Can You Prove That?
One of the reasons that people are hesitant to get involved in apologetics is the belief that you cannot prove that God exists.
That is correct. You cannot prove that God exists.
But the truth is that there is almost nothing that you can really prove. Can you prove that you are not dreaming right now? Can you prove that your consciousness is any more than an elaborate computer program? Can you prove that you were not created five minutes ago with a set of false memories of the past?
It was Rene Descartes who argued that the only thing that we can know for certain is that we exist, as even doubting our existence requires existence.
If we only believed that which could be absolutely proved, our society would collapse. We live our lives with beliefs that are reasonable based on the evidence. While we may not see the sun tomorrow, there is good reason to believe we will based on past experience.
What about God?
While we cannot prove that God exists, we can be confident in his existence based on the evidence. This is not the place for an exhaustive presentation for the proof of God but I can share a short list of evidences.
- Existence of the universe.
- Intelligent design.
- Morality.
- Resurrection of Jesus.
- Argument from desire.
- Experience.
While there is more evidence for God, there is another problem with this excuse. Apologetics is not limited to arguing the existence of God. In fact those who absolutely deny the existence of God is a very small minority of the population. Many of the apologetic conversations I have do not deal with the existence of God. I often talk about the historical Jesus, the nature of the Bible, the problem of suffering and numerous other topics.
To say that apologetics is not important because we cannot prove God’s existence is simply an excuse of not doing something we don’t like.
