Does God Exist?
Let's face this question! Is it rational to believe in God? Is God merely a myth—an invention of an ignorant, superstitious past? Many today assume this. Or is He REAL?
Read the TRUTH from your own Bible.
Fundamental questions about origins
Who among us has not gazed up into the nighttime sky and wondered why we are here? What is our place in the universe? What is the purpose of life?
At a time of an astounding increase in knowledge about the universe, philosophers, scientists and other thinkers ask these same questions. The assumptions they have drawn from traditional scientific understanding and thoughtful reasoning have been tried and found wanting.
British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, author of the best-seller A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, considers some of these vital questions: “We find ourselves in a bewildering world,” he writes. “We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the uni- verse? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from?” (1988, p. 171).
People have asked questions relating to our existence since the dawn of history. But rarely have they been so well expressed as by the eminent scientists, historians and philosophers of our age.
Professor Hawking does not claim to have all the answers. But through his extraordinary scientific knowledge and ability—especially in the fields of astrophysics, cosmology (the study of the nature of the universe) and mathematics he asks the right questions.
He is not the only scientist to ponder these fundamental questions. The late Carl Sagan (of the 1980 TV series Cosmos), also a brilliant scientist and bestselling author, wrote in his introduction to Hawking’s book: “We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend” (p. ix).
Sagan dedicated his life to bringing scientific thought to the general public. Notice another of his observations: “Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here . . .” (ibid.).
Perhaps most of us feel unqualified to weigh the mysteries of the universe, thinking we would be wasting our time. But that’s not true. This intellectual curiosity comes with the territory of being human. You should ask the questions, and you should seek out intelligible answers.
Professor Hawking emphasized this point in the last pages of A Brief History of Time: “If we do discover a complete theory [that explains everything], it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.” He concludes, “If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God” (p. 175, emphasis added).
