What defines a scientific fact?
“In science, [a fact is] an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as ‘true.’ Truth in science, however, is never final and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow.” [1]
In science no fact, theory or law is really, truly set in stone – simply because of human limitations. New data is always changing our understanding of the universe. Things which were impossible to observe a century ago are now easy to observe with today’s technology. In the future there will certainly be more information discovered which will cause us to look back and laugh at today’s scientific teachings. This is why even concepts and ideas which are commonly taken for granted leave room for doubt. This may lead one to wonder if anything is really “scientifically proven,” at least in the vernacular sense.
While I believe it’s fundamental to establish these definitions, it’s only partially relevant to the topic at hand. The question being asked is in essence, “can we know with reasonable certainty that God is real?” I believe it can be argued that both natural and social sciences provide compelling evidence that God is indeed real and present.
The Bible
In a creative writing course I took in college, the teacher gave us students a short-story assignment. One day, our teacher fell sick and didn’t show up to class. He left us a note saying that we could take this opportunity to discuss and compare our writing projects. We sat around the tables, telling each other our stories and giving feedback. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” one of my classmates said, “if all of our short stories were connected? I wonder how many assignments the teacher would read before he noticed that they were all telling one story?”
We all agreed it would be a great prank to play, but our consensus was that none of us were organized enough to pull it off. That in itself is kind of remarkable: a group of students who all live in the same culture, who are of a similar age bracket and who meet each other several times a week (not counting texting and email correspondence) could not write one continuous story together. Yet somehow a collection of writings written in 3 different languages by at least 40 different people living across 3 separate continents over a span of 1,500-1,600 years tells one continuous, coherent story! The people who wrote the Bible were from all different generations, cultures and language groups, but the truth they had to tell was nothing less than divine.
Many have spent their lives trying to find inconsistencies in the Bible, with weak results. Beyond that, the prophecies recorded in the Bible were undeniably specific and have so far come to pass. There is much to be written about this subject, and there exist many books about the Bible’s amazing continuity.
Even the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed, “I must confess to you that the majesty of the Scriptures astonishes me; the holiness of the evangelists speaks to my heart and has such striking characters of truth, and is, moreover, so perfectly inimitable, that if it had been the invention of men, the inventors would be greater than the greatest heroes” [3]
Jesus as Physical Evidence
The Bible’s very specific prophecies were fulfilled in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. He himself proclaimed to be God, capable of forgiving sins, and then performed incredible miracles to prove it.
The life of Jesus and the fact that he fulfilled the prophecies foretold about the promised messiah can be backed up by numerous historical sources. Besides the people who knew Jesus personally writing about Him in the gospels, He was also written about by renowned historians Josephus and Tacitus among other contemporaries. In coming to physically live with humankind, God made His presence and intentions towards humanity clear.
Lord Byron once said, “If ever man was God or God was man, Jesus Christ was both.” [4]
The Universe
The universe didn’t always exist. Popular science says it had a beginning. Something must have been there before the universe existed in order to “get it going.” That at first may seem like a logical fallacy, or at best circular reasoning since the thought is “It defies physics for the universe to have always existed so therefore something must have existed before existence itself.”
We often hear children asking, “Who created God?” and that’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. However, God is defined as omnipresent and always existing. That’s who He is. It’s an incredibly abstract concept for a human being to grasp, and virtually impossible to imagine something which didn’t have a beginning. I don’t think it should be at all surprising, however, that an infinite God would be beyond the imagination of finite human minds.
Life as we know it is so perfectly fine-tuned and can only exist in very precise conditions. It’s reasonable to believe that whatever created such a beautiful and complex world must be an intelligent “who” rather than a “what.” It’s been theorized that the multiverse is churning out infinite dimensions and that we exist in one that’s been lucky enough to support life. That doesn’t answer the question of who or what started the multiverse, however.
Furthermore, while the following point doesn’t prove God’s existence, it’s significant enough to note that the hypothetical idea of a multiverse existing is complex. It’s a theory which can’t be tested or observed and is therefore no less scientific than the belief that God created life.
Conclusion
While it’s not proof of God, it’s highly compelling that virtually all cultures from the beginning of recorded history believed in some sort of Higher Power. It’s only a minority which has existed in a short period of world history who have taken a naturalistic worldview. Most of humanity has taken the existence of God for granted, having a sense that existence itself must have been started by something divine. From an anthropological standpoint it could be seen as a bit out-of-the-ordinary that anyone would even question God’s existence.
There is yet even more evidence for the existence of God which I haven’t even touched upon. The evidence that God is real is quite solid and, one might say, scientific. However, in some ways it doesn’t really matter if science can prove the existence of God.
Human beings seldom base their beliefs on objective evidence. People have a very strong tendency to come to a conclusion and then find evidence to back it up. We can see this in daily life when a girl insistently gives reasons why her abusive boyfriend “really isn’t such a bad guy” because she’s decided to be with him. A person who wants to believe the earth is flat will find reasons to believe the earth is flat. Likewise, a person who wants to believe there is no God will find reasons to believe that He doesn’t exist.
God, however, in His grace is constantly and tenaciously reaching out to us. He leaves us evidence of his presence everywhere for us to find. He’s persistently calling to us, offering us a relationship so that we know Him and love Him, and we don’t need to do anything except believe and respond.
Casserley explains, “The gospel provides that knowledge of ultimate truth which men have sought through philosophy in vain, inevitably in vain, because it is essential to the very nature of God that He cannot be discovered by searching and probing of human minds, that He can only be known if He first takes the initiative and reveals himself.” [5]
Sources
[1] Definitions of Fact, Theory, and Law in Scientific Work
[2] What’s the Difference Between a Fact, a Hypothesis, a Theory, and a Law in Science?
[3] Frank Mead, Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations, p. 32
[4] Frank Mead, Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations, p. 81
[5] J.V. Langmead Casserley, The Christian in Philosophy, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 21
Prove to Me That God Exists: Getting Clear on Atheism, Agnosticism, and a Few Other Matters
Saree Not Sorry 