Posted by
Josh Kon on Saturday, February 28, 2009 8:38:02 PM
One of the atheists’ favorite assaults on the notion of God is that they claim there is no evidence for the “truth” of God’s existence. For now, let’s put aside the age-old arguments that establish lines of evidence or, of course, the fact that God is not a scientific claim for which a scientific type of proof is necessary or even desired. Instead, let’s discuss the evidence that theists can easily posit—the collective intuition and experience of a majority of the population. This body of shared understanding provides a solid basis from which one can find evidence for the “truth” of God existence.
Ask any good detective and he will likely tell you that when trying to ascertain the “truth,” instincts and experience—or something to the effect—are the best tools he has at his disposal. In other words, detectives find the truth even without “scientifically verifiable” evidence; they just know it in their gut. Indeed, if asked, they could not “show you the proof”—an act atheists routinely request theists to perform.
Granted, the inevitable response to this notion is that while detectives initially may make decisions based on these intuitions, they are later able to verify it by other, more objective means. Upon a bit of reflection, however, one must conclude that this is the same thing a theist does: he starts off with the assumption that God exists, based on his intuition. He then looks at the universe and verifies that assumption’s truth with notions of “first cause,” “specified complexity” or as Stephen Hawkins says, a finely tuned, if not perfect, set of laws without which life would be completely impossible.
So there is evidence of the “truth” of God’s existence. One just has to be be free-thinking enough to recognize it.