THe strongest Apologetic

This website, at this point in time in the early 21st Century, believes the Cosmological Argument is the strongest and most pertinent and persuasive argument for the existence of God. It is the most pertinent because of the growth and solidification of the Big Bang as the prevailing model and theory of the beginning of existence/the Universe. Since the time it was formulated and observed in the 1920s, every subsequent scientific experiment has served to bolster its claim thus leading to almost universal acceptance in the scientific community. Never has such attention been focused on the origins of the Universe outside of Christendom. Atheists, agnostics, and the children of religious parents alike are being taught it in school and being able to demonstrate not just the compatibility but the comparative scientific and philosophical strength of a religious viewpoint is or paramount importance.

With the whole world focused on the topic of the origin of existence, it is also a singular moment in history to share and spread what I believe to be the most coherent explanation of where the Big Bang could have come from or what could have caused it. Various articles or blog posts on this website cover this in more detail but I believe a religious perspective contains more explanatory power than atheist alternatives. Not in an attempt to belittle the view, but the posts, articles, and accompanying seminar demonstrate the paucity of an atheistic explanation for the Big Bang. For those reasons, it is hoped that both (1) Christians or their children will be bolstered and encouraged in their faith (the Saints will be equipped!) and (2) that the insights can be shared with and serve to illuminate the strength of the religious perspective with the growing numbers of non-believers in the United States, Europe, and around the world.

The Cosmological Argument as Apologetic

From its inception, Christians have attempted to “prove” the existence of God. Today, such attempts form a philosophical branch of theology called apologetics. As an academic discipline, the various apologetics that have been developed over the last 2,000 years (or beyond) can be grouped into categories, the most famous of which are the Ontological Argument, the Teleological Argument, and the Cosmological Argument.

For purposes of comparison and as the briefest of resources, the Ontological and Teleological Arguments are outlined below.

Ontological Argument

The Ontological Argument was first formulated by Anselm of Canterbury in 1078. Its defenders and proponents include Descartes and Liebniz as well as some of the most brilliant Christian minds of the past century including William Alston, David Bentley Hart, Kurt Godel, and Alvin Plantiga. The latter two have offered formal logical proofs of the argument.

What I believe to be a palatable summation of the various iterations of the argument is as follows: the fact that humans can conceptualize God indicates that She exists. From an evolutionary standpoint, there would be no reason human animals would evolve an ability to conceive of a supreme being unless such a being existed. Facially simple, the argument has captured the attention of many of the greatest Western minds.

A contemporary of Anselm’s as well as David Hume and in a slightly different sense Immanuel Kant, all pointed out that, based upon that logic, anything humans could dream is proof that it exists which is absurd - a logical fallacy. Thomas Aquinas rejected the notion by discounting the possibility that humans could even know God in an intelligible enough way. This author is sympathetic to both critiques.

Teleological argument

The Teleological Argument is also known as the Argument from Design, Intelligent Design, or more recently, the Fine-Tuned Universe argument. It identifies number of qualities of the Universe that if they were even marginally different than they are, then the Universe would not have expanded or evolved as it did. Proponents of this argument infer that these qualities are evidence that the Universe was specifically created and that that Creator is God.

It should be noted that Christians are not the only group that has looked at the world and the heavens and found therein an intentional order. All of the ancient Greeks and Romans believed there was an inherent order to the Universe and the famous concept of the Logos that the Apostle John attributed to Jesus - the root word for “logic” in case that needed to be pointed out - was a wholesale appropriation of the dominant thought and belief in the Ancient World concerning this organization.

The logical steps involved in this argument are: (1) that there is an order to be found in the world, (2) that this order indicates that it was specifically and intentionally placed there rather than the result of natural processes, and (3) that the person or entity which so created the world was God.

For a website that wants to appeal to both Christians and non-Christians, the required inferences are simply too great: an atheist can end the argument by asserting that cosmological and biological evolution account for the attenuated facts. If the world was any way other than how it is, we would not know it because the Universe wouldn’t have developed like this.