Does God Exist?

In http://gordon-feil-theology.blogspot.ca/2017/01/rising-from-dead.html I explained why I believe in the death and resurrection of Y’shuah. I know of no way that he could come alive again after he was prepared for the grave and lay in it for 3 days except that there is a God who did it.

Why believe in God?  If he is there, he keeps himself hidden.

I see numerous phenomena that seem to me to have no rational explanation other than God. Some of these are:

1.     To me the complexity and functioning interdependency of the physical world speaks of a Designer.  Romans 1:20a: “From the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly observed in what he made.”¹

2.     He is seen in our compatibility with his creation. 

3.     The resurrection of  Y’shuah (Jesus), as I already discussed.

4.     I have the evidence of my relationship with God, although the skeptic is unlikely to be convinced.

5.     The existence of matter. The decaying elements such as uranium and radium show that they could not have had a past eternity.  They had a beginning.  They were brought into existence.  By a big bang in which everything is said to have come from nothing?  In other words, nothing exploded? Hmmm…

6.     The existence of life. Numerous efforts to create life in laboratories under perfect conditions have failed to succeed. How could it have spontaneously occurred?

Couldn’t these evidences all have happened by chance?

1.     Can mathematics happen by chance?

2.     Can a mind that understands mathematics develop by chance?

This gets back to #2 under the previous question.   We are able to fathom a great deal about our world. The mind and the world go together.  Our minds comprehend the world because the world is designed by a Mind: it is rational.  These things are easy to dismiss as the products of chance if we give no thought to the mechanisms or processes that chance would involve.  Through what mechanism could such things happen?  What would be the engine driving this process?  Evolution is offered as the mechanism, but it has no satisfactory engine so far as I can tell.  Further, to my mind evolution fails for a large variety of reasons that would add too many extra posts to discuss.

3.     Where does morality to come from?  Can random chemical reactions produce the awareness of right and wrong? 

4.     From whence comes the longing we all have for something higher and better than ourselves to love us and to which we may aspire?  Did we randomly develop that desire?  

5.     The resurrection of Y’shuah is related to the empty tomb, and the fact of it being empty is perhaps the most solidly established fact of ancient history.  The location of Jesus’ tomb was well known.  Mark mentions that Joseph of Arimathea donated the tomb.   He was a well known public figure.  If there was no such tomb donated, the Jewish religious leaders would have been quick to discredit Mark’s account.  

If Y’shuah’s body remained in the tomb it would have been public knowledge.  Both his disciples and his enemies had motives for checking out whether his body was in the tomb.  The testimony is that it disappeared.   Where did the body go?

a.     His enemies did not take the body because if they had they would have produced it to contradict the teaching about the resurrection.

b.     His friends didn’t take it because they wouldn’t have died for what they knew to be a lie.

c.     Neither could have taken it anyway on account of the security placed at the tomb.