
deceptively simple, but it is in fact a robust and powerful deduction
that is beyond refutation. All it takes is intellectual humility to admit
that atheism is no longer tenable.
The only valid questions from now on can only be concerning the
nature of our Creator and not its existence. We are open to discuss this
extensively but is beyond the scope of this book. One important point
to note here is that just as in science, we have to accept the nature of
our Creator as He is and not how we whimsically want Him to be. It is
paradoxical for one to deny the existence of an entity based on its
nature of existence.
We do not even need to go beyond pantheism or panpsychism to
deduce some of the common attributes of our Creator. If we insist that
space, time, matter and the laws that govern them is all that there is,
then it follows that they are both omnipresent and omnipotent
throughout the universe. And since wisdom is needed to fine-tune the
laws that govern the universe, this entity must also be a conscious
being who is omniscient. One could argue that even machines have
intelligence and consciousness is not needed, but that is forgetting that
it takes conscious entities to make those machines in the first place.
Since our Creator is a conscious being, other aspects like intention and
purpose can only be known through revelation because science
currently has no way of detecting conscious entities, leave alone the
content of conscious thoughts. The only way for you to know if I
prefer strawberry or vanilla is for you to ask me and for me to reveal it
to you. In the same way, revelation is the only way to know the mind
of our Creator. Even neuroscience depends on the revelation of the
experimental subjects to know what they consciously felt during the
experiments. This makes revelation a valid source of knowledge of
mental states or attributes. As a Christian, I have reasons to believe
that Christ has manifest other aspects of our Creator like love and
sacrifice.
Of course, there are still many unanswered questions regarding our
Creator but I think it is unreasonable to expect answers to every
question one might have. No field of human enquiry has all the
answers, be it science, philosophy or mathematics. Why single out
religion then? If religion should be dismissed just because it does not
have all the answers, then we should be equally dismissive of the other
fields of human enquiry as well.
One of the common questions that every atheist repeats like a parrot is:
Who created our Creator? That’s a good question, but it is completely
irrelevant to this debate. The fact that we have been created by a
specific entity does not change just because we cannot explain where
that entity came from in the first place. One cannot reject the fact that
Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel just because one cannot
answer where he got the talent from! We will also have to reject all
phenomena that science has discovered because science is still clueless
how the universe came into being in the first place. In fact, science can
never cohesively answer the “origins” question because of its own
causal method. It is turtle’s all the way down for them. These causal
links will necessarily relapse into a reductio ad absurdum. “Ever
learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” 2
Timothy 3:7
Every field of human enquiry has its own set of axioms and postulates
whose existence is simply assumed without any further deductions or
explanations. Euclidian mathematics has its own set, in the same way
Science simply takes for granted the existence of laws and constants of
nature as an empirical fact and seeks no further explanation. Our
Creator is in the same way the axiom and postulate of our existence.
Classical Christian theology already had this insight that our Creator is
the “necessary being” who is needed to bring about contingent beings
like us into existence. Just like the laws and constants of nature, how
our Creator came into existence is surely a great mystery but it does
not in any way diminish the empirical fact that our Creator exists!

Oscar Priyanand