By William Baker author of Proving God Proving Jesus available at Amazon.com. In my book I provide evidence that when you consider the pattern of all the evidence (nature, archaeology, the Bible and Jesus burial cloth the Shroud of Turin) it proves God and that Jesus is God. This article can be downloaded at www.provinggodprovingjesus.com.
Consider the following ten items in evaluating the evidence for God:
- Trust your heart. We are all forming opinions based upon incomplete and hidden information. Some of us have weaker faith and need more hard evidence. Those of us that need more factual evidence to help us believe will be more vulnerable to secular bias in our society.
- Everybody is biased. Understand the basis of your worldview (your perspective on the world). Do you have a Christian worldview or a secular worldview? Don’t blindly accept the secular worldview of others because it does influence their view of reality and it may disagree with yours. Scientists and teachers are fallible and biased.
- Is there a God that created everything or is the universe eternal (or multi-verse and any new variant) is a debate that has been raging for millennia. The Bible says God created everything and that we should know Him from the evidence we can see. In Psalm 14:1 it says the fool says in his heart there is no God!
- Scientific evidence points to the universe having a beginning called the Big Bang. A beginning implies there must be a Creator. There is also evidence supporting the design of the universe which implies a Creator.
- Darwin could not explain the beginning of life, yet he proposed a theory to explain the development of all life because he wanted to show that the development of life did not need a Creator. The fossil record does not support his theory of evolution. Theory is not fact. Why should we believe in an unsupported theory that can’t even explain the beginning of life?
- Scientists are looking at the cell to explain the origin of life. All living things have their own DNA within their cells. DNA is a molecule that contains information necessary to build and maintain an organism. The four chemicals along the DNA spine called bases, function just like alphabetic characters (A-adenine, T-thymine, G-guanine, C-cytosine) in a written language. Even an amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The controversy surrounds the development of the cellular process and the information found in the cell. Was it caused by an intelligent being (hence intelligent design) or was it due to a natural process as Darwin’s theory of evolution requires? Dr Meyer in his book Signature in the Cell refutes all naturalistic explanations and shows intelligent design is the best explanation for the information found in the cell. If intelligent design is correct, it weakens the argument for an undirected evolutionary process (why design the cell and not the succeeding life forms?). Francis Crick codiscover of the structure of DNA proposed that life must have been seeded from another planet because he realized the complexity of life was difficult to explain with evolutionary theory. Did God or aliens create us? If you believe we were created by aliens, then who created them? Intelligent design does not claim (nor deny) that God is our Creator. To answer that question, one must look at other evidence like the Big Bang. If God created the universe that would include the aliens in it which makes the “aliens created us” position difficult to believe. To see video of the cell process go to https://signatureinthecell.com/.
- Modern archaeology as a science is less than a few hundred years old and is an incomplete record of the past. One archaeologist has said data (information) is only about ten percent of archaeology with the remainder being interpretation of the facts. Therefore, subjective opinion and not the facts may be the basis for archaeological conclusions. There is secular bias against the Bible. There is solid archaeological evidence supporting the truth of the Exodus, Moses, the existence of Mount Sinai (Jebel al-Lawz, Saudi Arabia) and many other events told in the Bible.
- There is no other document from the ancient world that is as validated as the Bible.
- Bible prophecy predicts the future in advance and is supernatural evidence validating the Bible which claims that Jesus is God and the Son of Father God. Professor Stoner looked at the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah (meaning the anointed one) that were fulfilled by Jesus in the New Testament. He calculated that the odds for just 8 of these prophecies being fulfilled was 1017 which is 100 quadrillion. Jesus fulfilled over 300 prophecies during His first coming and thus statistically it is a certainty that Jesus was the Messiah.
- The Shroud of Turin (believed by some to be Jesus burial cloth and kept in Turin Italy) provides supernatural evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. There is scientific evidence (although not universally accepted) which supports that the image on the Shroud was caused by a burst of radiation that emanated from Jesus body at the moment of His resurrection. Jesus resurrection from the dead is the basis of our faith. Therefore, as the Bible says: He is risen!