Evidence for God | UnApologetic Conference 2017 - Corpus Christi, TX

Dr. Craig was invited to speak at the UnApologetic Conference hosted at First Baptist Church Corpus Christi, Texas in May of 2017. In this talk, Dr. Craig utilizes Reasonable Faith's animated videos to illustrate arguments for God's existence.

Thank you very much. I so admire the Texas Baptists for their vision in holding these sorts of conferences to equip their people in the defense of the faith.

In our increasingly secular culture it is absolutely vital that Christians be able to defend their belief that God exists. As a Christian philosopher, I am persuaded that the hypothesis that God exists explains a wide range of the data of human experience. This evening I want to share with you five examples. In order to make these arguments easy to understand, I'm going to be showing some videos which we've developed at Reasonable Faith on each of the five arguments. Then, when we're finished, hopefully we'll have time for your questions from the audience.

1. God makes sense of why anything at all exists.

This is the most fundamental question of philosophy: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does anything at all exist? The great German philosopher G. W. Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of contingent things, but rather in God. God exists necessarily, and he is the explanation why anything else exists. Our first video explains Leibniz’s reasoning.

VIDEO: We live in an amazing universe. Have you ever wondered why it exists? Why does anything at all exist? Gottfried Leibniz wrote, "The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?" He came to the conclusion that the explanation is found in God. But is this reasonable? Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. The universe exists. From these it follows logically that the explanation of the universe's existence is God. The logic of this argument is airtight. If the three premises are true, the conclusion is unavoidable. But are they more plausibly true than false? The third premise is undeniable for anyone seeking truth. But what about the first premise? Why not say, "The universe is just there, and that's all"? No explanation needed! End of discussion! Imagine you and a friend are hiking in the woods and come across a shiny sphere lying on the ground. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. And you'd think it odd if your friend said, "There's no reason or explanation for it. Stop wondering. It just IS!" And if the ball were larger it would still require an explanation. In fact, if the ball were the size of the universe, the change in its size wouldn't remove the need for an explanation. Indeed, curiosity about the existence of the universe seems scientific - and intuitive! Someone might say: "If everything that exists needs an explanation, what about God? Doesn't he need an explanation? And if God doesn't need an explanation, then why does the universe need an explanation? To address this, Leibniz makes a key distinction between things that exist NECESSARILY and things that exist CONTINGENTLY. Things that exist NECESSARILY exist by necessity of their own nature. It's impossible for them NOT to exist. Many mathematicians think that abstract objects like numbers and sets exist like this. They're not caused to exist by something else; they just exist by necessity of their own nature. Things that exist CONTINGENTLY are caused to exist by something else. Most of the things we're familiar with exist contingently. They don't HAVE to exist. They only exist because something else caused them to exist. If your parents had never met, you wouldn't exist! There's no reason to think the world around us HAD to exist. If the universe had developed differently, there might have been no stars or planets. It's logically possible that the whole universe might not have existed. It doesn't exist necessarily, it exists contingently. If the universe might NOT have existed, why DOES it exist? The only adequate explanation for the existence of a contingent universe is that its existence rests on a non-contingent being - something that cannot not exist, because of the necessity of its own nature. It would exist no matter what! So "Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence"..."either in the necessity of its own nature, or in an external cause." But what about our second premise? Is it reasonable to call the explanation of the universe...God? Well, what is the universe? It's all of space-time reality, including all matter and energy. It follows that if the universe has a cause of its existence, that cause cannot be part of the universe - it must be non-physical and immaterial - beyond space and time. The list of entities that could possibly fit this description is fairly short - and abstract objects cannot cause anything. Leibniz' Contingency Argument shows that the explanation for the existence of the universe can be found only in the existence of God. Or, if you prefer not to use the term "God," you may simply call him: "The Extremely Powerful, Uncaused, Necessarily Existing, Non-Contingent, Non-Physical, Immaterial, Eternal Being Who Created the Entire Universe...And Everything In It."

DR. CRAIG: Let's have the premises of Leibniz’s argument on the screen again.

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.

According to the first premise of this argument, everything that exists has an explanation of its existence either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. So according to premise (1) there are two sorts of things: things which exist necessarily by their own nature and things which are produced by some external cause. Let me add a word of explanation about each of these.

Things which exist necessarily exist by a necessity of their own nature. It's impossible for them not to exist. Philosophers call such things metaphysically necessary beings. Examples? Well, many mathematicians think that numbers, sets, and other mathematical objects exist in this way. By contrast, things that are caused to exist by something else don't exist by a necessity of their own nature. They exist because something else has produced them. If their causes were removed then they would not exist. Examples? Most physical objects like people, planets, and galaxies belong in this category.

So when Leibniz says that everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, that explanation can be found either in the necessity of its own nature or in some external cause.

So what is the explanation of the existence of the universe? According to premise (2) of this argument, it can only be found in an external cause which transcends the universe. Since it's not part of the universe of contingent things, this cause must exist by a necessity of its own nature. So if the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation must be found in a metaphysically necessary, immaterial being which exists beyond space and time.

There are only two candidates that could possibly fit that description, either an unembodied mind or else an abstract object (like a mathematical object or a number). But here’s the rub. Abstract objects can't cause anything. That's part of the definition of what it means to be abstract. The number 7, for example, has no effect upon anything. So it follows logically that the cause of the universe must be a transcendent unembodied mind, which is precisely what God is.

I hope you grasp the power of Leibniz’s argument. If successful, it proves the existence of a metaphysically necessary, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal cause of the universe. This is truly amazing.

2. God makes sense of the origin of the universe.

Have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from? Typically, atheists have said that the universe is just eternal and that's all. But is that plausible? The next video explains how the scientific evidence for the origin of the universe points beyond the universe to its ground in a personal creator.

VIDEO: Does God exist, or is the material universe all that is or ever was or ever will be? One approach to answering this question is the cosmological argument. It goes like this. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist.Therefore, the universe has a cause. Is the first premise true? Let's consider. Believing that something can pop into existence without a cause is more of a stretch than believing in magic. At least with magic you've got a hat and a magician. And if something can come into being from nothing, then why don't we see this happening all the time? No; everyday experience and scientific evidence confirm our first premise. If something begins to exist, it must have a cause. But what about our second premise? Did the universe begin, or has it always existed? Atheists have typically said that the universe has been here forever. The universe is just there, and that's all. First, let's consider the second law of thermodynamics. It tells us the universe is slowly running out of usable energy, and that's the point. If the universe had been here forever it would have run out of usable energy by now. The second law points us to a universe that has a definite beginning. This is further confirmed by a series of remarkable scientific discoveries. In 1915 Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity. This allowed us for the first time to talk meaningfully about the past history of the universe. Next Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaitre, each working with Einstein's equations, predicted that the universe is expanding. Then in 1929, Edwin Hubble measured the red shift and light from distant galaxies. This empirical evidence confirmed not only that the universe is expanding, but that it sprang into being from a single point in the finite past. It was a monumental discovery almost beyond comprehension. However, not everyone is fond of a finite universe, so it wasn't long before alternative models popped into existence. But one by one, these models failed to stand the test of time. More recently three leading cosmologists, Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, proved that any universe which has on average been expanding throughout its history cannot be eternal in the past, but must have an absolute beginning. This even applies to the multiverse, if there is such a thing. This means that scientists can no longer hide behind a past eternal universe. There is no escape. They have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. Any adequate model must have a beginning just like the standard model. It's quite plausible then that both premises of the argument are true. This means that the conclusion is also true; The universe has a cause. And since the universe can't cause itself, its cause must be beyond the space-time universe. It must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, uncaused, and unimaginably powerful, much like... God. The cosmological argument shows that in fact it is quite reasonable to believe that God does exist.

DR. CRAIG: Let's have the three premises of that argument once again before us.

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

The video mentions scientific evidence for the universe's beginning, but there are also philosophical reasons to think that the universe began to exist. Just think about it for a minute. If the universe never began to exist, that means that the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. But how could an infinite number of events elapse one after another in order for today to arrive? That would be like trying to count down all of the negative numbers ending at zero. That seems like an absurd task since before you could count any number you would already have to have counted an infinite number of prior numbers. And if you could count down from infinity, why did you finish only today? Why not yesterday, or the day before that? At any point in the past you've already had an infinite amount of time to finish your countdown, and therefore you should already be done. These sorts of absurdities suggest that the idea of an actually infinite past is impossible.

Moreover, in one of the most startling developments of modern science we now have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning about 14 billion years ago in a cataclysmic event called the Big Bang. As explained in the video, in 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to show that any universe which is on average in a state of cosmic expansion throughout its history cannot be eternal in the past but must have had an absolute beginning. And that goes for multiverse scenarios, too. In 2012, Vilenkin showed that models which do not meet this one single condition still fail for other reasons to avert the beginning of the universe. Vilenkin concluded, “None of these scenarios can actually be past eternal. . . . All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”^[1]

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem proves that classical space-time under a single very general condition cannot be extended to past infinity but must reach a boundary at some point in the finite past. Now, either that boundary had something on the other side of it or not. If not, then that boundary just is the beginning of the universe. If there was something on the other side then it will be a region described by the yet-to-be discovered quantum theory of gravity. In that case it will be the beginning of the universe, says Vilenkin. Either way the universe began to exist. Since something cannot come into being from nothing, the absolute beginning of the universe implies the existence of a beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal creator of the universe.

3. God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.

In recent decades, scientists have been stunned by the discovery that the initial conditions of the Big Bang were fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a delicacy and complexity that literally defy human comprehension. Scientists once believed that whatever the initial conditions of the universe might have been, eventually intelligent life might evolve somewhere in the cosmos. But we now know to the contrary that our existence is balanced on a razor’s edge. The existence of intelligent life anywhere in the universe depends upon a conspiracy of initial conditions which must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable. The following video explains how this remarkable fine-tuning points to an intelligent designer of the cosmos.

VIDEO: From galaxies and stars down to atoms and subatomic particles, the very structure of our universe is determined by these numbers. These are the fundamental constants and quantities of the universe. Scientists have come to the shocking realization that each of these numbers has been carefully dialed to an astonishingly precise value, a value that falls within an exceedingly narrow life-permitting range. If any one of these numbers were altered by even a hairsbreadth, no physical, interactive life of any kind could exist anywhere. There'd be no stars, no life, no planets, no chemistry. Consider gravity, for example. The force of gravity is determined by the gravitational constant. If this constant varied by just 1 in 10 to the 60th parts, none of us would exist.To understand how exceedingly narrow this life-permitting range is, imagine a dial divided into 10 to the 60th increments. To get a handle on how many tiny points on the dial this is, compare it to the number of cells in your body, or the number of seconds that have ticked by since time began. If the gravitational constant had been out of tune by just one of these infinitesimally small increments, the universe would either have expanded and thinned out so rapidly that no stars could form and life couldn't exist, or it would have collapsed back on itself with the same result: no stars, no planets, and no life. Or consider the expansion rate of the universe. This is driven by the cosmological constant. A change in its value by a mere one part in 10 to the 120th parts would cause the universe to expand too rapidly or too slowly. In either case the universe would again be life-prohibiting. Or, another example of fine-tuning: if the mass and energy of the early universe were not evenly distributed to an incomprehensible precision of one part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd, the universe would be hostile to life of any kind. The fact is, our universe permits physical, interactive life only because these and many other numbers have been independently and exquisitely balanced on a razor's edge. Wherever physicists look, they see examples of fine-tuning. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. If anyone claims not to be surprised by the special features that the universe has, he's hiding his head in the sand. These special features are surprising and unlikely. What is the best explanation for this astounding phenomenon? There are three live options. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design. Which of these options is the most plausible? According to this alternative [physical necessity], the universe must be life-permitting. The precise values of these constants and quantities could not be otherwise. But is this plausible? Is a life-prohibiting universe impossible? Far from it. It's not only possible; it's far more likely than a life-permitting universe. The constants and quantities are not determined by the laws of nature. There's no reason or evidence to suggest that fine-tuning is necessary. How about chance? Did we just get really, really, really, really lucky? No; the probabilities involved are so ridiculously remote as to put the fine-tuning well beyond the reach of chance, so in an effort to keep this option alive, some have gone beyond empirical science and opted for a more speculative approach known as the multiverse. They imagine a universe generator that cranks out such a vast number of universes that, odds are, life-permitting universes will eventually pop out. However, there's no scientific evidence for the existence of this multiverse. It cannot be detected, observed, measured, or proved, and the universe generator itself would require an enormous amount of fine-tuning. Furthermore, small patches of order are far more probable than big ones, so the most probable observable universe would be a small one, inhabited by a single, simple observer. But what we actually observe is the very thing that we should least expect: a vast, spectacularly complex, highly-ordered universe inhabited by billions of other observers. So even if the multiverse existed, which is a moot point, it wouldn't do anything to explain the fine-tuning. Given the implausibility of physical necessity or chance, the best explanation for why the universe is fine-tuned for life may very well be it was designed that way. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect monkeyed with physics and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all... it seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the universe. The impression of design is overwhelming. The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

DR. CRAIG: The examples of fine-tuning shared in the video are all up-to-date, accurate, and well established. It's important to keep in mind that the term “fine-tuning” does not mean “designed.” The expression is a neutral term which simply means that the range of life-permitting values for the fundamental constants and quantities of nature is extremely narrow. If the value of even one of these constants or quantities were to be altered by less than a hairsbreadth, the delicate balance required for the existence of life would be upset and the universe would be life-prohibiting instead. Fine-tuning in this neutral sense is a well established part of contemporary physics.

The question then that we face is: What is the best explanation of this cosmic fine-tuning? There are three options in the contemporary literature on fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. Let's have the three premises of this argument on the screen before us.

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

As the video explains, the only serious alternative to design is the multiverse chance hypothesis. Now, there are multiple problems with this hypothesis, but let me highlight just one of the most important. If our universe were just a random member of a multiverse then we ought to be observing a much different universe than we do. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has explained this point very forcefully. He points out that the odds of our universe’s initial low entropy condition obtaining by chance alone are somewhere on the order of one chance out of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123. By contrast, the odds of our solar system forming suddenly by the random collision of particles is around one chance out of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 60. This number, says Penrose, is “utter chicken feed” in comparison with 10 to the 10 to the 123.^[2] What that means is that it is far more likely that we ought to be observing an orderly patch no larger than our solar system since a universe like that is simply incomprehensibly more probable than a finely tuned universe like ours. In fact, the most probable observable universe is one which consists of a single brain which fluctuates into existence out of the vacuum with illusory perceptions of an external world. So if you accept the multiverse explanation, you're obliged to believe that you are all that exists and that everything else including your body, this church, other people, the world of your perceptions, are all just illusions of your brain. No sane person believes such a thing. On atheism, therefore, it is highly improbable that there exists a randomly ordered multiverse.

Ironically, the best hope for fans of the multiverse is God. They would be able to maintain that God has ordered the multiverse and given preference to observable worlds so that the multiverse is not randomly ordered. God could give preference to observable worlds which are finely tuned. So, ironically, in order to be rationally acceptable, the multiverse hypothesis needs God.

With the failure of the multiverse hypothesis, the alternative of chance collapses. Neither physical necessity nor chance provides a good explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe.

4. God makes sense of objective moral values and duties in the world.

The following video makes this argument very clear.

VIDEO: Can you be good without God? Let's find out. [An atheist saves a cat stuck in a tree.] Absolutely astounding! There you have it; undeniable proof that you can be good without believing in God. But wait; the question isn't can you be good without believing in God. The question is, can you be good without God? See, here's the problem. If there is no God, what basis remains for objective good or bad, right or wrong? If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist, and here's why. Without some objective reference point, we have no way of saying that something is really up or down. God's nature provides an objective reference point for moral values. It's the standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. But if there's no God, there's no objective reference point. All we are left with is one person's viewpoint, which is no more valid than anyone else's viewpoint. This kind of morality is subjective, not objective. It's like a preference for strawberry ice cream; the preference is in the subject, not the object, so it doesn't apply to other people. In the same way, subjective morality applies only to the subject. It's not valid or binding for anyone else. So in a world without God, there can be no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. God has expressed his moral nature to us as commands. These provide the basis for moral duties. For example, God's essential attribute of love is expressed in his command to love your neighbor as yourself. This command provides a foundation upon which we can affirm the objective goodness of generosity, self-sacrifice, and equality, and we can condemn as objectively evil greed, abuse, and discrimination. This raises a problem. Is something good just because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good? The answer is: neither one. Rather, God wills something because he is good. God is the standard of moral values, just as a live musical performance is the standard for a high-fidelity recording. The more a recording sounds like the original, the better it is. Likewise, the more closely a moral action conforms to God's nature, the better it is. But if atheism is true there is no ultimate standard, so there can be no moral obligations or duties. Who or what lays such duties upon us? No one. Remember, for the atheist, humans are just accidents of nature, highly evolved animals. But animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a cat kills a mouse, it hasn't done anything morally wrong; the cat's just being a cat. If God doesn't exist, we should view human behavior in the same way. No action should be considered morally right or wrong. But the problem is good and bad, right and wrong, do exist. Just as our sense experience convinces us that the physical world is objectively real, our moral experience convinces us that moral values are objectively real. Every time you say, “Hey! That's not fair! That's wrong! That's an injustice!” you affirm your belief in the existence of objective morals. We're well aware that child-abuse, racial discrimination, and terrorism are wrong, for everybody, always. Is this just a personal preference or opinion? No. The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says two plus two equals five. What all this amounts to then is a moral argument for the existence of God. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. But objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore, God exists. Atheism fails to provide a foundation for the moral reality every one of us experiences every day. In fact, the existence of objective morality points us directly to the existence of God.

DR. CRAIG: Let's have the three premises of that argument on the screen.

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

What makes this little argument so powerful is that people generally agree with both premises. In our pluralistic age, students are scared to death of imposing their values on someone else, and therefore they give at least lip service to relativism. So premise (1) seems correct to them. At the same time, however, certain values have been deeply instilled into them such as the values of tolerance, open-mindedness, and love. In particular, they think that it's objectively wrong to impose your values on someone else! So they're deeply committed to premise (2) as well. They just never connected the dots.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind in sharing the moral argument is not to confuse moral ontology with moral epistemology. Moral ontology has to do with the objective reality of moral values and duties. Moral epistemology has to do with how we come to know moral values and duties. The argument has nothing to say about moral epistemology. It is wholly about moral ontology – the grounding of objective moral values in reality. But people inevitably confuse the two. For example, some people will think that you're claiming that in order to recognize objective moral values and duties you have to believe in God which is obviously false. Others will say that our moral beliefs can be explained as the result of sociobiological conditioning. Both of these objections are irrelevant to the argument. You're not saying that in order to recognize objective moral values and duties you have to believe in God, and the sociobiological account only shows how our perception of moral values and duties has evolved. But if moral values are gradually discovered rather than gradually invented then our gradual, fallible perception of the moral realm no more undermines its objective reality than our gradual, fallible perception of the physical world undermines its objective reality. The argument makes no claim about how we come to know objective moral values and duties. So these epistemological sort of objections are simply irrelevant.

From the two premises, it follows logically that God exists. The moral argument complements the cosmological and the design arguments by telling us about the moral nature of the creator and designer of the universe. It gives us a personal, necessarily existent being who is not only perfectly good but whose very nature is the standard of goodness and whose commands constitute our moral duties.

Finally,

5. The very possibility of God's existence implies that God exists.

Our final video explains this surprising claim.

VIDEO: In the year 1078, a monk named Anselm of Canterbury astonished the world by arguing that if it is even possible that God exists then it follows logically that God does exist. Anselm's argument came to be called the ontological argument, and it has sharply divided philosophers ever since. The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called it a charming joke, but many prominent twentieth century philosophers such as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga think that it's sound. Here it is. God can be defined as a maximally great being. If something were greater than God, then that being would be God. And in order to be maximally great, a maximally great being would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and morally perfect in every possible world. Possible worlds are simply ways the world could have been. To say that something exists in a possible world is just to say that if the world were that way, then the thing would have existed. For example, even though unicorns don't exist in the actual world, it seems at least possible that they could have, so we can say that unicorns exist in some possible world. On the other hand, a married bachelor does not exist in any possible world because the idea of a married bachelor is logically incoherent. It could not possibly exist. So if it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then we can say that he exists in some possible world. But wait; a maximally great being would not really be maximally great if it existed in only some possible worlds. To be maximally great it has to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and morally perfect in every possible world. So think about it; if a maximally great being exists in any possible world, then it exists in every possible world, and if it exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world. That is, a maximally great being actually exists. Thus the atheist has to maintain not simply that God does not exist, but that it is impossible that God exists. Here's a summary of the ontological argument. Steps 2 through 6 are straightforward and largely uncontroversial, but what about point number 1? Clearly if it can be shown that the idea of a God is logically incoherent, then the argument fails, but is the idea of a maximally great being absurd, like a married bachelor or a square circle or the smell of blue? This doesn't seem to be the case. The notion of the all-powerful, all-knowing, morally perfect being that exists in every possible world seems to be a perfectly coherent idea. But couldn't we parody this argument and make it work for anything? Why not say it's logically possible that a maximally great pizza exists, therefore a maximally great pizza does exist? However the idea of a maximally great pizza is not like the idea of a maximally great being. In the first place, there aren't intrinsic maximal values that make pizzas great. There could always be one more pepperoni to increase its greatness. It's not even obvious what properties make a pizza great: thin crust or thick crust, extra cheese, anchovies? It's relative to the taste of the consumer. In the second place, a maximally great pizza would have to exist in every logical possible world, but that would mean that it couldn't be eaten, so it wouldn't really be a pizza because a pizza is something you can eat. The idea of a maximally great pizza turns out not to be a coherent idea. The idea of God, on the other hand, is an intuitively coherent idea. Therefore, his existence is a possibility. And the ontological argument shows that if God possibly exists, then God actually exists.

DR. CRAIG: The premises of this argument went by pretty fast, so let's put them up on the screen again.

1. It is possible that a maximally great being (aka God) exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.
7. Therefore, God exists.

As the video explains, steps (2) to (7) of this argument are uncontroversial. The whole argument hangs on premise (1). Is it possible that God exists? I like to simply leave this question for the unbeliever to decide. You don't need to prove to him that it's possible that God exists. Just let him think about it. The mere conclusion that if it's possible that God exists then God does exist is enough to make the non-theist have serious food for thought.

In conclusion then, these five arguments present a powerful, cumulative case for the existence of God. Together they yield a metaphysically necessary, uncaused, transcendent, immaterial, personal creator and designer of the universe who is the paradigm and source of absolute moral goodness.

I had hoped to have time for questions, but I see that we have only five minutes left. So let me simply close by saying this. These videos are all available on our YouTube channel, and you can download them to your mobile device so that if you're sharing your faith with a friend you can say, “Hey, have a look at this video and see what you think.” And you can share these videos with them. These are meant to be tools for evangelism that you can use.

Second thing I'd want to say is almost all of these arguments are extremely simple and easy to memorize. They typically have three premises. “Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause.” “The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design. It's not due to physical necessity or chance. Therefore, it's due to design.” “If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. But objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore, God exists.” Any of you can memorize those little three-step arguments and have them ready to share with an unbeliever at the drop of a hat. The key here is to be prepared, to spend some time memorizing the premises, and being ready to share them with an unbeliever when you have an opportunity to do so. I find that the power of just being able to share some arguments for the existence of God is astonishing. The typical unbeliever has come to think that there is no evidence for the existence of God. Therefore, if you say to him, “Well, gosh, I can think of at least five arguments for God's existence.” He's got to say, “Yeah, like what?” Then you're off and running. I have found that even just being able to give a list of the arguments is enough to leave the unbeliever speechless. I'll just say, “Well, God makes sense of why anything at all exists rather than nothing. God makes sense of the beginning of the universe. God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe. God makes sense of the existence of objective moral values and duties in the world. And if God is even possible then it follows that God exists.” That's just a list. I didn't even share what the arguments are, and yet just being able to give a list to the unbeliever will often stop him in his tracks because he's so used to meeting Christians who are clueless as to why they believe that God exists.

So I would just want to close with an exhortation and encouragement. You've come to this conference. You've invested time and money in coming here. I would plead with you – keep studying, keep working, memorize these arguments, be prepared to share the premises with an unbeliever, and then expect God to use you as you give a good reason for the hope that is in you.

Thank you very much for your attention.